Author: Carl Morris (Blog)

Posted on

A Pyramid of All the World’s Knowledge

One video which I really enjoyed this year was this 20-minute talk about endangered languages.

I wasn’t particularly following this subject in any great depth before. Let’s just say raw curiosity can take one to some unexpected places.

You can open it in a new window here.

Dr. David Harrison says:

There are 7,000 languages spoken in the world and this represents the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled.

But they are rapidly going extinct and eroding under various pressures of globalization, which I will talk about today.

And this loss will be catastrophic for humanity, both in terms of science and technology and culture.

And not just to the people who speak these languages, but to all of us.

Harrison gives examples of the riches which are bound up in just a few of these admittedly obscure languages, including knowledge from medicine, geology and biology.

The most striking thing for me is when he refers to the Yupik language of Alaska as a “technology”. This might be obvious to some, but to me it was an intriguing perspective.

It may be possible to invoke arguments for preservation of these languages on the basis of feelings about old village life and its unfortunate decline. Those kind of arguments may have validity, but Harrison’s emphasis in this talk is on the value of languages to science, technology and the world’s knowledge.

It’s also a heavy blow to the assumption that we have access to all, or nearly all, of the world’s knowledge through the web and through our dominant majority languages. We don’t. Apparently, according to his closing words, it’s possible for these minority language technologies to co-exist with English and so on – although he left me wanting more details.

Harrison depicts the globe’s very uneven language distribution on an inverted pyramid, where the pyramid represents all languages:

83 of the world’s languages account for nearly 80% of the world’s population and I would draw your attention to the base of the inverted pyramid. 3,586 of the world’s smallest languages are spoken by just 0.2% of the world’s population.

It brought me back to this speech from Kevin Kelly, the thinker and founder of Wired magazine, in which he suggests that technologies don’t die. Surprisingly, technologies that we might think are obsolete (parts for steam-powered vehicles, ploughs, stone age knives and so on) can all still be bought from specialist shops – new!

For what it’s worth I usually love Kevin Kelly. Recently I’ve spent several evenings exploring his ideas, to then feel them rattling around my brain for days afterwards. I’m still trying to work out if his towering optimism about technology is a weakness.

Language would appear to be one big exception to Kelly’s assertion that culture tends to accumulate. Retrieving the total benefit from the world’s languages, as opposed to other technologies, will take a huge amount of effort.

If only we could get these guys in the same room for an intellectual deathmatch. Let me know if it ever happens, because hearing them slug it out on matters of technology would be sweet. In the meantime, once I’ve grokked Harrison’s whole entire web presence, I shall be tracking down his book, When Languages Die.

That 20-minute video is well worth a watch and back there I had to restrain myself from quoting the transcript in full. On a tenuously festive tip, the bit about the Tofa language of Siberia might teach you something about the classification of reindeer.

Posted on

What’s the point of Twitter?

twitter google trends 2008
Google searches for “Twitter” over time, source: Google Trends

This graph shows the huge increase in searches for the word “Twitter” on Google. It could be said to roughly correspond to the service’s popularity and importance.

Or maybe, for some of the non-adopters, it signals their rising levels of scepticism and annoyance in constantly hearing about it.

After some heavy field testing, I have discovered that Twitter is not exclusively for smug fools. Actually I have even stopped coyly referring to an update as a “Twitter post” and just started saying “tweet” like everyone else. Indeed.

Yes you ARE justified in feeling a little online service sign-up fatigue, but this is not another Facebook. The tweet hype will increase well into 2009, so you may as well try it. At least to avoid that kind of feeling of being the only person not on pills at a student disco.

Here’s a decent Twitter tutorial and here’s a persuasive intro to Twitter by Tim O’Reilly, the tech publishing overlord.

Such a medium gives tiny glimpses into the everyday. So if you were ever to meet Tim O’Reilly you could ask him about, say, his horses. That kind of question is officially not weird anymore – should it be that you find yourself stuck for an opener, meekly cowering beneath his guru beard.

The existence of a communication platform based on 140-character messages shouldn’t be shocking. Text messages have been widespread for about a decade. Yet, even among tech people, some of the admittedly valid criticism of Twitter points to this issue of brevity.

Other than being the soul of wit and all that, this is a definite limitation. But every medium has features which can manifest as weaknesses.

Nobody’s suggesting this should be the optimum or dominant form of communication between you and me. It can just augment and support what already exists and fill a niche of its own, just as conventional text messaging has done. Besides, a big part of the appeal are web links which telescope off into bigger “messages”.

As you read people’s tweets over time, you build up impressions. Twitter is months of agonising smalltalk, crushed down to the basic eigenvectors.

So I am intrigued by the pure economy of Twitter communication. It reminded me of other things – its precursors, especially other technologies.

My dad isn’t on Twitter, but when we’re apart he and I often communicate by SMS. The text message he frequently sends me is:

ok

That’s it – low fat communication with no caps, no punctuation, no salutation, no sign-off. A mere two letters and with that the most commonly recognised word in the English language.

