Sambal

I was reading the dragon book just now  (for work; for fun; work is fun!); in the chapter on lexical analysis they mention minimal-distance error correction as a possibility, mainly theoretical, for lexical error recovery.  That is, when you encounter a lexical error, find the path of the least number of insertions, deletions, transpositions or changes of characters that lead to a valid lexing, and proceed as if you’d encountered that.

This is a terrible idea, because it’s expensive and it can introduce horrific errors.  In practice,  nobody does it.  In their lexers.

But what if we do it in our brains?

So this got me thinking about human natural language “lexing”, such as it is, and how the brain interprets sound into phonemes, lexemes, and eventually meaning.  We have a pretty good ability to recover from a bad lex if we hear something that doesn’t resolve to a lexeme, and the ability to “search” the nearby phonetic/lexical space if the sounds we heard don’t resolve to a meaningful parse.

Trivial example: if a Southerner asks me for “a /pin/ to write something down with” I understand that they are saying “pen”.

So then I was thinking about minimal pairs, or groups of minimal-distance lexemes, such as “grin”/”grid”/”grit”.  These are mutually minimal pairs phonetically, with the /n/ /d/ and /t/ all dental or alveolar with substantial stop chracter.  They’re even all nouns.

What struck me, though, is that they don’t feel much like a minimal set.  I think that’s because they’re not very similar in denotation or connotation.  Which is to say, that the space in which I’m distinguishing them, mentally, is not merely the space of the phonetic differences between /n/ /d/ and /t/ but also the whole space of my internal lexicon, my experiences and memory including the sensations indexed under “grid” which are rather different from those near “grit”.  I guess what I’m really trying to say is that my experience of my internal lexicon is something like the OED’s list of citations, except that the citations are drawn from texts I personally have read and my own experiences.

I certainly have had the experience, while learning languages, of encountering what seems to me like a minimal pair, asking a native speaker about it, and getting a laugh because, I would argue, that person’s experience of the two words has a  large distance between them.

And that is what brings me to liberal education; the idea that in order to be well-rounded each person should read widely and get some experience of foreign, even hostile ideas.  What if the primary value of a liberal education is that it expands your lexicon — not just directly, in that more entries are added, but also by increasing the differentiation of nearby entries by increasing the distance between them?  This could work either by expanding the actual space (Ha – he said reading makes you big-headed) or it might increase the subjective experience of lexical distance by, effectively, fiddling with the metric that you use to measure the space.

Either way, I think it’s a good thing; it’s a literal expansion of the mind, and it’s one form of growth as a person that has no obvious downside.

Wouldn’t be American; and wouldn’t be, at all.

K has a love of history that we’ve been able to indulge by getting the Story Of the World audiobooks from the library.  She’s listened to all four volumes, from prehistory through about 1995.  (I was a bit reluctant to let her have modern history, 1860-1995, what with the various genocides that cloud the 20th century.  But Danielle and I talked about it, and K and I talked about it, and we decided to go ahead.  Not too many nightmares so far, though I never expected to be discussing the Holocaust in moderate depth with my 6-year-old.)

She was listening to Cold War history the other night when as I was passing by her room and I happened to hear that the topic was the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.  I walked in and paused the narration.

“Your grandma and grandpa were there, you know.  And your two aunts, but they were little kids then.”

“Did they see the soliders coming down from the sky?”

“The paratroops?  No, I think that happened at night, they were in bed.  But I remember my mom saying that N saw a tank in the street and it scared her.”

She paused to digest that.

“Y’know, if it weren’t for the Soviet invasion, my parents probably wouldn’t have left and come to America.  And I would have been a Czech, like my cousins – the children of my mom’s brothers who stayed.  And then you wouldn’t exist.”

I don’t know when I first heard the phrase “Brilliant Flash of the Obvious”. I know I was using it already in the 1990s, in California and I’m sure I didn’t invent it. It has some currency today — David Allen uses it in one of his talks — but only two google hits before 2005.

So what is a brilliant flash of the obvious? It’s an insight, or revelation, or transformative moment that contains absolutely no new information. The world doesn’t change, the available information doesn’t change – but something does change, in your internal cognition.

Maybe it’s easier to give an example. In my senior year of college, in P-Chem lab, I suddenly had a brilliant flash of the obvious: everything is made out of atoms! Normally, you’d hope that a senior chemistry major would know that already. But suddenly in that moment it hit me: I’m made out of atoms, the glassware is made out of atoms, the lab bench is made out of atoms, EVERYTHING is made out of atoms.

I was staggered. I must have said something out loud (e.g., “Whoa! Everything is made out of ATOMS!”) because my lab partner Jeff started making fun of me, and Dr. Cave told him to leave me alone. Which I appreciate, in retrospect, but at the moment I was too blown away to care or notice.

Turning and turning on its aging platter,
The disk cannot answer the controller;
Things fall apart; the server cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the blog...

Sambal.org used to be served out of my house; that server suffered a disk crash about a month ago, on its root disk, which was not RAIDed (not on the data disk, which was RAID-1). I haven’t tried to resurrect that machine yet, having been busy with various other things. We’re now hosted elsewhere while I figure out when to fit in “resurrect blog archives” into the rest of my life.

I’ve been reading Iris Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking — which, for all its flaws, appears to be the best English-language general history available.  I’m only about halfway through, reading about the International Committee’s Safety Zone and the descriptions of the atrocities; critics usually target the last third of the book, where Chang apparently speculates about the Japanese national character.

As far as I know, though, nobody sensible disputes the basic accuracy of her account of the massacre, killing competitions, rapes, etc.  I’ve been having to take it in small pieces.  It was giving me nightmares.

Chang committed suicide in 2004, while working on a book about the Bataan Death March.