Trying out MPH #12: Overcome the Tip-of-the-Tongue Effect

Published on March 8, 2010 in mind performance hacks. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Now that Zenoli is getting spun back up, it’s time to reopen the project of trying out all the hacks in Mind Performance Hacks.  I have a number of experiences to report with these, so let’s pick up with another memory technique:

Hack #12: Overcome the Tip-of-the-Tongue Effect

Unlike the mnemonic methods discussed earlier in the book, this hack suggests some techniques for shaking something loose from your memory, something that you can almost remember, but can quite get to float to the surface of your brain.

The technique suggested is “priming”; that is, you try to think of as many things as possible that are (however tangentially) related to the thing that you are attempting to recall.  Think of, for example, the context in which you were when you originally experienced whatever is that you are trying to remember, words that mean similar things (or even just sound similar), concepts that are similar, and so on.

One technique along these lines that often works for me as a starting point is to go through the letters of the alphabet, starting to say the sounds aloud, but the above method is broader: you’re attempt to activate as many concepts as possible that are, in some sense, “near” the memory that you’re trying to recall.

Unfortunately, I have a failure to report with this hack.  While I’ve had some successes, an examination of limitations can also be instructive.

Memory is curious.  When I gave my first organ recital in college (playing a toccata by Marius Monnikendam) I sat at the keyboard and began to play, just as I had practiced.  As the music swept along, though, my mind went blank.  I could not recall the score, could not picture what came next…but my hands kept on playing.  I hoped, in desperate terror, that they would continue to do so, as I didn’t have any helpful suggestions for them.  Fortunately, I made it to the end without choking, but I was left strongly impressed with the power of motor memory.

Why this anecdote?  On a two-week trip to Michigan last year, I found that I was completely unable to remember the password to get into my email account.  I tried dozens of possibilities.  I ran through every phrase and combination that I thought I could have used.  I tried to recall details where I had been, what I had been feeling when I set up the password, or any of the times that I typed in.

And that, it seemed, was the problem: for the most part, it seems as if when I typed the password it was with a part of my brain that was isolated from other thought processes that might have been going on.  The password was living in my motor memory, and had retreated from everywhere else.  I was completely stumped.

Finally, two days before the end of vacation, I sat down at the keyboard and just typed it.  There was no conscious recall, my fingers just went through the action.  Extremely worried that I might lose it, I typed it into an editor window to find out what it was.  I could remember the password, then, but it was a dry sort of memory, without much mental affect.

I now try to put a bit of emotion into my passwords, to make them, at some level meaningful (however much they may be obfuscated, the obfuscation is usually using some one-off algorithm that can itself be remembered).

The lesson?  Put some work in on the front end for things that you think you might need to remember.  By all means, try out the priming techniques…I’ve had good results with them.  Sometimes, though?  You’re just stuck.  Enjoy your practice of the ars oblivionalis.

The MentatWiki provides a link to the full text of this Hack.

Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis

Published on March 5, 2010 in books and languages. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

cover of Harrius Potter et Philosophi LapisI finally got around to picking up Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis, translated by Peter Needham.  First, though, a brief digression:

The Sorcerer’s Stone!?  This has incensed me for years (and I’m sure I’m hardly the only one).  Britain had no problem selling hundreds of thousands of copies of a book with (O horrors) the word ‘Philosopher’ in the title.  Renaming the book to the “Sorcerer’s” Stone is nothing less than crass, vicious condescension, a deliberate stupidification enacted by mealy-brained, cowardly editors and executives at Scholastic.  Sure, Rowling is playing fast and loose with her sources, but the Philosopher’s Stone has a cultural history, and discarding that damages both the book and its readers.

On to Latin.  I’d previously mentioned Philosophi Lapis, and was pleased to have an opportunity, finally, to crack its pages:

Dominus et Domina Dursley, qui vivebant in aedibus Gestationis Ligustrotum numero quattuor signatis, non sine superbia dicebant se ratione ordinaria vivendi uti neque se paenitere illius rationis.  in toto orbe terrarum vix credas quemquam esse minus deditum rebus novis et arcanis, quod ineptias tales omnino spernebant.

