I remarked the last little while ago on the phenomenon of English speakers who try so hard to get their French right that they go full circle and end up getting it wrong again.

This is not the same as when advertisers simply make up foreign-looking stuff, such as Häagen-Dazs or Yoplait.  No– I’m interested in cases where a genuine and sincere effort to apply a known rule, and even to honor exceptions to that rule, bumps into a wall of exceptions to the exceptions to that rule.

Last time, the issue was terminal consonants that by all rights ought to be silent in French but aren’t.  This time?  Word order….

In general, the rule is that a French adjective follows the noun that it modifies (and agrees with that noun in number and gender).  So we have la crème brûlée and le Bichon frisé and les États-Unis.  The exception has to do with a small class of frequently used, primal adjectives that express basic qualities (big, small, new, old, good, bad, etc.).  Adjectives in this class work the way adjectives do in English; they precede the modified noun.  Thus we end up with la grande jatte and la nouvelle année and le petit prince.

Well, today I received a newsletter by email from my favorite wine, beer, and liquor vendor, and its featured column celebrates the arrival of the “Nouveau Beaujolais”.  Given the rule and the exception described above, it’s no wonder that an author seeking to honor both would take “nouveau”, which after all belongs to that special class of adjectives that precede rather than follow, and cram it in front of “Beaujolais”.  Alas, things are not so simple.  In addition to the rule and the exception, there’s the exception to the exception: sometimes, primal adjectives that normally precede the noun follow it instead, and this is one of those times.

Idiomatically, then, the fact celebrated by lovers of table wine near and far is that le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!

A votre santé!

You know that old saw about how we can’t think beyond the limits imposed on us by the language(s) we speak? How Huck Finn reckoned himself Hellbound because his vocabulary defined the perimeter of what he could conceive? How our interactions with the material world are socially constructed by way of the linguistic instruments through which we differentiate and individuate percepta? Y’know how we’re trapped in the proverbial Prison House of Language?

All crap. Turns out that linguistic and conceptual syntaxes not so tightly at the hip joined are:

“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,”….

“Our data suggest that the ordering we use when representing events in a nonverbal format is not highly susceptible to language’s influence,” Goldin-Meadow and her co-authors write. “Rather, there appears to be a natural order that humans use when asked to represent events nonverbally. Indeed, the influence may well go in the other direction–the ordering seen in our nonverbal tasks may shape language in its emerging stages.”

Teasing out the implications for English and Mandarin poetry, and especially for synaesthetic consequences in Poundian Imagism, as an exercise for the reader remains.

A tip o’ the tiara to Dean Esmay

Joe Cocker covers the Beatles with a little help from his friends….

Courtesy of CNN:

…a business professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia wasn’t surprised when his tickets didn’t bring him the $75,000 grand prize, but he was shocked to learn the top prize had been awarded before he bought the ticket.

…He discovered the Virginia State Lottery was continuing to sell tickets for games in which the top prizes were no longer available. Public records showed that someone had already won the top prize one month before Hoover played. He is now suing the state of Virginia for breach of contract.

Here’s hoping Prof. Hoover sticks it to The Man for replacing infinitesimal odds with imaginary odds!

In the summer of 1967, something unthinkably weird happened on the deck of a US aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin.

It was fueling time in preparation for yet another sortie, and the planes were arranged on the carrier in this manner:

The large plane in the upper left, an F-4 Phantom II, flipped from external to internal power. Normally, this was wholly routine. This time, a power surge launched a 5-inch rocket out of the underwing rocket pod.

As you can see, the weapon struck one of the two manned planes, A-4 Skyhawks, on the right. Although a safety mechanism prevented the rocket from detonating, it struck and destroyed a wing-borne fuel tank on the smaller plane and a conflagration ensued. The external fuel tanks on those and nearby planes overheated and exploded, accelerating the fire with even more jet fuel, which then caused even more tanks in the area to cook off. The pilots in the affected planes could either quick-fry to a crackly crunch or jump ten feet down into the fire, near its source, and run through the erupting blaze to safer ground.

Meanwhile, the impact of the initial rocket strike had also caused a couple of half-ton bombs to come loose and fall into the heart of the inferno. A minute and a half into the crisis, as the mutually reinforcing jet-fuel/explosion cycle spiraled out of control, one of the heavy bombs beneath the struck planes cooked off. It destroyed the plane with its remaining arms, blew a crater in the flight deck, and rained fiery jet fuel and molten shrapnel on the crew who had been trying desperately to bring things under control. Almost all the on-deck firefighters were destroyed in the blast. In addition, the explosion detonated eight more of the same heavy bombs. The chained explosion of the half ton missiles shredded the flight deck and sent flaming and molten debris flooding down into the hangars and living quarters below.

