For a variety of reasons, I’ve decided to move my blog (back) over to blogger. The new location is here. Please visit me at my new location!

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=302

As promised, some more details and pictures from my trip in Japan:

After arriving at Narita airport, I took the train to Utsunomiya (宇都宮) where my friend Dai lives. We hadn’t seen each other for five years or so. The next day (May 29th) we took a road trip to Nasu (那須).

Nasu is a pretty mountainous area. We took a small hike to look at the azalias that are in bloom in Japan now. To get there we had to cross this suspension bridge. It swayed a lot while walking across. Scary.

We also went to a place called sesshouseki (殺生石), literally “killing rock”, so called because poisonous gases leach from the ground and kill any animals that get too close. Needless to say, that includes people, so you can only get so close before you reach a sign warning you not to get any closer. There is a lot of sulfur coming out of the ground, so the area smells like it’s filled with rotten eggs.

Geothermal activity has its good points, too. There are a lot of hot springs in the area. We stopped by one and soaked our feet for a while.

Now I’m at my friend Misato’s family’s house in Togane, Chiba prefecture. Here’s a picture of the room I’m staying in:

That’s all for now.

I just got into Japan the night before last. After arriving in Narita, I went to visit my friend Dai in Utsunomiya. Yesterday Dai took me to Nasu. We’re about to get on the train to head back to Tokyo and meet our friend Akemi.

I’ll post some pictures later.

Some of you know that I will be working this summer as an RA for Chris Potts on the grant called SUBTLE: Situation Understanding Bot Through Language and Environment.  The following brief description of the project is given at this website:

For effective human-bot communication to be possible, we must move from robust sentence processing to robust utterance understanding. Our bots must be able to decode not only what sentence the speaker used, but also what the speaker’s intentions were when he spoke. This task takes us far beyond a precise specification of the set of literal meanings of individual sentences in isolation. It pushes us well past current text processing methods. It demands that we achieve a robust and tractable computational understanding of both implicit and explicit linguistic meaning.

A daunting task, but one that I look forward to helping out with. And you can help too, by spending 10 to 20 minutes playing an online game. You’ll need a friend, and both of you will need to be connected to the internet. Click this link to play the pragBot game. Your participation will give us data for some interesting work in applied linguistic pragmatics.

Update: If you’re curious about the project, you can take a look at these slides.

Ken Miller has written a nice piece for the Boston Globe debunking Ben Stein’s Expelled, and the whole ID movement with it.

A voice like Ken Miller’s is important – because he is a Christian who also accepts the fact of evolution. If any religious-minded readers feel uneasy about this compromise, please do have a look here.

It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I myself am wholly sympathetic to the careful maintenance of religious belief in the light of new science. Far better, in my opinion, not to form beliefs about the world on the basis of religion in the first place. But people like Ken Miller should at least provide a voice of reason to those who are religious.

As I final treat I’m embedding a brief video in which Miller talks about a specific prediction that our common ancestry with the (other!) great apes makes about our genome. In particular, while the other apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, we only have 23. This means we “lost” one since our last common ancestor with the chimps. But it didn’t just disappear – we can see where the two older chromosomes fused to form our chromosome number 2. This kind of stuff is just too cool – and also shows the way science works.

I had an abstract accepted to a workshop at the European Summer School of Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI), to be held in Hamburg Germany. Assuming I can scrape together the funds, I can look forward to an exciting trip. You can see the program here.

Things are getting busy here as the end of the semester approaches. I just finished the latest (and maybe last?) draft of my first generals paper, which you can find here. But there’s no time for slacking, as I continue to work on my second GP. With any luck, that will be up on my site soon as well.

This quote from Richard Dawkins was so good I had to share it. The topic is the so-called “theory” of intelligent design.

What this does to science, is it wastes a lot of time of scientists who could be getting on with their work. As far as I’m aware in no other field of science does this happen. Physicists don’t have to fight a kind of rearguard action against sort of yapping terriers of ignorance the way biologists do.

I think I will have to co-opt the phrase “yapping terriers of ignorance”.

We linguists usually seem to get away without having to deal with any biblical fundamentalists trying to make the public believe that there is a scientifically respectable theory of language origins involving the tower of Babel, despite the best efforts of the wrathful dispersion theorists and the maintainers of conservapedia.

I think the problem faced by biologists stems from the fact that most people think they know how the theory of evolution by natural selection works. I bet far fewer people think they understand what the microwave background radiation is, or how its black body spectrum stunningly confirms the predictions made by the Big Bang theory.

The closest I got to having to waste my time with this kind of thing was during a discussion of the evolution of the human language faculty during a discussion section I was TAing. I was trying to press home the fact that whatever is unique to humans that allows us to have language must have evolved rather recently and quickly, since our last common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived some 5 million or so years ago. I was trying to get the class to think about what could be responsible for this difference between humans and chimps, and what could have been responsible for the rapid development of the ability to use language in our species. One student responded along the lines of Well, isn’t that just like God and nature? Like that’s just how we’re made? I think I was a bit harsh; I said something like That’s not an explanation at all; that’s just a restatement of the question, with the word God thrown in. Science is about explaining what we don’t yet understand, not just restating the problem and calling it God.

[The Dawkins quote is from a BBC show called A War on Science Evolution vs. Intelligent Design, which you can watch here. The program makes the creationists out like they're actually doing science, which is pretty misleading, because the fact is, they aren't. The section on Behe makes it seem as if he discovered the bacterial flagellum o something. He didn't. These people never do any actual science. They discovered that its much easier to get on the news by avoiding doing any science at all and going to court instead.]

(Click on image to enlarge if you’re having trouble reading the small print)

In case you’re not familiar with the Turing test, you can read the Wikipedia entry here, or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry here.