Random Acts of Mind by Dones

An interesting study published recently demonstrated that when native speakers of languages with various word orders were forced to communicate only with their hands, they all used Subject-Object-Verb syntax.

“‘Not surprisingly, speakers of different languages describe events using the word orders prescribed by their language. The surprise is that when the same speakers are asked to ’speak’ with their hands and not their mouths, they ignore these orders – they all use exactly the same order when they gesture,’ said Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Bearsdley Rum Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology and lead author of the paper, ‘The Natural Order of Events: How Speakers of Different Languages Represent Events Nonverbally’ published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

So when faced with saying “The captain swings the pail,” for instance, test subjects all gestured “captain pail swings.” This hints at the basic syntax of the theoretical universal grammar, or the basic set of language rules shared by all humans…and little green Jedi masters.

Okay, to be honest, Yoda uses an entirely different messed up syntax than this–more of an Verb-Object-Subject order, with a lot of helping verbs tossed in to make it intelligible to English speakers. Although he seemed to conform more to English patterns in his later years. (Plus he’s not real, which I have to keep reminding myself.) But it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Regardless of what one thinks of Obama, I think he was purposely mischaracterized by Dr. James Dobson the other day. I listened to Obama’s 6/28/2006 speech on religion & morality in politics, and I thought he was fair and accurate in his assessment of the relationship between the three subjects. I don’t know why Dobson would have found fault with what Obama said, but I don’t think he was listening.

You know what, I’m a bit tired right now, seeing as it’s 2am. Here is a great opinion piece on this issue, which I agree with at least 90% (further links from there to Dobson’s & Obama’s recordings.

Dr. Dobson is a man I have great respect for, but I think he was listening to his co-host’s take on this, not to Obama’s speech. He jumped to conclusions which were wrong, he used inflammatory language like ‘fruitcake’ and ‘distorted’ when describing the presidential candidate, and he chose not to be charitable enough to give Obama the benefit of the doubt.

Obama said, “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. What do I mean by this? It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, to take one example, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”

Dobson decides to completely twist this and (I believe) purposely misinterpret these statements and others to further his own ends. In doing so, he clearly misses Obama’s point. Again, Peter Wehner from the Washington Post assesses this correctly, I think.

Mainly I wanted to bring this to my readers’ attention, and hope to stir a bit of discussion. What do you think? Am I too hard on Dr. Dobson? Am I giving Obama a pass on this one, when he deserves to be criticized? Let me know.

No, no one’s hurt. This is a good thing. “The Waiting Room” is the title of a song by one of my favorite bands, Sixpence None the Richer. to see what prompted a 5am blog post, read this excerpt (reposted here with much love & respect) from the Sixpence None the Richer fan newsletter:

“New Christmas album “The Dawn of Grace” coming October 14

Sixpence None The Richer has put the finishing touches on its first Christmas album “The Dawn of Grace”. Set to be released on October 14, the album includes eight traditional Christmas songs and two originals, “The Last Christmas” and “Christmas for Two.”

Download ‘Angels We Have Heard On High’ for free now from Sixpence’s MySpace music player.
Why do a Christmas album? Leigh Nash says ‘Sixpence fans have been asking for a Christmas album for as long as I can remember. It was something we always wanted to do, but somehow time got away from us. Now that we are back together, we thought a Christmas album would be a nice gift for our long time supporters. We love it and hope they will too!’”

I am very much excited for the Christmas album; it’s been forever since I’d been ‘waiting’ for a new Sixpence album to come out. But what’s all this about ‘Now that we are back together?’ The band has been apart for a few years, as far as I know. Then I read this

“Sixpence will be going back to the studio in the coming weeks to work on a new album for 2009.”

And now the word ‘elation’ comes to mind, and I find myself hoping they mean something like January 2009, and not October.

We have our very own ’singing frog’ situation here with our little boy. It appears that when we are face-to-face with him now, he’ll just smile, and laugh, and coo to us, thinking we’re the greatest things he’s ever seen. I can’t even voice to you how thrilling that is: what a beautiful sight it is to see your child smile at you, how ‘worth it’ all the rest of life seems because this little one is thrilled to know you’re there for him.

