Peeking into the rock

The Bad Astronomer (Phil Plait) likes to share optical illusions and explain how they work. The moral he draws is that our mere meat bodies can't tell us what's going on.

But I've been thinking about it, and actually, I think that the mechanisms behind optical illusions are exactly why we can tell, to a large degree and usually as well as we need to. That thing where the mind extrapolates from  little bits of information to build a whole world of stuff beyond what we strictlyh see and hear and smell and touch and taste: that's how come we know anything. You see a blur and a blob and a couple of moving lines and you think "Here comes Yolanda, and she's kinda pissed, so I bet her bus was late again." You cast a swift glance at a sign and you see a smear of a green rectangle at a height somewhat above your head and some fuzzy shapes and dots and lines and you think "That was Washington Street, I'm turning right on the next block." There is no way at that distance and with that brief a glance that you actually read "Washington Street" off that street sign. If you had to have accurate inputs, you wouldn't even have been sure that was a street sign with the amount of information you picked up.

Yesterday's translation exercise was a good example too. Google translate didn't know what to do with words that didn't comform to the entries in their dictionaries, even with google's famous fuzzy logic. It couldn't figure out that koníčka vraného meant "crow-black pony," and it couldn't figure out that šabla nabrúšná meant "sharpened saber," and it couldn't figure out that na štyry noženky kutého meant "trotting on four feet." There were lots of reasons. kůň "horse" is in the online dictionary, but if you look for "pony" you will get ponik, not koníčky, though all songs in my children's song book use the latter. And since the online dictionaries (I also used a few others besides Google) could not handle koníčka, they also could not parse the next word, which is the adjectival form of the noun vrana "crow." Another thing that threw the dictionaries was dyž instead of když for "where." Since all the verbunky songs I looked at on the website had it, I assume it is a Moravian dialect sort of thing. Google rendered it as "hen," which was really confusing, because it is nothing like kuře. Only after I figured out that it must be "when" did I realize that Google had gotten it right and was dropping the "w" in a show of misguided solidarity with the sensibility of the text.

Google and I forget the name of the other text translator threw up their hands at noženky. For a moment I thought the verse was about penknives but browsing through the various dictionaries showed me that "shanks" was a reasonable interpretation, and then when I found the word behing used later in company with the word for horseshoes, I figured it out. And šabla is a variant of šavle.


So, I had to know things already: recognize tiny similarities, understand how loinguistic variation works, and relentlessly fill in the blanks. I could not have done it without the sort of perceptive system that also falls prey to optical illusions.

Spiritual Kvintet does a creditable Czech version of "Which Side Are You On?"

Frank took us to the Monastery beer garden at the base of Petrin Hill. Maybe not the base, maybe partway up. There's supposed to be an antenna on that r. We had beer and beer-based food. Emma and Frank adored ther goulash in bread bowls: I would have found it too salty to finish. Emma also ordered a beer cheese spread and potyato pancakes but could only eat a little, and I could only help her out with a few bites: way strong. I had beer-onion soup and a kind of blue cheese (don't know what kind of blue cheese) on thin whole wheat toast. And a cucumber salad with roasted pumpkin seeds and a tin splash of soy sauce (I thought it was probably dark beer at first, but it wasn't). We had two beers between us: an amber and the Easter beer, which was kind of lager-y or ale-y, I don't know enough about beer to say. Anyway, my Easter beer was a rich, light yellow color, with a light taste but a strong aftertaste that I called pleasantly bitter and Emma called too hoppy. Frank's amber had a thicker, sweeter (but not too sweet) taste, and an interesting aftertaste, less so than mine. The waiter was terribly surprised that we didn't want more beer.

Not far away in the complex of buildings around the monastery was a miniature museum which seemed to showcase the work of a SIberian who also designs tools for eye micro-surgery. Which explains why his wok features things like horseshoes on a flea and a caravan of camels marching through the eye of a needle. Understand I am speaking of literal fleas and needles and poppy seeds and mosquito wings. The museum has a series of counters which hold actual microscopes which appear to have been made for the purpose as the housings are fine oak. You cannot see the works without the microscopes.

Then we were on our way somewhere else when we had the idea to show Emma the HungerWall. This is a medieval version of the Works Projects Administration. So naturally we walked around the wall for a long time talkng about economics and governments and taking pictures (which I will post some of eventually). Then it felt like time to go and check on the funicular and see if it was running and we were coming down a shortcut and . . .

Emma took a nasty tumble and did something to her ankle, and it took us a couple of hours to just get down the hill and into a tram hotelward. Frank did some quick diagnostics and we iced her up (which involved me having another awkward conversation in Czech at the potraviny around the corner, where they nemaji led but the receptionist at the hotel found us some. Then we sat around talking and Emma chatted with Jason online and after a couple of hours Frank and I went out in search of food which was a minor adventure and finally produced kung pao beef, beef with broccoli, lemon chicken (without deepfried coating), and tiny glasses of plum wine for Frank and me while we waited.

It's early, early morning -- I'm going back to sleep for a while after this, I really only got up to get more acetaminophen for Emma (and me -- I am not damaged but we're on the fifth floor and I've been making a point of hardly ever using the elevator) and to pee. I kind of think Emma will still be in pain today. The pan for today is to put her on a streetcar and to ride around town just looking at things. If she's not up to even that, I intend to take that as a sign that she should be seen. So if it's that bad I'll ask the very helpful receptionist how to do that. They are very fluent in English, so I can dodge trying to express all that in Czech.

Semitic languages are written with the vowels as diacritical marks, if at all, because the word stem is the consonants and the vowels shift in more-or-less regular patterns as the word is declined. That's okay.

But in the Western and Southern Slavic languages they just do without vowels a lot of the time, replacing them with liquids -- mostly variations on r. I am reminded of this because Frank sent me a file titled "prurez krkem," which does, of course have three vowels for four syllables, not bad for Czech. I am not sure how to pronounce "krkem" without interpolating a schwa into that first syllable. That's because my gut sense of what's possible to say was trained by mimicking English speakers. And my poor lips and tongue have discarded a vast thicket of pruned-out sounds that have no place in English. And, actually, quite a lot of the sounds that are spoken by other speakers of English. I think we California natives have fewer different vowels than people from elsewhere.

Anyway, he's doing okay, he has electricity, he's getting health insurance, he can eat . . . the file in question was a schematic cross section of the neck which he sent me because it annoys him. It's sort of a crude drawing and he has to memorize it because it's what's on the test.

The grass at Lighthouse Field is well over my ankles in places, and the nice fellow is making promises to the dog about hiding in the grass someday . . .