Category: language

LEGO, AUDIO, VIDEO: I Read, I Hear, I See

As April 30 yielded to May 1, I recalled that Old-Time Radio will have passed the wand over to New-Time Television exactly 55 years ago this coming September 30; in fact, the final two shows turned their microphones off on the same day.

JD_Button

In the unlikely event that you have already guessed which two programs made it curtains for that classic era, I roll the timpani — or cue the crickets.

Und so:

  1. Suspense
  2. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar

Three suggestions for those new to the realm — a land wide, deep and satisfying.

  1. Vic and Sade
  2. Pat Novak for Hire
  3. Inner Sanctum
Vic-And-Sade-mp3
Paul Rhymer was the genius behind Vic and Sade

I have a soft spot in my heart for programs that settle into my psyche by way of sound waves — words existing on the printed page give your mind the means to fashion words to worlds. To use my sagacious father’s favorite phrase

“Well, let’s put it this way” — I prefer lego (I read) and audio (I hear) to video (I see). Reader or listener rather than viewer, what gives? Reading and listening demand more of the imagination. Theater of the Mind. Not my coined phrase, but dramatically accurate.

 

vacuum.tube.radio.deviant.art

Personally, viewing alone is like drinking alone — the experience doesn’t end well. It might work splendidly for thee, but not for me. In other words, judging my readers is never my aim (file under marginalia).

On with the show.

Watching TV with others involves participation. Joel Hodgson is the genius behind MST 3000 — an absolutely brilliant concept that sets Hodgson’s haplessly condemned yet innocent victim off planet, and forced to watch amazingly bad movies, a torture you may have experienced personally. Joel and his Bots (his own creation by the way) breaks that fourth wall too, perhaps a fifth wall.

Full disclosure: Lisa would rather shout VIDEO, ERGO SUM to my AUDIO, ERGO SUM. Well, let’s put it this way: we complement each other. So there!

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I view, therefor I am

During my years in West Germany (1971 to 1973), watching television was only good for language learning. Here is a recommendation for the next time you surf 255 channels — set subtitles to another language. Better still: watch a foreign film and set the subtitles to a language you want to learn. Experiencing a world without English language is a rare delight. I recommend it most heartily.  🙂

Advertisers want to make you think that the volition is entirely yours. IMO (only?), we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. Though you might be surprised to read that veganism is an effective remedy for that  imposition of schizophrenia upon readers, listeners and viewers. Blood-toothed marketers wish to either introduce or reinforce product loyalty. FTS say I. Out damned blood! FWIW, I pay an annual fee to keep this site advertising-free.

Addendum: I didn’t know that FTS was a sports term, so I pass that torch to my sports broadcasting alter ego. It was intended as a term of frustration directed at frustrating the darker side of advertising. Channel to ESPN-42 for more 🙂

Thanks for reading.

 

 

Sneaky Vegan Advertising

This is the story of a hypothetical broadcaster working an apocryphal news desk at an imaginary sports channel. Here’s the proverbial rub — he is a complete fraud, he has no sports credentials and he hasn’t followed team sports at any level since 1965. By sheer coincidence,  this fictional broadcaster goes by the name Bill Ziegler (no relation, or something).

Welcome to a narrow world of sports broadcast. All characters, statistics and coupon offers are spurious.

No sentient beings were consumed during the production of this broadcast. Go Vegan! Yay Veganism!

veganism.history

Transcript of today’s broadcast:

“Good evening sport, and welcome to our first post-Earth-Day program. We have four sports stories to cover today, so let’s get right to the latest news.