We’ve wanted to capture this on video, not only to keep for posterity, but also to share with the friends and family (particularly his grandparents, who are currently traveling overseas). Plus he’s just so adorable!!!

The only trouble is, the little guy didn’t want to cooperate. We’d get him smilin’ like a cheshire cat (minus the teeth), warm up the camera, and this is all you’d see:

I got to thinking that we had our own cute little version of the Looney Tunes dancing frog.

Then, last night, we tried for a while and got a glimmer of hope:

Then, this morning–a smile!!

…and then spit-up. Oh well, at least everyone can see him smiling now (and what freaks he has for parents).

Here’s what I say:

The answer to high fuel prices must change from changing the supply to changing the demand. It starts at home, with gasoline conservation like James has outlined. We’ve got to start using less gasoline.

It continues from there to further investment and commitment for mass transit in urban and suburban areas. We’ve got to make sacrifices through lifestyle changes.

We must accept that ethanol from corn is not the answer.  Newsflash: we EAT corn. Corn syrup is the sweetener of choice in just about every processed food. It’s a feed crop for livestock as well. Using corn for ethanol may make economic sense in the near term for corporate farmers, but even if we were able to turn from fossil fuels to ethanol, it’ll only turn the agriculture corporations into neo oil barons who will control the prices of both fuel and food. But the fact is we couldn’trun our economy on corn-based ethanol anyway. So in my opinion, we shouldn’t even try. We certainly shouldn’t be subsidizing ethanol production from corn. If you want to grow a non-food plant and get ethanol from that, be my guest. But that is not our destination; it’s just a bump on the road to where we need to be headed…

We must only purchase used cars until the automakers get electric cars on the roads. Then we must only buy the most intelligently designed electric cars on the market. If we all vote with our wallets, the manufacturers will get the picture. Those companies that don’t figure out the new market will die like the dinosaurs they are. We must accept changes like this. We must decide that if General Motors (as an extreme example) doesn’t give us a well-designed electric car, we will drive them to Chapter 13. Then they can be purchased by another company that will use GM’s resources to provide us with the gas-free transportation that we need.

We need to exploit the technologies we have discovered in alternative energies such as wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal energy generation. We’ve got to start a new Green Industrial Revolution that runs off of the infinite clean resources we have at hand, instead of limited polluting resources that we rely on other nations to deliver to us.

We need to realize that 21st-century nuclear energy is not the 20th-century stuff of bombs or meltdowns, but a clean source of electricity. In the technology’s current generation (which as far as I can tell has yet to be exploited on American soil), a nuclear plant can safely produce more energy with far less waste than anything currently built. We need to get over our fears of nuclear power and give it a significant role in our future energy development.

This is about a 30-year period of time I’m thinking about: roughly the remainder of my working life. This is just what I could come up with off the top of my head. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

So we come to Barack Obama, who yesterday gave a speech (video below) outlining his solutions for the energy crisis. Please note the similarities to what I have stated above. We’re certainly not saying all the same things. For one, I’m not running for president and can afford to say wacky stuff off the cuff. I also don’t have a professional speechwriter encapsulating my thoughts and ideas for me. But let’s just say that I like what I see in him, and I wouldn’t mind hearing even more from him on this subject.

Highlights of the video:

• - A program equivalent to Kennedy’s moon shot
• - More economic stimulus checks & tax credits in the short term
• - Raising gas mileage standards requirements for automakers
• - Investing in new and emerging alternative energy technologies, thereby creating new jobs
• - Incentivizing oil companies to drill in places they are already allowed to drill
• - Eschewing gimmicks (admittedly a bit of a gimmicky slogan)
• - “It’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to come overnight.”

Sorry for the work-related post today, but this was something I’ve been meaning to share. Despite the title of this post, I want to say that I really like my job. I think it’s a good fit in a lot of ways:

• - It’s mostly sedentary but I can stand up while working if I need to stretch my legs.
• - I’m not tethered to my desk/phone or constantly monitored.
• - It’s mostly task-oriented but I get to talk with lots of people.
• - There are few hard deadlines, and my bosses are fair.
• - I like the people on my team.

