modified 2003-12-20.
Musings on the geometry of thought-space: Consider *all* knowledge (known and unknown). What sort of framework does it have ? How many dimensions are needed ?
Pardon the construction. This is a extremely rough draft. Suggestions and links to relevant pages are welcome.
This includes:
everything
related pages:
disciplines which study everything
Being a Buckminster Fuller fan 3d_design.html#synergetics , I (DAV) like to consider ``everything'' a lot. When I look at all the fields of study available at a university, I wonder ``What is the complete list of all fields of study ? How do I learn about the interactions between each field of study ?''.
Sometimes I see a tree diagram, with extremely specialized classes at the leaves like ``VLSI design'' or ``electrical machines'' where we learn details of how people currently use some bit of knowledge. Moving towards the root, both of these classes have the same prerequisite ``Intro to Electrical Science''. In turn, that requires ``General Physics''.
...
|
|
|
General
Physics
------------------------
| | | |
| | \ \
/ | \ ...
... ... |
Intro to
Electrical Science
--------------------
| | | |
| | | |
/ | | \
/ | \ \
/ \ \ ...
/ \ \
/ \ ...
/ \
| |
electrical VLSI
machines design
As we move towards the root of the tree (``meta''), we get to classes which cover more general-purpose sorts of topics, and (at least in areas like VLSI design which is changing rapidly), even when leaf classes change rapidly from year to year (because new tools and ideas are being developed), the ``meta'' classes tend to change more and more slowly. (VLSI didn't even exist until late 1900s, yet a lot of the material in physics and calculus have not changed much from their development by Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) ).
So what is at the root ?
I think I was reading Douglas Hofstadter
when I had the epiphany that what is the root
is subjective.
There are a surprisingly large number of fields of study that can be considered the root:
-- David Cary
related web pages:
Here's the top N natural languages I would really like to learn. [FIXME: just list their names and a pointer to where I moved the rest of the information to http://www.worldwidewiki.net/ ?]
natural languages I want to learn:
"Life is too short to learn German." -- Porson, Richard (1759 - 1808)
By 2007, Chinese will be the #1 web language-- http://www.walid.com/
related links:
An opensource software translation project, translate.org.za aims to make software available in the eleven South African languages.http://translate.org.za/
Ethnologue: Languages of the Worldhttp://ethnologue.org/ ...
SIL International serves the peoples of the world through research, translation, and literacy.http://sil.org/
I've noticed for some time now that TV and radio news segments often feature heavily-accented English voice-overs when translating foreign speech. ... it doesn't matter who you use. Then again, maybe it does. The advantage of hiring an actor is that she or he can add any number of subtle inflections and modulations to manipulate our reception of speech. Can we ever know what the other is really saying?-- http://www.stingykids.net/archives/2003_03.html#000024
-- Dr. Philip Emeagwali http://emeagwali.com/interviews/mandate-the-future/While English is the language of choice on the Internet, it will hasten the extinction of thousands of indigenous languages. By the end of this century, 90 percent of the world's language could become extinct. The culture, customs and knowledge embedded in these languages will also become extinct. As we embrace the languages of former colonial masters, the world losses valuable information passed down by word of mouth over several generations. The extinction of any language is an irretrievable loss to humanity. If the early years of educational instruction are not in an indigenous language, then that language is headed for extinction.
The Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski Hypothesis, and related links.
"We lack decisive tests for distinguishing between nonsense babble, crafty cipher, and language." http://www.berkshire.net/~ifas/wa/glossolalia.html [offline ?]
short summary (probably inaccurate): The English language (and all other natural languages) is built of words and concepts created by people who assumed every "thing" was alive (has free will, wants and desires) and believed in (a) God . Therefore, a description of any "thing" using English (or other natural languages) is forced to use terms that carry the connotation that (a) the thing being discussed is alive, has free will, a soul, etc. and (b) the thing was designed by some intelligence.
However, since certain "things" are *not* alive (rocks, water, magnets, snowflakes, etc) and were *not* designed, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to discuss these things in a natural language free from inappropriate connotations. ( DAV: even if one does believe in (a) God, some things -- random permutations, emergent properties, etc. -- cannot be "designed". )
Karl Javorszky suggests using a synthetic language (mathematics) to describe things without using terms that carry inappropriate connotations.
Some sound-bites points I find interesting:
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, codified by linguist Benjamin Whorf, in its most extreme and simplistic form states that human behavior is determined by the structure and lexicon of the language in which the person in question actually thinks. To illustrate: a person whose language contains no word for falsehood cannot tell a lie; he cannot even understand the concept. The idea has been a popular one for many years, especially with science-fiction authors; it formed the basis of Jack Vance's excellent science-fantasy _The Languages of Pao_./* was http://www.webcom.com/~donh/conlang2.html */
Re:Blah Blah Blah (Score:1)
by orcrist (christopher.kuhi@stud.uni-*blah*muenchen.de) on Tuesday November 30, @05:05PM EST (#349)
(User Info)
I don't really need huge advances in interface efficiency. The needs you specify are cool by me. I'd love to be able to dictate my email,
navigate the web via voice, click 'Forward' without having to actually click...