My brother gets them too and it’s become a small point of reference in conversation between the two of us. It’s one of those trivial but cherished things that families have in common.

The fact is, because of the context and who it is, these replies from my dad always mean a lot to me. The “ok” signifies several things… I am here / I agree / No problem. It’s usually in reply to a plan or proposal from me, for example an initial text to the parents saying “hi, see you sunday, will pop round” so it’s about optimism and expectation too.

It also reminds me of the ultimate succinct exchange, when the author Victor Hugo was relaxing on holiday and used the high speed technology of the day, a telegram, to send his London publisher a single question mark. Keen to get news concerning sales of his new book Les Miserables, he received an equally terse reply. The first print run had entirely sold out and the publisher’s telegram was a single exclamation mark.

We can speculate why this took place. My theory is that the author was just too exhausted to embellish the message after the long process of getting the book finished.

Did the book REALLY sell out on the first run? Or is that fact included just to spruce up the anecdote (which I first read as a boy in Reader’s Digest)? How would Victor have reacted to the West End’s frilly-costumed musical adaptation?

We need not concern ourselves with these uncertainties. What we do know is, the messages are only rendered meaningful by the “metadata” of CONTEXT, with just enough content to work. See also: the Laconians, who stripped away all the redundancy to deliver pointed, concise, laconic comebacks.

Perhaps tellingly, the second biggest adopters of Twitter have been the Japanese, where wired openness about daily life gives rise to thousands of digital haikus per second.

We should also note that English and Japanese are currently the only interface language options on the Twitter website, although client software in different languages is available. I’ll reserve that line of enquiry for a future post.

The upshot of these examples is: we’ve long known that you can squeeze a lot of feeling or intent into a message with tiny informational content, from a round of applause to a marine distress signal. So the brevity is fine.

But what about Twitter as an echo chamber of self-referential tweets and inane signalling about Twitter itself? “Hello world.”, “I’m tweeting.”, “Which client do you favour?”, “test123” and so on? Well, the channel is open, and I think this is all possibly fine too.

Socially, amateur radio was always a marginal hobby and I guess it still exists in some corners. My awareness is largely informed by the Tony Hancock sitcom episode, The Radio Ham (although I believe enthusiasts hate this term). In reality, I’m told that much of the chatter on the airwaves was to exchange callsigns, establish contact and discuss – wait for it – the newest equipment for doing amateur radio.

Young boy riding by at high speed on a bicycle shouting repeatedly, ‘I am here.’ Perhaps the central and single message of humanity.

A Year with Swollen Appendices
Brian Eno
24 February 1995 (Diary entry in Egypt)

The last time I did a precise measurement of a message’s informational mass, I was studying a module on coding theory. We learnt how to introduce redundancy deliberately, to assist error-checking when sending data signals. It was useful but a bit on the dry side. I much prefer the riffing from people-to-people – and the joy of a communication which even, at times, celebrates itself.

Posted on

Sleeveface The Book

sleeveface the book

Sleeveface the book is out now!

Sleeveface has a dedicated blog of its own, so I’ll try not to duplicate too much here. It also has more info about the book.

At the moment we are doing a real mixed bag of press and radio interviews. Sunday Times magazine carried a feature recently, this afternoon I’ve just been speaking to the Irish Examiner, then soon it’s National Public Radio in the USA.

It’s particularly been a joy to chat to the Welsh language media. Recently I’ve met with Wedi 7 and Bandit which are cultural TV shows on S4C and the C2 show on BBC Radio Cymru. If I made any grammatical mistakes with the Welsh, I hope they at least made you laugh.

People have asked if I predicted this would happen with Sleeveface. Well I knew I liked it and I could easily imagine the record and photo geeks getting into it. But this is ridiculous. And great.

So I was glad that David Bowie, the ultimate chameleon, likes it. It was great to read a comment from fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld.

But it’s just as fun to see ANYBODY enjoying it. As former Pistols manager Malcolm McClaren put it:

Sleeveface is the most brooding, sullen, sexy as hell way to prolong the death of our culture. Long live the record! Resurrection is part of the hero’s journey. Renewing, revitalizing, reappraising pop culture in ways no industry could ever dream of. Hats off to these Rock ‘n’ Roll creeps from Wales! DIY adulation and worship of these now ancient deities deserve all our most fashionable darlings’ attention and all art crazies desperate to be the next big thing at the Biennale. Unfathomable!!! Unquestionably this attitude gets all those pop legends back from the dead and inside, on top, to the left and right of the liver and kidney body parts of the next generation. Who says they are not Patti Smith? Elton John? David Bowie? Tim Buckley? Elvis? Who says? Who says?

At the beginning I thought Sleeveface was daft. And I still think it’s daft! The new pics that I get still have the capacity to make me laugh out loud.

