The Universe of Discourse

Glade
Last week I needed to mock up a dialog box I was talking about in this article:

Glade lets you design a window interface, by positioning buttons and sliders and things, and then does something or other. At the time I didn't know what it would do, but I knew I could mock up the window I wanted, and I thought maybe I could screenshot the mockup for the blog article.

The Glade thing was so easy to use that the easiest way to get a mockup of the dialog was to have Glade generate a complete, working windowing application, compile and run the application, and then screenshot the application. I got this done in about fifteen minutes.

The application I made doesn't actually do anything, but it does compile, run, and pop up the dialog box I designed. I'm confident that I could get it to do something pretty easily, if I wanted. The auto-generated code, and some of the Glade controls, are very suggestive.

I give Glade a big gold star. I went from having never heard of it to a working (although trivial) window application in one two-minute session and one fifteen-minute session. Maybe two big gold stars and a "Good work!" sticker.

[ Addendum 20080530: I went ahead with making an application that actually does something. It worked. ]

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More Glade
After writing about Glade Interface Designer today, I decided to go ahead and see if it would be as easy to make a working application as I hoped it would be.

The outcome: big success.

The application has a window with two input fields, a "+" button, and an output field that shows the sum of the input fields when you press the "+" button. It took about half an hour from start to finish, and the only thing I had to look up in the manual was the names of the functions that read and write the values of the text fields. Everything else I got through bricolage and tinkering with the autogenerated monkey code.

The biggest problem that I encountered was that the application didn't exit when I clicked the close box, although the window disappeared. I figured out that the close box was sending a "delete" event and not a "destroy" event and fixed it up right quick.

Gtk+ and Glade Interface Designer get at least two gold stars. Maybe three. Maybe fifty-three.

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A missing feature in document viewers
It often happens that I'm looking at some multi-page document, such as a large PDF file, with a viewer program, say Adobe's Acrobat Reader, or Gnome Document Viewer, and the page numbers don't match.

Typically, the viewer numbers all the pages sequentially, starting with 1. But many documents have some front matter, such as a table of contents, that is outside the normal numbering. For example, there might be a front cover page, and then a table of contents labeled with page numbers i through xviii, and then the main content of the document follows on pages 1 through 263.

Computer programmers, I just realized, have a nice piece of jargon to describe this situation, which is very common. They speak of "logical" and "physical" pages. The "physical" page numbers are the real, honest-to-goodness numbers of the pages, what you get if you start at 1 and count up. The "logical" page numbers are the names by which the pages are referred. In the example document I described, physical page 1 is the front cover, physical page 2 is logical page i, physical page 19 is logical page xviii, physical page 20 is logical page 1, and so forth. The document has 282 physical pages, and the last one is logical page 263.

Let's denote physical pages with square brackets and logical pages with curvy brackets. So "(xviii)" and "[19]" denote the same page in this document. Page (1) is page [20], and page (20) is page [39]. Page [1] has no logical designation, or perhaps it is something like "(front cover sheet)".

Now the problem I want to discuss is as follows: Every viewer program has a little box where it displays the current page number, and the little box is usually editable. You scan the table of contents, find the topic you want to read about, and the table says that it's on page (165). Then you tell the document viewer to go to page 165, and it does, but it's not the page 165 you want, because the viewer gives you [165], which is actually (146). You actually wanted (165), which is page [184].

Then you curse, mentally subtract 146 (what you got) from 165 (what you wanted), add the result, 19, back to 165, getting 184, and then you ask for 184 to get 165. And if you're me you probably mess up one time in three and have to do it over, because subtraction is hard.

But it would be extremely easy for viewer programs to mostly fix this. They need to support an option where you can click on the box and tell it "your page number is wrong here". Maybe you would right-click the little page-number box, and the process would pop up a dialog:

But no, none of them do this.

The document itself should carry this information, and some of them do, sometimes. But not every document will, so viewers should support this feature, which is useful anyway.

