Fare Enforcement

I took the newish Seattle light rail from downtown to the airport Friday.  It was my first time on this new way to get to the airport.  M complained about it because it used to take 30 minutes to get to the airport from UW on the express bus and now it takes 90 minutes because that bus has been replaced by the light rail which meanders out there.  From downtown it took 40 minutes. 

I asked the man I sat next to what he thought about it.  His complaint was that everyone rides for free because they never have people checking tickets.  It's like the Berlin subway in that you buy a ticket but you don't have to go through any gate.  They enforce it by having people randomly board a train and check tickets.  He thought they were going to go out of business because so many people didn't pay. 

As he was saying this we stopped at a station and these guys got on.

My seat mate was pleased.  It seemed that most people had tickets, but they did take one person off the train.

Are Color Distinctions Natural or Culturally Created? More on Language and How We See the World

I recently wrote briefly (it was during my 1200 word limit period) about Guy Deutscher's book Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different in Other Languages In it, he's taking on the dominant linguistic paradigm (and Noam Chomsky) which argues that humans are genetically wired for language, all languages come from the same basic blueprint, and thus language does not affect how people think. Deutscher thinks it does. 

The first part of the book  was really interesting - it's about colors and whether they are 'natural' or 'culturally dependent.'  So I'm going to get into this a bit more deeply than I do with most books.  But remember, I'm just hitting the highlights, there are a lot more details that fill in the gaps in the book.

[I'd note this is also a great topic to put into your mental notes about how people know what they know - a basic theme of this blog.]

The first major foray into this battle for Deutscher is a discussion of color, or more accurately, a history of what scholars have observed about how humans perceive color. It's fascinating.  Deutscher tells us this is important in the debate between the nativists - language is genetic - and the culturalists - language impacts how we see the world - because people think of color as an obvious natural phenomenon. Natural phenomenon - like cats and dogs and birds (and color) should have matching words across languages while abstract concepts could be expected to differ more.   Thus every culture should have words for red, green, blue, yellow, etc.  If they didn't, then that would give ammunition to the culturalists.  (By the way, he does say that the concepts of cats and dogs and birds do have labels across languages that translate pretty easily.)

He starts in 1858 with future British Prime Minister William Gladstone who wrote a three volume treatise on Homer's Oddessy and Iliad. A chapter in the third volume looks at color in Homer's works. Gladstone's conclusion is: there isn't much and what there is, is peculiar.  The sea is wine-colored.  So are oxen.  Honey is green.  The sky is black.  Blue is never used, and despite Homer's rich descriptions about many aspects of nature, color is almost absent.  Gladstone hypothesized that humans 3000 years earlier weren't advanced enough to perceive as many colors modern folks.

Nine years later, a German philologist, Lazarus Geiger, intrigued by Gladstone's observations on Homer and color, examined other ancient texts and found the same general lack of color, and where it was the colors were strange.

I'd note that as I read this, I kept coming up with plausible explanations such as maybe Homer was color blind, only to have Deutscher explain away my point.  The idea of color blindness wasn't generally known in 1858 and since the lack of colors showed up in other texts, then everyone would have been color blind, which is pretty much what Gladstone was saying.

But the concept of color blindness was being discovered then and a German doctor, Hugo Magnus, went to Sweden to study a train wreck - despite the stop signal, the engineer went right through.  The engineer was dead, but Magnus got permission to test 266 engineers and station masters and found 13 to be colorblind. Deutscher writes:

The practical dangers of color blindness in an age of a rapidly expanding rail network thus became acutely apparent, catapulting color vision to a status of high public priority.  .  . The climate could not have been more favorable for a book which implied that latter-day color blindness was a vestige of a condition that had been universal in ancient times.  And this was exactly the theory proposed in Hugo Magnus's 1877 treatise on the evolution of the color sense. 