This was somewhat along the lines of what I was thinking of.
and hey, tell me speech rec in FPS games wouldn't be cool as heck
You've got me there.
(maybe not JUST, but in addition to the other controllers
This is my point; not a replacement, rather, in addition to the traditional controls.
I could handle hitting Enter to CR to the next line, then saying the line of code
Like I said, try dictating code to someone else and you'll see what I mean. Programming languages aren't spoken languages, and aren't
meant to be. Maybe if the technology allowed it, someone might develop a spoken programming language, but frankly (speaking as a
Linguistics student) I doubt it. Even Mathematicians tend to show each other their formulas rather than say them, and I think we can assume
their speech recognition works fine (despite how it seems when you're talking to one ;-)
I want to be able to talk to my puter like they do in Star Trek someday.
That's what I meant by language recognition, or better comprehension. In Star Trek they use colloquial language with the computer. This
requires a great deal more than just the one-to-one relationship represented by replacing typed commands with spoken ones. For this the
computer needs to understand what you mean not just what you say. If the computer's that smart, you probably don't need to tell it what to
do :-)
Chris
(archive version; current version at http://visual.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/SpeedTalk ) Somewhere I thought I read about a language designed to be spoken very rapidly. Maybe it was called "speedtalk", I can't remember. Elsewhere I read about machines designed to "speed up" any spoken language, but avoiding the "chipmunk effect". [FIXME: I've lost the links -- please help me find more information]. If teachers could communicate 4 times as fast, then 4 years of college classes could be compressed into 1 year. (Even if it took the same amount of time to *understand* something, so it still required 4 years, perhaps you could squeeze a week's worth of classes into 2 days, and then spend the rest of the week *doing* useful but routine stuff that left your mind free to ponder what you heard.) (see data_compression.html#source_compression for basically the same idea applied to human-to-computer communication rather than human-to-human communication ). Other minor benefits: books require less paper to print (see http://visual.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/TerseWriting , http://papertalk.wiki.taoriver.net/ )
While "word rate" varies somewhat from culture to culture, "information rate" is basically a constant. To express "The little boy was hit by a blue ball and started to cry, but his mother cheered him up with some cookies." will take about the same amount of time in spoken langauge in all languages (meant for face-to-face interaction).http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=86294&cid=7504638
I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages.
mikebelrose:
No wA! ppl wl nvr tlk lk dat! w@ r U, %-)?
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=86294&cid=7511496
(What are you, crazy ?)
``... the languages of mathematics and technology permit and promote different and more effective styles of thinking. ...
... Supertongue ... Terseness is itself a virtue insufficiently appreciated. Who has not had the experience of reading a long sentence, involving difficult concepts, or complex relations, and found that at the end of the sentence he had forgotten the beginning? If you cannot express an idea briefly, then a combination of ideas may become so awkward that its expression is not just difficult, but impossible. Yet in English, for example, we use unnecessarily long words because most of the one-syllable words have not been allocated.
... linguists believe that with moderate ease we can speak and hear at least 100 simple sounds (40) whence it follows, with reasonable assumptions, that the entire unabridged English vocabulary could be reduced to words of one syllable-still leaving plenty of room for redundancy, synonyms, poetic variation, and the monosyllabic rendition of a large store of common phrases! ...
Our languages are exceedingly weak also in the description of contoured surfaces, including faces; we can easily recognize differences of physiognomy and expression that we are nearly helpless to communicate verbally. ...
... ''
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg/b/Br-Bt.html#BrevBrev
Artificial language designed to allow a baseline or near-baseline to communicate the maximum amount of information in the briefest amount of time.
Brev makes use of the entire range of word sounds that the baseline voice is capable of, not just those belonging to a particular language group. Mostly used by those hu who prefer to avoid using direct mind to mind communication links. The written version of the language employs graphic ideograms. Speakers of Brev brag that they can compress an entire life history into into 5 sentences or 3 lines of ideographs.
Brev was invented during the early Empires period by a splinter faction of the Refugium Federation, Ecos Ascending
The language is so compact that a speaker can repeat themself three times before a "slow-language" speakere can say the same thing once. This repetition allows the listener to pick up the patterns of the sentence/paragraph more easily. Sometimes - especially among the cyborg augmented clades, there's a sort of back and forth patter in each exchange like information packets being sent:
C: Mary had a little lamb :receipt?: D: Mhall :receipt.: C: Whose fleece was white as snow :receipt?: D: Wffwwas :receipt.: C: :incorrect receipt.: :correction: Whose fleece was white as snow :receipt?: D: Wfwwas :receipt.: etc.