Some document formats support internal links, but most documents do not use those features, and anyway they are useless when what you are trying to do is look up a reference from someone else's bibliography: "(See Ogul, pp. 662–664.)"

This is not a complete solution, but it's an almost complete solution, and it can be implemented unilaterally, by which I mean that the document author and the viewer program author need not agree on anything. It's really easy to do.

[ Addendum 20080521: Chung-chieh Shan informs me that current versions of xdvi have this feature. I was unaware of this, because the version installed on my machine was compiled in celebration of the 1926 Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exhibition and so predates the addition of this feature. ]

[ Addendum 20080530: How I made the dialog box graphic. ]

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Luminous band-aids
Last night after bedtime Katara asked for a small band-aid for her knee. I went into the bathroom to get one, and unwrapped it in the dark.

The band-aid itself is circular, about 1.5 cm in diameter. It is sealed between two pieces of paper, each about an inch square, that have been glued together along the four pairs of edges. There is a flap at one edge that you pull, and then you can peel the two glued-together pieces of paper apart to get the band-aid out.

As I peeled apart the two pieces of paper in the dark, there was a thin luminous greenish line running along the inside of the wrapper at the place the papers were being pulled away from each other. The line moved downward following the topmost point of contact between the papers as I pulled the papers apart. It was clearly visible in the dark.

I've never heard of anything like this; the closest I can think of is the thing about how wintergreen Life Savers glow in the dark when you crush them.

My best guess is that it's a static discharge, but I don't know. I don't have pictures of the phenomenon itself, and I'm not likely to be able to get any. But the band-aids look like this:

Have any of my Gentle Readers seen anything like this before? A cursory Internet search has revealed nothing of value.

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More artificial Finnish
Several Finns wrote to me to explain in some detail what was wrong with the artificial Finnish in yesterday's article. As I surmised, the words "ssän" and "kkeen" are lexically illegal in Finnish. There were a number of similar problems. For example, my sample output included the non-word "t". I don't know how this could have happened, since the input probably didn't include anything like that, and the Markov process I used to generate it shouldn't have done so. But the code is lost, so I suppose I'll never know.

Of the various comments I received, perhaps the most interesting was from Ilmari Vacklin. ("Vacklin", huh? If my program had generated "Vacklin", the Finns would have been all over the error.) M. Vacklin pointed out that a number of words in my sample output violated the Finnish rules of vowel harmony.

(M. Vacklin also suggested that my article must have been inspired by this comic, but it wasn't. I venture to guess that the Internet is full of places that point out that you can manufacture pseudo-Finnish by stringing together a lot of k's and a's and t's; it's not that hard to figure out. Maybe this would be a good place to mention the word "saippuakauppias", the Finnish term for a soap-dealer, which was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest commonly-used palindromic word in any language.)

Anyway, back to vowel harmony. Vowel harmony is a phenomenon found in certain languages, including Finnish. These languages class vowels into two antithetical groups. Vowels from one group never appear in the same word as vowels from the other group. When one has a prefix or a suffix that normally has a group A vowel, and one wants to join it to a word with group B vowels, the vowel in the suffix changes to match. This happens a lot in Finnish, which has a zillion suffixes. In many languages, including Finnish, there is also a third group of vowels which are "neutral" and can be mixed with either group A or with group B.

Modern Korean does not have vowel harmony, mostly, but Middle Korean did have it, up until the early 16th century. The Korean alphabet was invented around 1443, and the notation for the vowels reflected the vowel harmony:

The first four vowels in this illustration, with the vertical lines, were incompatible with the second four vowels, the ones with the horizontal lines. The last two vowels were neutral, as was another one, not shown here, which was written as a single dot and which has since fallen out of use. Incidentally, vowel harmony is an unusual feature of languages, and its presence in Korean has led some people to suggest that it might be distantly related to Turkish.

