alphabets, sex, and religion

I suppose I should blog about the awesome 4th of July party we had last night (anyone want to help us finish 1.2 watermelons and 40 beers?) but I've been thinking a lot about alphabets, sex, and religion.

(So, the party: We played this game called

"Norwegian Horseshoes, Ladder Golf, Snakes, Hillbilly Golf, Polish Golf, Horseballs, Tower Ball, Bolo Golf, Gladiator, Bola, Snake Toss, BlongoBall, Ladder Toss, Bolo, Rodeo Golf, Dingle Balls, Bolo Polo, Cowboy Golf, Redneck Golf, Pocca Bolo, The Snake Game, Willy Ball, Ladder Ball, Slither, Zing-Ball, Snakes & Ladders, Hillbilly Horseshoes, Flingy Ball, Norwegian Golf, Monkey Bars Golf, Swedish Golf, Polish Horsehoes, Dandy Golf, Montana Golf, Australian Horseshoes, Ladder Game, Monkey Balls, Rattlerail Toss, Golfball Horseshoes, Arizona Golf Balls, Spin-It, Ball Dangle, Bolo Ball, Poor Mans Golf, Bolo Toss, even Testical Toss!"

Perhaps you know it- it involves throwing golf balls tied together by string at a set of three rungs. The deck was fantastic, and no one came to kick us off the lawn. We'll call it a success.)

Now, on to alphabets: I decided to learn the Cyrillic alphabet for my upcoming family trip to Bulgaria, and it only took me about two days. Two half-hour study sessions! How can we learn alphabets that fast? I submit that learning alphabets is part of our linguistic endowment, if you will... I mean, I'm pretty sure that if I had been trying to memorize 30 arbitrary symbols that stood for something besides sounds, I wouldn't have done as well. I also made up my own semi-phonetic alphabet as a child (it doesn't have a one-to-one correspondence with English spelling), and I've given samples of it to two people. Both of them figured it out without even knowing what the text was about. That's crazy. Part of our innate linguistic knowledge, I tell you.

So, sex and religion: it seems like almost all the American linguists I know of are married to either other linguists, or people from another country who are not native English speakers. (Chomsky included; his wife is a linguist.) Cause-and-effect notwithstanding, they're motivated by sex in addition to the love of languages. The other group of linguists, the ones who know lots of crazy languages at a young age, are missionaries. Academia is a pretty secular place- except for linguistics. (Based on my limited experience, there are more religious people in linguistics than in religion. The font for the International Phonetic Alphabet was created by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, whose main goal is Bible translation.) They, too, are motivated by a higher cause.

This is why I'm 27 years old and only really speak Spanish (ok, and some German, and a little bit of French, and a few words of Bulgarian and Greek.) I'm just in it for the linguistics.

in ten years

In honor of my upcoming 10 year high school reunion:

Firefox...	is the new Netscape Navigator
Scrabulous...	is the new Diamonds
$4.29 gas...	is the new 99 cent gas
Cell phones...	are the new landlines
Grey's Anatomy...	is the new Ally McBeal
TiVO...	is the new VCR
Gmail...	is the new Hotmail
Facebook...	is the new paper facebook
Google	is the new Yahoo
Digital cameras...	are the new film cameras
Cell phone cameras...	are the new digital cameras
iPods...	are the new Discmans
Keens...	are the new Tevas
Thai food...	is the new Chinese food
Free internet TV...	is the new TV
Reality everything...	is the new Truman Show
Netflix...	is the new Blockbuster
Heath Ledger...	is the new Kurt Cobain
Laptops...	are the new desktops
Tsunamis...	are the new El Niño
Plastic frame glasses...	are the new wire rimmed glasses
Terrorists...	are the new Unibomber
Eliot Spitzer's prostitute...	is the new Monica Lewinsky
Gay marriage...	is the new Matthew Shepard
Electronic tickets...	are the new airline tickets
No food...	is the new airplane food
Travelocity et al...	are the new travel agents
Wii...	is the new Nintendo
The euro...	is the new peseta, franc, mark, krone, drachma, lira...