Because of Brev's vulnerability to errors/noise, a lot of effort has been put into reducing or eliminating such problems as the language was developed. One simple method was to eliminate the use of words that sound the same but mean different things. (deer/dear, to/to/too are examples in Information age English). Speed of delivery would not be as much of a factor as tone, prefix and suffix placement and the use of words built around all the phonemes to clearly get a point across without using a lot of individual words to do so. Which is not to say that it would be impossible to be misunderstood, just harder and with a lot more information being misunderstood in one chunk.
-- Todd Drashner
Of course, every profession has its jargon, but Silicom is sillier than most. Whereas doctors, musicians, and mechanics invent terms for concepts unique to their professions, computer-industry nerds merely substitute words for which perfectly good English equivalents already exist.'' Pretty funny.
Exactly the opposite direction from #speedtalk .
... two principles for defining spoken editing commands. ... experimental results ... spoken editing language ...
The first principle is to identify more basic editing concepts than found in most editors and to construct a notation that allows for the orthogonal composition of such concepts.
The second principle is to encode each editing concept as a single syllable (with a few exceptions).
... ShortTalk, an editing language built through extensive experimentation over a period of six years. It contains thousands of commands constructed according to the principles just formulated. Still, its complete syntax can be described on a two-page quick reference card. The prototype system called EmacsListen is written in 10,000 lines of Lisp on top of GNU Emacs[4].
Data gathered over a two-month period, following several months of training, show that the author of the present article was able to actively use some 1000 ShortTalk commands. The information content, also called entropy is estimated to 7.3 bits/command. More precisely, this number is the -p log p summation over command occurrence frequencies p stemming from a total of about 30,000 commands recorded.
...
Our results indicate that editing (including punctuation and other symbol entry) may in fact on average be accomplished more effectively by speech than by keyboard, since the use of editing keys tends to be slow, involving either keys far from the keyboard center or key combinations. ...
Since command syllables can be chosen carefully (out of some 15,000 to 30,000 possible syllables) to not generate collisions with English, recognition accuracy of commands can be made much better than dictation accuracy, often reported to be somewhere between 90 and 95 percent. In contrast, studies of keyboard use during editing show that operator errors are very common, frequently around 20% to 30%. These errors include keys hit by mistake. ...
It follows that error correction and a way of easily backing up, undoing the last utterance, is very important also for spoken commands. ...
There is a great amount of work in the area of using natural language for commanding small devices, like PDAs. This work is also not relevant to editing, since it assumes relatively simple tasks that are carried out after little or no training. Editing, is a professional activity and a process so complicated that it requires substantial training -- no matter what. Thus, our results and philosophy only superficially contradict research in speech user interfaces.
...
... the principle we advocate: that humans through their intellectual superiority are better served by a strange-sounding, but precisely delineated set of primitive concepts. ...
...
Our results show that editing commands may be transmitted about as quickly to the computer as English dictation, measured in terms of information-theoretic entropy. Our assumption that editing by speech demands a substantial learning effort is contrary to conventional wisdom about the role of speech recognition. Editing is so complicated that innate naturalness of the UI does not exist. The rational approach is to let efficiency, the amount of editing information that can be transmitted per second, drive the development of a spoken interface. For the user, efficiency is the strongest motivation for learning the complex tool any unfamiliar command language is. And we argued that natural language -- being verbose, ambiguous, and vague -- may be a poor underpinning for such a tool (even if it could be understood by a very intelligent machine). Our perspective and results demonstrate that the natural match between human and machine may be the one that recognizes the superiority of the human mind over computational capabilities of machines.
-- http://anvilwerks.com/index.php/TheShadowOfYesterday/IntroductionTheir native tongue, which they kept highly secretive, was different than any other known language. It was built not of words, but of things called zu, tiny discrete bits of ideas, each pronounced as one syllable, which were combined in a complex method that could convey any idea depending on the zu used and in what order. Best of all, this language had a unique power: anyone who heard it understood the zu and in prolonged exposure gained knowledge of how to speak the language. Emperor Absolon commanded his advisors to spread the language of zu throughout his Empire.
...
highly sketchy - both because I don't know any better and often because nobody knows any better. Among the unexplained things are the fact that the ear produces noise out of its own accord, but also generates an echo when fed a click - but too late to be a natural echo, it is actively generated.
...
let's try to design a protocol that meets all these design goals, but is more limited than real speech in many ways ...
constructed languages similar to German, English, Hebrew, etc. in that they can be written down with a small alphabet, communicated verbally and sequentially, etc.
See also modified_english for smaller modifications to English.
From: John Eaton Subject: Re: universal spoken language??? Date: 01 Nov 1999 00:00:00 GMT Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design ... I have heard that when real linguists get together for their world wide conference that the official proceedings are in the one language that all linguists know: latin. John Eaton
``English dictionaries for ispell(1) supports 3 prefix and 14 suffix flags.