Thanks to John, the gang and everyone who helped with the book, especially those who sent photos. If you’re one of those people who contributed, I’ve emailed you personally.

Posted on

Pidgin Stryd

There’s a scene in Alan Bennett‘s semi-autobiographical play The History Boys where two teachers are discussing the English language. Hector, played by Richard Griffiths, remarks to his colleague that he loves language. Not merely “words”, he says. “That would be so… Welsh!”. They both chuckle.

I wasn’t able to quote that one exactly as I watched it on TV back in Christmas 2007. But disregarding for now the possibly that Hector might not know an englyn from an awdl, there seems to be a grain of truth in that comment.

It’s also my warning shot for what follows. This post has more of my highly personal perspectives on learning the Welsh language, following my first post on that theme. Below contains PIECEMEAL DISCUSSION OF INDIVIDUAL WORDS. If you’re a Welsh speaker, I guess you should substitute “warning shot” back there for “bait”. Words? You LOVE IT.

If you don’t love it, start your own blog because I’d like to read more Welsh language blogs.

Anyway. I got through wlpan and am now on the pellach course. Despite my shortcomings, language is a general interest of mine. I often think and talk about the English language. It’s one of my favourite subjects. But Welsh speakers totally rule on this one. They talk about their language A LOT. And now, it’s starting to feel like my language too in some ways – so I gladly follow suit.

“But Welsh is such a difficult language to learn”, people tell me. They’re right in some ways. ALL languages present difficulties; Welsh has its own. Written Welsh uses the Latin alphabet which can be deceptive – it’s immediately familiar but rendered differently. Comparisons to English are inevitable and understandable. If English is all you have in your toolkit, of course it’s going to look strange. That’s what the learning stage is all about.

English is a pretty versatile and useful language. I like English. Actually I love it. Although I imagine it’s a right bitch to learn as an adult. Irregular verbs, wonky spellings, arbitrary plurals, bits of Saxon, Greek, Latin and French all mashed together. Fortunately I started learning English as a baby and freely enjoy all the benefits it brings, with none of the confusion of, say, whether to use “bring” or “take”. Or what exactly the word “it” means and to use it.

So right now I’m missing the word “it” because my brain fibre seems to have wired itself around the word. So I’m in a process of unravelling some of that and wrapping it around Welsh, which uses different structures.

Check a Welsh-English dictionary for the “it”-shaped hole.

Neither can I say “I don’t mind if I do”, one of my stock phrases when offered, say, a chocolate digestive. All I get is blank faces or laughter if I use “dw i ddim yn poeni os dw i’n wneud“.

Well, it’s nice to be of some amusement.

“But aren’t the dialects in north and south Wales, like, TOTALLY different?”, I hear them cry. No, not at all. It’s one language. Although some of the Gwynedd and Ynys Môn folk have put my confidence here through some rigorous testing, it must be said.

For a few days into wlpan last year I thought I was learning south Wales dialect. Fine. I live in south Wales. My dad’s parents were from Cwmaman which is perhaps where I could be if they hadn’t moved to Slough in the 1940s to find work, along with countless others. South Wales dialect? Here’s my 400 quid. Bring it.

Then I gradually realised it’s partly some kind of bizarre learner’s dialect with bits of schoolly official words that you hardly ever hear (sglodion and micro-don are two examples from the kitchen of nobody I know) and “proper” phrase structures.

But mainly, because I’m in Caerdydd, Y Mwg Mawr, I’m over in Dempseys / Mochyn Du /  Clwb Ifor Bach and picking up Welsh words and phrases from all points of the compass. As my tutor remarked, purely in reference to Welsh and not even in jest – Cardiff is VERY cosmopolitan.

Each of my carefully plotted utterances could involve a word choice, such as teisen/cachen (cake), becso/poeni (worry), nawr/rwan (now) and llaith/llefrith (milk). The latter is an age-old shibboleth which verges on some miniature holy war at the breakfast table. My inclination would be just to adapt and pick one for the situation, in the same way I’ll just say cellphone to Americans like some accomodating chameleon. Everyone’s mate, see. Kindly pass me the milk and let’s get on. Dim siwgr diolch.

The only current exception is losin (sweets). That one’s hyper-regional and I’ve heard not only that but pethau da, fferins, da-da and melysion. And rumours of minciag, neisis, tyffish and pethau melys. How many of these are valid moves in Scrabble Yn Gymraeg?

But other than regional stuff, personality is a big one. In any given tongue, everyone tends to have their own personal micro-dialect, as it were. Part of the language learning process is finding it – refining your personality in the NEW (to you) language. Linguists might have a proper term for this. And it includes individual word choices (UPDATE: The word is idiolect.)

I resigned myself to being known of and thought of as a dysgwr (learner). Although at the very beginning I did entertain fancies of privately learning and emerging as a fully formed siaradwr Cymraeg, there’s no way it could happen like that. So I have to blunder about in public parading my peculiar accent, being all wonky, getting words wrong and enduring the laughs. Actually I like the laughs.