Then people began to realize that there were still people living in 'pre-modern' cultures and they should see what words they have for color.  This became a big deal and surveys were sent out to test as many 'primitive' languages as possible.  The results found similarly restricted language vocabularies.

No one could any longer just brush off their [Gladstone and Geiger's] findings as the overreaction of overly literal philologists, and no one could dismiss the peculiarities in the color descriptions of ancient texts as merely instances of poetic license.  For the deficiencies that Gladstone and Geiger had uncovered were replicated exactly in living languages from all over the world.

In 1898, W.H.R. Rivers went on an anthropological expedition to the islands in the Torres Straits between Australia and New Guinea to study a group of people who'd only been exposed to outside Western culture in the previous 30 years.  He found their color words to be very similar to what was found in Homer and other ancient writings - black and white, reddish, green which included blues, and just different ways of using color labels - including black sky.  But when he gave his subjects color tabs, they were able to pair up matching colors.  So, the conclusion was that while they could see and distinguish all the colors, how they described colors in their language was very different from how modern European languages described colors.  It was the language that was different, not their physical ability to see the colors. 

This was a 'big win' for the culturalists.  It 'proved' that language and culture affected how people see the world.

Until 1969 when Berlin and Kay  published a color guide - Basic Color Terms -  based on studies of 20 language groups.  Their study showed that all very similarly classified the same basic colors as did European languages - black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, purple, orange, and brown.  The ball was now back with the nativists.  Language doesn't affect how you see the world.

Except, 20 language groups aren't very many.  As linguists began to test other language groups, things proved to be less neat, and a number of languages proved to have different ways to categorize the color spectrum.  There was also discussion about the order in which different colors gain names in different cultures.  Black and white followed by red seems to be a basic pattern, but then the others aren't as predictable.   This has left enough ambiguity for both sides of the nativist - culturalist battles to feel justified.  (I'm skipping a lot in the 90 so pages he covers this in.)

Deutscher ends this section by saying both sides have points and summarizes the state of affairs  as Freedom Within Constraints.

In light of all the evidence, it seems to me that the balance of power between culture and nature can be characterized most aptly by a simple maxim:  culture enjoys freedom within constraints.  Culture has a considerable degree of freedom in dissecting the [color] spectrum, but still within loose constraints laid down by nature.  While the precise anatomical basis of these constraints is still far from understood, it is clear that nature hardly lays down inviolable laws for how the color space must be divided. (90-91)

He also tips his hat to William Gladstone before going on to other topics (he suggests we're going to hear about space and spatial relations, kinship, and grammar) in the culturist-nativist wars. Here's a passage that showcases the kind of stylistic playfulness that makes this book so much fun to read:

A lot of water has flowed down the Scamander since a great Homericist who occasionally dabbled in prime ministry, set off on an odyssey across the wine-dark sea in pursuit of mankind's sense of color.  The expedition that he launched in 1858 has since circled the globe several times over, been swept hither and thither by powerful ideological currents, and got sucked into the most tempestuous scientific controversies of the day.  But how much real progress has actually been made?

After another paragraph that chronicles modern scholars' lack of mention, even knowledge of, Gladstone's contribution he goes on:

And yet Gladstone's account of Homer's "crude conceptions of colour derived from the elements" was so sharp and farsighted that much of what he wrote a century and a half ago can hardly be bettered today, not just as an analysis of Homeric Greek but also as a description of the situation in many contemporary societies:  "Colours were for Homer  not facts but images:  his words describing them are figurative words, borrowed from natural objects.  There was no fixed terminology of colour;  and it lay with the genius of each true poet to choose a vocabulary for himself." 

I expect this isn't the last post on this book.

Meanwhile - The experience of you watching your memories becomes a memory itself.

I was introduced to an amazing book titled Meanwhile by Jayson Shiga.

 Quotes are from ComicBookResources.











