RIP Ian Murdock, founder of Debian. Only 42.

Debian Project Founder Ian Murdock: Here’s to You

Got this book for Christmas... How it Works: The Husband 📚

It does bother me sometimes that palaeontologists of the future aren't going to have a foggy clue what cats really looked like.

Skeleton of a cat

Wey hey, it's Panic Saturday! Time to start my Christmas shopping. Or should I wait until Christmas Eve for maximum Dad points?

Mr B K S Iyengar on Google Doodle today :-)

BKS Iyengar’s 97th Birthday

Two years since Helen Maclean died. An inspirational teacher.

Helen Maclean: funeral arrangements

The Two Cultures

Are scientists easy prey for jihadism? — The Guardian

My background is in the humanities, but I've spent >20 years working in STEM. I think it's fair to say, all of the engineers I've worked with (a) recognise that there is no one right way to do things and (b) respect evidence, not authority. (Also they've all been very much aware of the human consequences of their work.) So I find it hard to believe this characterisation of the way science and engineering are taught. Is someone at the British Council perpetuating the Two Cultures? Sad if true.

Ubuntu Team Needs a Cat to Replicate Important Bug

Since quite a few people said that this is happening, the status of the bug changed to confirmed, but developers have a hard time replicating the circumstances that led to the problem, which seem to be directly related to the presence of a cat.

At my old university to present a paper on computational linguistics. A glimpse down the road not travelled. Feeling old.

mFiL 2015

I'm presenting a talk on linguistic markup and transclusion in XML documents at mFiL – Manchester Forum in Linguistics. I'm in the Corpus Linguistics strand at lunchtime on Friday 6th November:

mFiL 2015 

Another day, another dead rodent. I live with a killer.

Waiting for the tram home. It's been great. Thanks Tom and Martin!

The Bar, Chorlton. A pint of Seamless.

Crisps!

Whew!

The Rules of the Pub Crawl state that we're allowed to skip Withington and St Werburgh's Road because there's sod all there.

Stop number 3: The Railway, Burton Road. Possibly my favourite pub :-). Holts Hat Trick.

Second stop of the night. Wine and Wallop, West Didsbury.

My pint was called Under Current. Can't remember where it was from. Slightly over-hopped.

Martin and Tom have already broken the seal. I'm holding out until the next pub.

First stop: the Fletcher Moss, Didsbury Village.

Hydes Original!

It's time for another South Manchester Metrolink pub crawl! Waiting for the tram at the start of the line...

I'm at Manchester Piccadilly. The last train on the departures board is... the 8:29 to Manchester Piccadilly.

Lesson for technical communicators. This information is true and accurate: the train goes to Glossop, Hadfield, and back to Manchester. But I don't think it's very helpful.

PACBook

Here are the open source documentation tools I've been developing at work over the last few years.

STANLEYSecurity/PACBook

Waiting for a tram at Deansgate.

The combination of moonlight and twilight made the whole scene look unreal. I tried to capture it with my phone camera but I only had a few minutes.

Transclusion

I'm giving a talk at the Manchester Forum in Linguistics conference this November on Linguistic Markup and Transclusion Processing in XML Documents. It's all about the markup and tools I developed at Stanley Black & Decker Innovations, and recently released as open source.

Former colleagues may be interested to know, and anyone else who's listened patiently as I droned on about this over the years.

More details when I know them...

MFiL – Manchester Forum in Linguistics

Joined the ISTC.

I just remembered that someone tagged me to do that five poems thing a while back. Probably left it a bit late to do the whole thing now, so here's a mashup of poems I could have chosen. Enjoy!

I met a traveller from an antique land, who said:
I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin,
the butterfly, a cabbage-white —
I know that I will meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above.
Yes, I remember Adlestrop!

Finished reading: The Climb by Chris Froome 📚

Finished reading: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin 📚

My last official day working for Big Yellow. I've had a great time here over the last 8-9 years. Good luck to all my former colleagues!

(Pic shows some scribbles from a fairly typical day at work, wrestling with two different languages, one human, one not...)