And- though it wasn't the point of this post- we're *still* doing shit in Iraq.

conspicuous consumption

I've been buying a lot of stuff recently... mostly stuff that I really need, like new hiking shoes. (I extended the shopping "pleasure" by buying them six or eight times, and then returning them for various minute flaws. I netted two pairs of hiking shoes.) During the year, I'm only allowed to come out of my hole for grocery shopping, so I've just been catching up.

But it does make me feel like a consumer. I've been to mall-land too many times. Bed, Bath, and Beyond is a warehouse of ideas people come up with in the shower: a salad spinner that also grates cheese! A popsicle maker that you can put alcohol in! Hmm, wait, you can do that with... nevermind.

Fortunately, I still consume a lot less than these people:
http://chambana.craigslist.org/gms/738383381.html

Look quick before it's gone.

-they're selling a 50" TV, a 42" TV, and a 27" TV so they can upgrade to a 62" TV. Hey, guess what? You already have 119 inches of televisions!
-they're selling an electric grill and a charcoal grill because they've already bought a bigger charcoal grill.
- Printer: "Only selling because its not what I thought when I bought it $90" Did you think it was a huge TV or a huge grill? Also, this problem can be solved by waiting 15 seconds before buying things.
-"DYNALAB SPEAKERS SET OF 2 WORKS PERFECTLY MY WIFE JUST HATES THE FACT THAT THEY ARE SO LOUD." This problem can be solved using the volume knob on any of your three TVs that may be hooked up to the speakers.

Ah, the Joneses. Be sure you keep up with their credit card debt number.

new cell phone

Check out the coolness of my new (free upgrade) cell phone:


It swivels open! And it plays mp3s!

So far, the only downside to it is that I have to use more finger muscles to hold it up to my ear, because it's so smooth. It doesn't have an indentation in the middle like my old phone. But look how much smaller and awesomer it is.

RSS

After a long period (precipitated by the untimely demise of Safari on my laptop) of checking blogs manually, I watched an amusing video about RSS and finally started using Google Reader. Now search engines have access to yet more information about who I am. (Things I like: snarkiness, people I actually know, a post rate of approximately 1/day, chauvinism, babies, personal finance.)

Safari is still in a medically induced coma. Periodically, I try to wake it up, and it flutters its eyelids, slaps me in the face, and then quits again.

Jon & Kate plus eight

I discovered this show on motel TV... Jon and Kate have six-year-old twins and two-year-old sextuplets, and their own reality show.

(In the ultimate his-and-hers TV watching compromise, we were switching back and forth between this and Verminators.)

At first I thought it was a nanny show, since they were interviewing nannies. I like me a good nanny show, but these parents are organized disciplinarians already- when they send their kids to time out, they go. In fact, they consider themselves so good that they wouldn't actually hire any of the nannies, because they thought none of them "knew how bad it really is here."

Kate seems deeply unhappy, and she does bitch out her husband on occasion. Many viewers of the show object to it for that reason. And they are secretly Christian- you can't really tell by the show, but their website is all "God had truly blessed us with these darling miracle babies." (OK, maybe you can tell by the fact that they have sextuplets at all.) None of them have health problems, though, so you can watch without that pesky "my god, what these people have done is really unethical" feeling you get from the McCaugheys- two of whom still can't walk without walkers at age 10.

The real draw of the show, of course, is the cuteness- it's pretty hard to resist six little practically-identical people talking to each other and shoving each other down on the cement garage floor. That pretty much outrides Kate's OCD and abusive tendencies. And the bicultural family thing stays pretty much in the background. It's actually a reality show that seems to depict reality in the right light- the fights and crying aren't censored out, but the overall picture of the family is guardedly positive. They don't have any big fancy house or pile of handouts from sponsors, either- they seem kind of... normal.

I just hope seasons 1 and 2 come out on DVD before my free trial of Netflix is over.

Wanderlust, lack of

I've been meaning to put up this post for a month, but you know, I had more important things to do. Like getting a free trial of Netflix and watching a movie every single day. Anyway.

