I am here in Rio de Janeiro in a hotel on the Copacabana. The trip was much easier than I expected; on the way out the airline showed The Terminal and I tried to write some comments on a paper by Julie Cohen, and then slept. Immigration and customs let me through immediately (without fingerprinting or photographing me!) and my biggest problem is that I'm unable to try to use my Portuguese because the radio taxi drivers and hotel employees all speak English and switch immediately when I try to speak Portuguese to them. ("Quero copiar meu passaporte ... e comprar um cartao do Internete ..." "All right, let me have your passport, and what's your room number?")
Of course, I've been asleep in my hotel room all day and I haven't tried to get any food yet...
I was looking forward to seeing whether water really does go down the drain the other way in the Southern Hemisphere, but Seth Finkelstein told me that the effect is too small to observe easily by yourself in a bathroom. Apparently pre-existing currents in the sink or bathtub will dominate the Coriolis effect and cause a stable vortex in one direction or another in a way that is somewhat random and not very dependent on which hemisphere you're in.
Seth also says that a particular sink or bathtub may tend to favor a particular direction because of random details of its construction. Sure enough, I tried this today and found that the bathroom sink here tends to drain one way but can easily be induced to drain the other way just by stirring up a little appropriate turbulence. Oh well, I guess I won't get to convince myself that I'm really in the Southern Hemisphere that way...
Some CNN International commentator: Schwarzenegger has an approval rating of 62%! Bush would kill for an approval rating like that!
Seth: He has!
Leonard recalls that he had exactly the same language problem -- he couldn't use his language knowledge because everybody kept speaking English. Yep.
I finally found a restaurant where, after initially handing me an English menu, the English-proficient staff was nonetheless actually perfectly willing to speak Portguese. At the end of my meal, I said "obrigado pela comida, e obrigado por falar o português, porque todos os homems no hotel sempre falam o inglês comigo, e quero falar português!" Actually, what I said had at least two more gramamtical mistakes than what you see here, but the waiter understood me and was actually very happy to hear someone make the effort.
Today I visited the Pão de Açúcar -- Rio's own Mount Sugarloaf -- and had a lovely time despite the general tourist-trap feeling. The views were unbelievable. At the top, I ran into a different kind of language difficulty. I heard a woman speaking Hebrew to her children. I ran into her again on the way down, speaking a mixture of Portguese and Hebrew, and so I was sorely tempted to say "com licença, senhora, at mdaberet ivrit, me-efo culchem?" ("Excuse me, ma'am -- you speak Hebrew, where are you all from?") But I chickened out because I don't actually know enough Hebrew to carry on a real conversation, and I don't even remember an idiomatic way of explaining in Hebrew that I don't know very much Hebrew. (If only I knew the Portguese word for Hebrew, I could at least have explained in Portuguese that I don't know very much Hebrew; my Portuguese is now, I think, much better than my Hebrew.) So, as I say, I chickened out and didn't say anything at all.
On the way down, I wrote a postcard in Portuguese. I had a grammar question and I actually figured out how to ask the question itself in Portuguese, but I ended up chickening out again and not asking anybody. I didn't have any good excuse not to ask that question; in fact, I at least should have asked the taxi driver on the way back. ("Por favor, posso perguntar alguma coisa sobre o português? Tento escrever para a minha família no portguês, mas não sabo: posso falar 'fico mais quatro dias'?") So if you happen to know Portuguese... (and it's still November 2004...)
Leonard had a great fear, that he would
somehow order the concept of waffles, or all the waffles in existence, or whatever weird thing I learned "la x" meant in that context; furthermore that they would actually carry out my order and I'd have to pay for the concept of waffles.
Those Platonic Forms Restaurants they have in some countries can get pretty expensive!
This is especially scary in Portuguese because it uses articles so much.
I got an e-mail message from someone at the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. What do you suppose its MIME Content-type was?
Content-type: multipart/alternative
Heh, heh.
I had several very long conversations with Brazilians in Portuguese that were great fun and made me realize that I know a lot more Portuguese than I think I do.
My worst linguistic blunder while I've been in Brazil was as follows. On the subway (Metrô), a little girl was in my way. "Aha!" I thought. "I'll ask her politely in Portuguese to move over so I can get out." But I suffered a momentary memory lapse about the irregular verb ter. I meant to say
Com licença, senhorita, tenho de sair do trem agora!
(Excuse me, little girl, I have to get off the train now!)
But instead I said
Com licença, senhorita, tem de sair do trem agora!
(Excuse me, little girl, you have to get off the train now!)
Clearly it must be disturbing to a little girl to have a large foreigner randomly say this rather loudly. I hope the experience wasn't too traumatic for her.
Boing Boing linked to a hilarious piece about how philosophers break up with one another.