Blue Moon

The meaning of the term blue moon has changed over time. If you think there's a blue moon today, you're using the new meaning. And according to this article, the new meaning came about by mistake...

There's A Blue Moon This Friday - But What Does That Mean?

Incidentally, if you ever get a chance you should look up the traditional English names for the full moons (Moon After Yule, Wolf Moon, Lenten Moon, Harvest Moon, etc.) and see how they compare with Bede's description of the pagan Anglo-Saxon calendar.

Blanton's Bourbon

At Wine and Wallop. I'm drinking this. Yes it does say 64.4%.

Some kind of limited edition Kentuckian single-barrel bourbon. Be careful, the barman said, the first mouthful does burn slightly. He was right. Ah, but the second mouthful though, the second was sublime. I had the impression of an infinite wave of complex hydrocarbon molecules stretching back to the seconds after the big bang and on into eternity. I couldn't tell you what the subsequent mouthfuls tasted like.

New bike mitts

And they're made of crochet!

Hmm, so now there really might be such a thing as road tax.

Budget 2015: Vehicle Excise Duty reform for new cars

Standoff! The Dutch angle seemed appropriate.

I must have clocked 20,000 miles this morning without noticing. Oh well, it's only an approximation — I lost the running total when the battery went flat back in April.

The cat is earning her keep

Oh no, here we go again.

Flat, under the mat
Like a pressed violet
In a lady's book
There is a vole.
Its body curled like a flower
Its tail a thin, thin stem.
It is my gift to you
And you will hate it
Almost as much as I think it wonderful.
That's because you are stupid
And I am a cat.

— Gift by Jan Dean

Radishes!

RIP Hermann Zapf

Hermann Zapf, the font designer behind Palatino and Zapf Dingbats, has died at 96

I'm doing a couple of gigs with Martin Keates and Guy Lightowler this year. Here's the first:

Summer Ceilidh

Using drones to enforce document reviews. I might implement this :-)

Reducing tedium in content workflows with exceptionally mobile technology

Daughter №1 wants to phone her friend, but the battery on her phone is completely dead.

It's okay, I'll use that weird phone in the living room!

I think she means the land line.

(Five seconds later: Dad! How do you switch this thing on!?)

Through the Language Glass

Well, I finally finished Guy Deutscher 📚 Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. I promised I'd post my thoughts, just skip this if you're not into linguistics.

I take back the scepticism. He does make a convincing case, from the experimental evidence, that language does influence thought, in three areas anyway: colour terminology, spatial terminology and grammatical gender.

Some small thoughts:

1. His examples are fairly small scale, on the level of vocabulary rather than syntax. I think there was some news recently about an experiment on German speakers that found that language influenced thought on the syntactic level, but I can't find the link now.

2. He barely mentions any research on multi-lingual speakers. Some experiments on grammatical gender were carried out on German and Spanish speakers through the medium of English, which has interesting implications for mother tongues versus later acquired languages.

3. The experimental evidence is based on groups of people. He doesn't discuss the idea that Sapir-Whorf might be stronger for some individuals than others.

One big unanswered question:

Okay, so Russian has two words for blue. This has a measurable effect on the time it takes for Russian speakers to distinguish between different shades of blue, etc., etc. But, this is the thing: English has many words for blue also. Cyan, indigo, what have you. Ah, but си́ний and голубо́й are core vocabulary, like blue is, and cyan and indigo aren't. But why? There's nothing intrinsic in those words to make them core vocabulary. Their coreness is, what, a cultural or historical thing? Similarly, Guugu Yimithirr habitually uses compass directions to mark location: There's an ant just to the north of your foot. This forces Guugu Yimithirr speakers, from a very early age, always to know which compass direction they're facing. Okay, but again, English also has the terms north, south, east and west. We just don't use them habitually. We would say in front, behind, left or right. Deutscher claims that Guugu Yimithirr does not make use of egocentric co-ordinates at all, but this is disputed; GY does apparently have terms for left hand, right hand, front and back, Haviland 1988, see the Wikipedia article for links if you're really interested. So what makes English speakers habitually use egocentric co-ordinates while Guugu Yimithirr speakers use compass directions? Again, there's nothing intrinsic in the vocabulary or syntax. It's just what you do.

