Roots of Reggae

I've been a reggae fan for some time now, tho lately I find I listen to more dub, which is arguably very much the same, though with more reverb and overdriven bass. This means you, Abyssinians and King Tubby.

Toots Hibbert (of and the Maytals fame) came up with the word reggae (actually "reggay") in the late 60s with this hit.

In its etymology, the words "rags, ragged clothing" and "a quarrel, a row" feature prominently, two terms which are associated with the music to this day. The revolutionary tone, a movement of the people, these are the fundamentals of this music.

There are others who claim the roots of "reggae" lie in the Jamaican patois word streggae, meaning "loose woman" became morphed into reggae. Apparently, Toots once said of a woman when she walked by "she look streggae, raggae." He and his friends put that to a beat that we now recognize as reggae, and the music has since been associated with the term.

Bob Marley once claimed that the word reggae derived from regis, latin for "to the king," but it would seem to me that this music, tho possibly directed at the king, was not intended to be consumed by the king, and so this seems unlikely. It's hard to argue with the king of reggae, but, well, I think I just did...

This kind of thing leads me to wonder about the roots of a lot of words. This is one the reasons I first got into linguistics, before I realized it was dominated by Minimalism, the Penn Treebank, and grammars of obscure languages spoken by a dwindling few. But, now I'm getting off topic.

Not enough math

So, when has a proposal or paper not enough math? When has it too much? Is math the only language that mathematicians speak? Cannot examples in prose often illustrate points more clearly than sigmas and pis?

What does this signify? The end of an age of innocence? Of indolence? Of incompetence? What gives a person the heebie-jeebies about not seeing a list of equations gracing the page?

Mathematics is one way to describe things, and is a very effective means of communicating concepts. I for one am okay at deciphering such script, but there are certain examples that confuse and confound me. And why would I put up with such things? Why would any reader not want to fully understand the author? Unless you're reading poetry.

But enough about semi-probabilistic li'l ol' me and my orthogonal to the norm problems.

Lossless compression for all of human knowledge?

An org out there is offering a 50'000€ Prize for Compressing Human Knowledge, with a focus on lossless compression of information. Many questions come to mind, questions for a later post.

Some thoughts recently come across(t):

"The theory of probability ... can and should be developed from axioms ..." -- Andrei Kolmogorov

"Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily" -- William of Occam

Those Dang Daunting Round Numbers

It's the dog days of summer, and the country has experienced the the hottest first seven months on record. This heat wave largely affects the denizens of regions of the country that aren't used to such high temps. Last night, David Letterman's top ten list enumerated the ways in which a person could tell it was so hot. Maybe three of the jokes were amusing, a record in its own right. But I'm not writing to pick on Letterman.

He made an interesting quip though: "It's 98, but it feels like 103. Can you really tell the difference?" I think the heat index is largely ignored unless it tops 100. Buy why 100? That seems like such an arbitrary number. It's a nice round number, for sure, even sporting two matching zeroes, but why is 100 significant? Living in Texas, you get used to the temperature (not to mention the heat index) regularly topping 100. Does it matter? Is 100 really that bad? My answer: no. I find 80 with 100% humidity much worse than 100 with 40% humidity.

Now percentages. That's where the number 100 is significant. It means all, absolutely, without question, the universal quantifier!

When the Dow-Jones hits 10,000, that's a big deal to a lot of people, but really, what should matter is the percentage that their investments rise or fall, not the absolute value of an unabsolute index. The Dow is a very indirect measure of the economy.

When an NBA basketball team scores 100 in a game, it's a big deal. There is even a metric that tracks how many times a team scores 100 in a game, which is often applied in relation to the number of wins a team accrues over a season. It is meaningless otherwise.

I find that people tend to set very arbitrary thresholds in many aspects of their lives, including the normal speed limit of US highways: 65mph (roughly 100kph ;).

Relation Ship-shape

Were I a better logician, I would define a relation Ship-shape (S), that takes two arguments of type man-man, man-woman, woman-man, woman-woman (power set of Genders G where the cardinality of the set is 2). These arguments wouldn't often argue; in fact, they ought to align, benign, make a b-line along a spline monotonically along the love axis (aka, the Axis: Bold as Love). Even if we allow local minima, there should be some hill-climbing, mountain-climbing, mountain-biking, back-packing solution to escape it, some escapade with a paddle, be it tabble-tennis, canoeing, or kayaking.

Though I keep yacking (SYN-ACK), reproaching imperfectness in a relationship, I am approaching the limit of my patience function, rapidly diverging from TruthLove, on the verge of emerging from the denominator, the product of the other side.