"Meanwhile" begins with our young hero Jimmy choosing whether to buy a chocolate or vanilla ice cream cone; choosing vanilla sends Jimmy home after an enjoyable but uneventful afternoon, while picking chocolate sends him on myriad science-fiction adventures.














   The lines lead you to other parts of the book - like a very elaborate Choose Your Own Adventures book.  But it's complicated enough to require this instruction page that warns you:

Most [adventures] will end in doom and disaster.  Only one path will lead you to happiness and success

"I wanted to start the book off with the type of choice that we make every day," Shiga told CBR. "Once the reader is familiar with how choices in the book are made, I try and graduate to weirder choices like whether to kill every human on the planet or to travel back in time and punch yourself in the face."

Definitely worth checking out at the library or book store.  Meanwhile, here's a link to  Shigabooks

Alaska Native Actor Savanah Wiltfong's Name Missing in Movie Publicity

Dear Lemon Lima (Lima like the bean, not the capital of Peru) first came to the Anchorage International Film Festival in 2007 as a lushly beautiful short film focused on teenagers who were real and interesting.  The color was vivid. The exchanges between the kids was  often the way kids talk to each other when they have serious things to say and there are no adults listening. And mostly the movie was anti-slick.  Hercules' parents seemed a bit arch, but I took it that we were seeing the world through the kids' eyes, so maybe that's how they looked to him.  It was maybe ten minutes and I guessed it was the first glimpse at what promised to be an interesting feature. 

[I've found - at video.nymag.com - what appears to be the short we saw in 2007 and some of the main characters, including Vanessa, are played by different actors. I was close, it's 11 minutes. The color on here isn't as rich]





And it came back to the Festival in 2009 as a feature length film.  And it got an audience award in the feature class that year. 

Suzi Yoonessi, the director, emailed me the other day to say the movie would be released VOD (she thought I was hipper than I am and it took me a while to figure out that means video on demand) on Comcast, Time Warner, Cablevision, and Verizon Fios in Alaska on March 4th. It will be released in LA that date too in theaters. Then March 11 in New York. If it does ok in those places, the rest of the world might be able to see it in theaters too.

But as I went to look for more information I found info on the movie, but the Alaska star's name wasn't included.  Savanah Wiltforng - an Alaska Native teen - plays the lead role of and assimilated Yup'ik who gets the Native scholarship to a boarding school in Fairbanks and because she has the scholarship people expect her to be expert in all things Native which she then has to become.

Here's an example from IMDB - where's Savanah's name?  It's not there.

Screen Capture from IMDB - so this is an image, the links won't work except IMDB

Here's the official poster:

Can you find Savanah Wiltfong's name on the poster?  Even though she's the star, you can't find her name among the four names on top.   It is on the poster.  It even says "Starring Savanah Wiltfong."  But you'll have to double click it to be able to read the purple on black small print. (hint, right side)

When I asked by email what happened to the star in the publicity, Suzi Yoonessi, the writer and director (can you find her on the poster?) wrote back, in part:

Savanah is included in the materials that our PR people send out, but it seems the popular teen sites are really focused on Meaghan Jette Martin or Vanessa Marano, since they have larger fan bases. This isn't a bad thing, since kids will make it out to see an indie film because of Meaghan's popularity in more mainstream material.

Maybe my readers are cooler than I am (or teenier) and recognize those other two names.  I get it though.  The point is to hook people to what they know.  I get it.  Let's see if it works. 



The director spoke after the short version in 2007 and surprised me by saying the story takes place at a boarding school in Fairbanks, but because it was so expensive to do it in Fairbanks, she was doing most of it in Washington State.  I posted about that and asked Fairbanks folks to contact her if they could help with housing and other services, but it didn't happen.

It came back to the Anchorage International Film Festival in 2009 as a feature length film.  I liked everything about it, EXCEPT that it purported to be in Fairbanks.  If Fairbanks residents want to see what there town will look like after 50 more years of global climate change, then check out the movie.  You'll be hanging around in your shorts and t-shirts on the grass mid-winter.  But Anchorage audiences voted it, as I said, an Audience Choice Award for what that's worth.