So yes, language influences thought, but culture or habit or usage or something controls language, maybe, and I don't think Deutscher gets to the bottom of it. Let's hope John McWhorter's book has more to say.

Route 62 now reopen between the Pyramid and Heaton Mersey. It's getting so the trails have better surfaces than the roads in Stockport.

Portwood Cut

More scenes from the commute. This is Portwood Cut in Stockport. Not a navigation; James Harrison built it in 1796 to provide hydro power for his mills in Portwood, where that massive Tesco is now. The cut doesn't seem to be marked on maps or the A-Z any more, but look, it's still there, especially when it's been raining :-)

Election

Le peuple Anglois pense être libre ; il se trompe fort, il ne l'est que durant l'élection des membres du Parlement ; si-tôt qu'ils sont élus, il est esclave, il n'est rien.

— J-J Rousseau, Du contrat social

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Collection complète des oeuvres

The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken, it is free only during the election of the members of Parliament; as soon as they are elected, the people is enslaved, it is nothing.

Of course J-J only lived in England for 2 years and apparently never learned any English, so you shouldn't believe a word of it.

Day 14. Remote control still missing. However, looking down the back of the sofa I found this.

Not a story, you see. A fact file. Maybe this one will be a technical author like her old dad.

Lemn Sissay for Chancellor!

Election of the Chancellor, 2015

Stockport Tiviot Dale station. A bit of urban exploration.

Remains of the eastbound bay platform.

The engineering sidings.

This photo was taken in more or less the same place in 1968. The station had closed about a year previously. You can see the platform edge in my first picture.

Some kind of weird-ass fungal spore things in Lud's Church. Bizarrely beautiful.

One Person One Language

One Person One Language (OPOL)

And in other news:

1,000-year-old onion and garlic eye remedy kills MRSA

Who will win?

There's only one way to find out. FIGHT!

Just to clarify, I don't really believe that linguistic controversies are best resolved by fisticuffs.

Very crudely, Through the Language Glass: why the world looks different in other languages by Guy Deutscher 📚 is defending the (probably misnamed) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; The Language Hoax: why the world looks the same in any language by John H. McWhorter 📚 is attacking it. Personally I'm rooting for McWhorter; I've always suspected Sapir-Whorf is a crock.

I've started with Deutscher. I was kind of hoping this would make me really angry, but so far it's very reasonable; the only infuriating thing has been the quote from the Observer on the cover Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics. Admittedly, I'm 150 pages in and he's still reviewing the literature.

A friend asked, are there any books about the way we become different people in different languages? It's an interesting point. These guys are, I think, arguing about the effect (or not) of language on speech communities, rather than individuals, and so far they assume those communities are monoglot. There must be something out there that looks at multilingualism; it seems like the obvious next step.

Well I was going to go out and do some gardening today, and the weather's been perfect, but hearing Marit Fält's absolutely rock-solid playing last night with the Tom Kitching band has compelled me to spend most of the afternoon indoors practising the mandola. Damn.

Also for International Women's Day: Annie Jean Easley, who worked at NASA at the same time, but perhaps had a slightly different experience.

On Heroes

For International Women's Day: Margaret Hamilton, lead Apollo flight software designer, credited with inventing systems engineering. I love the photo of her standing next to a pile of documentation that's nearly as tall as she is.

Margaret Hamilton (scientist)

Might be of interest:

Power to Fly

I'd never heard of Pine Nut Syndrome before, but I think I'm experiencing it. Icky!

The Great Pine Nut Mystery

The cat is doing her job

Daughter #1 was not pleased to find this on her bedroom floor this morning.

Empty nitrous cylinders all over the road. Like riding over marbles.

using a warm air dryer... increased the bacterial count by an average of 255 per cent

Hand towel or hand air dryer? Finally, an answer

All day breakfast. Daughter №2 decided she was ready for the full English! And she did pretty well.

Wow. Publisher throws typeface into the Thames in hissy fit. 99 years later, typophile fishes it out...

Recovering the Doves Type

Railway sleepers ready for action!

Meanwhile, far below the busy streets of Stockport...