Khaki F. Dog

Followup to the previous piece on the new ugliest word in my language, I’d like to expand a bit on this statement:

Dutch is a merchants’ language, harshly deriding ambiguity and far favoring clarity over beauty. This isn’t to say it lacks grace, simply that our verbal eloquence comes from idiom rather than vocabulary.

An example of this just popped on my screen. A car ad with a clip of a dog whos flews are fluttering in the wind with ‘roll over for more’ underneath it. At least, that’s what I assume should be there, since the ad was creepily localized for me: ‘Erover rollen voor meer’.  Let me break this down, since it illustrates the above point precisely.

Er is a particle that’s very difficult to describe in English, because, somewhat contrary to my point here, ‘er’ is hugely ambiguous. Germans and, I presume, Scandinavians will be familiar with its equivalents in their language. The French have a very similar word in y and while I don’t know its equivalent in Spanish, ya is similarly hard to define.

Where ya refers to time (I’m told it can mean ‘already’, ‘still’, ‘now’ or even sometimes ‘later’), er is very much about place. ‘Erover’, then, can be read as ‘over it’ which would make the sentence in the ad: ‘Roll over it for more’. This reads just fine in English, but it’s frustrating to read in Dutch.

It’s too ambiguous, you see. What’s ‘it’, and what are you ‘rolling over’ it?

This isn’t even the right way to construct an imperative sentence. You can often get away with setting an imperative up like this, but only if the subject and object are clear.

‘Click here’, for example, is ‘klik hier’ and that one’s totally fine. I’m being told to ‘click’, which I know how to do, and I’m being told where to do it. No problem. So you could also structure it like the earlier example: ‘hier klikken’. Which one is chosen by a copyeditor will depend on the intende audience: depending on age and cultural background, different Dutch folks will consider one ruder than the other.

In both cases the instruction will be perceived as ruder than it would in English. While in English ‘click here’ is at once an imperative and an implicit invitation, Dutch is profoundly un-weasely and the imperative is always very firm and commanding.

So the copyeditors tried to match the tone of the English phrase ‘roll over for more’ despite the fact that Dutch doesn’t support that particular register, and settled for an ambiguous syntax as well.

Apparently they want us to put the screen on the floor, lean back on it and rock side to side over the ad to learn more.

Fine. Have it your way!

In June I railed against ‘geüpdated’, the neerlandified word for ‘updated’. Now there’s a new contender: ‘gelikete’, meaning ‘liked’ in the context of Facebook’s like button.

The verb ‘to like’ knows no translation in Dutch. No surprise; even among its Germanic siblings the Dutch language has a particular paucity in vocabulary, so it certainly can’t hold a candle to its close cousin English, which suckles at the teats of various Francic, Celtic, Germanic and Latin sources.

Dutch is a merchants’ language, harshly deriding ambiguity and far favoring clarity over beauty. This isn’t to say it lacks grace, simply that our verbal eloquence comes from idiom rather than vocabulary.

Usually this means that a single word in Dutch (especially adjectives and adverbs) covers a whole host of English counterparts. ‘Mooi’ can mean ‘beautiful’, ‘pretty’, ‘handsome’, and even ‘convenient’, ‘good’ or ‘fairly’, depending on the context and the tone of the sentence.

With the English verb ‘like’ the situation is reversed. To tell someone ‘I like you’ you’d say ‘ik vind je leuk’ or ‘ik mag je graag’ or ‘je mag er zijn’ depending on the exact nature of your liking.

This makes the ‘like’ button rather problematic. There’s no substitute for it. Fortunately, pretty much everyone here speaks decent English (and most can hold their own in French or German) so there’s no issue with translating that button as ‘like’. We’re used to absorbing useful words from other languages (a habit for which our Flemish neighbours mock us).

Just as in English, verbs can be used as adjectives. Either the present participle (a rolling stone) or the past participle (a broken vase) will do just fine, but this lands us in murky waters when we use loan words.

‘Liked articles’ become ‘gelikete artikelen’ and since we don’t have a current equivalent to ‘item’ we turn ‘liked items’ into ‘gelikete items’. This is worse than ‘geüpdated’ because that one at least offers some guidance as to how it should be pronounced.

My disapproval is only limited to the written form, mind. There’s no ambiguity or terrible inelegance when the word’s used conversationally; just another bead in the colorful multi-lingual patchwork of daily discourse. But on paper? Yuck.

Only that it should.

B5 broke new ground in its day, breaking from the Star Trek establishment by blasting a sci-fi series onto the screen that blended speculative contemplation, mystical philosophy, long-term character development, conspiracy, heroism, betrayal, cutting-edge creative effects and wicked, wicked forehead jobs.

The original airing of the pilot episode featured puming electric guitars in a rocking score by Steve Copeland (of The Police fame), later retconned to the orchestral stylings of the series’ composer Christopher Franke.

