I notice that I visualize the letters of the words that people are speaking. I see the text as the words pass. I wonder whether other people experience a visualization like this.
If I were to learn a new language, the need to spell text might be limiting.
Arabic and Farsi would first require me to learn how to pronounce and write Arabic script. It would be an added step that I wouldn’t have learning new European languages. I don’t think visualizing it would be a great challenge once I could read and transcribe words.
Mandarin Chinese, in contrast, might be acutely difficult for me to learn. Since words are not written phonetically, I would need a completely new level of interpretation to see what I am hearing. I suspect that skill would develop very slowly (if at all.) There are phonetic transcriptions of the sounds, but if the variations in the pronunciation of words is subtle, I might not “see” the correct “text.”
In some languages, people speak more words per minute than in English. Would my ability to visualize the words be overwhelmed by the speed that the letters go by?
What would happen if I had a stroke that broke that neural link between my hearing and the visualizations? I wonder whether I could track a conversation when I couldn’t see the words anymore.
I believe song lyrics access a different part of my language system. When I read the lyrics to familiar songs, the words don’t register as familiar. Often, I find that I never really knew what the song was about. My visualizations didn’t seem to help. I’m wonder whether a PET or fMRI of me listening to a song and its lyrics would be different from one recorded while I listening to the same words as prose.
It’s interesting to notice skills that are natural to me. It would also be interesting to learn skills that are natural to other people that I’m unable to experience.
An aptitude might be broken down into micro-level skills. Some may take practice to develop fully. It is a form of neurodivergence to identify skills that might be missing in one person and robustly available in another.
Consider the ability to recognize faces and the ability to visualize images. I’ve heard informal suggestions that people have different levels of proficiency. These are examples of everyday skills that might have a spectrum of ability. Mathematics may be hard for some people because some necessary sub-skill is neurologically disadvantaged.
Brains are mysteries full of puzzles. They hide individual differences. I don’t know things that I can’t do that are natural for you. It’s hard for you to know things I take for granted that you struggle with.
In the past I’ve made some collection of comics. One was a collection of Frank & Ernest comics. Another was a collection of editorial cartoons from The Star newspaper in Auburn, Indiana.
The Frank and Ernest are organized by publication date. I would cut out a few weeks of comics and then glue them 5 comics to a page. I would start a new month at the top of the page. Once the pages covered a whole year, I would bind the pages together with my Velobind strip binding system. Comics are easy to organize chronologically because the artwork has the month and day within it. In contrast, I manually stamped the editorial cartoons each with a red date stamp to record their date of publication.
I consider these as just collections. There was no plan to organize the comics beyond sorting them by date.
I also started a collection of comics from the weekly magazine The New Yorker. The magazine includes 10 – 15 comics each issue. I have been cutting out the comics and filing them with the title page and cover in a page protector for each issue. That holds them together, so they don’t get mixed up. Recently, I had accumulated about a year and a half unprocessed. For a long time, I didn’t really have a purpose for them, I was just filing away each week’s drawings. I was getting more and more behind with no plan.
Recently I thought of turning the collection into an archive by asking the question: What are the differences between the styles of the comic’s creators? The New Yorker’s title page has an index of the artist names for each comic so that I could attribute them to the right artist. I wondered whether I could learn something from the different artists’ styles. That gave me the impetus to do more with the comics I had accumulated. I would separate the comics and organize them by each artist chronologically.
When I started processing them, I made a pipeline where I would take one of the page protectors and pencil the comics’ margin with the artist’s name and publication date. By having this basic information on the paper, if a comic falls out, it will have enough information to be put it back in place. After labeling them, I put each week in a manila envelope and made a pile of those. I would keep the pile from getting too tall by taking the bottom envelope and gluing its contents to artist pages. I took the penciled information and wrote it in ink next to the comic. The artist’s name is at the top of each page. When a page was full, I would create a new page for that artist. I only glued the comics on one side of a page which makes them easier to leaf through. After this, I would try to be efficient with a couple of filing steps before the comic is in its final position.
I keep the comics on paper instead of scanning them in. That would allow the archive to not be affected by technological change. Old digital archives can become useless because the software they need won’t work anymore. Digital archives can require substantial work by archivists to preserve. Although, at some level, the metadata will need to be in digital form, the ground floor will be something more permanent.
When I decided to turn the collection into an archive, I started thinking about what additional information would someone find useful if they were doing research? I was told that a historian would like to have full bibliographic information, so I started including page numbers with the date. Since the archive wasn’t started with that in mind, most of the older comics are missing their page number. Other useful data is to give each comic an index number so that researchers could easily find a comic in the archive after finding them in computer search. I haven’t chosen an indexing system yet.
Looking at what librarians would like to do with the comics, I thought of additional metadata that would be useful. The dimensions of the comics are easy to measure and useful. I could also pick keywords to describe each comic. I could evaluate different existing metadata standards from the Library Science courses that I took. Perhaps one of them will work well.