Prefixes: *A - re *I - in *U - un Suffixes: V - ive *N - ion, tion, en *X - ions, ications, ens H - th, ieth *Y - ly *G - ing *J - ings *D - ed T - est *R - er *Z - ers *S - s, es, ies *P - ness, iness *M - 's''
Similar lists of common prefixes and suffixes can be generated from any word list (any alphabetic language) using the ``munchlist'', ``findaffix'', and ``icombine'' utilities (part of ``ispell'').
see also pictoral languages
``Sign Language to Learn the basic finger language and to communicate with the deaf'' http://www.dictionary.com/Dir/Reference/Dictionaries/Sign_Language/
Q: Why ? :
A:
`` Without a written language, a heritage dies.'' --
http://www.signwriting.org/forums/email/email040.html
Charles Butler 1998-02-19
http://www.SignWriting.org/read.html | http://www.wycliffe.org/pray/HTPsignlang.htm
[FIXME: this is old. Moving to http://www.worldwidewiki.net/wiki/VisualLanguages ]
ways of communicating that involve 2D relationships (non-sequential).
(pictorial ?)
``post-literate'' visual languages that do not depend on an alphabet. A few of these require animation, which is simply not possible with a static printed book.
[FIXME: there's one item here that claims to be a 3 D language ... perhaps I should rename this "nonlinear language" ? If I did that, would I have to include hypertext ?]
These are not merely a way of transcribing some spoken (or even sequential audible) language. ``Symbols are meaning referenced (can be interpreted without reference to sounds or words.)''
-- Kevin Kelly, executive editor of _Wired_, quoted in "Interview with the Luddite" article in _Wired_ magazine Jun 1995. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/saleskelly.html?pg=7Technology is a language. Technology is a language of artifacts. And when you have a bad thought, when you have a stupid thought, the answer to that is not to be silent. The response to a stupid thought is a wiser thought. Since technology is a language of artifacts, the response to "this technology is stupid" is to make smarter technology, not to withdraw from it.
Ontrario Crippled Children's centere
Bliss True Type Font http://www.symbols.net/zips/fonts.htm
also has links to Theory, points to other ``Indices and Collections'' of symbols and constructed languages, points to (non-pictoral) minority and endangered natural languages, Writing systems (including pictographs, petrographs, Hieroglyphics).
[FIXME: crosslink from data_compression.html]... not even the author knows what an idea is until it is clearly expressed in words, a quality which makes language the essence of understanding. (Diagrams and pictures may be used to support words, but it is the words that contain the idea) Hence:
- Language is the expression of thought, and the act of translating thoughts into words is the refining of understanding.
- The understanding of an idea can be improved by simplifying the words used to express the idea.
- The understanding of an idea can be improved by shortening the number of words used to express the idea.
- The exercise of improving the expression of an idea, is the improvement of the understanding of that idea.
- The more plain the use of language, the more clearly an idea is revealed. The more clearly an idea is revealed, the better the understanding of that idea.
- If an idea cannot be expressed in plain English, it cannot be understood.
-- which is why all English speaking citizens should strive to use plain English in their thoughts as well as their communications.
From: "Kevin McGee" Subject: Re: LOGO-L> Re: Fear of strong steam Date: 22 Jul 2000 00:00:00 GMT Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com X-MSMail-Priority: Normal Newsgroups: comp.lang.logo "Brian Harvey" wrote in message news:8l9t3p$aej$1@agate.berkeley.edu... > "Adele Woods" writes: > So far, at least, I see old-fashioned literacy as a tool for liberation, > and newfangled multimedia pseudo-literacy as a tool for enslavement. Oh, puh-lease. :-) I have a pretty good idea of the things you could say to support this; one could also make as valid a case that the history of text/literacy is one of alienation (yes, in the same Marxist spirit that you seem to mean the above). My point wasn't to make an argument for or against such assertions. My point, baldly stated is: certain forms of representation and interaction make certain things easier and more powerful than others. Text and textual (read/write) approaches make some things easier -- and others harder. Conversation does the same. "Multimedia" does the same. The important and interesting work, to my mind, is not to decide which one is "better" in some absolute sense -- but to explore which representations and modes of interaction best facilitate which activities and goals, and to design to support them. To give a concrete example, they keyboard makes certain activities easier (typing text) and the mouse makes others easier (drawing images). You could use *either* form of interaction to perform *both* tasks -- but why would you? Yes, there are cases where it is useful to use the keyboard for graphics -- and a mouse for text; but the point is to look at the *cases*, not proclaim by fiat that one should only ever use one form of interaction or representation. k
... Picsyms (Dynasyms) ... Picsyms appear to be similar to or slightly more difficult than both PCS and rebus symbols and superior to Bliss. ...
Ideas for making minor modifications to English. Perhaps English could be improved incrementally.
Reasons to keep English just the way it is.
Its aim is the use of good, clear language by the legal profession.
Ideas for making minor changes to English to "improve" it.