Unfortunately, things have been more stressful lately because of things surrounding having an interim supervisor.  Our interim supervisor is great, but the new supervisor was just announced yesterday, and so it’s currently an unstable situation. Our previous supervisor is one of the greatest people you’d ever meet, but it seems he wasn’t getting the job done.

With the turnover in that position, naturally the interim supervisor and our manager have been going over procedures with us to see what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, what needs to change, etc. I think it’s good that these things are being done: it’s never good to go too long without questioning why we do the things we do, especially if they’re not as efficient as they could be. Plus there has been some interpersonal strain amongst the team because we’ll get behind on certain things, while trying to keep up on other things, and each person thinks their tasks are more important than the next person’s. So the extra attention from up the ladder is not unwelcome or unnecessary, but since they’re shining a spotlight on everything, it’s natural for us to get a little tense from the extra scrutiny. And with the extra scrutiny comes changes handed down from above, and all forms of change can be stress-inducing.

For me, the light at the end of this tunnel has been that we’re getting a new supervisor, and after a period of them learning the ropes and sorting us out, we’ll be left pretty much alone again to get our work done. That’s fairly unrealistic, but it’s been what has gotten me through the day, aside from my growing photographic shrine to my son on my desk. (There’s something about imagining that I’m holding him that makes everything else go away.)

But yesterday came another hint of hope: I heard throught the grapevine that our manager has submitted to home office to make an additional position in our department. Hooray! More help! This is something I’ve started to mention to people when asked what needs changing in the department. We just need another full-time set of hands that does the same things we do. Not an intern, or part-time underpaid helper loaned from another department. No, I think our department’s responsibilities have grown, and our department has not. So this is all good stuff, and I was very excited just to hear that such a change was being submitted to home office, even if it never pans out. It could very well be rejected right now for budget reasons, or whatever, but it means so much to me that our manager would even try to request the extra person.

SANTA MONICA, CA– In a stunning move that will likely have the stand-up comedy profession in an uproar for years to come, God has banned veteran comic George Carlin from making any future live performances. This is only the latest in a long string of live performance bans by the Big Guy, who many say is starting to get a reputation for censorship and lack of a sense of humor. Critics have pointed out that this may have been a late retaliatory move against Carlin for participating the Bill & Ted movies, and that Keanu Reeves should watch his back.

Carlin–who was known for his sapient, observational humor, poking fun at everything from language and censorship to God and the American Dream–was unreachable for comment. Fans everywhere who have missed the opportunity to see Carlin perform live are filled with regret that they will no longer have the chance to go laugh at his jokes, then go home and look up what he was talking about.

Quote from Ars Technica:

‘Almost two dozen public interest groups have asked the Federal Communications Commission to start a proceeding on what they call “advertainment”—TV programming saturated with product placement. “We must not allow television programs to become Trojan® horses,” the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC) wrote to the FCC on Thursday.’

That is all.

(Okay, I admit I put the ® in there. But I think you catch my drift.)

Bottom Line: A far cry from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but who was expecting that?

**Note: If you want to remain totally spoiler-free before you watch the film, please note this review does contain what I would call significant spoilers. It’s also safe to assume any comments may contain spoilers**

It’s been a few weeks since this highly anticipated film was released, and I saw it the week after Memorial Day…so I apologize for the delay. Better late than never, though. Plus I hope to get some comments of people who have also already seen the film.

At the open of the film, we see the great Indiana Jones appear old, beaten, and captured. I think this sums up a lot of the film: Indy’s been locked up in a trunk for 20 years and just isn’t the same as he was in his prime. I think the film might have actually been better if the filmmakers kept him in this state throughout the film, instead of letting him out of his box and turning him into an invincible superhero. He goes from weak & old to single-handedly escaping Soviet commies, an atomic bomb, and destruction by aliens. I mean come on, even Superman has his kryptonite! Can the guy not even get hurt anymore like he did in Raiders?