The vowel harmony thing is interesting in this context for the following reason. My pseudo-Finnish was generated by a Markov process: each letter was selected at random so as to make the overall frequency of the output match that of real Finnish. Similarly, the overall frequency of two- and three-letter sequences in pseudo-Finnish should match that in real Finnish. Is this enough to generate plausible (although nonsensical) Finnish text? For English, we might say maybe. But for Finnish the answer is no, because this process does not respect the vowel harmony rules. The Markov process doesn't remember, by the time it gets to the end of a long word, whether it is generating a word in vowel category A or B, and so it doesn't know which vowels it whould be generating. It will inevitably generate words with mixed vowels, which is forbidden. This problem does not come up in the generation of pseudo-English.

None of that was what I was planning to write about, however. What I wanted to do was to present samples of pseudo-Finnish generated with various tunings of the Markov process.

The basic model is this: you choose a number N, say 2, and then you look at some input text. For each different sequence of N characters, you count how many times that sequence is followed by "a", how many times it is followed by "b", and so on.

Then you start generating text at random. You pick a sequence of N characters arbitrarily to start, and then you generate the next character according to the probabilities that you calculated. Then you look at the last N characters (the last N-1 from before, plus the new one) and repeat. You keep doing that until you get tired.

For example, suppose we have N=2. Then we have a big table whose keys are 2-character strings like "ab", and then associated with each such string, a table that looks something like this:

Whether to count capital letters as the same as lowercase, and what to do about punctuation and spaces and so forth, are up to the designer.

Here, as examples, are some samples of pseudo-English, generated with various N. The input text was the book of Genesis, which is not entirely typical. In each case, I deleted the initial N characters and the final partial word, cleaned up the capitalization by hand, and appended a final period.

N=0

Lt per f idd et oblcs hs hae:uso ar w aaolt y tndh rl ohn otuhrthpboleel.ee n synenihbdrha,spegn.

N=1

Cachand t wim, heheethas anevem blsant ims, andofan, ieahrn anthaye s, lso iveeti alll t tand, w.

N=2

Ged hich callochbarthe of th to tre said nothem, and rin ing of brom. My and he behou spend the.

N=3

Sack one eved of and refor ther of the hand he will there that in the ful, when it up unto rangers.

I have prepared samples of pseudo-Finnish of various qualities. The input here was a bunch of text I copied out of Finnish Wikipedia. (Where else? If you need Finnish text in 1988, you get it from the Usenet fi.talk group; if you need Finnish text in 2008, you get it from Finnish Wikipedia.) I did a little bit of manual cleanup, as with the English, but not too much.

N=0

Vtnnstäklun so so rl sieesjo.Aiijesjeäyuiotiannorin traäl.N vpojanti jonn oteaanlskmt enhksaiaaiiv oenlulniavas. Rottlatutsenynöisu iikännam e lavantkektann eaagla admikkosulssmpnrtinrkudilsorirumlshsmoti,anlosa anuioessydshln.Atierisllsjnlu e.Itatlosyhi vnko ättr otneän akho smalloailäi jiaat kajvtaopnasneilstio tntin einteaonaiimotn:r apoya oruasnainttotne wknaiossäelaäinoev aobrs,vteorlokynv. Aevsrikhanä tp s s oälnlke rvmi il ynae nara ign ssm lkimttbhineaatismäi tst lli ahaltineshne kr keöunv ah s itenh s .Ia pa elstpnanmnuiksriil anaalnttt mr ti.Ooa ka eee eiiei,tnees äusee a nanhetv.Iopkijeatatits,i l eklbiik suössmap tioaotaktdiir rkeaviohiesotkeagarihv nnadvö jlape öt kaeakmjkhykoto tnt iunnuyknnelu rutliie.Leva eiriaösnaj,rk oyumtsle,iioa,aspa aeiaä wsuinn eta y tvati klssviutkuaktmlpnheomi.T akapskushhnuksnhnnheaaaaussitseminmpnamäiaä pät.Kaaaabl unnionuhnpa iaes,outka.Cväinvkshvrnlteeoea rmi re suodmpr autlysa tnliaanäass. Srs rnvrtsita kmidusvjn tii.