``The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed." '' -- unknown.
...
OK, I have it! (Notice the absence of the construction "I've got it!" Got is an ugly little word that is redundant when used with the word have. I have formerly campaigned to have got kicked out of the English language ... )...
...
(apparently an excerpt from "Chapter 13: E and E Prime", _Quantum Psychology_ by Robert Anton Wilson (New Falcon, ISBN 1-56184-071-8).)
. Perhaps it would simplify the language to not have *any* prefixes or suffixes -- make them stand-alone words that modify the previous or following noun, like prepositions and adverbs.``Words are reduced to a stem by removal of common suffices before searching is performed, so in general you need not worry about singular versus plural and other grammatical distinctions.''
I assume those search engines use the Porter Stemming Algorithm http://www.tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/ (links to implementations in C, C++, Prolog, Python, Ruby, and many other languages).
[FIXME: move up to "keep it the way it is" section ?]The problems with our current system are sufficiently well-known that I feel no need to rehearse them all here; and people have been protesting about the situation for centuries. So just what is wrong with the idea of switching to something better?
Voice of America Special English and Ogden's Basic English are similar languages. ... VOA SE [has] more ... expressions for international news: activist, administration, ambassador ...
http://www.boeing.com/phantom/sechecker/se.htmlWhat Is Simplified English?
AECMA Simplified English http://www.aecma.org/Publications.htm is a writing standard for aerospace maintenance documentation. This type of writing standard is also known as a controlled language because it restricts grammar, style and vocabulary to a subset of the English language. ...
The objective of Simplified English is clear, unambiguous writing. Developed primarily for non-native English speakers, it is also known to improve the readability of maintenance text for native speakers. ... many of its rules are recommendations found in technical writing textbooks. For example, ...
- Use the active voice.
- Use articles wherever possible.
- Use simple verb tenses.
- Use language consistently.
- Avoid lengthy compound words.
- Use relatively short sentences.
-- http://specialized.english.net/whatspec.htm (the word list is available for download here) (Not afraid to talk about Jesus)
- a vocabulary (word list) of about 1500 words.
- a speaking speed of about 90 words each minute (that is about half of the normal speaking speed).
- short sentences.
Compare Specialized English with VOA Special English http://www.basiceng.com/specialized.html has a list of the additional words (and additional meanings to attach to words already there) that Specialized English added to VOA Special English, and a list of the words they left out.
links toThe rules of usage are identical to full English so that the practitioner communicates in perfectly good, yet simple, English.
We call this simplified language Basic English, the developer is Charles K. Ogden, and was released in 1930
http://www.basiceng.com/ramble.htmlBasic English is a language created by Charles Kay Ogden as a subset of standard English ...
Even though Basic English is intended to be self-contained, it incorporates some of the idiosyncrasies of standard English such as full conjugation of the few Basic verbs. A criteria was compatibility so that (1) the speaker would be seamlessly accepted as an English speaker, and (2) the student can progress painlessly to the full language. Therefore Basic is not without unfortunate complications -- namely its whimsical spelling.
Basic English could have taken the track of a separate language without any exceptions of grammar, spelling, and pronunciation, but it would sound strange to the ear of the speakers of standard English. Others have tried to regularize English, to no avail. ...
There are at least two schools of thought about simplifying language. Ogden studied and attempted to select words that can be used to express all fundamental ideas. The second approach is to select the most common words in use and exclude the frills. ...
... simplify, yet retain full compatibility with normal English ...
Interesting.
Because ``god'' is not in the word list,
that concept is expressed by other words:
Father of all
.
Here BASIC English is an acronym for British American Scientific, International and Commercial English.
There are 2 very different kinds of translation: translating from one "natural language" to another (difficult), and translating from one "artificial language" to another (easier, especially when the language was designed to be translated).
There are a few translation-related items that don't fit in either category -- -- translation from natural language to machine language (difficult) and vice versa (almost trivial), and tools that can be used for both kinds of translation.
Help me find more general-purpose translation tools.
Related local pages:
general translation:
Douglas R. Hofstadter writes a lot of fascinating stuff about the "language translation problem".
Douglas Hofstadter seems to think that natural language translation cuts to the very heart of the intelligence problem. I've enjoyed his books on fonts [FIXME: title] and on natural language ( _Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language_ book by Douglas R. Hofstadter, 1997 book.html#le_ton ).
natural language translation
(see also
)
The baffled tourist takes a digital photo of the sign with a camera built into his PDA, and the sign translator software detects the text within the image. In a matter of seconds, the text is translated into English. ... The current version of the Sign Translator is fluent in Chinese.
...
"Japanese people really enjoy reading documentation, but that's because Japanese documentation is actually fun to look at," explained Mike Adams of translation and marketing firm Arial Global Reach .
Manners must also be considered when preparing documentation. One company's on-screen training program alerted users with a sound whenever a mistake was made. Adams said this feature proved so embarrassing to Japanese users that it had to be removed.
