The end of an age?

In generations to past, philosophy and logic students have stood outside ugly concrete buildings in the bracing Scottish wind as the night draws in, and arguing furiously because someone is wrong about politics and philosophy of science. (Even though it was definitely only going to be a five-minute-chat, but now that so-and-so has said such-and-such about Karl Popper or Palestine and before you know it, you’ve been huddling in the cold for two and a half hours arguing about whether their premises were sound…)

But future generations of students they won’t be huddling around the Existentialist’s or the Logic Lecturer’s conical roll-up cigs for warmth anymore. They’re both quitting the smokes.  Maybe it will be too cold in Decembers to come, without the cigarettes to huddle around. Maybe in future, the arguing will have to be done in the pub, or via listserve or something.

Reminds me of the old xkcd:

Image description: the cartoon shows someone sitting at a computer. The speech bubbles are transcribed:

Person outside room: Are you coming to bed?
Person at computer: I can’t. This is important.
Person outside room: What?
Person at computer: Someone is wrong on the internet.

–IP

On garden paths and what I want to be if I grow up

There are times when we realise things about ourselves that other people have known for ages.

In my first term at university, I came home from my first Logic lecture and burst into tears because I was convinced that it was hard and I couldn’t do it. But it was required course so I went back. Three weeks later I was reading everything I could get my hands on that had formal semantics in the title. When I started computer science, I again panicked about it being new and hard, and then found that I loved hearing about logic and language processing from three openly antagonistic perspectives. I knew I would enjoy linguistics, but I hadn’t yet found the kind of linguistics that really made me buzz.

Now, a few years on, I picked my linguistics courses this year on the basis of what fit my timetable, and on the basis that some empirical research methods couldn’t hurt (the courses I really wanted to do where all held at the same times as my required courses).  So I didn’t expect to become quite so captivated  by the course I picked.  And now I’m awake at night wanting to take apart the cogs and wheels of every linguistic study I’ve read to see how the numbers work, where they come from, what they mean. I want to hold each token in my hand and watch what it’s doing and why. I want to know its formal purpose, but I also want to know its social purpose. What do we pay attention to? But more precisely, how does we pay attention to it? How do we pick up on the things that signal social and linguistic differences? How to we process that stuff? Where does variation come into it, and why?

The week before submitting my project I was working 10+ days on 5 hours of sleep while feeling crap. What I wanted to do most was go to bed for at least a week. But after that, what I most wanted to do was find out what the next result was. I’m not sure I could have maintained that kind of drive and focus in those circumstances with philosophy or computer science or even with another branch of linguistics. I still just want to go back to my numbers and my tokens — to tinker with the little cogs and wheels, and maybe supplement them with formal semantics and garden paths and parsers.

I have to make some serious decisions in the next two weeks or so. I have to decide where I’m going with this stuff in terms of dissertations. I think I know now I’m not really a straight philosopher. I’ve tried it on for size, I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve spent hours upon hours thinking about philosophical stuff. But I need my numbers and cogs and wheels and facts. Which makes me a scientist, I think. As for informatics, I think I just don’t really care enough about the artifical intelligence models and cognitive science models. At least not right now. Maybe I just don’t know enough about them — that’s always a possibility. But I want to know what real people do with real language. I expect philosophy and informatics to continue playing a part in what I do, but I’m thinking that right now, linguistics is what I want to focus on.

Does that make any sort of sense?

–IP

In praise of naked cucumbers

Praise be to:

