And Slaters Go Plop

Keeping with the theme of quirks of the English language, here’s one courtesy of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct:

This one requires a lot of scene-setting, let’s start with,

Cats whom dogs chase like to eat mice.

which can be shortened to,

Cats dogs chase eat mice.

We can place the cats, dogs and mice in locations:

Christchurch cats Dunedin dogs chase eat Masterton mice.

What if there is no chasing or eating, just bullying?

Christchurch cats Dunedin dogs bully bully Masterton mice.

Why not make them all live in the same town?

Christchurch cats Christchurch dogs bully bully Christchurch mice.

Let’s only talk about cats who are bullied and who themselves also bully:

Christchurch cats Christchurch cats bully bully Christchurch cats.

Let’s move them to the town of Buffalo in the US:

Buffalo cats Buffalo cats bully bully Buffalo cats.

Swap the cats for buffalo instead:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo bully bully Buffalo buffalo.

And did you know that another word for ‘bully’ is ‘buffalo‘? Let’s do it:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

There, perfect sense.

This is likely to be familiar to many people. It’s about how the addition of punctuation can turn a seemingly nonsensical set of words into a technically correct sentence, usually with a story to go with it.

So,

There is not enough room between fish and and and and and chips

makes sense when I tell you that a shop owner is telling the signwriter that the words for his fish and chip shop are too close together:

There is not enough room between “fish” and “and” and “and” and “chips”.

Ok then, try to add punctuation to the following to make it make sense:

Jack while Joe had had had had had had had had had had had the teachers approval

Answer below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been incredibly slack over the last nine months or so. One reason is that I’ve been fairly flat-out on a contract to a company in town during that period and so my available ruminating time has been quite limited. But perhaps the real reason is that I feel like I get more from life when I spend more time listening than opining and being busy is a convenient excuse to say less.

So anyway, here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to lately:

In June last year I took up a position as a contractor for a fairly well-known New Zealand ISP and web-hosting company tasked with the job of implementing a content management system for six websites running in a LAMP environment but with occasional SOAP web service integration into Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We ended up going with Drupal which we wrote a couple of our own modules for and re-themed for each site. It’s a pretty nice system once you get to know it but I’m not sure I’d choose it over my own mini-framework when it comes to day-to-day rapid application development, especially given that my other clients rarely need multi-site, multi-user content management systems.

I’m finishing up there at the end of this week but will probably occasionally be called in from time to time over the next few months. From here I’m back to looking after my other, neglected clients who I’m in danger of losing if I neglect them any longer. Looking forward to the variety once again but will miss the security and profitability of this latest job.

Back in September of last year I became afflicted with a terrible addiction. It is commonly called ‘home brewing’. I started with a couple of batches of kitset beer straight from a can with a bit of water and yeast and quickly moved to boiling plain extract with additions of hops, proper yeasts and resulting in much cleaner, more flavoursome beers. I’ve even done partial mashes of grain to augment the flavour and complexity of my brews but I’ve yet to slide completely into the abyss by going all-grain mash and leaving the happiness and safety of malt extract behind. Be warned of lots of upcoming posts that will be of absolutely no interest whatsoever to many of the past visitors here.

I’ve been reading some pretty good books too. One that is of particular interest to me is Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter which was recommended to me by a commenter called Simon last year. He’s quite right, it really is ‘insanely mindblowing’.

Meals on Wheels continues in a fairly non-eventful way and my weekly catch up with my Big Buddy little buddy is going really well. He’s 9 now and really coming out of his shell which is infinitely rewarding. If you are an average bloke in Auckland and have the time to spend three hours a week with a boy kicking a ball around or doing other things that you are supposed to have officially grown out of, then get into contact with them. There are a lot of boys who are growing up out there without really getting to see how ordinary adult males deal with life.

My wife continues to be lovely and we manage to get out of town frequently which keeps us both pretty happy. We’re lucky to be living in this time and in this country.

That’s really about it. Non-controversial. Not particularly interesting. But that’s life eh?

Earlier in the year my wife and I went along and saw Tim Minchin who is our new favourite comedian. This is my new favourite Christmas single.

As someone who believes in critical thinking, scepticism and rational enquiry it is with a little trepidation that I want to address the recent announcement of the Atheist Bus Campaign here in New Zealand.

I’ve given more thought than most would on the issue of the existence of God and, after many years of deep belief, have come to the difficult conclusion that it is just not true. For many this question is simply not an issue; they’re either completely ambivalent and would see someone as a bit wonky for believing or they know ‘deep down’ that God exists.

The campaign represents my beliefs nicely. I even respect the use of the word ‘probably’ in the opening line “There’s probably no God”. It’s nice and accurate and less like the dogma we mistrust so much in religion.

You’d think that I’d be quite enthusiastic about the campaign but I’m just not.

I think that replicating the campaign here in New Zealand smacks of an identity crisis fuelled by a little too much US Internet consumption. We just don’t have the same problems they do. A person can become the leader of our nation and not believe in an imaginary God. People don’t seem to think I’m a morally inferior person when they find out that I’m an atheist.

Sure, we have our problems. The main one I can think of regarding religion is that religions are tax exempt by default; all they have to do is “further their religion”. And there is the occasional exorcism/murder but that’s pretty much down to pig-stupidity and I doubt any amount of buses with signs would stop that. Most of our problems are down to a lack of critical thinking. Whether it be alternative medicine that just doesn’t work or our embarrassing statistics on global warming denial or our deep fear of anything not ‘natural’ (whatever that means). Here in New Zealand we have a deep distrust of science and we lack the ability to carefully weigh facts. It’s almost like we’ll back whoever comes out with the most anti-scientific sentiment as if we are backing the number-8-wire-underdog who will come through in the end with their wacky but revolutionary ideas.

I feel that the closest thing to a ‘magic bullet’ here in New Zealand is to teach children how to think critically, how to examine evidence, how not to be fooled in life, at a primary school level. Methods that we can all agree on that they can apply later in life when someone tells them about the latest healing remedy or their life-transforming revelation or the magnets that help them sleep, etc, etc.

I feel that all an Atheist Bus Campaign will do is make those who are ambivalent think that atheists are wannabe martyrs and give a platform for media-desperate fundamentalists who will come off looking semi-respectable in contrast.

To those running the campaign I say good luck and that I agree with what you are saying. I just don’t think it’s going to achieve what you think it’s going to achieve.

Place all the images you want in the PDF into a new directory and in the console run the following from within that directory:

convert * mynewfile.pdf

The powerful convert command uses the ImageMagick library which can be installed (in Ubuntu) with the following console command:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Lazy blogging, I know, but I have a deep love for Richard Feynman’s way of making physics simple and fun. This is a 12 part series that showed originally on BBC back in 1983.

From the new They Might Be Giants kids’ album, Here Comes Science.

I little while ago I wrote a layman’s overview of mitochondrial DNA. David, over at The Atavism – who actually knows what he is talking about which it comes to all things mtDNA – has written an excellent piece on the topic where he goes into the nitty gritty of the inheritance of mutations (good, bad and neutral), discusses how these mutations provide an important piece of the puzzle showing our common ancestry with the other great apes and monkeys, and even reveals a dirty little secret he’s been keeping all these years. Go check it out.