Indeed, I have yet to fully define/refine the sublime function S, where S(M,W) > S(M) + S(W), und so muss allein vielleicht sein. Traurige Träume, unz.

Perhaps I must turn to geometry to present a better solution. Gee Oh Me? Try?

Puzzlin' Evidence

It appears to me that puzzles have taken on a new mainstream lustre in modern American culture. With the recent popularity of sudoku, the NYT Crosswords (even spawning the documentary Wordplay), and the fun and games surrounding the DaVinci Code, it appears that big game outlets have reminded Americans that there's more to entertainment than the XBox and Fox News.

Video games have been an outlet for lovers of think-fast logic puzzles for some time now. Ever since the Nintendo Gameboy brought us Tetris, video gamers have enjoyed out-witting and this out-playing their friends in such games as Dr. Mario, and now the Brain Age phenomenon (which tags me as a 73-yr-old, fee-fi-fo-fum).

Even in plastic and paper form, logic puzzles continue to delight people of all ages. Ever try to solve a Martin Gardener puzzle? Those things make my head spin like a Rubik's Cube (Bűvös Kocka). Speaking of spinning and repetitive stress syndrome, I owe part of my computer science education to the Towers of Hanoi ripoff I played in 5th grade, and boy are my arms (still) tired. How else could I understand recursion without first understanding recursion? And the fox-chicken-cabbage-over-the-river puzzle...imagine, thinking in reverse and/or being able to make a global move on a local level, thinking non-greedily. Imagine what we could do as a country if we could do the same by aligning with the Kyoto Accords... Now there's a not-so-difficult puzzle...it's the environment, silly!

I'd like to have time to get into geocaching, a sort of scavenger hunt using GPS and clues found online. This blend of exercise, fresh air, and problem solving is probbaly too much for many modern video gamers, who'd rather suck down Doritos and Mountain Dew on the couch as they try to re-"beat" Final Fantasy for the umpteenth time.

I'd like even to run a city-wide capture-the-clues-and-figure-out-the-story competition, but the amount of logistics required is too daunting without a fully committed team. Ah, well, I suppose I'll have to wait for virtual reality to meet mobile computing to create virtual worlds that are mapped over real-space, so people can wander the park searching for the dragon, or the pirates, or the exit from the airlock...

Now that WotC/Hasbro have bought up many of the gaming companies from olden times (with the exception of Parker Bros, who just released a version of Monopoly where you can pay with credit), it's hard to say what the future of gaming-as-mental-activity will be. Hasbro has already released a few gaming titles in dumbed-down form...what's next? Hopefully, a new golden age of games will come about, as these games become more mainstream and widespread, and cross cultural, linguistic, and cultural barriers.

Someone needs to write a simple Java app to grab the day's NYT Crossword onto my mobile phone so I can solve it on the john or on the bus. Then we can all burn a few brain cycles trying to find an eight-letter word to complete the first line of Longfellow's Evangeline, "This is the forest ________."*

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(scroll down for the answer)























* primeval

Bye, bye, Archimedes' pi

Just as not every physicist cites Einstein's 1905 papers and not every mathematician cites the work of Pythagoras of Samos, not everyone needs to cite many of the work in their fields. This leads me to wonder -- just how much fundamental work goes uncited, especially in today's world of instant communication?

This I wonder as I often discuss technical ideas with friends, but work for a company which, in theory, owns that which I produce during the day. But do they own what I produce at night, or that which I cannot own, as I share it with another? How much of our own work can we erase, and how much of it goes unnoticed? Hence the palimpsest syndrome (as I'm interpreting it). As with employees of companies in the software business, I also wonder how many words and theories become wrapped into another and never see the light of day.

I mean, how old is pi? According to an article that's almost as old as me by E. Garfield in Essays of an Information Scientist Vol:2, p396-398, 1974-76 entitled "The 'Obliteration Phenomenon' in Science--and the Advantage of Being Obliterated!" Archimedes estimated pi in the third century BC and others refined it from the sixteenth century until now. Of course, it wasn't called pi until 1706, when William Jones started using the greek letter. It's a good thing we don't have to keep track of all the work that's come before us, otherwise our references would outweigh our new material...Still, it would be nice to have some historian track the development of, say, computer science from BC until now, including Kruskal's algorithm, the significance of depth-first search, etc. I considered embarking on one back as an undergraduate. I'm sure someone has at least begun such a treatment.

My linguistic correlate: how many language/linguistic concepts have we lost citations on...is there a Complete History of Linguistics out there? I mean, the easy (and incorrect) answer is to say it's all Chomsky's doing. But I can see a lot of shaking heads out there...