...
"The left hand is considered unclean in some cultures, .... Burning flesh isn't considered a great sales gimmick in a lot of countries, either," Shapiro said.
... "Technobabble is difficult to translate in any language," Shapiro said.
[FIXME: unknowns#what_do_people_want] [FIXME: move to user_interface.html ?]...
It's pretty clear that programmers think in one language, and MBAs think in another. I've been thinking about the problem of communication in software management for a while, because it's pretty clear to me that the power and rewards accrue to those rare individuals who know how to translate between Programmerese and MBAese.
... Customers Don't Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want. It's just never going to happen. Get over it.
...
You know how an iceberg is 90% underwater? Well, most software is like that too -- there's a pretty user interface that takes about 10% of the work, and then 90% of the programming work is under the covers. ... [perhaps even] less than 1%.
That's not the secret. The secret is that People Who Aren't Programmers Do Not Understand This .
There are some very, very important corollaries to the Iceberg Secret.
...
Since I am fluent in the C programming language, but not-so-fluent in the Fortran programming language, sometimes I use Fortran-to-C translation tools.
more and more people are using C as a kind of ``assembly language'' that other languages compile into. [mention this on c_programming ?]
[FIXME: crosslink with #compiler ?] [FIXME: ... perhaps I should break this section up and disperse the fragments to the appropriate places. ]
... using C as intermediate language in native code generation ...seems to include all source code for the cross-compiler. The goal here seems to be *speed* of the compiled code. Measured using the Stanford integer benchmarks (source for those also seems to be included). [FIXME: benchmarks] DAV wonders about the reverse direction -- translating C to Forth, and then optimizing for *space* of the compiled code (or perhaps even the Forth source code). This article *seems* to say that the compiled object code is about the same size, whether it was compiled by a C compiler or a Forth compiler -- but it just does a straight translation; I suspect that semi-automatic factoring could make things smaller (at some loss in speed ... but there's hope that making it smaller helps it fit into the instruction cache, perhaps making it a bit faster in some cases).
... contrary to a myth popular in the Forth community, calls in C are not slow...[FIXME: move to c_programming.html ?] [FIXME: combine with quotes from that paper in data_compression.html#program_compression ?]
how to make HP48, Windows, Atari, etc. software run under Linux or other boxes.
See also video_game.html#emulators [FIXME: merge ?] hardware_david_uses.html#hp48
``Turn Your PC Into a Mac?!'' review by Phil 1999-03-25 http://www.sysopt.com/reviews/macemu/ reviews, compares, and contrasts 3 emulators:
MACE: Macintosh Application Compatibility Environment http://macehq.cjb.net/ ``Mace is free under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)''
I don't know much German, so I try to absorb more by reading German (".de") web pages.
See also international mailing addresses .
See also online natural language translation tools #natural_translation .
a few links about the smallest pieces of a written language, letters (listed in the alphabet).
At the letter level, there's a big split between typography computer_graphics_tools.html#fonts which can be (more or less) easily read and written by someone trained to read standard Roman letters, and the alphabets I list here, which need a bit more effort and in some cases specialized tools.
Why on Earth would you go to this extra effort when you already are familiar with the Roman alphabet ? Why hassle with anything other than traditional Roman letters unless there's some real benefit ? There are some very good reasons:
(I originally started out here talking about simple letters, but then I rambled on until I started describing the general design principle http://rdrop.com/~cary/html/3d_design.html#design of ``levels'' ... I don't think I can really talk about such an abstract idea without some sort of concrete example. [FIXME: should I seperate out the idea of "levels" anyway, then just point to it here where I discuss letters ?] )
Once I thought that the more words and ideas one had to express, the more letters/symbols one needed to express them with. I was surprised to learn in grade school that all possible words in English can be represented by a fixed number of symbols strung in long sequences (the 26 uppercase and 26 lowercase letters ... English text also uses a few other symbols ). But I still thought that I'd have to learn more symbols every time I learned a new language (Spanish, German, Mathematics, etc.). (: Multilingual Downhill http://cartoons.sev.com.au/archivepage.php?cartoonid=s329 :)
I was surprised to learn that all possible words in all possible languages can be represented by a fixed number of symbols strung in long sequences.
How many symbols do I need ?
I was even more surprised to learn I only need 2 symbols. ( Bits are Bits http://www.argreenhouse.com/papers/rlucky/spectrum/bits.shtml )
In calligraphy I got my first clue that the exact shape of the letters was not very important. Simple substitution ciphers http://www.webcom.com/nazgul/codeclass.html (an entertaining way to start learning about the ASCII code and Morse Code and data compression) showed the particular shape of the letters is completely unimportant. If a completely different shape were substituted for any particular letter of the alphabet in all the books of the world and in the letter-recognition part of the brain, no one would notice (with a couple of exceptions: deeply intertwined calligraphy, and expressions like ``U shaped'' and ``T shaped'' and ``O shaped''; we'd have to find some sort of replacement like ``circular'' or ``zigzag'' something ... any other exceptions ?).