This included an interview for the Deffro’r Dinas column in Y Cymro (a newspaper) and a spot on Uned 5 (a TV show) to talk about Sleeveface in my clumsy pidgin Welsh.

A couple of times I’ve been told I speak like a public warning sign.

Also, drud (expensive) and rhad (cheap) used to get mixed up, as did gwr (husband) and gwraig (wife) – not helped by their proximity in my course notes. If I were the kind of guy that gets embarrassed, this kind of thing would be a problem. Particularly when I casually referred to my female tutor’s child as FY mab (MY son).

But if I was going to be a blundering learner I could at least pick words that sounded ultra-Welsh. So why would I say lico or licio when I could say hoffi (like)? That’s “like” as in “like”, to enjoy or approve – not a kids-overheard-conversing-on-a-bus like… As much as I might amuse myself (and probably myself alone) to pepper my discourse with “fel” or “megis” as I suspect Quentin Tarantino would if he were ever to learn Welsh.

Unlike some, it wasn’t an aversion to loanwords or some romantic notion of “pure Welsh”. That might mean cutting out words like cefndir (background), which smell slightly of English too. (That was just a hunch, but it seems a bit like the thing where “secretary general” smells of Anglo-Norman.) No, I never struggled with these things. Language has always been a mishmash. What are you going to do, cut out the Latin?

Hey! Some words are almost the same all around Europe now. Which is old news. Siocled (chocolate) springs to mind.

It was more about trying to squeeze as much new and exciting Welsh knowledge into a sentence as possible. Thus, warming to my new policy, I dredged up partly forgotten placenames like Trelluest (Grangetown) and Caerliwelydd (Carlisle). And zoomed into saying things like cyfaill (friend) and cyfeillion (friends) instead of ffrind and ffrindiau.

Hey everybody, I’m speaking the Welsh! You can’t get Welshier because I just cut ffrindiau right out of there. Almost literally – thanks to my new found zeal. I eventually chilled out and started using both. I’m told cyfeillion is a bit formal, like the kind of word you’d use in a speech. That’s OK for me. It sits comfortably as I have a personal fondness for the uncommon, the archaic and the perverse. That goes for any language. It’s in my DNA.

When I was chatting at the Eisteddfod I heard someone conjugate lico to make Licwn i (I would like) – albeit not while onstage in the main pavilion. Ergo new outlook. Besides licio is OLD, I heard that they use it in Patagonia, which is a yardstick of OK for these matters. Heh!

One personal trait which runs deeper is that I cannot abide any trace of twee. If there could be a trump card for Carl Morris it would have a rating of 0/10 for tweeness. If the name of the game is twee, then I lose – but I figure I gain so much more. So whoever cooked up popty ping (microwave oven) must feel highly deserving of some kind of award. But not from me. Unless I’m giving an award in recognition of their massive twee face.

In English, I have trouble with “bubble and squeak” for the Bank Holiday Monday breakfast meal. It’s tasty but I cannot allow this ghastly set of sounds to grace my lips. Similarly “I like to cook spag bol in my des res with all mod cons.” is an example of a sentence I would never use. I consider myself a self-respecting human being and only quote it here in mockery of the non-self-respecting.

Obviously it’s not for me to prescribe how anyone else should use language. But neither is it for me to prevent anyone talking like a douchebag.

In among other subjects, I think I’ll MUTATE next time. Ngh!

Mmmmmutations. Don’t hate them. Love them.

Posted on

Beyond YouTube

Mucking about with music video streams isn’t the only misuse of YouTube I’ve been enjoying lately.

Here’s a game called A Car’s Life which is based entirely in YouTube. Click the annotations to save the car, but be quick!

As to how it works, each level has a different video with an annotation linking to the next level. If you let any video play to the end, you’ll see the bad outcome.

It’s a very simple game but from the relative proportions of view counts from level to level, we get an indication of many people have been successful. As you’d expect not everyone proceeds and it’s lower for each successive level. But obviously we don’t know how many good players are just abandoning the game – either because they’re analysing its technical aspects, or because they’ve decided to close it and get back to work.

If you want to upload and share video, there are some good competitors to YouTube – Blip.tv, Vimeo and Viddler all spring to mind. Each seems to focus on a unique set of subtle distinctives and strengths.

But YouTube remains the leader for sheer width of content, particularly music videos. If you want to find a well known video, it’s likely to be on there.

As such it’s long been the de facto site for video and its layout has become very familiar. It’s hard to imagine this advert working on any other video site. (Keep watching…)

http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

Perhaps a good example of a phoney site put to a good use rather than phishing? You may find that the view count is not very reliable.

Clearly the singular popularity of YouTube has led to their unique advertising deal with Nintendo here.