N=1

Ava pän svun kerekent lsita batävomenasttenerga kovosuujalules rma punntäni rtraliksainoi van eukällä. Enäkukänesinntampalä ttan kolpäsäkyönsllvitivenestakkesenelussivaliite kuuksä kttteni einsuekeita kuterissalietäkilpöikalit ojatäjä pinsin atollukole idoitenn kkaorhjajasteden en vuolynkoiverojaa hta puon ehalan vaivä ihoshäositi. Hde setua tämpitydi makta jasyn sää oinncgrkai jeeten. Ljalanekikeri toiskkksypohoin ta yö atenesällväkeesaatituuun. Paait pukata tuon ktusumitttan zagaleskli va kkanäsin siikutytowhenttvosa veste eten vunovivä. Vorytellkeeni stan jä taa eka kaine ja kurenntonsin kyn o nta ja. Aisst urksetaka. Hotimivaa ta mppussternallai ja. Hdä on koraleerermohtydelen on jon. Rgienon kulinoilisälsa ja holälimmpa vitin, kukausoompremänn ra, palestollebilsen kaalesta, oina. Blilullaushoingiötideispaanoksiton, mulurklimi kermalli pota atebau lmomarymin kypa hta vanon tin kela vanaspoita s kulitekkäjen jäleetuolpan, veesalekäilin oii. Häreli. Ymialisstermimpriekaksst on.

N=2

Omaalis onino osa josa hormastaaraktse tyi altäänä tyntellevääostoidesenä, la siä vuansilliana inöön akalkuulukempellys kisä nen myöhelyaminenkiemostamahti omuonsa onite oni kusissa. Kungin sykynteillalkaai ellahasiteisuunnaja eroniemmin javai musuuasinä, sittan tusuovatkryt tormon vuolisenitiivansaliuotkietjuuta sensa. Kutumppalvinen. Vaikintolat hän ja kilkuossa osa koiseuvo keyhdysvisakeemppolowistoisijouliuodosijolasissän muoli ogro soluksi valuksasverix intetormon patlantaan et muiksen paiettaatulun kan vuomesyklees ovain pun. Sesva sa hänerittämpiraun tyi vuoden sälisen sän yhtiit, set tämpiraalletä. Senssaikanoje leemp:tabeten ain raa olliukettyi su. Solulukuuttellerrotolit hee säkinessa hän sekketäärinenvaikeihakti umallailuksin sestunno klossi ilunuta. Klettisaa osen vua vuola, jani ja hinangia en ta kaineemonimien polin barkiviäliukkuta joseseva. Ebb rautta onistärään on ml jokoulistä oheksi anoton allysvallelsiliineuvoja kutuko ala ulkietutablohitkain. Ituno.

N=3

Ävivät mena osakeyhti yhdysvalmiininäkin rakenne tuliitä hermoni ja umpirauhastui liin baryshnikoneja. Ain viljelukuullisää olisäke spesideksyylikoliittu latvia. Helsina hän solukeskuksen kannumme, peri palkin vieskeinä sisään on orgaan poikanssisäätelukauno klee laisenäläinen tavastui kauno on länteen muttava hän voimista kilometsästymistettäjän lehtiöiksitoreisö. Sitoutuvat mukalle. Ainettiin sisäke suomaihin, jouluun. Verenkilpalveli valtaineen opisteri poli ohjasionee rakennuttikolan aivastisenäläistuu kehittisetoja, rajahormaailmanajan kulkopuolesti kuluu mooliitoutuvat ovat olle. Ainen yhdysvaltai valiolähtiöiksi vasta, S. Muidentilaisteri jotka verenkirovin verenkiehumistä nelle väliaivoittynyt baleviiliukoisiin maailmestavarasta, jokakuudessa laisu. Sai rakeyhti yhtiö eli gluksessa. Ebbin, ja linnosakkeen hormonien I hallistehtiin kilpirasvua jaajana hormaailusta kunnetteluskäyttöön suomalaivat yhdysvalmistämistammonit veteet olimistuvatta. Hormon oli rautta.