Suzi made this film as an independent.  That means she made every penny stretch as far as it could go - which didn't reach all the way to Fairbanks except for a few location shots as I understand it.  The State Film Board hadn't reopened yet.  Now that there are tax advantages for film makers on location in Alaska, let's hope this is the last 'green December in Fairbanks' movie until the weather has really changed that much. 

On the good side were great acting, interesting characters, and a good story about an assimilated Alaska Native girl discovering her Native roots.   It does use the underdogs in competition theme, but has a sweet - I'm tempted to say quirkiness, but it's only quirky for a movie.  These are real kids who just aren't the cheerleader types that most common in Hollywood type movies.   

And it starred a young woman from Eagle River - Savannah Wiltfong. 

So, Alaskans, check it out.  My first reaction to the Dear Lemon Lima website was it was waay to girlie for me, but it is original and it captures an aspect of the film. 

Here's the trailer.



(Think this is too promotional? Trust me. Like always, no one has paid me to write this. I just think pushing a film by an indendent director - and Indian-American woman if I'm correct - dealing with Alaska Native assimilation and then discovery of her Native culture, starring an Alaskan, with a (unfortunately fake) Fairbanks setting is the right thing to do. I'm just letting people know it's there.)

Anchorage Airport Native Art Gallery

[This is a bit embarrassing. I thought I'd posted this yesterday, but it went up as a tab - you can see those just above here - home, anchorage film festival, chancellor search. So I'm posting it for real now.]

As often as I've gone through the Anchorage airport, I've never gone upstairs in Concourse C to the observation deck and Alaska Native Art Gallery.

Yesterday I took some time to check it out on the way to Seattle.  (When your daughter writes that she has a week off and do you want to visit, there's only one answer.)

The gallery is upstairs ( there's an elevator too) after you come out of security as you get into Concourse C, the long one where the Alaska Airline gates are.

The architect designed this so the window at the end of the concourse perfectly frames Denali (Mt. McKinley) on a clear day.  Yesterday it was, but it was hard with my little Powershot to get the mountain clear.   My memory (faulty as it is) says there didn't used to be a roof blocking most of the mountain.  But it is that white speck above the roof in the inset I put on the right.

There are some very good pieces in the gallery.  The white mask is by Fred Anderson of Naknek and the other is by Nathan Jackson of Ketchikan.

But I don't think think the art work they have is supposed to be getting direct sunlight as it was yesterday.  It probably doesn't happen often, but I imagine a museum curator would cringe.

The blur isn't that I was shaking, but it's the shadow of the lettering from the sun. 

I think this is "Going to the Mud House for a Party" by Rosalie Paniyak of Chevak.  Seal skin face, appliquéd nose, seed bead teeth, badger hair, bearded seal gut parka. . .

Admission to this gallery is a plane ticket to or from Anchorage since it is inside security.  It's also at the observation deck so there is a view of all the Alaska Airlines planes.

[UPDATE August 2012:  More pictures from this gallery here.]

I had an aisle seat so I couldn't get any pictures of the setting sunglow on the mountains.  It's raining in Seattle, but there is green grass.

I Have a Friend - Is VK.com Really the Russian Facebook?

I got this email message here at What Do I Know?

whatdoino,

Вадим Блинов has added you as a friend on the website VK.com

You can log in and view your friends` pages using your email and
automatically created password: XXXxxx

VK.com is a website that helps dozens of millions of people find their
old friends, share photos and events and always stay in touch.

To log in, please follow this link:
http://vkontakte.ru/loginxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

You can change your password in Settings.

Attention: If you ignore this invitation, your registration will not be
activated.