As other video sites grow though, some will chip away at YouTube’s lead. I wonder if there’s any scope for a dedicated video search engine which indexes them all and is impartial. After all, Google own YouTube. Can we trust the standard search box to index all the other video sites fairly and prominently? Searching for videos there is already quite hit-and-miss. Its format remains largely unchanged since its pre-YouTube days, when online video was relatively undeveloped. For video, all we’ve had from Google since then has been Google Video – but that only indexes itself and YouTube.

All I want is the old footage of Les Dawson playing The Entertainer deliberately wrong on his piano. It’s nowhere to be found.

Posted on

Discreet Disco

Here are two embedded videos.

They are identical.

I’ve posted them so you can play them both – simultaneously.

Have a play around with these identical videos. Experiment.

No rules, but some things to try: use the pause/play button to synchronise the videos as close as possible. To bring them closer, just delay the video that’s ahead by a quick pause and unpause. It helps if you’re aware of the difference in visuals and clock. You should get some nice “flanging” sound effects. Then if you stagger the videos again it will make various kinds of galloping rhythm.

I discovered this recently, marvelling at the looping melodies when I opened a video twice, by accident.

It’s easy to do in an age of multiple windows. Inside your computer should be a sound card capable of mixing inputs, like a DJ mixer or the mixing desk at the back of a gig. If you’re not viewing this on a computer it might be worth a try anyway. If it fails, try opening the video in a dedicated window, twice.

It reminded me of a similar thing with vinyl turntables. Years ago, I had two 12″ copies of a tune which I tried to beat juggle to repeat and extend passages – a technique popularised by Grandmaster Flash and other hip-hop pioneers. I was at home and I wanted to see how difficult it was. After 20 minutes I gave up this line of experimentation and took to playing the records simultaneously instead.

The “flange” noises are better with vinyl, not only because of sound fidelity but because the noises are more varied. With the videos the streams are locked. On vinyl, it’s possible to introduce slight variations in the playback which make rather splendid flanging and phasing sounds with proper whooshing and everything. You can also adjust the playback speed with the pitch control – to affect the effects, as it were. I guess this would also work on other DJ set-ups such as CDJs, Serato or Ableton Live.

(Pausing and unpausing the video should be instinctive to a DJ who’s accustomed to ordinary beatmatching – it’s similar to a pitch bend downwards, which you would achieve on vinyl by slowing the rotation of a turntable.)

For the spotters, it’s worth noting that this tune is part of a lineage of remixing and revision. The Source’s original version of You Got The Love came out in 1986. Then in 1989 the remixer John Truelove used Candi Staton’s vocal (essentially the acapella version of it) to create an early example of a musical mash-up. The result is a club anthem with a longevity far in excess of the mash-ups which came later. This took some ingenuity, awareness of musical key and a bit of cheek. The track he picked for the instrumental backing was Jamie Principle and Frankie Knuckes’ Your Love with the now familiar melody and bassline. The bassline of Your Love is, in turn, reappropriated from a fragment of an italo disco track, Feels Good by Electra. According to Discogs this came out in 1982. Confusingly, we also learn from Discogs that John Truelove eventually started using The Source name himself (don’t ask me how that works).

Incidentally here’s another version of Your Love, the one that started the dual play trick off for me. This tune’s nice because the twinkly melody at the beginning lasts for a while. Muso-boffins like Steve Reich and Brian Eno would approve!

I’m sure there are other tunes that would sound interesting with this treatment.  There may even be examples of pairs of tunes which are suitable for live mixing and mashing up. It would help if they were identical speeds (down to the precise beats-per-minute count). On that note proper remixing will have to wait. But I’m working on something along these lines…

Posted on

Peace and Love, the Ringo way

Is it me or is this possibly the worst PR ever?

This clip has been broadcast today by TV and covered by loads of media – and counting.

It’s a great example of how NOT to communicate.

Whatever you think of Ringo Starr as a musician, he has worked hard over a span of five decades to build a following of dedicated fans. The breadth of his fanbase is the envy of many musicians, particularly emerging bands.

And in a succinct 44-second video clip he declares his intention to toss a great deal of that away. Well, throwing away mailed correspondance from your fans is tantamount to the same thing. Massive blunder.

This is not just about music. For “fans” substitute, if you prefer, “customers”. Except that someone who takes the trouble to write is more like a super-customer or super-fan: enthusing about you, recommending you to others, blogging about you, announcing your news for you on forums…

Through my work with musicians I have observed this kind of fan at close range. Granted, they are a little more earnest than the rest. They hang around after the gig. They might need a bit more maintenance than the average person. But they are great people to have around. You can’t afford to ignore them, let alone cut them off. Whether you’re on a small level or a big level, they are offering to help you with whatever you are trying to achieve.

This is not about privacy issues either. Ringo Starr’s website boldly announces his new album. He is an active artist, still touring. Therefore he is actively making invitations for people to embrace him as a person and get into his music. People will respond to those invitations, he CANNOT switch that off. (If he wanted to be left alone to spend some time with the family, garden or somesuch he always has the option of doing a Rick Astley and disappearing completely for several years.)