I must say that I found "yhdysvalmistämistammonit" rather far-fetched, even in Finnish. But then I discovered that "yhdeksänkymmenvuotiaaksi" and "yhdysvalloissakaan" are genuine, so who am I to judge?

[ Addendum 20080601: Some additional notes. ]

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Artificial Finnish

Order Symbols, Signals, and Noise with kickback no kickback

But around that time the Internet was just beginning to get into full swing. The Finnish government was investing a lot of money in networking infrastructure, and a lot of people in Finland were starting to appear on the Internet.

I have a funny story about that: Around the same time, a colleague named Marc Edgar approached me in the computer lab to ask if I knew of any Internet-based medium he could use to chat with his friend at the University of Oulu. I thought at first that he was putting me on (and maybe he was) because in 1989 the University of Oulu was just about the only place in the world where a large number of people were accessible via internet chat, IRC having been invented there the previous autumn.

A new set of Finnish-language newsgroups had recently appeared on Usenet, and people posted to them in Finnish. So I had access to an unlimited supply of computer-readable Finnish text, something which would have been unthinkable a few years before, and I could do the experiment in Finnish.

I wrote up the program, which is not at all difficult, gathered Finnish news articles, and produced the following sample:

Uttavalon estaa ain pahalukselle? Min omatunu selle menneet hy, toista. Palveljen alh tkö an välin oli ei alkohol pisten jol elenin. Että, ille, ittavaikki oli nim tor taisuuristä usein an sie a in sittä asia krista sillo si mien loinullun, herror os; riitä heitä suurinteen palve in kuk usemma. Tomalle, äs nto tai sattia yksin taisiä isiäk isuuri illää hetorista. Varsi kaikenlaineet ja pu distoja paikelmai en tulissa sai itsi mielim ssän jon sn ässäksi; yksen kos oihin! Jehovat oli kukahdol ten on teistä vak kkiasian aa itse ee eik tse sani olin mutta todistanut t llisivat oisessa sittä on raaj a vaisen opinen. Ihmisillee stajan opea tajat ja jumalang, sitten per sa ollut aantutta että voinen opeten. Ettuj, jon käs iv telijoitalikantaminun hä seen jälki yl nilla, kkeen, vaaraajil tuneitteistamaan same?

In those days, the world was 7-bit, and Finnish text was posted in a Finnish national variant of ASCII that caused words like "tkö an välin" to look like "tk| an v{lin". The presence of the curly braces heightened the apparent similarity, because that was all you could see at first glance.

At the time I was pleased, but now I think I see some defects. There are some vowelless words, such as "sn" and "t", which I think doesn't happen in Finnish. Some other words look defective: "ssän" and "kkeen", for example. Also, my input sample wasn't big enough, so once the program generated "alk" it was stuck doing the rest of "alkohol". Still, I think this could pass for Finnish if the reader wasn't paying much attention. I was satisfied with the results of the experiment, and was willing to believe that randomly-contructed English really did look enough like English to fool a non-English-speaking observer.

[ Addendum 20080514: There is a followup to this article. ]

[ Addendum 20080601: Some additional notes. ]

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The Origin of Consciousness

Order The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind with kickback no kickback

Human consciousness (which Jaynes describes and defines in considerable detail) is a relatively recent development, dating back at most only about 3,000 years or so.

That is the shocking part of the theory. Most people probably imagine consciousness arising much, much earlier, perhaps before language. Jaynes disagrees. In his theory, language, and in particular its mediation of thought through the use of metaphors, is an essential prerequisite for consciousness. And his date for the development of consciousness means that human consciousness would postdate several other important developments, such as metalworking, large-scale agriculture, complex hierarchical social structures, and even writing. Jaynes thinks that the development of consciousness is a historical event and is attested to by written history. He tries to examine the historical record to find evidence not only of preconscious culture, but of the tremendous upheavals that both caused and were the result of the arrival of consciousness.