The show was thrilling. Political intrigue, thought-provoking concepts of science and mysticism, entwining and unfolding destinies and most of all, to the young nerd that was me at the age of fourteen, the logistics of travel, habitation, trade, peacekeeping and ultimately warfare in space.

Yes, the sound sucked. Yes, the sets were a little on the hokey side, but you know what? A recent re-watching of the series showed that they held up impressively under the exacting standards of my adult eyes, accustomed to the glories of Firefly and Battlestar Galactica.

But the CGI on the DVDs is terrible, terrible. Gather ‘round, children, and hear the sad tale we call the Tragedy of Babylon 5.

J. Michael Straczynski, Joe to his friends, worked tirelessly to get B5 onto the screen and would later perform a Herculean feat unmatched in television history before or since, penning all the scripts for a 22-episode season solo. The man was a visionary, brilliant not only in his own creativity, but his ability to enthuse and nurture other talens (including established ones like ‘creative consultant’ Harlan Ellison) and to dance with light-footed grace around the perils of television production.

An actor decides to leave the show before completing their character’s intended four-season arc? No problem. Straczynski had a trap door ready, a plausible plot twist that could drop the character, plus a clever reinterpretation of past events that would let a different character fulfill the intended role.

Visionary that he was, he could also see that television in the future would be different from 1993. The DVD Consortium was hotly and noisily debating the digital media of tomorrow, and the benefits of 16:9 widescreen were so obvious that television would definitely one day embrace it.

So up he came with a cunning plan. “Let me film it in widescreen,” he said. “We’ll compose the shots so they can be cropped to 4:3, but then at least we’ll have widescreen footage which we can use on the DVDs.”

The studio’s nostrils throbbed. “But what of the special effects you’ve budgeted? Wider screens at higher resolutions cost significatnly more computing power.” Ah yes, there’s the rub. Why would anyone spend that extra money for a benefit that wouldn’t be felt for half a decade at least?

Straczynski planned for the future. “When the time comes to make DVDs,” he said, cackling with snotty glee, “computers will be more powerful by an order of magnitude. They’ll be able to render all the CGI we need at DVD resolution in a fraction of the time it takes us to produce it for VHS. Think of it! With only a small investment in ten years’ time, you’ll be able to market the series as a whole new experience!”

And wouldn’t that have been nice, children?

Wouldn’t it have been nice if poor management, poor archival practices and the dissolution of the VFX houses that produced the effects for B5 hadn’t resulted in the utter annihilation of the graphic assets that could have been used to re-render the CGI?

Look at the B5 DVDs. The footage is crisp and detailed, but as soon as a space-ship comes into view it turns to shit. Blurry, knobbly, even with some weird prismatic haloing around the jagged edges.

Being unable to re-render the graphics they had no choice but to take the VHS tapes of the computer effects, which were already of lower resolution and quality than DVD by far, and then cut the top and bottom to narrow it down to widescreen.

Now, if the studio wanted to put B5 out on Blu-Ray, they would have to start all the graphics from scratch. They don’t even have any archives of any of the CGI models — the shot of a Minbari ship in the straight-to-DVD Lost Tales set was only possible because nerdy fans had independently created a model of the ship and provided it to the producers.

Would that be so bad, though?

Think of it. The studio has that most precious of resources: camera negatives. Can you imagine what that would look like, digitized with modern equipment, graded to modern standards, and then bolstered by brand-new, far-less hokey CGI?

I know, I know. I sound like George Lucas. But stick with me.

B5 made its limitations work. Straczynski’s production team struck a brilliant balance between quantity and quality: the sets were small, but that was made plausible because on a space station, habitable space is at a premium. Of course you’d make all your workspaces as compact as possible. And as a result, they could build a huge variety of exciting locations in a limited amount of studio space.

Likewise the CGI. Yes, it wasn’t convincing, but it was awesome — literally, awe-inspiring. Space-ships obeyed Newtonian physics (or at least, the ones that were bound by them). The designs were inventive and spoke volumes abuot the species’ culture and psychology.

The series, for all its weird little silliness here and there, is a treasure of ingenuity and richly deserves to be refashioned. Who’s with me!

I haven’t used Apple’s ingenious new Siri, nor do I need to in order to parry Android chief Andy Rubin’s assessment that “your phone should[n’t] be an assistant.”

Siri purports to interpret natural language instructions. You are encouraged to treat it as a person both because of the casually courteous phrasing of its responses and the slightly sassy responses it gives to cheeky queries.

This last part is extremely clever. In our culture, people use this kind of sass to communicate a very complex set of cues: A) I deserve more respectful treatment, B) I accept your taunting because we are friends, and C) I understand your taunting is in good fun and therefore respond in kind. Siri encourages its users to be familiar.