  1. Steve Dreadnought graduated from the NCAA (National Cademy of Academic Academies) in 2011, but it was all for naught until Nought got caught by the Astros on Shale Tuesday to become a doglegged free agent. Steve is a tight-end shaver with a bevy of linesman singing for the county of Paris in New Orleans. Nought controls the inside inch of the rail much better than Ben Bright’s Tights® Dawn’s Men and Seeping Cobwebs® is just about the only team remotely comparable to Ben Bright’s Tights. The team factors in with a ratio of twenty plays deep on the curve and thirty angstroms on the narrow —  each tight has the coarse battle scars earned on the course court to prove it.  Course they do. Write me for details.
  2. The Wave Continentals®are back in the wardrobe factory this season, filling in the gaps left by the Easter-Fry Warriors of Bangor®; as I recall, not a single Swigger Sweet could ravel the ball through the parallels as smoothly as Manfred Fried-Fries of Kenosha® — it’s the only place you can expect spectacular scurries thrown through the fourth wall. Seriously. My words say that they are second only to the Lads of Lancaster® I’ve been there — it ain’t never meant grease to donuts to me, but I’ve shelved Bangor Walnuts® for a living. A hard living, yet may the welts of dignity shine through, and with some decent resilience. I’m stowing my pine on the kitchen counter as my ante — they will make it to central division or drop into the Ides before April. Mark my broadcloth and send it to grandma if you don’t thank me later.
who-likes-vegans
Veganism is not just a trend

3. Moving on to the Autumn training hopes of the Gardenia Wafers® now. You just can’t find daylight between the Solid-Pack Drivers of Scant Regard® and the man who drove the wedgies home before breakfast. Sugar-toasted wedge bars are a new sponsor at ESPN-42®, they’re linked and liked everywhere, manufactured by Pistachio Penached Planchette, Inc.® Remember the name, it’s a double-dork franchise opportunity that you’ll only find on ESPN-42. We remain the only media outlet still located at Bent Beach, future home of the Pretense Machines of Machismo® and the Celery Bakers of West-North Eureka®. Try them soon or shoot the balloon.

a.truth.whose.time

Now, back to your program.

4. We’re introducing a new segment on the Big-Arse 42®— the outside line on the Neon Street Outlaws® those up-and-coming loot traders of the salvage yards begin a new season Thursday evening. Beaster the Baker and I are tracking them assiduously, with scented frame you play a wary game, it’s a tooth-swarm with a schoolmarm’s charm  — that’s what we claim and that’s what we tame. The guys and gals in the wardrobe garner their toes when they tracking a branded. Count down from 7 to 3 and you’ll know what I mean. We broadcast solid encounters with genuine street-incredulity — bouncing leatherettes sparring their claim to fame, as fisted and fancy as October’s Clancy®. Yes, it’s a retro-shot for the Donuts of Shame® a gifted pair of bozo twins who can wave a century-old limey bar faster than you can spin the coffee table to a screen-beveled level. Hey, we’ve all been there and this season promises more than pumpkin-scented jet-streams. You haven’t witnessed a charge more challenging than watching a brand expand into your dug-out chug-out — click SportWafers dot com for 50% off the second season-ticket. Take it to the general and sneer at the devil — it’s that kind of mango.”

northern-parula

Thanks for watching. Tune in tomorrow at 8 for more words from our sponsor 🙂

Disclaimer:

  • The information in this book is meant to supplement, not replace, proper (name your sport) training. Like any sport involving speed, equipment, balance and environmental factors, (this sport) poses some inherent risk. The authors and publisher advise readers to take full responsibility for their safety and know their limits. Before practicing the skills described in this book, be sure that your equipment is well maintained, and do not take risks beyond your level of experience, aptitude, training, and comfort level.

Thanks for reading.

Discovering Patterns in Language

Regular expressions. are powerful metamathematical tools, advanced techniques for matching patterns in a text or multiple texts — something fun and something useful. They are concise chunks of cryptic characters that can search a single text or multiple texts for precise patterns. Select an input file, do one thing or very many things to the file, then drop the resulting text into an output file.

regex-to-fa

Stephen Cole Kleene is the mathematician and philosopher who introduced the concept of the regular expression. He worked with Alan Turing and other pioneering types who were intensely active in the 1930’s. Their understanding of a mathematical maneuver called recursion; that led to breakthrough tools in logic — decisions made at superhuman speed and using the processing speed and memory to process words and numbers thrown together and called data. However, beware of the sorcerer’s apprentice phenomenon. Just bewaring.

recursion

An example: look for successive occurrences of WTF (upper or lower case) and substitute “what the fart”.