1. Scotland’s Co-op for selling naked cucumbers; they expect to save 8 tonnes of plastic per year in so doing. I’m pleased about this, and hope it gets extended to other unnecessarily-overpackaged produce, and retailers. Tesco’s habit of placing their “Finest” range tomatoes in protective plastic trays and then wrapping the whole lot in plastic bewilders me. This is a good example of a little step that can make a big impact and doesn’t inconvenience anyone much. Not that I’m opposed to changing habits for environmental welfare, mark you. Just that I recognise that there are some adjustments that some people are not able to make.
2. LED headtorches. I got the Existentialist an LED headtorch for his birthday. This is a partial experiment. Firstly, we are hoping that it will be useful for him when he travels and stays in hotels/friends’ houses where the default is fluorescent lighting, and he can then turn off the fluorescents in his room and just use the headtorch instead.* The experimental bit is this: we’re hoping that he may be able to use the headtorch in public places where fluorescent lighting is default (eg, university lecture halls). Possibly if he can illuminate just his desk/notes with the headtorch, the fluorescent ceiling lights will be less bothersome. That’s the hypothesis anyway. We’ll see how it works. If the experiment is successful, I may invest in a headtorch too in the hopes that this will increase the amount of time I can work productively in the labs without getting migraines.
3. TENS machines, and all the people who have recommended them to me. The Existentialist got me one for my birthday, (also as an experiment). I tried it for my back, and the first few minutes felt weird, but I definitely felt better after 15 minutes. Yay! I am so pleased at having another non-medicine option for pain.

In other news, my research group and I have finished and submitted our project. It is done done done! Ask me anything you want about variational analysis of verb inflection. Go on, I dare you.

I only have two minor gripes:

1. I will never ever be able to believe statistics again. Not unless I’ve processed them myself and even then I’m not so sure. You would not believe the stats I have been crunching this week, to make something comprehensible out of what can only be described as a mess. I mourn the lost era of innocence and simplicity. But at the same time, the mourning is tempered by the fact that I’ve never been so fascinated by a problem in my life. I don’t even mind that I’m losing sleep, waking with urgent and important thoughts about multi-variate analysis that I cannot then remember upon waking. I worry that I may be becoming another spaced out obsessive academic, with all that that entails.
2. I’m exhausted. I do mind, actually. I know that contradicts the above, but there we go. Possibly a proper academic or a logician (or both) will have to sort that out. Maybe there should be an Academic Theory of Truth, or possibly an Academic Logic to accomodate that sort of contradiction (or non-contradiction, as the case may be) in very specific domains.

–IP

*For those who don’t know, both the Existentialist and I are sensitive to fluorescent lights, due to unrelated chronic medical conditions. Mine is migraines — I find I am sensitive to changes in light intensity and, when migraines are starting or when I have lower-key continuous headaches (which may be several days a week) I am sensitive to fluorescent lights.

Moving day

Welcome to the new cyber-soapbox! Please do help yourselves to some tea and coffee and biscuits. Make yourselves at home. Don’t mind the dust, I’m still graffitiing decorating.

I’m leaving the old Soapboax, because it feels rather, well young. Some of the things I’ve posted I’m not sure I still agree with. Some of the things I know I don’t agree with anymore — some of the things I’m ashamed of. I’ve been harsh to people, I’ve been naive, I’ve though about things in a very black-and-white way, I’ve been uncompromising.

Time to grow up a little. I’ll still leave The Soapbox up as archives, but I’m moving to a new blog. Anyway, all the cool kids seem to be WordPressing. Why not?

Why “modus dopens”, I hear you cry? A good question.

As any logic student knows, there are some argument forms in propositional logic that one sees again and again.

1. Modus ponens:
   If P then Q, P. Therefore, Q.
   Formally: P → Q, P ∴ Q
2. Modus tollens
   If P then Q, not Q. Therefore not P.
   Formally: P → Q, ~Q ∴ ~P

Both modus ponens and modus tollens are valid argument forms in propositional logic.

The third argument form is modus dopens, which earns its name through being both invalid and commonly mistaken for valid.
If P then Q, not P. Therefore not Q.
Formally: P → Q, ~P ∴ ~Q

I distinctly remember a logic tutorial in my first year in which the tutor wrote modus ponens and modus tollens on the board, and everyone dutifully took notes. He then proceeded to nearly choke himself sniggering as he wrote modus dopens on the board too, and saw about three people get that it was invalid and thus spot the connection with its name, while ten other students looked up blankly and proceeded to dutifully write it down in their notes.

–IP