Noel Lynne Figart

If you’ve ever played any of the Sims games, you know that the characters “speak” in a series of sounds including pitch, cadence and vocal tone to indicate emotion.

muscle_boy just asked me if I speak Simlish[1].  I thought about it and commented I didn’t think Simlish was really a language as we generally define it.  While it does convey a rather interesting nuance of emotion, there are neither nouns nor verbs, so one cannot describe objects nor one’s relationship to them in Simlish.

Language wonks?  I’m curious about your opinion of this.  Can a language be a language if it only conveys emotional state, but cannot describe the physical world?

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[1] He knows I pick up languages pretty easily, even invented languages from movies.  Yes, I understand Huttese, Elvish and Klingon.  By the Return of the King, I did not have to read the subtitles to understand the Elvish.

In Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, one character scolds a young woman for bowing clumsily and then blowing on her tea to cool it rather than to wait for it to cool before drinking it.  The scolding involved a caution that a geisha had to be conscious at all times of the image she presented.

We live in a far more transparent age than Kyoto of the 1930s and if we are going to have an Internet presence, we need to be conscious of what we put out there.

If you have a presence on the web, especially if it’s linked to a legal name <cough>Facebook</cough> you might want to consider what you put out there.  Can employers see it?  Can colleagues?  Can employees, clients or potential clients?  Are you a teacher?  If so, are you careful that you only put publicly online Facebook things you’d want your students to see?

I’m not saying that you have to be totally stiffnecked, or that you shouldn’t have any personality to what you’ve got online.  My own online image is quirky as hell.  It’s also quirky on purpose, as that’s what differentiates my work from others and makes my classes and talking interesting.  So for me, being kind of weird is actually a business asset.  If you think I’m don’t consider carefully what sort of weirdness I make public, you’re fooling yourself.

That’s really the point in the long run.  Have a clear idea about what sort of public image you want to have, then be very careful that anything you let appear online sticks to that.

Ah yes, what an adorable Facebook group.

I’ve almost no sympathy for this one.  We often get all high and mighty about people learning another language for our convenience.  Coming out of an American’s mouth, it’s appalling.   Chances are good anyone joining the aforesaid group is fluent in exactly one language –English.  Chances are equally as good that they’ve not traveled enough to know what it’s like to try to get by in a day to day situation in one’s non-native language.

Unless and until you’ve followed complex instructions in a language that is not your native language, you don’t get to have an opinion on this.

I’m saying this as someone who does speak more than one language by the way.  My French is good enough to do minor tech support[1], I can follow a Karate class taught in an Okinawan dialect[2] and can understand Spanish well enough to follow a movie without reading subtitles.

Those are easy languages/situations, I have a talent for languages and it’s still rough.  My bank account, credit rating or legal future are not involved in a fine understanding of any of those languages.  To expect someone to “just pick up” English well enough to handle this is absurd and self-righteous.  Especially out of people I expect don’t have any talent for languages themselves.

Show a little imagination and empathy people!

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[1] try it sometime on four years of high school French learned at a time before most computer terminology was even invented

[2] Ya, body language and visual cues to help!

I’ve trained myself to hyperfocus for a few minutes when necessary, but because I don’t like to do it for long periods of time, I tend to do it in fifteen minute chunks.  I’ll put my sleep timer on my iPod to play music[1] for fifteen minutes then just dive into whatever I need to do until the music turns off.

I made a bit of mistake in my playlist today.  I had the theme from Jurassic Park in the playlist.  That did not help my concentration, as it sent me into a reverie.

The first career I ever considered was paleontologist.  I was that annoying kid who would correct the museum guard or guide about them.  There’ve been millions of us over the years.  To this day, I could not tell you why I loved dinosaurs so.  I’ve known of few children who were that into the monster aspect of paleontology.  Most of us who loved them did so from a very scientific standpoint.  Maybe that was it.  Kids love logical puzzles and paleontology is all about learning to construct logical theories.  It was many of our introduction into many sciences[2] – from geology to biology to forensics…  You could branch off into so much.

For those who are misguided enough to think that emotions and intellect are polar opposites, I’m sure the sight of someone sitting in a dark movie theater watching Jurassic Park for the first time with tears running down her face at THAT SCENE[3] with the brachiosaurs would be a bit of a shock.

To this day, I cannot hear that theme without recalling the power of seeing the dinosaurs living and moving for the first time.  So it’s a bad one to play when I’m trying to concentrate on something else.

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[1] Usually classical, but almost invariably instrumental.