I should decide on the purpose of a keyword index. I would define a standardized vocabulary that I could use for keywords. An index could be kept in cataloging software. Without planning, choosing the keywords to describe each comic could become an ever-expanding job. I don’t want to give the comics keywords and then realize I need to go back and select more keywords to the old drawings. It would become an endless task! Information that I might want includes graphical details of the graphic such as drawing technique and style. Other keywords would describe the theme such as “sheep,” “pearly gates,” “therapist office,” or “royalty.” The purpose of the archive should inform my choices of what keywords to use. I can use what I have so far to suggest a more thorough list to move forward.
I didn’t start recording some of the metadata. I’m about a year behind the current publication, about 45 issues. I’m playing catchup. Some of the desirable metadata is lost, or at least impractical to recover. The order the comics appear in each issue might be interesting to analyze and is only available when I dissect an issue. Once the magazine is chopped up, that information is lost. I need to consider what is worth keeping and what is impractical.
I try to minimize is going back to older items to fill in missing data. To rewind several times would become frustrating and eventually overwhelming. It’s a matter deciding what’s practical to get vs. what is important. I need to make a good-enough archive, not try to make a perfect archive. Data entry is a substantial task and I need to estimate how much I really can take the time for.
Already, there are several artists who I can identify without needing to see the signature. Someday, it would be fun to interview some of the artists.
I just saw Lightyear for the second time this week. It was better the second time.
The framework of Lightyear is that it is the movie that Andy from Toy Story watched which led him to fall in love with his Buzz Lightyear toy. In this film, Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Chris Evans) is a Space Ranger devoted to “completing the mission.” His intense focus on that principle costs him a lot. He doesn’t seem have the insight to see that life can have more purpose than just fulfilling a singular goal.
One of the transformations Buzz undergoes is that he comes to a realization that his friends had worthwhile lives without escaping the strange planet that they landed on. He had been convinced that he was a failure when he couldn’t rescue them. Several of the characters make mistakes that seems to be impossible to correct. Their level of distress is managed because a humorous solution exists to solve the problem. However, Buzz revealed that his career started with failures and the confidence of a mentor helped him succeed.
For some, the fact that a woman falls in love with another woman is too much to accept. Their disapproval seems to be reflexive. Diversity in the film is more deeply rooted than the superficial reading of a half-second kiss between two women as a horrific affront. When Alicia Hawthorne (voiced by Uzo Aduba) tells Buzz of her engagement, Buzz asks what “her” name is, indicating that he knew she was attracted to a woman. The final energy crystal had a rainbow of colors, a nod to the rainbow LGBTQ flag.
The story can be choppy with abrupt transitions. It was almost as if they had too much story to stuff into the allotted time so that scenes need to move quickly from one to the next. For example, their visit to a mine seems like an arbitrary plot device. Although the film foreshadows that particular event, other unexpected situations are science fiction cliches. The robotic cat SOX, (voiced by Peter Sohn) is a good comedian. The ludicrous bee-boop bee-boop when the cat is scanning can be silly, but the cat’s running commentary is also light-hearted. The cat also has some surprises built in.
There was a running gag about life on the planet being dangerous or even hostile. Buzz’s initial reaction is to report that the planet is uninhabitable but they stay. Perhaps this initial reaction was part of Buzz’s determination to escape. I couldn’t see the characters expressing many emotions but a crucial turning point, you see a hint of Buzz’s sadness. That tension quickly fades as the adventures restart.
Although the movie wasn’t outstanding, the story was engaging. It was an action science-fiction story and not a psychological commentary. If I wanted the film to make the characters seem more 3 dimensional, I was pretty much dooming myself to be disappointed.
The movie was good enough to see twice and I enjoyed it both times. The first I was able to see it in a local theater before it closed. The last movie I saw before the pandemic began was Onward, another Disney film. Now that both are available on Disney+ and BluRay, I probably won’t be able to see them on the big screen again.
The theater I would go to for movies has closed. The closest one near me is on the other side of town and requires driving in some of the most congested parts of Fort Wayne.
Right now, I don’t subscribe to any of the premium services. I’m not sure which, if any, to choose. I don’t have a lot of incentive to subscribe. My TV has been on only a couple of times in the past few months.
I discovered that they are showing Everything Everywhere All at Once in the local theater again. They had stopped showing for a couple of weeks but now it’s up again. They’re also putting it up at the prime time of 8:30. When I saw it before it was in the afternoon.
the-numbers.com reported that the number of theaters carrying it jumped from 170 to 1490 this weekend. They also had a big jump in the box office receipts. Including international box office receipts, the movie has already collected about 4 times more than it cost to make it. The income per theater hasn’t changed that much this first weekend, but the gross number are a lot better.
So far this year, it’s #1 by a substantial margin in the category “Top 2022 Theater Average at the Domestic Box Office”
I was thinking about going to see it again before it dropped out, but now I’m considering it again. I already saw Lightyear which is gone. I’d also like to see the new Minions and Marvel movies but it’s easy for me to decide to stay home rather than hit the road for a show.
Go see it! It’s really high energy, funny and touching.