While not as lyrical as Winnie Ille Pu, it is nonetheless quite servicable, and I’m enjoying it.  It is definitely stretching my vocabulary, and is a slow slog with frequent recourse to Whittaker’s Words and my ongoing notes.

rattus ille Scabbers de digito eius pendebant, dentibus parvis et acutis in Goylis condylo immersis – Crabbe et Malfoy pedem rettulerent, Goyle Scabberum magno cum ululatu circumagente, et cum tandem Scabbers avolavisset et fenestrae incursavisset, tres illi statim evanuerunt.  fortasse putabant rattos plures inter bellariola latere, fortasse sonum pedum audiverant quod post secundum, ingresa est Hermione Granger.

This is, by no means, an easy read, but once one has the basics under one’s belt (say, having worked through Wheelock’s) it’s more than surmountable and has the engaging charm of the original.  I’d recommend it to anyone classically inclined who is fond of fantasies and doesn’t take himself or herself too seriously.

Skulking toward normalcy

Published on March 4, 2010 in blogging and miscellanea. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I suppose it’s about time for an update, as my frayed nerves are beginning to return to normal.  Sleep may knit up the raveled sleave of care, but don’t underestimate the healing power of a good lay-off.

Indeed, almost exactly two years after the last adventure, the hammer came ’round again, and in November I found my at liberty.  This time, however, I volunteered to step into harm’s way: the timing was serendipitious, as I was rapidly moving toward my Ph.D. candidacy exam.  On November 1st, I found myself at ends, out of the office but still officially on the books through the end of the year, on “gardening leave,” as they call it in the UK.

snowy bushesI barely noticed that I was no longer working, as the exigencies of research and writing pressed hard, and November passed quickly.  In mid-December, happily, I passed into the exalted status of Ph.D. candidate: classes complete, and now on to the dissertation.  (At my department, achieving candidacy also greatly reduces tuition, in another bit of cheerful timing.)

It was well into January, however, before my mind began to feel a bit less like suet.  It’s quite possible to pursue a Ph.D. while working, but I will observe that it’s extremely painful, much harder than working on a Master’s.  The relatively well-defined demands of classwork can be contained much better than the open-ended, all-consuming requirements of research.

I’m now starting to settle into the new rhythm of the days; the recent heavy snows that have been assaulting Philadelphia have not inconvenienced me at all, as I happily had chanced to refit my home office before finding out about my impending free agency.

With that in mind, I’ve begun to fire up zenoli.net again,  To those patient readers who have kept this site in their RSS readers: huzzah to you, friends.

Skinput

Published on March 2, 2010 in input devices. 0 Comments

I was sorry (though not, alas, surprised) that IBM’s “personal area network” never took off.  This was a research project, demonstrated in the mid-90s, to transfer data through the body.  The skin, more or less, can act as a conductor, allowing a low-power signal to travel between different devices being worn, or to an other person or device with which you are in physical contact.  The sexy demo was exchanging business cards by shaking hands.

This was shortly before Bluetooth press appropriated ‘PAN’ to describe short-range wireless network (though much leakier and higher-powered), and this technology seems to have stayed in the labs.

I always perk up when a new input device is demonstrated, and this one made me think of IBM’s quondam project. Called ’skinput’, it’s an interesting twist on human-computer interfaces: bio-acoustical sensing combined with a pico-projector to turn the skin of your arm into an input device.  At the moment, the researchers (the project is a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft) have a prototype that distinguishes between five input points with a slick dynamic interface.  Looks like they have a paper that will be presented at the upcoming CHI 2010.

(Via Engadget.)

Administrative: zenoli.net RSS/FeedBurner Problems

Published on March 1, 2010 in blogging and tools. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Here’s a bit of a technical aside, I’m afraid.

It looks like zenoli.net may have been experiencing a few problems with the RSS feed, related to the backend configuration changes required by Google for the FeedBurner service.  I’ve been using FeedBurner for feed hosting and management for quite a long time, since before they were acquired by Google in 2007.

Google finally got around to making some changes to the MyBrand feature, which lets you use your own domain name FeedBurner: convenient for preventing lock-in if you ever want to take your feeds somewhere else.  This requires having a CNAME set up in your DNS to point to the FeedBurner/Google servers.

I’ve had two such CNAMES set up: feed.zenoli.net and feeds.zenoli.net, but something related to Google’s back-end changes caused the former (which was also the default configured in my WordPress FeedSmith plugin) to stop working: any requests for the feed URL were met with not-found errors (you may or may not have experienced this, depending on which URL your feedreader is using).