At the end of April, I went to Austin for a conference. I had some funding that had to be spent on a hotel, so I actually booked the Rodeway Inn online. Then I read the reviews. "The bathroom floor was dirty, it blackened your feet and was sticky." "I killed 7 roaches. Enough said." "I will never stay in this hotel again, even if it were the last hotel with vacancy. No not even then, I would stay in my car." I mean, the Google maps listing comes up as "Dirty, disgusting, and smelly."

So, I canceled my reservation and switched to the Super 8 for approximately $5 more.

The whole thing disturbed me, though. I mean, I happily stayed at the crappiest hostels in all of Europe just a few years ago. I got bedbugs in Italy. I slept in a handicapped bathroom in Krakow. I'm not the kind of person that really needs a five-star hotel (though I do prefer them with beds, and without bedbugs.)

What changed? I think it's safe to say that our standards only go up, not down, throughout life. The McDonald's burger becomes a steak, the roommate disappears, the bike becomes a car, and the Rodeway becomes a Red Roof Inn.

Money is part of it, of course- if we have more money, we don't need to stay at the 20-bed-per-room youth hostel. But I really think there's more to it than that. I remember going backpacking with my dad for the first time when I was 8, and he said that I didn't need a good sleeping pad because I was a kid. I'm sure I did sleep better on that piece of foam than he did on the Thermarest. We're less uncomfortable when we're young- all those back problems and lactose intolerance issues don't really crop up until we at least graduate college.

I also think we become better at predicting the future. The truth about travel is that it's often uncomfortable, inconvenient, and expensive. As long as we can keep our optimism intact, though, we can at least undertake the travel in the first place: Maybe the room will be really nice. Maybe the train will get there on time. Maybe the airport won't strip-search me and then put my luggage through a meat grinder. Maybe my awesome photo of the Capitol building will be worth the walk.

The internet cuts through that optimism by providing the most critical reviews. You can't trust them- they may have been written by the 5-star hotel people. On the other hand, I'm sure I would not have been impressed by the Rodeway Inn. But I probably would have been happier with it based on a 1-paragraph Lonely Planet blurb than with the capacity to do internet statistics on what percentage of the guests found foreign hairs in their rooms.

So, I think we do actually experience discomfort more strongly as adults- when I was 20, I didn't need pitch blackness and a firm bed to get a good night's sleep. And, we're also better at predicting how inconvenient things will actually be. A third factor is being responsible for other people: I'm more willing to risk a crappy lodging for myself than, say, if I was bringing my hypothetical children along.

When the trip is over, though, we don't really remember the inconvenience- we remember the highlights. So yeah, duh, of course travel is really worth it.

The "modern world" has given us such low levels of inconvenience in our daily lives (free two-way shipping, ergonomic workspaces, elevators, central air and heating, curbside takeout) that we're not really used to inconvenience anymore. Or walking. The nice thing about the human psyche is that it does adjust to different levels of convenience, so that a youth hostel bunk can be either a relaxing retreat (after a day of walking in the rain) or a noisy, dirty, last resort (after a night at the Hilton.)

So, the moral of the story is: go see the world before you turn 25, so you can happily do it in squalor. Alternatively, if you're over 25, do it anyway! It just might cost you more for a lower level of comfort.

And, to conclude, here is a picture of Eric playing in his rock band.

moreTs

morewords.com is back, so I can give you a few numbers on the Ts. Unfortunately, it cuts off once it gets to over 2000 returns, so I have to do them individually.

	initial t	3rd position t
3 letter words	57	84
4 letter words	249	211
5 letter words	553	444
6 letter words	907	858

Up to this point, the total is 1766 vs. 1597. Initial T is ahead by 10%. But once we get into seven-letter words, prefixes start making an impact. Let's just consider "re": retable, retacks, retails, retaken, retaker, retakes, retaped, retapes, retaste, retaxed, retaxes, reteach, reteams, retears, retells, retests, rethink, retiled, retiles, retimed, retimes, retints, retired, retirer, retires, retitle, retools, retorts, retouch, retrace, retrack, retract, retrain, retread, retreat, retrial, retried, retries, retrims, retuned, retunes, returns, retwist, retying, retyped, retypes. All of those have viable words after the re- prefix.
Actually, just looking at these words, it seems like the impact should have been seen a couple of letters earlier- there are a lot of -s and -d. Anyway, on with the numbers:

	initial t	3rd position t
7 letter words	1363	1512
8 letter words	1535	1944
9 letter words	1208	1906