[2] Though not mine.  I was introduced to computer science before I could read.

[3] Anyone who has had the experience knows the scene.

Okay, I’ve got one for you.

Why in hell do people flip out at a rumor that Facebook is going to start charging for its services?

A)     Aint’a gonna happen, my little chickadees.  Facebook’s business model is based on you donating time to market research playing Farmville, favoriting products for free advertising, and writing book reviews, ‘kay?  This is an order of magnitude cheaper than advertising on a sitcom and the audience is much more specifically targeted.  As far as revenue?  I assure you they get more money off of advertising than they could out of charging you.

B)      Even if that weren’t so, why does a company owe you an expensive service that’s a pain in the butt to maintain?

Do I mostly go for the free services? Yep. I use Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yahoo, Gmail, Google Docs and Wikipedia.  Shoot, several of the former I even use professionally!  But there are services I pay for.  My Livejournal account is a paid account, because I like the lack of advertising.  My blogs are hosted on a server I pay for, ditto.

Are there a lot of free services offered on the Internet?  Yeah, and a lot of them are pretty cool.  I think it’s a neat development that we can do so much for little money.  If a service isn’t worth me paying for, I don’t.  I have a free Pandora account because I don’t find the ads that annoying, and I never have it playing for more than 40 hours in a month.

But it seems kind of silly to me for people to think that sysadmins and programmers are supposed to work for free or something so people can post about what they had for breakfast, ya know?

A favorite passage of mine from Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather:

‘All right,’ said Susan. ‘I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.’

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

‘Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—’

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

‘So we can believe the big ones?’

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

‘They’re not the same at all!’

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET— Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME… SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—’

MY POINT EXACTLY.

She tried to assemble her thoughts.

THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS, said Death, apropos of nothing. DON’T TRY TO TELL ME THAT’S RIGHT.

‘Yes, but people don’t think about that,’ said Susan. Somewhere there was a bed…

CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE’S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A… A BED IS A NORMAL THING. IT IS THE MOST AMAZING TALENT.

‘Talent?’

OH, YES. A VERY SPECIAL KIND OF STUPIDITY. YOU THINK THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS INSIDE YOUR HEADS.

‘You make us sound mad,’ said Susan. A nice warm bed…

NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?

Tastes and smells can be highly evocative of memory.  I think science has pretty much proven that these senses are hardwired into your memory.

I had an experience of this today.

Snow used to be special to me.  I grew up in Virginia, where it didn’t snow often and when it did, it meant a holiday from school, sledding, an icy butt because few people owned water-resistant snow pants, and…

Toll House Cookies

A snow day meant Toll House Cookies.   Looking back, I realize it was a way for mom to keep us occupied when we were sick with excitement from the snow, and chilled to the bone from being too wet and not wanting to come in from the cold¹.   She would get us to go down into the basement and strip out of sopping wet cold snow things, hang them in front of the wood stove to dry and we’d change into warm dry clothes.  Being quick and efficient about this meant a reward of a spoonful of raw cookie dough.

I took a taste of the cookie dough today as my son and I were making toll house cookies in celebration (for him) or consolation (for me)² of the first snowfall of the year.   When I’m tasting something and want to concentrate, I tend to close my eyes.    As I did so today, I was right back in my mother’s kitchen, asking her if the spoonfuls of cookie dough were the right size to make good cookies, smelling the chocolate, sugar and vanilla, and anxiously staring into the window on the oven waiting for the melty cookies to solidfy and be ready to eat all warm and gooey.  I remember being glad that Mom’s mixer had two beaters, as my brother and I were allowed to lick the beater when the cookie dough was all mixed up.  My Kitchen Aid only has one, so if one child gets to lick the beater, the other is allowed to scrape the bowl.

Toll House cookies were such a favorite in the household that Mom always baked a batch with the other Christmas cookies, so that’s another good memory I tend to have associated with them.  In fact, I don’t think I have a bad memory associated with making them.   They’ll always mean wintertime coziness with loved ones to me.

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¹Northerners, don’t laugh. Those snow pants we buy every year for our kids are simply not an appropriate use of money when they’ll be used at most twice before the child is too big to wear them. It’s a considerably different proposition when the kid is walking a mile to school in the snow every day for four months out of the year.

²Snow used to be magical to me, even when I first moved up here. Almost nine years on and the magic has worn off a bit. Now it just means shoveling driveways and dangerous driving to me. I should take up skiing or something to return to a more positive view.