Good luck!Best regards,
VK Administration

It turns out VK.com is a Russian version of Facebook.  Here are some comments on a Stream Recorder.com forum in 2009:

I wanted to delete the thread at first, but then realized that it might be useful. Many of my friends really use vkontakte mainly to listen to music. It is absolutely free and they don't have any ads. And you can find almost anything there. Although vkontakte itself doesn't allow to download music, it is pretty easy to download/save HTTP mp3 music streams. You can use many free programs for that or even download such streams with your browser. You can also use Replay Media Catcher that renames and tags songs automatically.

10-13-2009, 08:14 AM

I registered in vkontakte and I like it! I would add that not only music but video could just as easily view and download!

Wikipedia has this article (which they say needs verification):

VKontakte (Russian: ВКонтакте, internationally branded VK) is a Russian social network service popular in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Because of its design and functionality, VKontakte is often claimed to be a clone of Facebook, accommodating not only a similar concept, but also a comparable business model.^{[citation needed]} However, its incorporation of other features makes it more like YouTube, Pandora, and MySpace rolled into one, with an interface highly reminiscent of Facebook.
As of December 2010^[update], the network has around 102 million users and is the leading site in Europe in terms of user visits, page views, and the amount of data transfers per day. VKontakte is ranked 35 in Alexa's global Top 500 sites and is the third most visited website in Russia.
Since 2007, major Russian companies have been sending job offers via VKontakte. Most of the site's users are university and high school students. However, as the site's popularity increases, more and more people are joining, many of whom are youths of various age groups.
In English, В Контакте or V Kontákte is literally translated as "In Contact", but basically means "In Touch". It can be alternatively translated as "Linked In", which is another mostly business-oriented social network.

There's even an iPhone app:

Chat VK.com

By NOOTEK Co., Ltd.

View More By This Developer Open iTunes to buy and download apps.

The app functionality includes easy access to friends profiles, statuses (online/offline), activities, a simple, fast and powerful messaging system with animated smileys, etc.

App support URL handling + internal browser, cool animated smileys, landscape and portrait orientations, full copy/paste, etc.

App work very easy!
App work very fast!

Now you can receive new messages when app work in background.

Image from iTunes Store

I took it as my blogger responsibility to my readers to check this out, but,

It's clearer and bigger if you double click

using an online translation site, I got this and gave up:

You entered an invalid ID code. Personal identification code must come to the phone as an SMS, if one of your friends sent you an invitation. Personal code: Attention! Send invitations to all the users can not facebook. If you know they do not, you can not register.

The code I got was in Western alphabet, so maybe that was the problem.  Another problem I just noticed was the date of the email which just came today:

Tue, December 15, 2009 4:07 am

Moonlight Walk after The Illusionist

 

J wanted to see the Illusionist.  I didn't know anything about it except she told me it was animated.  I noticed the name Jacques Tati in the opening credits, and later when the Illusionist stumbles into a movie theater, My Uncle is playing.  

I remember my dad taking me to see My Uncle and then Mr. Hulot's Vacation.  It must have been when they came out in the mid-50's.  Even though they were in French, they left enough of an impression on me that I still remember seeing the movies and the bumbling Mr. Hulot.   

The Illusionist is a very melancholy story. The illustrations are beautiful - the scenes when he first gets into rural Scotland reminded me of the mountains portrayed in Paxon Woelbers The Prospector. 

Here's an interview dubbed in German with the director Sylvain Chomet, who directed The Triplets of Belview, that has a number of shots from the movie.

Thanks to Lee Roy at Sketchbook where I found the YouTube video.

The movie tells a sad story that makes me want to know happened to Jacques Tati that is coming out in this movie.  And so, I had to start looking things up.  

Here's what I learned:

This is NOT The Illusionist that came out in 2006.

Wikipedia's Jacques Tati page has an explanation that works just right for me:

The Illusionist (2010) is an animated film based on an unproduced, semi-autobiographical script that Tati wrote in 1956. Directed by Sylvain Chomet, known for The Triplets of Belleville, the main character is an animated caricature of Tati himself. . .