One hundred thirty-four dead. One hundred sixty-one injured. It took the ad hoc firefighting crew until the following day to master the flames.

One of the pilots of the two Skyhawks the wayward missile had struck was incinerated by secondary explosions as he tried to escape his cockpit. The other, whose plane had dumped the half-ton bomb that set off the huge chain reaction 90 seconds in, managed to survive. Throwing open the canopy and climbing onto the nose of his plane, he ran down, leapt into the flames, and fled through the fire shortly before the big one beneath his craft went off and destroyed his aircraft and everything around it.

He escaped– but not before going back in to try to help another plane’s pilot to safety– a rescue interrupted and prevented by an explosion that threw him back two body lengths, pelted his chest and legs with shrapnel, and ripped apart his fellow rescuers.

From the heart of the disaster the Skyhawk pilot finally made it to the periphery and safety, having defeated fear– having reacted with courage and agility just in nick of time.

His name? Lieutenant Commander John McCain.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the relevant details and images.

It seems that laying out 18 KDollars at Christie’s will score this lovely artifact of ancient geekage. They should’ve thought twice before playing the Barbarian Expansion module.

Modern scholarship has not yet established the game for which these dice were used.

Heh….

Thx to BoingBoing and Critical Hits.

Sometimes, the magnitude of moronicity is mind-boggling.

Over at Newsbusters (”Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias”), Mark Finkelstein breathlessly reports that Barnes & Noble is tweaking search results to pimp Obama’s biography:

Shane was reluctant to accuse Barnes & Noble of bias, but I’m not. First, the book industry is notorious for its liberal leanings. Second, every other book on the first two pages of search results contains the search term “God” somewhere in its title. It’s difficult to imagine that B&N’s search algorithm put Obama’s oeuvre, which does not contain the word “God,” in second place without some definitely un-divine intervention.

Well. Do you think the search results might have something to do with the occurrence of the term “God” in the editorial reviews? Do you suppose that B&N’s own review of the book, which includes a quote in which Obama references God, might be a factor in their search algorithm? And do you suppose their algorithm might take into account which hits for the term “biography” have yielded the most views or sales lately?

Incidentally, a search at bn.com on “faith” “biography” yields McCain’s gripping auto-bio in the top 10 results. By Finkelstein’s logic, Barnes & Noble must be conspiring to sell McCain to true believers.

More amusing than any imagined conspiratorial tweakage of search results is the actual editorial blurb B&N provided for McCain’s book:

Senator John McCain won’t win his party’s presidential nomination, or even receive the vice presidential nod, but his autobiography can’t be seen as anticlimactic. In ways, the failure of his campaign allows us to peruse his relaxed and often self-critical memoir in a leisurely and nonpartisan way….

Life is full of irony. Case in point: search on “Finkelstein get a life” at bn.com for an interesting paired result.

Making software for the Military-Industrial Complex™ is just a cover to deflect attention away from my true role as Guardian of All Secure Perimeters for the Network Operations division of the Tri-Lateral Commission (GASP NO TLC). In that capacity, I had occasion on the job today (during a break, out of respect for your tax dollars and mine) to hit that notorious den of social iniquity, Popehat.com. Here is (more or less) what greeted me:

Access Denied (policy_denied)

You have been denied access to: http://www.popehat.com/ ;

Category: Violence/Hate/Racism

Your IP is: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. All web activity is being monitored.
The local time is: [15/May/2008:09:07:33 -0400]
Proxy IP is: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

If you feel you should have access to this site contact the Service Desk at NPA-NXX-NNNN and provide this information. For assistance, contact your network support team.

So there you have it.  The Powers That Bomb think we’re probably a Violence/Hate/Racism site.  Some of our sister nodes in the intolerance network were also filtered.  (They can say it was because of our bandwidth, but that’s just the Official Story.)

Now that “they” cannot see us, the rocky road to Revolution should be much smoother. Meet me in the forum for logistical planning.

Why cut through all that muscle when you can reach down the throat and yank the appendix out?  Of course, this comes eighty-two years too late for Houdini….

Everyone has a mental-verbal lapse now and then. Sleep-deprived candidates running on empty or arugula seem particularly likely to suffer from them. That’s why I tend to cut McCain some slack when he misspeaks, rather than join the harping about his age. That’s also why I’m inclined to cut Obama some slack when he does likewise, rather than pretend the slip is less meaningless than I actually take it to be.