If preconscious humans farmed, built temples and granaries, and kept records, they must have had some sort of organizing behavior that sufficed in place of consciousness. Jaynes believes that prior to the development of consciousness, humans had a very different mentality. When you or I need to make a decision, we construct a mental narrative, in which we imagine ourselves trying several courses of action, and attempt to predict the possible consequences. Jaynes claims that Bronze Age humans did not do this. What then?

Instead, says Jaynes, the two halves of the brain were less well-integrated in preconscious humans than they are today. The preconscious mentality was "bicameral", with the two halves of the brain operating more independently, and sometimes at odds with each other. The left hemisphere, as today, was usually dominant. Faced with a difficult decision, preconscious human would wait, possibly undergoing (and perhaps even encouraging) an increasingly agitated physical state, until they heard the voice of a god directing them what to do. These hallucinated voices were generated by the right hemisphere of the brain, and projected internally into the left hemisphere.

For example, when the Iliad says that the goddess Athena spoke to Achilles, and commanded and physically restrained him from killing Agamemnon, it is not fabulating: Achilles' right brain hallucinated the voice of the Goddess and restrained him.

In Jaynes' view, there is a large amount of varied literary, anthropological, and neurological evidence supporting this admittedly bizarre hypothesis. For example, he compares the language used in the Biblical Book of Amos (bicameral) with that in Ecclesiastes (conscious). He finds many examples of records from the right period of history bewailing the loss of the guidance of the gods, the stilling of their voices, and the measures that people took, involving seers and prophets, to try to bring the guiding voices back.

Jaynes speculates that mental states such as schizophrenia, which are frequently accompanied by irresistible auditorily hallucinated commands, may be throwbacks to the older, "bicameral" mental state.

Whether you find the theory amazingly brilliant or amazingly stupid, I urge to to withhold judgment until you have read the book. It is a fat book, and there is a mass of fascinating detail. As I implied, it's either a work of profound genius or of profound crackpottery, and I'm not sure which. (Yaakov Sloman tells me that the response to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was similarly ambivalent when it was new. I think the consensus is now on the genius side.) Either way, it is quite fascinating. There needs to be some theory to account for the historical development of consciousness, and as far as I know, this is the only one on offer.

Anyway, I did not mean to get into this in so much detail. The reason I brought this up is that because of my continuing interest in Jaynes' theory, and how it is viewed by later scholars, I am reading Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination by Daniel B. Smith. I am not very far into it yet, but Smith has many interesting things to say about auditory hallucinations, their relationship to obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other matters.

On page 37 Smith mentions a paper, which as he says, has a wonderful title: "Involuntary Masturbation as a Manifestation of Stroke-Related Alien Hand Syndrome". Isn't that just awesome? It gets you coming and going, like a one-two punch. First there's the involuntary masturbation, and while you're still reeling from that it follows up with "alien hand syndrome".

To save you the trouble of reading the paper, I will summarize. The patient is a 72-year-old male. He has lesions in his right frontal lobe. He is experiencing "alien hand syndrome", where his hand seems to be under someone else's control, grabbing objects, like the TV remote control, or grabbing pieces of chicken off his plate and feeding them to him, when what he wanted to do was feed himself with the fork in his right hand. "During his hospital stay, the patient expressed frustration and dismay when he realized that he was masturbating publicly and with his inability to voluntarily release his grasp of objects in the left hand."

Reaction time tests of his hands revealed that when the left hand was under his conscious control, it suffered from a reaction time delay, but when it was under the alien's control, it didn't.

Whee, freaky.

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At that moment, the novice was enlightened...
Presented without further comment, a conversation I had yesterday on IRC. I am yrlnry:

(I have changed the name of the other person.)

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