I would add:
Pythagorean: I am a lover of wisdom, but not of you.
On my last day in Brazil, I met with a gentleman from Rits and then went to the feira hippie in Ipanema. That's right -- it's a hippie fair!
The Ipanema Hippie Fair is really just a crafts fair, but it has a great name. I met two Brazilian painters there and talked to them in Portuguese for about an hour, and then bought a painting from each of them. One of the painters didn't have anything with him at the fair within my budget, so he painted something on the spot for me -- a scene of a favela near Botafogo, with the Pão de Açucar in the background.
It's great to read units.dat (probably /usr/share/units.dat or /usr/share/misc/units.dat on your system), the encyclopedic compendium behind the amazing units program. It's got everything from the kilogram, meter, and second to the wey, sack, sarpler, last, susi, kirat, wukiyeh, periot, blanc, pony, and firkin. Never mind furlongs per fortnight -- that's a snap!
It's especially fun to try combining SI prefixes with ancient and traditional units.
They have even defined loony (you know, the Canadian currency).
This reminds me of the comparably amazing experience of reading the source code for the time zone definition files in the GNU C Library. Take a look at the contents of glibc-2.3.3/timezone, for example. There is so much research represented there, including an attempt to get the time zone name and offset right for every location in the world ever since time zones were introduced there. If you're in a U.S. time zone, for example, try date -d 'now-60years' and look at what you get.
I was taught in school that there were 24 time zones (UTC plus or minus each whole number of hours up to 12). That's what a lot of globes show, anyway, but this is terribly wrong. There are actually many more because of variances in whether and when summer time is observed -- and some time zones have offsets of 0:30 or even 0:15 and 0:45. What's more, if you take a time zone as including the whole history of when summer time was or was not observed in the past (and in which direction, because some Southern Hemisphere jurisdictions observed it in the wrong direction in the past to ease commerce with the Northern Hemisphere but to their detriment in other ways), it seems that there are at least thousands of different time zones. The glibc people have tried to collect and document and substantiate each one.
While I don't watch TV, I'd hate to be left without the option of not watching TV using free software.
Er, I mean... of using free software not to watch TV.
Anyway, to preserve my ability to watch TV using free software, I have just purchased an HD-3000 card from pcHDTV. That means that (for as long as the card lasts) I can ignore the broadcast flag restrictions on U.S. digital television broadcasts.
All you non-TV-watchers who care about free software may want to do the same. And for TV-watchers who care about free software, it should be a no-brainer.
If ALA v. FCC goes well in the D.C. Circuit, of course, we won't have the July deadline.
I appear in the current issue of conduit!, the publication of the Department of Computer Science at Brown University. (See p. 10.) I'm in interesting company.
I haven't had any Portuguese speakers jumping in to help me with my questions, but this one probably has a common answer with Spanish, so maybe some of you Spanish speakers can tell me how you think it should go.
Portuguese (like Spanish) has distinct verbs ser and estar (to be permanently or inherently; to be temporarily or accidentally). I'm all right with using these in the present and future, but I'm terribly confused about how they work in the past. Ser and estar have distinct past-tense forms for each Portuguese past tense. When is it appropriate to use one or the other? Is there an obvious rule? Does it matter whether the situation described is persisting? Does it matter whether people recognized something as permanent at the time, or is it a question of whether people now see it as permanent? (I'm thinking of the contrast between "Está doente" and "É doente", for example, but what if you were describing the onset of a chronic illness?)
This seems like an interesting philosophical question. For example, if we're saying that a day was hot, or that a law was unjust, is it inherent to those things that they were that way? Is that different from the situation if we're saying that today is hot or that a law is presently unjust? Do Portuguese speakers commit themselves to philosophical positions by their choice of ser or estar in a given situation? If you like General Semantics and hate Plato, do you feel that estar is less philosophically corrupt than ser?
Michelle once told me that you can subtly insult people by saying something like "Você está linda" -- literally "You are beautiful", but in the sense of "You are beautiful for the time being". In English you could say "You're beautiful tonight!" and raise the same question: hmmm, what about at other times?
The specific thing I was trying to say that raised this question was "it was useful" -- "foi útil" or "esteve útil"? Does it matter whether the benefit obtained was long-lasting? Does it matter whether the thing to which it was useful was long-lasting?
I got to celebrate Kragen's and Riana's birthdays and to see the closing performance of Tooth and Nail at Berkeley, in my beloved Dwinelle Hall. (I like Dwinelle Hall's architectural chaos so well that I once bought an official Dwinelle Hall construction shirt -- complete with a monster attacking the building. I think someone should create a NetHack level based on Dwinelle Hall.)
Tooth and Nail (a South African play over a decade old whose playwright is reportedly now amazed by the liveliness and urgency of his own work) was fragmentary by design; it had over 90 scenes, each about a minute long, and it told the stories of several people during the end of the Apartheid era.