Out of that simple nugget of a story, Evelyn is distracted by her tangled life. She can’t pay attention to what’s going on but denies her wandering attention. Through the film she finds what her life could have been.
Threaded through the story is humor and the ridiculous possibilities of life. Evelyn finds a way to lighten up each situation. She draws strength from the universes that she visits. Her ability to bring silliness is disarming. The film shows flashes of Evelyn in the different lives that comes from alternative choices. She can switch realities that are linked together so that Evelyn acquires new skills or memories.
When the action stops abruptly, there’s just the emotions of the Evelyn and her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Their chase ends in a stalemate, and they try to sort out what life means. They sit on the edge of a canyon watching the peaceful beauty.
The energy of the film grows out of control with montages of rapid cuts. The screen flits between brief views of Evelyn in many universes. She speeds through possibilities until she has found the resource that the current quandary needs. Googly eyes are used to represent mischief, inner sight and traversing life’s complexity.
The film balances humor, terror and sentimental feelings as the situation turns dangerous and then ludicrous and then emotionally difficult. A path through the multiverse is not easily mapped out. An app on the phone that the universe jumping version of her husband, Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), helps find the right path. The red pill is pressing a green button on the earpiece of a Bluetooth headset. Evelyn learns there she has so many possibilities because of her imagination and flexibility.
Eventually, she still can’t pay attention but is willing to come “back to earth” and acknowledge her quirks. The changes might not stop, but her zany character is game to find a way through them.
The section of the magazine that I appreciate the most is the fiction. The magazine regularly includes a short story. They are something I look forward to each week.
I’ve made a table with links to the stories organized by publication date. Most of the time, the online copy of the magazine also includes an interview with the author and a podcast where the author reads their story. The table includes links to those as well.
The page helps a reader find to the different stories if they want to go back and read an older story.
In the summer, I forget what it is like to be chilled and cold. The rain is the closest I come to that. I avoid the rain mostly unless I can wear a hat. My wardrobe of hats isn’t very fashionable. I’ve got some baseball caps and some knit stocking caps. Even though I want to keep my head dry, I don’t use them.
I got one of my hats when we were working with Macromedia to make the Flash library work with our screen reader, Window-Eyes. At GW, they complained that I never gave them the swag that we got.
The Macromedia hat is a kind of trophy. When I was at Purdue, I took a computer graphics class. One project was to simulate a 3-d moveable arm. The memorable part was that I did it so well that they gave me a special Megatek coffee mug as a prize. I feel that it is one of my favorite trophies. I still have it 35 plus years later.
I get chilled also when I get stuck working on a project and it seems like I am doing it wrong. This week I’ve been really devoted to a computer program. It is going well. I didn’t get very far but I am getting close. With all the effort that I am putting in, I’m glad that it is coming through.
It is a good day and I want for tomorrow to also be good. If I see people, I could be glad for my striving for a better life.
My friends have found the truth. I have said it aloud; now I’m in shame.
I thought they would forgive me. I wanted understanding and acceptance. Instead, their judgment was unanimous.
Will I be stuck as an eternal “I”? “We” and “our” are foreign words now. I know that I have made a grievous error. With no one to share with, I began to despair.
The days have been passing slowly. I cannot expect freedom again. The world around me is black. I can wish for friends, but it will be in vain. I will be alone again and again.
William Wayne Smith
One of my worries had been that I do something bad and lose a friend. My imagination can be vivid so that I can compound simple conflicts into a lost friendship. If I can’t forgive myself—why would anyone else?
This poem takes that fear to new levels. Not only have I made a mistake, it is so severe that everyone abandons me. They reject me because some secret sin had been revealed.
If I am alone, I cannot use “we” and “us” again. This is as if one mistake would be a dead end for my life in the world.
I make mistakes all of the time. They do not mean that I am unworthy of the caring and friendships that I cherish.
This poem paints a bleak outlook on reality. I don’t embrace that perspective, but my imagination could bring it forth at times.
There is an xkcd comic by Randall Munroe titled Nerd Sniping. In the comic, Black hat creates a game along a busy highway. When a mathematician, engineer, computer scientist or other nerdy type crosses the road, he yells out an interesting problem. He wins points if the victim freezes to think about the problem and is hit by a passing truck. Mathematicians are worth more points than physicists.
Poetically, today I got nerd sniped by a different xkcd comic. Bracket shows a fictional tournament listing people or items that are put against each other. Usually, the names are related by similar sounding names or by theme. For example, Mr. Spock, Doctor Spock and Doctor Octopus make one bracket. I remember a set of polls to run the tournament, but I can’t find a link to it.
I was looking through the list. I saw a few that I recognized but are less well known such as Amanda Palmer. I found one I didn’t know, Mark Shuttleworth. I went to his Wikipedia page and saw instantly why he was on the list.
The nerd sniping happened when I saw how much money he paid to be launched as a space tourist in 2002. The article gave an inflation adjusted value to 6 significant figures which was obviously more precise than is mathematically justified.
I spent an hour fixing that. Most of the time was learning how the {{Inflation}} tag works on Wikipedia. Nerd sniped!
W. Smith 