It seems that, under the current regime, FeedBurner does not like having two MyBrand entries for the same domain; if there’s something else going on, I haven’t been able to divine what it might be.  I have, however, found a workaround, setting the feed up to use a single canonical URL:

  1. My web host, Nearly Free Speech, makes it easy and cheap to create new sites.  I created a new website that would simply act as a redirect.  (This could also have been done using the main website, but since I’m actually maintaining a number of different websites, it seems to be convenient to host all the redirects in one place.)
  2. I changed the DNS CNAME for feed.zenoli.net from the link to Google’s servers to point to this new site.
  3. I added an Apache .htaccess file to redirect requests for feed.zenoli.net to feeds.zenoli.net with a 301 response: 
    RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(feed.zenoli.net) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://feeds.zenoli.net/$1 [R=301,L]
  4. I ensured that FeedBurner had just one MyBrand entry for zenoli.net (feeds.zenoli.net), and that the FeedBurner feed for zenoli.net was configured to point to the WordPress feed.
  5. I pointed the FeedSmith plugin (which I updated to 2.3.1), to the now-canonical MyBrand URL for the FeedBurner-hosted feed: ‘http://feeds.zenoli.net/zenoli‘.

And that seems to have done it.  Hopefully any requests for the feed, whether at the default WordPress URL, feed.zenoli.net, or feeds.zenoli.net will work seamlessly.  We now return you to our regularly scheduled miscellanea.

Paying the Paper

Published on February 28, 2010 in organization. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Sunday has been laundry day for the past decade, but I still haven’t managed to develop the habit thoroughly checking every single pocket as each load goes in.  Due to this, I’ve been able to observe the decreasing quality of Kleenex over the years.  Whereas they used to demonstrate much integrity, coming out of the wash intact (if a bit thinned), they now invariably reduce themselves to clingy shreds.

I’m still quite fond of my Hipster PDA, but I haven’t been quite as good about ‘backup’, shall we say, as I might have been.  Some time ago, @MindPerfHacks twittered:

Writing in longhand is useful and fun, but it must eventually be transcribed, a production phase known as “time to pay the paper”.

This, dear readers, is the wages of laziness:

Shreds of Memory

The picture above portrays every single piece of text I could salvage after failing to check my jeans pocket before tossing them in the laundry.  From these shards, I was able to reconstruct notes on:

  • A roguelike MMO based on a combination of Dwarf Fortress and Pokethulhu
  • Speculations on what an ornithopter-like vehicle that mimics the flight characteristics of bats might be called (a ‘chiropteropter’? a ‘desmodontopter’?  a ‘noctiliopter’?)
  • Ideas for a mental “hash function” to remember website passwords

I’ll never knows what else was lost, alas.

Note to self: regularly upload everything from the Hipster into org-mode.

Second note: do not record the above note only in the Hipster!

Don’t do this with your conlang

Published on February 27, 2010 in languages and science fiction. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I am periodically stunned by the insipidity of much of the Star Wars “Expanded Universe”, and the way that incidental references are inflated through mechanical cross-referencing into something of tediously world-shattering importance.  For example: did you know that IG-88 (a bounty hunter ‘droid seen en passant on the Death Star in The Empire Strikes Back) was actually one of four assassin droids in its series, and these four planned a “‘droid revolution” that would annihilate all biological lifeforms?  And that one of these ‘droids uploaded its consciousness into the second Death Star, and was destroyed just before it could take over ALL THE ‘DROIDS IN THE GALAXY?!

Ay gevalt.

I thought I’d grown calluses over the part of my brain that could be harmed by further violence to the Star Wars saga, but I am newly aghast at this article on the Jawa language.  Here’s how you count in Jawaese:

  • 1 Po
  • 2 Ko
  • 3 Kyo
  • 4 Yo
  • 5 Dyo
  • 6 Lyo
  • 7 Does not exist in Jawa arithmetic
  • 8 Ho
  • 9 To

We’ll skip past the lameness of having a merchant race use words for numbers that can barely be distinguished when spoken. The number seven doesn’t exist?  This sort of “novelty” is the work of an inane intellect.

(The best extension to the Star Wars universe, I think, was the early trio of Han Solo books by Brian Daley. These didn’t reference anything in the original trilogy except for Han and Chewie, reinforcing the immensity of the setting rather than turning it into something claustrophobic and inbred.  Also, I prefer to regard episodes 1-3 as regrettable fanfic.)

