Complétude, calculabilité, décidabilité!

The will to tongues

2012-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

Language skills have a seemingly high bragging rights/efforts to acquire ratio. No need to start early on as a kid, buy equipment and go to dedicated practice venues regularly, as with music and sports. Simply being able to decipher some cryptic foreign inscription puts an “educated” halo over your head. No surprise, many would like to learn another language just out of expectations of raised social prestige. But people are lazy and would try to pick “the most useful language” to learn.

How do we pick a third (fourth, fifth…) “useful” language? After we realize that it’s not necessarily a language with most speakers, we could invent some “influency” metric. But what if we major in liberal arts, and bringing in numbers kills the fun for us? We could look at a consensus about the same set of languages reached after a long and exhausting edit war (which is an absolutely legit way to create knowledge in humanities).

We’ll see that the “strictest” list of world languages is the list of historical maritime empires without Dutch, while the less strict one corresponds to greater land empires without Turkish. The nine languages listed include all six official languages of the United Nations. Are they really “global”? Let’s see:

Spanish and Portuguese have little use outside of South America, despite being formally “maritime”;
Russian and German haven’t been languages of colonial empires and have lost their cultural influence over the 20th century;
Arabic and Hindi-Urdu are dialect continuums, not languages, and respective standardized forms still have to compete with French and English at home;
Mandarin Chinese is hyped as a language of an emerging superpower, but remembering the example of Russian and Japanese, alarmism alone is a bad reason for diving into textbooks.

We’re left with English and French. The latter has the same weight as German or less these days (if the Francophone Africa is not considered), so studying something besides English, the local idiom and the mother tongue will not be immediately practical. But if the goal is to pass for a broad-minded Westerner, it makes no sense to miss some of the humanity’s greatest works created in French and German. Knowledge of pragmatics and the ability to recognize cultural references matter here.

To avoid the “impractical” languages doesn’t only mean to replace the original works with renderings and retellings, but also to deprive oneself of better understanding of English, uniquely built on both Germanic and Roman legacy. Of course, as the old nation states are being deconstructed in favor of a global utopia, the legacy of the Modern Age will disappear from the common curriculum just as the studies of Antiquity did, and the “impracticality” will be ridiculed even more.

Surrendered to the cloud

2011-09-08T00:00:00-07:00

Why would one need a «personal» server? Most common use is to maintain presence on the net under one’s own domain name, which is often associated with running HTTP, SMTP and XMPP daemons. Prudent people also might want off-site backups and a VPN as a countermeasure against malicious ISPs and coffee shop hotspots. And I’ve heard about a fad called «Minecraft» too.

I used to run lighttpd, postfix/dovecot, ejabberd, openvpn and rsync on a first-generation Apple TV sitting under my desk and connected to my home broadband. Then I moved and couldn’t neither bring the box with me nor hope that it won’t require physical attendance while I’m away, so I bought a VPS from Slicehost first, and switched to a cheaper one from RAM Host later.

Simply being responsible for yet another machine is a pressure. Even when it does not require routine administration, and even security updates are installed automatically, how can I be sure that somebody else did not get root there without checking from time to time? It’s just too much effort even for simple things like homepage, mail and storage. On the other hand, deciding to go for cloud services is hard — it’s my data strangers’ dirty hands will be touching!

But what difference does it make when compared to VPS? It doesn’t matter for the authorities which datacenter to subpoena or raid, and peeping admins are found everywhere. Homepage and backups are not sensitive to eavesdropping by the definition, because the latter is intended to be in public access and the former do not leave my laptop unencrypted regardless of the storage medium. Cloud provider lock-in is also not possible because I have another copies of data, again, by the definition.

Without hesitation, I moved them to GitHub Pages and Amazon S3 respectively. I have given slightly more thought to migration of mail and IM to Google Apps. But after all, my communication is exposed to many more parties than just mail provider, I have no control over those, I still don’t worry much, so I have to be careful about what I discuss electronically anyway (and you should too). Still, a probable issue is that my circle of contacts is being handed over.

As for the trusted last mile, I can live with university ssh SOCKS proxy for a while, I think. Or maybe, I’ll try Ipredator at last.

Man speaks English soon not, or Pax Sinica Redux

2011-08-15T00:00:00-07:00

The Roman Empire has two cultural heirs — Anglosphere (through Holy Roman Empire, Reformation and Enlightenment) and Russia (through Byzantium). The former is the champion of humanism, rationalism and free enterprise, and the latter relies on prophecies and rituals to make its people work (and die) for (carefully rationed amounts of) food and shelter in the name of Orthodox faith, or Europeanization, or worldwide proletarian revolution. China seems to have learned from both.

China has adopted Soviet methods to organize population into fodder for industry and military, and also conveniently borrowed Soviet nuclear and space programs, which are basic attributes of a superpower, while America provided markets and universities. There is no ready solution for establishing cultural dominance, which is impossible without changing the global lingua franca. Teaching Mandarin to speakers of other Chinese languages succeeded not because schools were controlled by the government but because learning a language similar to your own is relatively easy, just like Scandinavians do well in English and Bulgarians did in Russian. For the rest of the world a language depending on tones, rich on homonyms and lacking an alphabet is completely alien.

The prominent languages of the Roman Empire, Latin and Attic Greek, didn’t survive per se during the transformation of Western civilization from Roman to American, but Latin and Greek roots provide about 60% of modern English vocabulary, and the share is even higher among scientific, medical and legal terminology. Drawing an analogy, if China is to become the next big thing, Chinese vocabulary has to Anglicize, so the syllable-per-morpheme ratio increases, tones and homonyms become an excess, and there won’t be a reason to continue with logographic writing, which makes up for the pronunciation differences of varieties of Chinese and creates an illusion of languages being dialects. A radical language reform can even help to rewrite recent history and to get rid of traces of communist ideology.