As exemplified by former prime ministers Paasikivi (1952), Jäätteenmäki (2003), and Vanhanen (circa 2006). And of course Mika Häkkinen is a classic on this front, not only for his accent but also for his demeanor.

Helsingin Sanomat ran a story on the brain and how it processes stimuli. The story, published on February 12th, is behind a paywall, but I thought I’d post some of the links mentioned.

At first listen, this clip doesn’t make sense. But then listen to this, and return to the first clip. Sine-wave speech becomes decipherable after the brain knows what it is listening to.

Dropping syllables from recorded speech makes it nearly unintelligable (listen). But filling the gaps with static restored their comprehensibility (listen). Makio Kashino’s paper.

McGurk Effect — how your eyes throw off the ear. A great demonstration that visual cues are an integral part of speech recognition.

Looking isn’t necessarily seeing. For an infamous example, watch this video and “count the total number of times that the people wearing white pass the basketball. Do not count the passes made by the people wearing black.” Then proceed to step two.

Another example of attention in seeing is shown in the flicker paradigm: “A large fraction of traffic accidents are of the type ‘driver looked but failed to see’. Here, drivers collide with pedestrians in plain view, with cars directly in front of them (the classic ‘rear-ender’), and even run into trains. (That’s right — run into trains, not the other way around.) In such cases, information from the world is entering the driver’s eyes. But at some point along the way this information is lost, causing the driver to lose connection with reality. They are looking but they are not seeing.”

True to Slashdot, the discussion on the new Firehose service wildly spins off into a debate on the origin of the idiom “to drink from a firehose”. Some recognized it from the cult movie UHF, while others testily retorted that it’s been common parlance at MIT since way back when.

I got a kick out of this comment by Gulthek. Here’s the last paragraph:

“To bite the bullet is 1700s military slang, from old medical custom of having the patient bite a bullet during an operation to divert attention from pain and reduce screaming. To bite (one’s) tongue “refrain from speaking” is 1593. To bite the dust “die” is 1750. To bite off more than one can chew (c.1880) is U.S. slang, from plug tobacco.”

reCAPTCHA seems to be making the rounds quite widely right now, but I thought it was too neat to not mention it. Reminiscent of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, reCAPTCHA is a clever way of distributing the word-recognition work involved in scanning old books, and, at the same time, providing humanness-credentials needed to foil spambots. And it’s accessible, too (though there’s no OCR benefits from the audio version)!

Markosamuli mietti tänään mitä lehden pääkirjoitustoimittaja tekee. Kirjoittaako toimittaja yksinomaan pääkirjoituksia — ja jos ei, niin onko kyseessä jonkunlainen kunniatitteli? “Jos kirjoittaa pääkirjoituksia, niin eikö sitten ole pääkirjoittaja?”

Arvelin oikein, että Markosamuli tykkäisi tämän päivän Hesarin Tiede&Luonto -osion pääjutusta nisäkkäiden uudelleennimeämisestä suomenkielellä.

Näin eilen Keskustassa vaateliikeen, jonka jokaisessa ikkunassa luki “turkisviikot” isoin tikkukirjaimin. On varmasti ainoastaan onnistuneen propagandan ansiota, että täysin vailla mitään erityistä tunnekuohuntaa mietin miltäköhän näyttäisi, jos ikkunoissa lukisi “murhaviikot”.

TechCrunch takes a look at SystemOne, a wiki with semantic analysis capabilities.

“Essentially, it’s a wiki that analyzes what you are writing in real time and offers up related search results from other pages in that wiki, the web in general, your uploaded OPML file of RSS feeds, your emails and any files the system is given access to.”

This is the kind of technology I’m thinking about when I’ve talked about using linguistic tools to assist in publishing systems. Learning, self-organizing helpers. Automatic category suggestion, autolinking via user-defined keywords, simple site-specific ontology builders, etc. What about author recognition via grammar analysis?

Shame about the name, though.

There is something strangely fascinating how closely documented recent, Internet-related topics are on Wikipedia. We have exact dates and the context of terms being coined. Snowclone, disemvoweling, splog. It’ll be interesting to see if these neologisms survive, and if the way we “write history” will look more like this.

Which vs. that. The basic rule: Use “which” plus commas to set off nonrestrictive clauses; use “that” to introduce a restrictive clause.