This recent speech by wine blogger Gary Vaynerchuk explores these ideas in a social media context. It’s a kind of semi-ridiculous motivational thing about building brands using social media. He does a lot of shouting… you need to answer your emails, respond, care about your users, through as many media as possible – that sort of thing. While entertaining, it’s pretty obvious stuff! Fulfilling these obligations can be time consuming. Vaynerchuk takes an extreme approach by personally responding to every message.

As a byproduct of his own success, Ringo has a bigger, more cumbersome issue with postal overload. How about hiring someone for a day a fortnight? Give them a custom rubber stamp of a Ringo-face and a stack of envelopes. Or a stack of signed postcards? While you’re at it, why not bung in a flyer mentioning the new Ringo album and tourdates?

Aside from straightforward courtesy, it’s good for business.

Posted on

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Heniaith

The last year has been a bit of a language learning adventure for me. I was preparing a massive post but it’s rapidly expanding into several posts.

So I want to blog about the Welsh language, for these reasons:

  1. I love it
  2. I’m learning it
  3. To offer my perspectives
  4. Recording my thoughts for a year’s time

As I’ve just started this blog, there are no posts from my first year – of doing the wlpan course, as it’s known. The learning system is based on an Israeli method for intensive teaching of Hebrew, which is also the source of the word wlpan. Other than the fact that Hebrew is also an old language, there aren’t many other parallels.

Until last year, my language learning experience was confined mainly to school and was in some ways typical for somebody born in the UK. Many people have lingering memories of frustration with languages at school and a quick straw poll of my friends echoes this. While it’s generally acknowledged that other languages can at least be useful, we can be inclined to think learning remains an academic pursuit for the dedicated. It’s formal and it involves drudgery.

Obviously there are exceptions where people have learned languages to fluency, in the school system. But they’re gifted or at least different to the rest of us – right?

Years before wlpan, I did get some experience of Welsh. I was subjected to Welsh language classes during the first three years of high school, for maybe two hours per week. Being a kid with very little life experience, I was a very reluctant learner. It didn’t interest me and I didn’t pay much attention as I never thought I’d use it.

Actually, I hated the feeling of being coerced into learning it.

The Welsh GCSE exam wasn’t compulsory until the following school year, to my relief. I would just sit it out, daydream and then move on.

Another memory was an invitation to a school trip to a residential centre in Llangranog, west Wales – for karting and exciting outdoor pursuits, plus some Welsh learning. Although some of my classmates went, I can clearly remember not taking up the invitation and staying at home for the weekend. It smelled of indoctrination and the fun stuff was quite clearly there to draw kids to the language classes. You know, to sweeten the pill.

I’d been living in Cardiff suburbs since the age of nine-and-a-half. I’d seen Welsh on road signs but otherwise assumed it to be dead, outdated, parochial, sentimental. Even if I were to visit north Wales or maybe Llangranog, there would be no monolingual Welsh speakers – they can all speak English can’t they? (These are comments which would irk me if I heard them now!)

In hindsight these were good opportunities. It was a teenage reaction in some ways. At the age of 13 nobody had really showed me any benefits to learning Welsh. I wanted to learn sciences and seemingly forward-looking subjects. Towards the end of year three of high school, I was obliged to take one modern European language at GCSE level. So I dropped Welsh for good (it seemed) and continued with French. Now unfortunately, a decade later, my knowledge of French has been remotely filed away in the cobwebs of my mind, buried by pop trivia and funny facts.

Things have definitely changed. I’m sitting in my living room in Cardiff, where there are visible signs of someone with a rampaging curiosity for all things Welsh. On my table:

  1. Y Cymro, various issues (newspaper)
  2. Golwg, Barn and Cambria (magazines)
  3. Siarc Marw and Y Selar (music/culture fanzines)
  4. Welsh Roots and Branches (extremely useful guide to words, for learners)
  5. Y Dinasydd and Tafod Elai (paperau bro, meaning ultra-regional papers listing community events, newborn babies, church and school news etc.)
  6. Welsh to English dictionary
  7. Cymdeithas Yr Iaith magazine (and other bits picked up from the National Eisteddfod, a giant cultural jamboree perfectly timed to arrive, almost at my doorstep, in August)
  8. A History of Wales by John Davies (very detailed book)
  9. Neighbours From Hell by Mike Parker (awful title, good book especially chapter on Welsh language misconceptions)
  10. Tu Chwith literary mag is not here but would be if I could track it down
  11. Print outs of essays, speeches and documents found online

An example of the latter is the rather ace transcript of English and Welsh by JRR Tolkien. He talks about his particular fondness for Welsh in some detail. You’re dealing with a guy who devours languages before breakfast, as well as inventing his own.

Back to the table of paperwork (which my friend Anwen jokingly calls the Bwrdd Yr Iaith), some of the periodicals like the papurau bro are not always immediately relevant to me, but I’m going for total immersion here! It’s helping with the language learning and plugging gaps in my political and historical awareness.