Rosenberg’s A Literary Bible: A brief hatchet job

Published on January 24, 2010 in books, literature and peevishness. 0 Comments

Awful.

Awful, awful, awful.

I picked up Daniel Rosenberg’s 2009 A Literary Bible with a bit of initial interest, interest that was soon to be thoroughly brutalized.  This turgid morass bills itself as a “translation” of the Hebrew Bible, which is bollocks.  To pick one mite from a mountain, consider this excerpt from what appears to be intended as Chapter 2 of Isaiah:

all the upright oaks
of Bashan
all the straight-backed mountains

and high-rising hills
the skyscrapers
and sheer walls

the Super Powers
and their walls of missiles
stockpiled

Um, what?

This isn’t translation.  This isn’t “literary” anything.  This is Bible-flavored poetastery.  A perfectly legitimate endeavor, as long as you keep it to yourself and don’t try to claim that the random associative crap that floats through your head is anything other than random associative crap that floated through your head.

Not convinced?  Perhaps we should try a bit of “Job”:

We’re all somebody’s workers
in a big factory
grasping for breaks

reaching for paychecks and prizes
here I’m paid these empty months
heavy nights awarded

[...]

listen to this mind in pain
this “educated” soul
in words it complains

am I some Frankenstein
to be guarded
can’t go to sleep alone

This may be poetry (in as much as any act of writing stuff down with random line breaks and [ooh!] violating conventional English sentence structure is poetry), but it clearly reflects more on Rosenberg than on the source text.  Perhaps it’s the “method” school of literature: just make sure you emote like a Great Poet-Author while you’re writing it.

His Yahweh talks like an aphasic Yoda.

“Who told you naked is what you are?” he [Yahweh] asked.  “Did you touch the tree I desired you not to eat?”

or

“What disturbs you so?” said Yahweh to Cain.  “Why wear a face so fallen?  Look up: if you conceive good it is moving; if not good, sin is an open door, a demon crouching there.”

I was horrified anew at each page.  Rosenberg picks and chooses what he “translates,” leaving out books or chapters at whim.  This is, I suppose, a mercy.  I must admit that I thought some of “Lamentations” wasn’t too bad, but at the end he swings into a bathetic

I lighten their labors
I am the guinea pig of their salvation

Recently, I read two poetic renderings of the Epic of Gilgamesh, one by Stephen Mitchell, one by David Ferry.  Neither writer knows Sumerian, Akkadian, or Old Babylonian, and each worked from various literal translations and textual commentaries.  Neither one claims to be “translating” their source; they explicitly state that what they are doing is composing English-language poetry.  While I’m not too keen on the Mitchell (which was a bit tepid and tried to fill in the gaps to make a nicely rounded story), I have much more respect for his efforts than Rosenberg’s haphazard textual flailing.

If you’re in the mood for modern adaption of ancient literature, give this “literary” Bible a miss.  Pick up a copy of Ferry, who understands the importance of language and cadence to poetry.

And so they traveled until they reached Uruk.
There Gilgamesh the king said to the boatman:

“Study the brickwork, study the fortification;
climb the great ancient staircase to the terrace;

study how it is made; from the terrace see
the planted and fallow fields, the ponds and orchards.

One league is the inner city, another league
is orchards; still another the fields beyond;

over there is the precinct of the temple.
Three leagues and the temple precinct of Ishtar

measure Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh.

Foul news: Ron Hale-Evans’s upcoming book cancelled

Published on January 22, 2010 in books and mind performance hacks. 1 Comment

Ron Hale-Evans just twittered that Mind Agility Hacks, his in-progress (and rapidly nearing completion) sequel to Mind Performance Hacks, has been cancelled.

A boo and a hiss to those at O’Reilly Media whose short-sightedness has deprived us of what promised to be another intelligently orchestrated assemblage of tools for exploring and tuning the functioning of the tool that matters most: our grey matter.

I heartily recommend that everyone solace themselves by purchasing a copy of the original MPH.  If you already own one, go ahead and buy another—it’s probably getting dog-eared.

Alveolar Trills Revisited: Enter the Tiger

Published on March 27, 2009 in languages. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Since my original post on the topic, I’ve tried many methods to learn to produce a rolled ‘r’.  After quite a bit of practice, I managed to come up with an alveolar flap that sounds more-or-less like it should, but a sustained trill remained elusive…until now.