This was my first glimpe of the concept of ``levels'' or ``layers'' in the sense of the OSI seven-layer model. The idea is that one thing (in this case, English words) builds on top of another thing (the Roman alphabet). In some sense, the Roman alphabet is like a tool that can be used to build many different things -- an English word, a French word, ein Deutsch Wort, etc. . But on the other hand, any of these other alphabets can be substituted.
While the Roman alphabet could be considered ``analogous'' to the Chinese alphabet, the alphabets I list here have a much closer relationship. It goes beyond putting them in the same category. Various fruits have many things in common, and while I might have roughly the same reaction (happy happy joy joy) to an apple pie, a peach pie, a cherry pie, or a pumpkin pie, substituting other fruits -- cucumbers, eggplants, tomatos, etc. -- is just not going to cut it for me.
But these alphabets go beyond being in the same category -- if they're used as an internal representation and translated at both ends, no one on the outside ever notices when one is swapped for another.
upgradeability:
I think the cool thing about ``levels'' is that instead of having one huge monolithic structure that you have to change all-or-nothing, you have small pieces that you can pop out and replace -- hopefully making an improvement, and when it's not an improvement you can pop the original back in without much hassle and with a little more respect and understanding. If you get an entire new set of silverware (-: or in my case plasticware and stainless-steel-ware :-), you don't need to upgrade your dishes, your table, or your food to work with it. You can try it out the new set for a while and see how you like it. If you decide you liked the old set better after all, you can switch back easily. In fact you can try out just 1 new knife or fork or spoon at a time. But there are limits -- you can't try out just a new fork *prong* by itself, the entire fork prongs + handle is a monolithic all-or-nothing structure.
If you truly want to understand something, try to change it.
-- Kurt Lewin
In architecture and in computer programming we have the concept of ``scaffolding'' or ``framework'' -- you build something that you really don't want (which at first seems wierd), but it works just enough that you can start swapping out levels and get incremental improvement. (related to http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TestFirstDesign , http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TestDrivenDevelopment )
Often you have several levels. The next higher level, ``words'' ... we can swap out different words (especially nouns) ... different ways of spelling the same words ... we're still using the same alphabet at the lower level, and the sentence (at the higher level) means the same thing (with a few exceptions -- puns and onomatopei and anagrams spin_dictionary.html#anagrams ). (exceptions are called http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MixingLevels )
It seems that this concept of ``levels'' occurs in many fields of study:
-- http://www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/questionCorner/noneucgeom.html``All of Euclidean geometry can be deduced from just a few properties (called "axioms") of points and lines. With one exception (which I will describe below), these properties are all very basic and self-evident things like "for every pair of distinct points, there is exactly one line containing both of them".
This approach doesn't require you to get into a philosophical definition of what a "point" or a "line" actually is. You could attach those labels to any concepts you like, and as long as those concepts satisfy the axioms, then all of the theorems of geometry are guaranteed to be true (because the theorems are deducible purely from the axioms without requiring any further knowledge of what "point" or "line" means).''
... Euclid's Parallel Postulate ... is independent of the other axioms, in the sense that it is logically self-consistent to have some things called "lines" and other things called "points" which satisfy the other axioms but don't satisfy the parallel postulate. Any such a collection of things is called a non-Euclidean geometry.
There are many examples. Most concretely, if you do geometry on a curved surface instead of on a flat plane (where now "line" refers to the shortest path between two points, which obviously will not be straight if you are on a curved surface), you typically end up with a non-Euclidean geometry.
-- http://www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/questionCorner/projective.htmlThe axiomatic approach:
This approach requires no philosophical definition of what a point or a line actually "is", just a list of properties (axioms) that they satisfy. The theorems of geometry are all statements that can be deduced from these properties. In this approach, the theorems of geometry are guaranteed to be true no matter what concept of "point" or "line" is being used and no matter how they are defined, as long as they satisfy the basic axioms.
...
One interesting fact is worth mentioning: in projective geometry, points and lines are completely interchangeable! That is, any statement about points and lines would still be true even if you replaced all occurrences of the word "point" with the word "line", and vice versa. For instance, the basic axiom that "for any two points, there is a unique line that intersects both those points", when turned around, becomes "for any two lines, there is a unique point that intersects (i.e., lies on) both those lines", which is the property described above. There is a complete duality between points and lines in projective geometry.
-- http://www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/questionCorner/noneucgeom.htmlIf it seems unsatisfying to think of having to assume certain things without proof before you can prove other things, you can think of it in the following alternative way: the postulates give a definition of what one means by the words "point" and "line". These words mean any things that behave in the manner described by the postulates.
...
... the axiomatic approach ... rather than defining points and lines by some philosophical definition of what a "straight line" actually is, they are defined by what their properties are.