So what happened in the intervening years? If I could summarise, I would say that I was drawn to Welsh rather than being pushed into it.

Not long after I thought I’d parted ways with Welsh, it came back on the radar. It would have been when Super Furry Animals emerged on Creation records. They had a few Welsh language tracks on b-sides and then their Out Spaced compilation came out when I was doing my A-levels. I would have discovered that through BBC Radio 1 on the John Peel show. Later of course I heard about the Mwng album (possibly through the Session in Wales as it was then) and I knew that was a big achievement. I also remember hearing Patio Song by Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci on Mark and Lard’s breakfast radio show when it came out, a bilingual song.

I can clearly remember a couple of situations where I overheard people speaking Welsh when I reached Cardiff University. It seemed quite exotic to actually hear it being used by real people, despite my school experience. It might sound ridiculous but it made me feel slightly uncomfortable and some internal dialogue was necessary to calm myself down. University is a great time for having your preconceptions remoulded.

In my first year of university I also got myself a Clwb Ifor Bach membership card which allowed me admission to their diverse and excellent venue on the condition I was either a Welsh speaker or had made a commitment to learn the language. Neither was the case. Incidentally, it’s very common for members’ clubs to have specific membership criteria. Clwb Ifor Bach were relaxing this policy anyway and it was revoked not long after.

Over the years I then met people who happened to speak Welsh. Knowledge of the language never seemed a prerequisite to polite conversation (aIthough I can’t say with certainty what everyone really thought of me). Of those who became my friends, I never felt any kind of pressure from them to learn Welsh.

But gradually I felt some kind of higher plane of mutual understanding was possible. It felt a little impertinent, maybe, to converse with them in English. These were people who’d write their shopping lists, get their schooling, sing, pray and do whatever else people do – in Welsh.

It’s like going to Japan and opting merely to shake hands with people. When in Japan, it’s probably better to bow – if you can.

For me, working with Welsh musicians was another little pull in the direction of the language. I was promoting sublime tunes of Welsh origin, sometimes with lyrics in Welsh. A couple of these musicians offered some gentle encouragement when I mooted the idea. I also noticed my younger brother making good progress with the language.

In September 2007 I started attending daily classes – which involved getting there for 8AM. And paying perfectly good money.

This isn’t a dig at compulsory education. I should also say that teachers do a great job. As if to labour the point, some of my friends are teachers. Education was good to me and I did pretty well in the subjects I cared about. But there are certain subjects in which it’s very difficult to instil enthuasiasm in a pupil. Languages in general are one. (For some, mathematics is another.)

How should languages be taught in school? Without any formal training in education as a discipline, I can’t answer. I’m only an expert in the literal sense of “one who has experience”. Maybe I just wasn’t ready. Or maybe it was the timing.

I might have to revisit this one. But now if you’ll excuse me, I have some homework to do.

Posted on

Trainspotting and the Cognitive Surplus

Here’s a video showing giant dominoes assembled from smaller dominoes. It’s pretty satisfying to watch them topple. This must have taken TIME.

There are probably thousands of videos like this. If you prefer, you can have Japanese people making mechanical versions of Super Mario. Or maybe BristleBots.

All around the web people are doing fun stuff, posting it up and inspiring others. But if you are anything like them, you may have occasionally been told that you have “too much time on your hands”. This comment is reserved for those who cultivate a special interest in something. Maybe something a little unusual or esoteric.

So you painstakingly assemble giant dominoes from smaller dominoes, do you?

Or maybe you re-enact historical battles?

Or collect stuff?

Or you know your way down a list of real ales or northern soul tunes? (Those two usually go together.)

In the United Kingdom (N55:56:58 W3:9:37) we used to be very suspicious of anoraks. By that I mean, not the coats themselves but the people – usually blokes – who wear them. If you don’t follow UK slang, anorak is almost synonymous with the word geek or nerd. They have a fixation or obsessive interest in something. (The way it usually differs from the archetypal geek is that the pursuit of an anorak doesn’t necessarily have a creative aspect.)

Back in school days, I remember showing a teacher a sprite animation engine I had programmed in C. I mentioned how it was the basis of a new computer game I was writing in my free time. I expected maybe a discussion of how I could improve or develop the idea. To my surprise, this IT teacher responded by calling me a “sad git”.

If you’re out there, Ms Hatcher, feel free to drop me a line as I’d love to show you all the fun and cool stuff I’ve been doing since then, in spite of your discouragement. Ha! No hard feelings.

What’s the implication of the original comment – berating enthusiasts for having “too much time on their hands”? I believe it’s the fact they’re nonconformists. They don’t subscribe to the work ethic that dictates you must be immediately useful all of the time. The subtext? If you’re not focusing purely on the tasks set for you, you’re not being “productive” and must be wasting your energy. Well, a counter-revolution to this poisonous idea is forming. Read Quitting The Paint Factory or almost anything from The Idler.