Commenter falco (whose comment, I admit shamefacedly, was missed and has languished in the approval queue since January) writes of his early troubles (and recent success) learning the trill:

I am 32 now, my mother tongue has the alveolar trill; however, I was the only one of the family and the class (in the past) that couldn’t produce it; so around the age of 6, they forced me to learn the uvular trill by gargling water, as it was believed in those times that all sounds must be learnt before the age of 7 or it would be to late. So, I spoke my own mother tongue wit a uvular trill, which always made certain people think I was originally from somewhere else, an immigrant in my own country (first frustration).

[...]

It is an article on the internet that I found a little time ago that changed everything: http://www.wikihow.com/Roll-Your-%22R%22s

In days, I learnt to roll my ‘r’ by using the “Tiger Method”. I also used the site http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/spanish/frameset.html under “vibrantes” and then [r] to see the different steps of the sound-reproduction. As none of the above techniques in this website had worked for me in the past; apparently the tiger method was the only one that did it for me starting from a uvular trill.

What is the tiger method?  I was initially skeptical, as other initally-promising methods that I’d tried had met with only indifferent success.  wikiHow (whose Creative Commons attribution clause states that I need to write that this excerpt comes from “wikiHow.com – The How-To Manual That Anyone Can Write or Edit”) describes it as follows:

The key to rolling R’s is creating the proper vibration. The vibration starts at the back of the tongue and moves toward the tip of the tongue (like a wave). If you can produce the German “acht” or Arabic and Yiddish pharyngeals and basically clear your throat, then you can roll R’s. This seems counter-intuitive because rolled R’s are pleasing to the ear – whereas pharyngeals are harsh. The vibration is the key and the same technique is needed to roll R’s. Remember: The air passing through your larynx and mouth makes the sound.

  1. Start by practicing that clear-your-throat “ckh” sound. Try to turn it into a “grr”. Don’t be afraid of sounding ridiculous. Do whatever it takes to make the roof of your mouth vibrate. (This skill also comes in handy when speaking Chewbacca and making a variety of animal noises.) Practice getting the feel for that vibration. Your throat might get a little sore at first. You’re working out “new” muscles and they’ll get stronger with use.
  2. Press the tip of your tongue against the alveolar ridge behind your teeth. Your tongue touches the right spot when you finish saying the letter L and the letter N. Say L or N and at the end of the sound keep your tongue firmly in place. Try to say “girl” and “hurl” without removing the tip of your tongue from your alveolar ridge. Use the clear-your-throat vibration to start the word and try to form the vibration into a rolled R. Initially, use the “G” sound to kickstart a rolled R. At first, you will sound like a strangled tiger (grr, grr, grr), but you’lI start rolling R’s. Eventually you will be able to purrr using purrrfectly rrrrrolled Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr’s.
  3. Practice and refine. Once you can get your R rolling, experiment with the position of the tip of your tongue. To move the sound toward the front of your mouth, add the “Z” sound in front of your R. Practice adding vowel sounds (ah, ee, uh, o, oo) before and after the rolled R’s.

My instant results were astonishing.  At first, it sound much like someone trying to strangle a pig.   (This method is not for the self-conscious!)  Almost immediately, though, my tongue started vibrating with the airflow.  Within five minutes I managed something that sounded (and seemed to feel) like an actual alveolar trill.

This method is a little hard on the throat, and after ten minutes I was starting to feel a bit light-headed.  I will be continuing to practice over the next week, and will report on how it goes.  At the moment, once I achieve the trill I can sustain it indefinitely, but there is much hunting around before tongue and airflow find the right position and balance of tension.  If I attempt to transition into a word, it falls apart.

falco concludes his comments:

I’m now practicing to soften the trill a little more and use it in different words of different difficulty levels… but I am confident that it’s just a matter of time now before I can speak fluently with a rolling r, the alveolar trill!
Record your voice on a computer/mobile and listen to yourself in order to easily define errors or its evolution, compare it to the recorded r-sounds on the above-given website (www.uiowa.edu)… and most importantly: DON’T GIVE UP, you might sound ridiculous at the beginning but we can all learn it!

Intelligent bloody-mindedness is the key.  If you’ve been trying to learn to roll your ‘r’s, I strongly recommend giving the tiger method a try.  If anyone has successes (or failures) using this method, I’d love to hear about them.