I wrote a quick and dirty script to detect whether an entry was English or Finnish. It’s based on two explicit lists of signifiers (frequent words that are in only in one language). Each signifier is assigned a weight in order to make up for the fact that signifiers may occur in bodies of text of another language.

It’s actually much easier to match English than Finnish.

I couldn’t find any real natural language models for PHP, which is really a shame. A Markovian language classifier would’ve been exactly what I needed. I bet Ispell would work.

PBS has 100 examples from The Big Book Of Beastly Mispronunciations: The Complete Opinionated Guide For The Careful Speaker by Charles Harrington Elster.

Trevor Smith has an awsome speed-reader applet that flashes Cory Doctorow’s novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, on the screen, one word at a time. It’s an interesting experience of reading.

Cory’s been up to a lot. He loosened the (Creative Commons) license of his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and gave an interesting talk at the Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books event.

There’s also an Ogg file of Cory’s speech, Web 2.0 == AOL 1.0?, available through BitTorrent.

...and the newest one, by Margaret Mauldon, is horrible. At least according to Clive James.

... Already, though, it is hard to suppress a suspicion that in the matter of historical fidelity things are out of kilter, and the suspicion intensifies once the book is opened. Professor Malcolm Bowie, who wrote the informative introduction, makes much ado in his back-of-the-jacket blurb about Flaubert's precision, which the professor assures us is matched by Mauldon's brand-new and meticulously accurate translation of the actual work. Any reader wishing to believe this is advised to start on page one. He had better not open the book accidentally at page 178 [end of chapter 12, in part 2], on which we find Emma's lover Rodolphe justifying to himself his decision to ditch her. Rodolphe is supposed to be a creep, but surely he never spoke the French equivalent of late-twentieth-century American slang: "And anyway there's all those problems, all that expense, as well. Oh, no! No way! It would have been too stupid."

Just to be certain that Rodolphe never spoke like a Hollywood agent, we can take a look at the same line in the original: "Et, d'ailleurs, les embarras, la d�pense � Ah! non, non, mille fois non! Cela e�t �t� trop b�te!" The perfectly ordinary, time-tested English idiom "No, no, a thousand times no!" would have fitted exactly. The awful possibility arises that Mauldon has never paid much attention to English idioms like that. Instead she thinks "No way!" is perfectly ordinary. We can take it for granted that she knows the French language of Flaubert's era inside out. (She has already translated, for the same series of Oxford World's Classics, works by Zola, Stendhal, Huysmans, Constant, and Maupassant.) But she has a crucially weaker knowledge of how the English language of her own era has been corrupted. You might say that English has always advanced through corruption, but "No way!" is an idiom so closely tied to the present that it can hardly fail to weaken any attempt to summon up the past. In Alan Russell's translation of Madame Bovary, first published by Penguin in 1950, there is no "No way!" Probably the phrase did not yet exist, but almost certainly Russell would not have used it even if it had. What he wrote was "No, no, by Heaven no!" Not quite as good as "a thousand times no!" perhaps, but certainly better than "No way!": better because more neutral, in the sense of being less tied to the present time.

Looking at this online version of Madame Bovary, I can’t find see who the translator is. A little investigation, based on James’s comparisons, proved inconclusive. The last sentence of part 2, chapter 12 is interesting. It reads: “And besides, the worry, the expense! Ah! no, no, no, no! a thousand times no! That would be too stupid.” Just as James recommends.

This remix of Bush’s speech from the September 30 debate reminds of the story about the guy who made a tape of the between-word sounds he made while giving a lecture. He edited out all the speech and kept only the umms and uhhs. There was twenty minutes of it! Voke, a Finnish teacher I had in high school, used to tell this story to make students pay attention to the stalling sounds we make when speaking publicly.

Here’s another work of edited footage, this one video from the Republican National Convention.

When I asked about other words besides “vacuum” with two U’s in a row, the one I was thinking of was “continuum.” Janne found two other ones: “menstruum” and “triduum.”

So yesterday Helsinki opened its Christmas Street. I happened to be walking by, and I couldn’t resist the pull of the crowd. I didn’t stay long, though. I was hungover, and the crowd and the music of the military band were too much for me to stand.

Is this beginning of waiting for Christmas? December, in Finnish, is joulukuu which literally means “Christmas month.” But it’s not December yet, so there’s not even any calendar windows to open. I think Christmas calendars are what got me through December as a kid. That, and advent Sundays, which I remember best for the Hoosianna song we used to sing at school.