On perception

Submitted by sifaan on Wed, 10/01/2008 - 01:36

I recently came across a few facts on how sensitive our perceptions can be:

If our physical senses are working normally, we can:

  • See a burning candle from 28 miles away (if you are dark-adapted)
  • Feel on your fingertips a pressure that depresses your skin .00004 inch
  • Smell one drop of perfume diffused through a three room apartment
  • Distinguish among more than 300,000 different colors
  • Accurately gauge the direction of a sound based on a .00003-second difference in its arrival from one ear to another

At the same time, we often block our sensitivity and limit ideas for improvement - because we already know "The Answers". Confirmation Bias is such a wonderful thing isn't it :P ?

Desiderata

Submitted by sifaan on Thu, 09/18/2008 - 22:24

Came across this old gem recently: Desiderata by Max Ehrmann

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

International punctuation

Submitted by sifaan on Sun, 09/14/2008 - 17:58

I remember asking Alberto (my Colombian team-mate in Estonia) why they use a "¿" at the start of a question in Spanish. He answered "so you know right from the beginning that it's a question".

OK, so why don't other languages need it? In English and Estonian, there are words that help identify a question (what, when, why, where, how, are/is) so perhaps an additional punctuation is not needed. On the other hand, in Sinhalese, you don't know that it's a question until you come to the letter "ද" just before the "?".

Perhaps the answer lies with the origin (and evolution) of punctuation marks - as an aid to pronunciation as spoken languages evolved written forms. So, a sign to indicate the start of a question would be needed only if the spoken language had some kind of emphasis at the start of a question: to test this I need to check if this is the case in Spanish...

The price of apathy

Submitted by sifaan on Tue, 06/24/2008 - 01:10

"First they came" is a poem attributed to Pastor Marin Niemöller(1892-1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets. There are quite a few variants of this, this is one of them:

First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the sick, the so-called incurables,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't mentally ill.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Hillary Clinton - the race for the nomination

Submitted by sifaan on Mon, 06/16/2008 - 08:48

To be quite honest, I wasn't really following the progress of the Presidential elections in the U.S.A. (or to be more precise, the progress of the race for the Democratic Party nomination). I would be quite pleased to see a Democrat elected, but didn't really know enough about either of the two candidates to form an opinion of who I preferred... especially as they were both running against tradition - one by being African-American, the other being a woman.

Be that as it may, I followed some links and ended up at the transcript of Hillary Clinton's speech conceding the nomination to Obama, which impressed me enough (because it echoes much of my attitude to life) to post some excerpts here (emphasis mine):

Rata Perata: Anyone up for a late-night Children's movie?

Submitted by sifaan on Sat, 10/13/2007 - 13:12

When I watch movies, I prefer to watch them on my laptop; I detest watching movies on TV - in fact, I can't remember when I last watched a movie on TV. I do remember what it was - Men of Honour - and I got pissed off by having to endure 30 minutes of advertising to watch a 90 minute movie.

If it was only the advertising (TV stations have to make money somehow) I might have been able to live with it... but on the laptop, I can watch the movie of my choice (it would be very rare for me to be unable to procure an English movie popular enough to be shown on TV), at the time of my choosing (and not of the TV stations), at a place of my choosing (not only where the TV is), and have the ability to pause and continue (or even rewind) at will.

Can't do this wedding!

Submitted by sifaan on Fri, 10/12/2007 - 04:09

Tech note: If you cannot see the Sinhala characters, please download unicode Sinhala fonts here.

I've recently started taking notice of, and investigating, the influence of Sinhalese grammar and idioms on English in Sri Lanka. Some of the idioms, for example "can't do this wedding" (මේ මඟුල කරන්‍ඩ බැහැ) simply do not translate well, but a few, like "I'll put a wash and come" (මම ‍‍වො‍ෂ් එකක් දාලා එන්නං) have actually crept into normal usage.

In any case, it can be quite funny to try to reverse-engineer the original... but beware, phrase/word orders may have been changed to make it grammatically (ahem!) correct in English:

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