Here's the problem: initial T and 3rd position T have both already peaked at the 8 letter word level, but initial T declines a lot faster. Think about those prefixes: as long as 3rd position T benefits from prefixes, it can always beat initial T. No matter how many initial T words there are, there will be more that are 2 letters longer with prefixes. But, among shorter, more common, less morphologically complex words, they're pretty close.

	initial t	3rd position t
10 letter words	905	1764
11 letter words	688	1410
12 letter words	489	1106
13 letter words	319	795
14 letter words	221	494
15 letter words	122	346
16 letter words	74	248

By this time, we're talking words like "retinoblastomata" and "interpenetrating." Are shorter words easier to think of than those? Sure. But should we really be saying that people are so stupid because they think there are more initial T words than 3rd position T words? No. Up until 6 letters, there are actually more. So the "availability bias" may be more about word frequency than initial vs. medial.

The moral of the story is that that 3rd position is not as arbitrary as you might think. In fact, comparing 1st vs. 2nd position, 1st position wins by a LOT. At every level from 3-10 letter words, 1st position has more than twice as many words as 2nd position. I'm tired of making tables, but it's true. But that wouldn't make such a nice little anecdote for the availability bias, now, would it?

Thanks, internet, for backing me up!

The paradox of Ts

I finally got around to reading The Paradox of Choice. I haven't actually gotten to the part where it'll help me decide whether I'll regret getting the English Cheddar instead of the Pesto Grilled Cheese (I did) or whether I'll regret getting the Cheesequake Blizzard instead of the Cookie Dough Blizzard (I totally didn't), but I have high hopes for the book.

Early on, though, it cites that thing people always use as an example for the availability bias: when asked whether there are more words with T as the first letter or T as the third letter, people always go for words beginning with T because those are easier to think of. Apparently, they're wrong.

This anecdote has always bothered me. OK, so it's easier to think of words that start with T. But all things being equal, there should be the same number of Ts in first and third position. And T is a common onset in English. Of course, no one actually ever comes out and says whether the numbers are equal or whether 3rd-position T is actually more common. And morewords.com seems to be hiding from the internet now that I decided to write this post, so I can't provide you with those numbers.

Then, today, I realized: it could be the prefixes that make the difference. Tour, detour, turn, return, tie, untie... um, tern, intern? English has a lot of two-letter prefixes. So my guess is that if you took prefixed words out of the equation, the difference would even out to some degree or even completely.

Damn you, internet, without your support, I can't make any bold claims!

where I'm from

Yesterday, I had someone ask me what they should do in NYC, since I'm "from New York." Well, the difference between the city and Allegany County is as follows:

This is someone from my high school class, or at least married to someone in my high school class. Please note:
•He's wearing a "realistic camo" print T-shirt.
•He's wearing a baseball cap with "Bud" displayed prominently on the front.
•Her perm and glasses are circa 1989, but the photo's from 2001.
•They seem to be the champions of some sort of bowling league.
•The theme is "Wild Irish Rose."
•LOOK at the horrible backdrop!

I actually had to click on "ignore all requests from this person" on Facebook, because every few hours, she was inviting me to play Bingo and Slot Machine and race cars.

I know a lot about her. She's racing a tricked out Koenigsegg. Her other car is an SSC Ultimate Aero. Her Facebook house is a Big Yellow, her Tuner Car is a 67 shelby mustang, and her BBQ grill is an upright pit and smoker. Oh, and her bike is a Dodge Tomohawk. She has 223 bottles of beer to give away.

She has a lot of time to hang out on Facebook because she's a stay-at-home mom. She's a stay-at-home mom because she has SIX children (hey, she graduated from high school 12 years ago and he graduated 10 years ago, what were they supposed to do?) One of the children is at least middle school age.

Any more questions on why I'm totally going to my high school reunion?

[Edit: I just saw that another Alfred compatriot of mine just attended a "21+ Christian singles retreat" where they prayed for the salvation of someone's "unsaved loved ones."]