... one either opts for the axiomatic approach, or else moves to analytic geometry, whereby a point on the plane is defined to mean an ordered pair of numbers, and a line is defined to be a set of numbers (x,y) satisfying and equation of the form ax + by = c where a, b, and c are constants.
From a coding perspective, all of these alphabets are ``simple substitution cipher'', a 1 to 1 mapping of the letters of the alphabet onto different shapes (sounds, bumps, etc). While they may seem mysterious and ``impossible to read'' at first glance, they're all easily decoded by any competent amateur cryptologist, given enough source text.
"Why are the letters of the alphabet in its current order (alphabetical order, rather than, say, Futhark order) ?" For most purposes the ordering of the letters makes absolutely no difference, (reading english text), while most other times the ordering is arbitrary (sorting names, words, etc) as long as we include all the letters, and we might as well use the standard alphabetic order. DAV: is there a better order ? ... consonants, then vowels ...
I briefly touch on the idea of adding or subtracting letters from the alphabet here ...
http://www.evertype.com/standards/wynnyogh/thorn.html
also has a nice explaination of where each of the letters of the modern Latin alphabet (aka Roman alphabet, English alphabet) came from, and suggests adding the letter thorn (þ þ Þ Þ) after the letter zulu.
The Moby Dick chart indicates "TH" occurs 345 times, while 'J' only occured 11 times, 'Q' 16 times, 'X' 11 times, 'Z' 6 times. )
[FIXME: I mention this URI elsewhere -- should I bring the references together ?]
A B C D E F G H I _ K L M N O P Q R S T _ V _ _ Y _
and ran words together with no spaces.
-- _The Second Cryptographic Shakespeare_ by Penn Leary http://home.att.net/~mleary/pennl14.htm ``In Elizabethan english, the letters "I" and "J" were used interchangeably ("Ben Ionson"), as were "U" and "V" ("INSVING"). The letter "W" was often printed as two "V"s ("VVilliam").'' -- http://www.veling.nl/anne/templars/acrocipher.html (So how were X and Z represented ? Were they just skipped, or what ? -- DAV) (DAV: consider eliminating C as well, as suggested by EU SPELLING by Gary W. Fugate http://www.basiceng.com/euspell.html ) [FIXME: crosslink "adding and deleting letters" with "simplified english" ...]
A phonetic alphabet is useful when you are talking over a noisy phone / radio and the exact spelling of a word ( name, call sign, etc.) is important.
Expressing letters in terms of word-sounds. Names people give individual letters (and other written symbols).
Too many people give the letters ``n'' and ``m'' and ``p'' and ``b'' and ``z'' and ``c'' names that I can't tell apart. (Read the previous sentence aloud to someone over the phone...).
[FIXME: move to greek_alphabet.html ] [FIXME: delete ../mirror/greece/Greek_Alphabet.htm once I'm sure all the information there is redundant. ]
See also greece.html
Greek alphabet Scalable form in utf-8 http://www2.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/greekutf.htm
Greek alphabet http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/chem/course/studhand/greek.html
What I'm calling ``improved alphabets'' (is there a better term I could use ?) are superior to the Roman alphabet in some quantifiable area, although the Roman alphabet could be substituted.
technical improvements -- given characteristics of the tools you give to write letters on paper, these other alphabets let you write text much more quickly or much more compactly. compact representation -- packing more words onto a sheet of paper. [FIXME: Mark Twain quote ... ``typewriter ... an awful pile of words ...'']
Torbjorn Andersson is the only human that DAV has ever heard about that cuts runestones and also writes web pages. You can order custom runestones from him. The inscription on his first runestone says: ``Torbjorn cut these runes for his good mother Ingrid. She is buried in Botkyrka. This will stand as a memorial of Ingrid as long as mankind will exist.'' -- http://www.algonet.se/~tanprod/zenrph1.htm
One page on this site mentions -- "Reseach has shown that lower case letters with the extenders are more distinctive and legible. Most newspaper and magazine headlines are now downsized for this reason." http://66.41.60.21/unicase.htm "There are 12 pure vowels in English speech and at least 12 important combinations."
DAV played with something similar, but thought everyone would laugh if I put it on my web page. (basically 7 segments ...) ... Who cares if people laugh ? let's put it up anyway: computer_graphics_tools.html#seven_segment_letter
[FIXME: should I move this over to typography computer_graphics_tools.html#fonts ? ]
See si_metric_faq.html#iso8859 for a little info on ISO-8859-1, how to encode all the letters I use into that encoding, and some of my related rants and raves.
"Sequoyah and His Syllabary" by Helge Moulding http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1401/sequoyah.html
someone, somewhere, thought this alphabet ``looked cool'', but (in DAV's opinion) it is not objectively superior to the Roman alphabet.
Here I list alphabets with typography that's not directly readable by someone used to the Roman alph