Between 1940 and 1942 he presented his Sporting Impressions at the original Lido de Paris . There he met the dancer Herta Schiel, who fled Austria with her sister Molly at the time of the Anschluss. In the summer of 1942, Herta gave birth to their daughter, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel. Following the pressure of his sister Nathalie Tatischeff, he refused to recognize the child and abandoned the mother and his first child.

 For those of you who know history, you'll recognize that this was during WW II which began in late 1939.  Wikipedia gives a bit of explanation why this young man wasn't fighting:

In September 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War Tati was conscripted into the 16th Regiment of Dragoons. Placed into a new unit, he fought in the Battle on the Meuse in May 1940. Tati ended up in Dordogne, where he was demobilized.

The Wikipedia article also tells us:

Controversy has dogged The Illusionist. The Guardian reports,

In 2000, the screenplay was handed over to Chomet by Tati's daughter, Sophie, two years before her death. Now, however, the family of Tati's illegitimate and estranged eldest child, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, who lives in the north-east of England, are calling for the French director to give her credit as the true inspiration for the film. The script of L'illusionniste, they say, was Tati's response to the shame of having abandoned his first child [Schiel] and it remains the only public recognition of her existence. They accuse Chomet of attempting to airbrush out their painful family legacy again.

The movie now makes sense - why it is so overbearingly sad.  It's Tati talking to his long lost baby girl and telling her there is no magic.  (Tati died in 1982)

The movie got slow toward the end and we needed that brief walk out in the moonlight after that movie.   But the movie will stick.  And now that I have a sense of what was behind it, it's very powerful.

Onions and Contact Lenses

I realized that I didn't have my contact lenses in this morning when I was cutting the onion for our omelet this morning.  One of the side benefits of contacts for me, is that I don't cry when I'm cutting onions, and so this morning, without them in, I could feel the onion on my eyes.  (I have hard, gas-permeable lenses.  I don't know if this works with the soft and disposable lenses.)


This makes three posts under 1200 words (including 1000 for the picture.)  I kind of like this, but I know there will be some long ones again soon. 

Does the Language You Speak Affect How You Think?

I picked up Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different in Other Languages at the library last week.  Ever since I was a student in Germany and had to take all my classes in German and got to the point where I could let go of English and just talk in German without translating, I began to think, “Wow, a different language makes you see the world differently.” 

I was vaguely aware that not every linguist agreed, so I thought this book might be interesting.

Does language reflect the culture of a society in any profound sense beyond such trivia as the number of words it has for snow or for shearing camels? And even more contentiously, can different languages lead their speaker to different thoughts and perceptions?

So, what’s your answer?  [STOP!  Don't read on until you answer.  Just a yes or no will do.]









I, of course, want to say yes. But then it said.

For most serious scholars today, the answer to all these questions is a resounding no. The dominant view among contemporary linguists s that language is primarily an instinct, in other words, that the fundaments of language are coded in our genes and are the same across the human race. Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language. Deep down, so runs the theory, all languages share the same universal grammar, the same underlying concepts, the same degree of systemic complexity. . .

OK, so I should read this and find out where I’m wrong and why. I’m open to changing my stories about the world if I get new information. But then I read on.

In the pages to follow, however, I will try to convince you, probably against your initial intuition, and certainly against the fashionable academic view of today, that the answer to the questions above is - yes.

Hot damn. I have an ally. So, I’ll let you know if the rest of the book is as good as the beginning. He does have a sense of humor and playfulness that I’m enjoying just in the prologue.

See, I can do it. This post is under 400 words. One more short post to go. But maybe I can make this a habit.

[UPDATE:  I have a follow up post here which is much better than this one.]

Zero

I promised the next three posts would be under 1200 words.  If the picture is 1000,  I don't have too many left. 

The picture was earlier this morning.  It's ten now.  And sunny.  And yes, that's Fahrenheit.