In the morning Michelle took me to a Berkeley institution called the Thai Temple Brunch, which you can find any Sunday on Russell at Martin Luther King (about two blocks from the Ashby BART station); there is a glorious amount of Thai food served up to throngs of admiring brunchgoers as a fundraiser for a Thai Buddhist temple. I wish I'd experienced that sooner.
It sounds like -- thanks to Carlos and Abby -- the answer to my earlier question is that you need to choose between ser or estar from the point of view of the period of time you're talking about, not from the point of view of the present (nor sub specie aeternitatis). I still see some ambiguity, but this helps a lot. Carlos suggests that the choice of ser or estar typically has more to do with subject matter than with any consideration of tense.
Perhaps books are leading us astray by suggesting that ser has anything to do with perpetuity; many books written for English speakers refer to the concept "always" when discussing ser, but it sounds as if native speakers of Spanish and Portuguese actually have a mostly different concept (which I might try to paraphrase as something like "inwardly", "generally", or "normally"). Perhaps the concept of "always" is actually a foreign concept that creates more confusion about tense than is really necessary. Abby, for example, has asked people in Spain about the situation where the population of a city changes over time; they agreed that it was appropriate to use ser when talking about the previous population, which is obviously inconsistent with "always", "permanently", or "inherently" explanations, but perfectly consistent with "generally" (when qualified by time). And "generally" would still work if most of the population of a city went on vacation but then came back, or if a lot of people visited the city for a special event like the Chinese New Year parade or the Pride parade.
There is a book called Counterexamples in Analysis that one of my math teachers admired. (There's also a Counterexamples in Topology.) The point of the book is to challenge your intuition by showing strange mathematical situations that you might not have thought possible, and to highlight the importance of rigorous definitions. Presumably all of this will also improve your mathematical intuition, by way of destroying your confidence in your original intuitions. I wonder if someone ought to write a Counterexamples in Spanish and Portuguese Grammar that presents (for example) weird hypotheticals about ser and estar involving strange sequences of tenses, inaccurate and contrasting beliefs, unanticipated events, and so on, to try to challenge any straightforward rule. (Taking a page from Douglas Adams, we might ask what happens to grammar in the presence of time travel.)
Much as BookFinder searches many book sites to obtain useful price comparisons, Mobissimo (and a few others mentioned in a recent Associated Press article) search many travel sites to obtain useful price comparisons. I tried it and was pretty impressed, especially for international travel (which has a completely chaotic and non-transparent price structure at the moment, so that searching multiple travel sites can really make a big difference). For example, a trip to Germany in January which I had just purchased for about $800 roundtrip turned up on Mobissimo for about $650. Mobissimo and other travel meta-searches also apparently search JetBlue and Southwest and perhaps other discount airlines that are usually not searched by other travel sites.
I wonder if they're scraping with or without permission, or perhaps with some mixture of the two. Why would JetBlue, for example, want Mobissimo to scrape its site, but not want Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, etc., to do the same?
Slashdot reports that a Groklaw reader has found and published the 1994 BSD settlement, whose terms were previously known only to a few lawyers and BSD insiders. Let's hear it for public records!
Keely has posted something on the occasion of the 11th anniversary of Jonas Klein's death. Jonas meant a lot to me, too. I think of him many Novembers (and many other times) even though I never met him in person.
I got to do some maintenance work on the graduation cap Keely mentions, which was a great honor despite the humiliation of damaging one of the transistors by overloading it, and it inspired me to decorate two other graduation caps with technology (mine from my high school graduation, which had spinning spokes on top, and my friend Michelle's from her first university graduation, which enhanced her papel picado dragon with glowing blue and gold eyes). If I should ever graduate from a university, I'm sure I'll take up the soldering iron once again and think of Jonas.
I've been planning for over six years to dedicate a book to Jonas, and, now that I have a contract with No Starch Press, I'll finally get that opportunity.
I recently wrote a fairly long post to Dave Farber's list about some of the context around TiVo, "convergence", and regulation of receivers for various kinds of television. There are some definite oversimplifications in my post, but if you follow copyright or are curious about what I've been working on, you might enjoy reading it.
As a spoiler, here's my conclusion:
In terms of end user control, there is an opportunity for CE devices
to converge up (enhancing customers' control) and a risk of PC
devices converging down (eroding it). I think the world the
entertainment companies have built is providing exactly the wrong
incentive at every point as this question is worked out.
I forgot where I just recently saw this link, but Joe Hall explains how to pronounce Siva Vaidhyanathan's name, including an MP3 clip. I've been saying it wrong (wrongly pronouncing the "th" as a "t" and wrongly putting the the stress on the third syllable instead of the fourth).
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