Reportedly, a great deal of R&D went into developing this personality and I believe that this is why Siri is only available in a few languages at launch: while natural language processing is hard, it’s even harder to define a personality appropriate for the culture in which the language is spoken.

Andy Rubin, head honcho of Google’s Android, feels that phones are for talking to other people, that they should be devices only, but he’s missing the point: talking to a machine as if it’s a person is a very good and natural way to convey your intentions.

First came the mouse: instead of remembering text commands, you could move a cursor to point at the thing you wanted and click the mouse buttons to interact with it. Two decades later, the touch interface: you directly interact with whatever’s on the screen as if it’s a real object right behind the glass. 

Both of these innovations, popularized by Apple, were a dramatic leap in human-computer interaction because they shortened the user’s intention path. They eliminated layers of abstraction that were previously necessary for the user to communicate their desires to the computer.

Voice controls have existed for quite some time, but they usually required a rigid set of commands which the user had to learn – very much like a command-line interface. Unless you know how the device expects you to talk to it, it won’t understand your intention.

Siri is a different beast. By going to such lengths to encourage you to anthropomorphize it, you relax and feel free to convey your intentions as you would to a person. And that’s pretty neat: we all have decades of experience in doing just that.

Touch is the fundamental physical human-computer interface because our hands and fingers are our fundamental tools for interacting with pretty much everything in the physical universe. Maybe there are more robust ways we could interact with a device, but we’d have to learn those behaviors first. Touch interaction builds on skills we’ve been developing since birth.

Natural and more importantly personal speech is the fundamental verbal human-computer interface because that’s how we interact with pretty much everything around us that we can talk to: other people, animals, and objects that annoy us. Again, it builds on skills we’ve been developing since we first learned to speak.

And again, there may be more powerful ways to non-physically interact with devices, but those would require us to learn new behaviors. 

This is what Andy Rubin fails to understand. A phone is for communicating, sure, but that’s only a fraction of the purposes for which people use their Android, iPhone or WhateverPhone. There are tons of other tasks they use their devices for, so the burden is on device and software developers to present us with the shortest possible intention path in order to convey to the device what we want from it at any given time.

Take this scenario: “Invite Abdel to lunch at noon.” Siri currently responds by creating a new calendar entry for lunch, today at noon, and then asking which of the Abdels in my Address Book I’d like to invite to it — but that can be taken further. 

Because the invitation is for lunch, Siri might suggest some venues where we could meet up. If Abdel’s sharing his location with me (Google’s Latitude, Apple’s Find My Friends) Siri could narrow those options down to locations that are convenient for us both. And further, because Abdel once invited me to his family’s Eid celebration, Siri might deduce that he’s a Muslim and filter the suggested locations to ones that offer halal menu options.

That would be pretty cool. 

In 1935, Austrian big-brain physicist Erwin Schrödinger developed a thought experiment that has since seeped into public awareness in recent decades because it’s totally far out, man. Largely without complaint from animal rights groups, curiously. 

The original thought experiment called for a steel box in which are placed a cat, a quantity of a radioactive substance, a Geiger counter, and a death trap. Originally the death trap was a vial of hydrocyanic acid that is triggered to spray in the box when the Geiger counter detects sufficient decay of the substance. Later versions of the story called for a shotgun to blast the box, which I actually think might be more humane. 

This hypothetical experiment illustrated the phenomenon of quantum superposition as described in the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox: without opening the steel box you can’t know if the kittycat has been murdered by the acid, or if it’s still happily snoozing. 

What’s totally far out, then, is that the cat is both alive and dead until the moment the box is opened. Only when the box is opened and its condition observed does the superposition collapse into one definite state, and at that point the cat becomes either alive or dead for real. 

When I was told this story as a teenager, I was totally like whoa. The universe suddenly seemed just a little more magical and far out, and the complex relationship between observation and reality, which fascinated me already, became even more awesome. I imagine there are scads of bright minds out there, young and old, for which this story created a sense of wonder and awe. 

It’s sad to realize that this completely misses the point of the story. Schrödinger used this story to poke holes in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (and not to simply illustrate it) by inventing a situation that would produce superposition, but which is obviously nonsense. Cats obviously aren’t both alive and dead. Trees that fall in the forest do make a sound, and bears shit in the woods all the time. 

I know, it was a huge disappointment to me, too, when I learned this, but we owe it to ol’ Erwin to recognize what he was trying to tell us. We weren’t supposed to be totally like whoa, we were supposed to realize that cats are either alive or dead, and that therefore this superposition stuff was rather suspect. 

The universe, alas, is perhaps a little less wondrous now. But take heart: this was in 1935. Much has been learned since then and with the construction of truly awe-inspiring machines like the Large Hadron Collider, more is being learned and supposed and debunked every day. There may be even more radical realities for us to marvel at. 

I just hope they’re not illustrated with lolcats.