That’s why it’s absurd that Hinderaker tries to make heavy weather over so much nothing:

This is much worse than anything Dan Quayle ever did. Needless to say, these bizarre moments won’t be promoted by the media as evidence that Obama is stupid.

No– no, it’s not ‘much worse than anything Dan Quayle ever did.’ Obama, referring to his travels in the contiguous states, accidentally said “fifty-seven” rather than “forty-seven” while discussing his impending trip to the forty-eighth. Big whoop. And what did Quayle’s brain/tongue nexus achieve?

• “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.” (Referring the the United Negro College Fund’s slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”…)
• “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.”
• “I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change.”
• “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.”
• “We’re going to have the best-educated American people in the world.”
• “For NASA, space is still a high priority.”
• “I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made.”

And so on and so Danforth, seemingly ad infinauseam. But Hinderaker decides that a slip in the tens place is worse than serial malapropism? And Instapundit picks it up without noting the speciousness of the comparison? Sorry, John and Glenn– there’s no comparison, and it’s irksome to force one.

On the matter of graphical representations of quantitative data, the New York Times offers a nice example today: Mapping the Human Diseasome.

Edward Tufte, the persistently self-promoting but nevertheless pretty cool author of the paradigm-refinin’ book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has made a career out of shouting from the rooftop that there’s a better, punchier, more powerful way of doing some of the things that are worth doing. In particular, he singles out and evangelizes in behalf of amazingly informative, instantly intelligible graphics of statistical data.

His most famous case in point is Charles Joseph Minard’s chart of Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812. All at once, and without confusion, the attrition chart shows the size of Napoleon’s army (width of line) over time (length of line), over topography (course of line and geographical place-names), according to military goal (advance color and retreat color), and in relation to the bitter winter temperature (marked in degrees below zero). He even illustrates reunion with a detachment:

Well, attention to such matters has caught on largely due to Tufte’s efforts, and now the art/data jockey Martin Wattenberg has a time-suckingly fascinating website, http://www.bewitched.com/, that aggregates his own amazing examples of the dynamic visual presentation of raw data. For example, there’s the wholly entrancing Name Voyager, which shows the top 1000 names for boys and girls for every year in the past century. Mousing over the interface will reveal the names; clicking at any time will isolate and inflate that name’s chart.  Type a single letter, or a couple of letters, to see a subset:

Yes, it’s true: Gertrude and Ethel are old-fashioned!

And then there’s History Flow:

The colorful history flow diagrams take a lengthy edit history and turn it into a picture. The image above, for instance, shows the history of the Wikipedia article on chocolate. What jumps out? The zigzag pattern at the right. It turns out that this is an argument over whether a certain type of surrealist sculpture exists or not.

Other mind-soothing stimulators of the stat-sensory cortex available at Bewitched.com include Apartment, which takes anything the user types at a prompt and converts it into a rational domestic floorplan based on semantic and thematic analysis. Continue to type, and the apartment will expand into buildings and communities, all organized as a function of the content you provide.

After textually sim-citifying, relax over the shapes of some popular songs and think about how the weekend’s looking.

Save Ferris!

Let’s send April out with a feel-good sports story.

Earlier this week, Sara Tucholsky, a right fielder for Western Oregon in her fourth year of NCAA Div II Softball, hit her first home run ever in collegiate competition. On her way around, she missed first base and injured her knee. Constrained by the rule that players must circle the bases unassisted by their teammates, she crawled back to the base she had missed, but the pain was too great. She could do no more, and was about to watch her one and only home run dissolve into a single.

Then the magic happened:

Central Washington first baseman Mallory Holtman, the all-time home run leader in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference, asked the umpire if she and her teammates could carry Tucholsky around the bases.

The umpires said nothing in the rule book precluded help from the opposition.

Holtman and shortstop Liz Wallace lifted Tucholsky and resumed the home-run walk, stopping to let Tucholsky touch the bases with her good leg.

No doubt if they had been playing hardball, the opponents would have gone to where she lay writhing at first base and stomped on her other knee while shouting “Sparta”. But this wasn’t hardball. This was sportsmanship.

Thinking about dropping 100k for an undergraduate education? Unless you don’t need it, don’t bother:

…a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. …Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that’s terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they’d still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they’re brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

Accessible education: formation, or fraud? Career counselor Marty Nemko does an adequate job of identifying the symptoms of academic illness. However…

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