Not to say that I didn’t enjoy the film. It was a lot of fun, first and foremost. It was also about what I expected, though a little more explanation and/or mature nuance would have been quite welcome. For example, in The Last Crusade, you have the love triangle between the father, son, and the Austrian gal, who turns out to be a villain. Good stuff, the likes of which you will not see in The Crystal Skull. No, in this film you’ll get some fan-baiting by bringing back a character from a previous film, but even that isn’t executed well, and it’s really not the same character anymore. They’ve become a charicature of themselves, much like Indy has become. I didn’t expect a Best Picture nominee, but for pete’s sake, I expected more out of the last 20 years than a trite tall tale. Anyway… here are the ratings:

Production value: 3/5 stars. Part of this is the comparison to expectations. Badly used CGI, bad wig for Cate Blanchett, bad set design (name one scene apart from the scene in the first two minutes that didn’t look like it was on a sound stage or backlot?

Story: 2/5 stars. Ugh. First of all, the crystal skull isn’t even in the same league as the other relics Indy searched for in the other films. Here, read the real story of the crystal skull as explained on Skeptoid.com. I’m not even going to get into holy grail vs ark of the covenant vs shankara stones…at least none of them are 20th-century hoaxes like the crystal skull. Second, as I said above, no nuance. No maturity. This was a popcorn movie, and not even a strong one like, say, Men In Black or Ghostbusters. The story had holes galore, the dialogue was banal and trite, and the script seemed simultaneously tired and hurriedly cobbled together.

Enjoyability: 3/5 stars: Like I said, it’s a popcorn movie, and I did enjoy it. The gags were corny, but good-spirited; the villains were one-dimensional, but that’s okay for the type of movie this was. If only it were a different type of movie: one that was made for the sake of making a good film, not just pleasing fans and making money.

Dones’ Rating: I accept this as part of the Indy series, but I’d rather watch the first three, or else the Young Indiana Jones TV episodes. Oh, and Steven Spielberg & George Lucas need to friggin’ retire instead of making a mockery of classic films.

I’ve been ‘that guy’ who’s been collecting Pepsi points off of bottle caps for the last several months. It started because we have vending machines at work and I got burnt out on Diet Dr. Pepper, so I switched to buying Diet Pepsi in the 20 oz bottles. Well, they’re like a buck apiece, so I quickly switched to grocery store-bought 6-packs of the stuff, in 24-oz bottles. Every cap has a code you plug in at pepsistuff.com (no link for them, this isn’t an ad), and for every 5 points you get a free mp3 from Amazon.com, which I can plan on my computer or ipod.

I consider this win-win-win, because I get my caffeinated beverage, at a non-vending machine discounted price, and on top of that I get the equivalent of 20 cents per bottle cap (since downloads generally cost a buck each). It’s given me the chance to build up some of the 80s music library I never legitimately purchased, and to fearlessly buy newer songs for my wife and I, since it doesn’t cost anything except the energy to do it.

But if I collect 60 points, the equivalent of 12 downloaded songs, I could get an actual CD from Amazon. My take on downloading music (legally) is that it’s only worth it if you’re not going to buy the album. So I can buy A-Ha’s “Take On Me” (Best song of the 1980’s) and the 2 songs from The Cure that I really like (”Lovesong” & “Friday I’m in Love”), and I’m only out $3. But if I want an album, I want the CD version so I always have the solid-state backup. Yes, I know I can burn CDs with my mp3s to back them up, but since mp3’s are compressed it’s better to have the CD-quality as the archive. Plus not every one of my friends and vehicles is ipod friendly, etc, so CDs still have a purpose, in my opinion.

But here’s the conundrum: I have enough points to get a CD now, but A) the selection of CDs I can redeem with points is fairly limited, and B) Amazon’s prices for CDs are pretty darn good. I can get a new copy of Radiohead’s “OK Computer” (I lost my old copy in 1999 when I brought it to work to play for everybody at Pizza Hut, but I never found it after that night…You’re welcome, thief! You know who you are!) for the point equivalent of $12, or I can buy it for $7.99 cash money. Well, that’s not a good value for my Pepsi points!

So the CDs that I would consider point-worthy are unavailable, and the available CDs are too inexpensive for me to give up my precious points for. Curse you, Amazon! Mocker of Pepsi Point collectors!!!

Update: They had The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” album available, which I’ve always wanted to get, and it sells for $13.97 normally. SOLD! for $12 in Pepsi Points and free shipping!