I can’t always explain geek or anorak behaviour. Like the appeal of jotting down endless lists of train numbers on a Saturday afternoon. But I do know that those people get a lot of joy out of it. They might retort by asking about the appeal of sitting passively in an armchair at home alone – watching, say, the TV show Friends.

These days of course, there’s a rising geek quotient in the media too. (Anyone care to plot this on a graph?) It’s what Stephen Hawking, Quentin Tarantino, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have in common. I’m aware the latter and Microsoft (MSFT) get criticism from uber-geeks for their company’s products and dominance – but that just adds to the geek credentials for both parties. Those uber-geeks have more in common with Bill Gates than they’d care to admit. Such bitching and quarrelling is expected in any sidelined or alternative group of people. Besides, the real disdain is reserved for Steve Ballmer, on the basis that he’s a pure ruthless businessman. Importantly for them, he’s not known for writing even a single line of computer code. What a fraud eh!

The author and speaker Clay Shirky talks about society having time on its hands but he prefers to call it a cognitive surplus.

(With a surname like that, he should write for The Idler.)

Here’s an insightful speech Shirky did at some geek expo earlier this year. He defines the cognitive surplus and talks about the benefits of consuming, producing and sharing – as well as the phenomena of “lolcats” and “grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves”. There’s a transcript but check out the video:

The cognitive surplus has made me see our Sleeveface exploits in a new way. Not only did technology and social networking help it to spread, but people have the urge to take part because of new habits of recreation and participation. Look out for the book!

Passivity is, literally, lame. So, make sure you write your own definition of cool. Develop your interests and keep on having fun.

Posted on

The Freaky Future of TinEye

In a dizzying round-up, Reportr alerts us to 10 tech trends, the 11th presumably being to drop letter ‘e’s now that single-word domains are in short supply (cf. Flickr, Dopplr, Tumblr…)

The thing that caught my attention was the mention of visual search. I’ve been playing with a new search engine, TinEye, for a couple of months. It claims to be the first on the web – it’s probably the best example so far.

You submit an image to TinEye and it returns similar images from all around the web, based on pattern matching.

Their page of cool TinEye searches is a good introduction.

This is a nothing shy of a REVELATION. It’s funny how tech journalists remain all cool when they see something like that. Well I’m going to point out it’s AMAZING. Inevitable maybe. Given there is so much information on the web, there do remain undiscovered and undeveloped ways in which we can retrieve it. Visual search is a known problem – it just required somebody to sniff out the winning search index algorithm, for accuracy and speed.

In the life of the web, we have become accustomed to fairly good text-based search. The search box has become a second brain for many. We live in a post-search world. (At least, those of us who live in countries with easy access to the web do.)

How does Google find the stuff we want? At the moment a particular page or file has a URL. It may have other metadata such as a filename and keyword tags or alt tags. And unless you’re talking about a video or image, it could be a document with some kind of text body. It also has the pages from around the web which link to it. Those are the only clues, unless I’m forgetting any.

It’s pretty easy for computers to do pattern matching on text. Good search algorithms that work on text databases have been known for decades. But it’s the indexing of the whole web that’s always the big challenge. When you do a Google search, you’re not really searching the web itself, you’re searching Google’s indexes.

What is so amazing about TinEye is they are introducing another clue into the search – the content of the image – and found a quick enough way to index it.

Before I get too excited about TinEye, right now you can hope for hit-and-miss results at best, particularly as the pool of indexed images is relatively low. Since some early announcements of the service this has increased and they recently widened this pool to 901 million images, some of which might be yours.

It remains at the beta test stage, but it’s already quite useful. Some photographers and other visual artists have already been able to track down where their images have been used.

Visual search is still in its infancy and we can expect other players to possibly rival TinEye. There’s a shopping service called like.com mentioned in the Reportr trends piece, but I can’t seem to get past the nauseous feeling of entering a glitzy shopping mall the minute I arrive. It does pose another question for me.

What about the commercial outcomes of visual search? How will companies try to seek traffic from visual search? Will there be attempts at search engine optimisation? Will we see images being priced and ads being sold like Google AdWords? (GOOG)

TinEye doesn’t do human face recognition yet. Could it be just a matter of time, processing power and a dash of ingenuity? Let’s imagine a world where it is possible and it becomes a commonplace thing for use and abuse. Permit me to do some wild speculation.

What about finding doppelgangers and lost relatives? Missing people? It’s possible that a missing person could be an incidental feature of a photograph that somebody posts online.

Could it be used for casting films or theatre, when a new Kubrick absolutely has to find an actor with distinctive facial features?

What about looking for a partner? In a world already filled with all manner of weirdness, would someone try to seek a replacement partner who looks like their ex?

How could police use and potentially misuse this technology? Could they find missing suspects? Match fingerprints?

The future of TinEye and visual search could be like having eyes everywhere… It’s very promising and possibly a bit unsettling.