Through recursion you can stop, go backward a certain of characters, query the findings. Do something with it. Once you become familiar with the meta characters and the syntax, you can do a lot of useful things or destroy many useful things. So save the original file in a safe place and know where your output file ends up.

 

When I was a freelance translator I maintained a translation memory database that kept track of all my translations so that I might be reminded of earlier translations. The software I used was called SDL Trados; however, that was over ten years ago.

Here is one example of how I used regular expression code to insert a carriage return and linefeed whenever a blank space appeared in the original German. Essentially this created records that were one word long — the number of records was the number of words in the text. Then I queried my database for finds. A lot faster than the technique I used when learning German — looking up the words in a large-ass dictionary that I still have on the bottom shelf over there.

mastering.regular.expressions

The same Unix tools developed in the 1960’s remain in the electrons flowing from my screen to yours. They remind me of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws:

  1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

— Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws

Hoping this is somewhat illuminating, or mildly amusing 🙂

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Now for something incompletely different, something inspired by Hariod Brawn’s comment below. It’s an article on The Sound (And Taste) Of Music by Layla Eplett — she brings a platter to the conversation and complements Mariano Sigman’s TED Talk:

 

SoundTasteofMusic
Layla Eplett

Thanks for reading this postscript 🙂

Working on Computers in 1975

Let’s flip the toggle switch on my steampunked time machine and head back to 1975 — the year Gordon Moore revised his hypothesis on the potential exponential growth of computing power, now known as Moore’s Law: computing power doubles every two years. He surprised himself at its curious accuracy.

moore.graph
Semi.Wiki (a semiconductor’s discussion site

Let’s go back to 1975, a year when Singer built business computers — I worked on a Singer System 10. That sewing-machine outfit made a foray into small business systems, a foray that ended abruptly in 1976.

 

singer.computer
A fine two-tone-dial phone with rotary dial.

Ten years later I was assigned the task of converting a completely manual order processing system at a Cincinnati Milacron division in Blanchester, Ohio. They obtained a small business computer, a wardrobe-sized unit called a CIP 2200B, from the Milacron Products Division. So it was a hand-me-down — with 64K core memory, 10 megabyte fixed disc, 10 megabyte removable disc and a 96 column card reader/punch.

I reported to the corporate boss of information: Pat Goggins. She was a wonderful iconoclast who ruffled many corporate functionaries. I have a soft spot in my soul for independent minds because they threaten the order of things. That is as it should be. Vegans pose a threat to the tyranny of the majority, and that is a very good thing.

vegan.humor

The Electronic Circuit Materials Division manufactured board bases for Ford automobiles, crappy scrap for Radio Shack and all manner of integrated circuit users. It was a fascinating place to work in the 1980’s At that time I was a single parent to my two children — my wife Jeanne died in 1983, and I wouldn’t meet Lisa until 1993. so I chucked my suit-and-tie collection into the closet and returned to German language and literatures, a world I had left in 1973. We moved closer to town in 1987. It was a hot and densely humid day. The cicadas sang, the car blew a radiator hose. We were at the shoulder of an interstate. Who populated that vehicle? Myself, my two kids, our cat and our bird.

Coding a program is a lot like learning a foreign language. Database records are words and relationships. Programs have syntax, grammar, logical thought — uttered or iterated.

Programming-816

One kind reader has expressed an interest in my use of pattern-matching techniques, a method called “regular expressions” — an invention of the 1960’s: it still supports many shells glommed around it — devices with modern application. The shoulders of those giants still support us. There is no such thing as a sky hook.

Meanwhile — in the “greater” world — folly tramples on dreams deferred. Do we stand at the rim of an abyss — perhaps of our own making? Dinosaurs peered skyward at the brink of yet another extinction. What other species unknown evolved over billions of years, to return all to primordial casseroles with a punch on the reset button. Five extinction events and counting. This planet is patient and resilient.  I like the way my friend Hariod expresses a gentle treasure — confronting imponderables with contentedness. Witness contentedness. Consider this photograph:

 

happy-indian-girls-in-kolkata-by-jorge-royan-argentina

Happy Easter 2017 🙂

Thanks for reading.