msb-0207 Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought"

msb-0207 Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought"

intro

Feedback comes first, so...

I am still unemployed and looking for anything that will pay the rent...

My mother's still hanging there.

I received a book "The Stuff of Thought" by "Steven Pinker", (ISBN: 978-0-670-06327-7) which I am I am reading "voraciously".

Its of course about one of my great obsessions, "words."

---- "Small Bodies" by: "Magnetic Four" http://www.magneticfour.net/

Feed Forward comes next, so...

This is "your" segment.

Say "your" piece on this segment.

Share with other MSers whatever "you" want to share.

Drop me an email: charles at MSBPodcast.com

And I would apreciate if someone could write a review of this podcast on iTunes [ http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=120932170 ] You can just select the link and, eventually, scroll down the iTunes page to "Customer Reviews"

---- "Stay Small " by: "The Receiving End Of Sirens" http://www.merchdirect.net/TripleCrownRecords/CDs/The_Receiving_End_Of_Sirens_The_Earth_Sings_Mi_Fa_Mi_CD?productid=8273

Feed Me comes third, so...

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That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

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---- "When Did You Get So Small?" by: "Todd Lerner" http://www.songforfree.com/

"Thesis:"

Just because I'm unemployed doesn't mean that life has stopped around me, or even in me. (I'm continuing the musical theme of "Small and Insignificant" that I started last episode because I just loved all the music I found on the PMN [the Podsafe Music Network] Its such a trip for me, to browse through the tens of thousands of songs looking for appropriate music [and occasionally being just so blown away by some artist or other that I have to rewrite or recast the theme of the particular episode.])

This episode is going to be a quiet one because Steven Pinker's book is about something that I love, "words" (its also about thought,) and, more specifically, its about "verbs."

---- "Small " by: "Amy Abdou" http://www.amyabdou.com/

"Synthesis:"

Now I am a great friend of "nouns" and "adjectives" but this book is making amply clear to me that I really don't "know" "verbs" as well as I should.

This must be the main difference between my mode of thinking, call it "Martian", and that of the rest of the world, call it "Human".

(Well... It certainly feels that way to me at times. Perhaps that explains why I was so enamored of formal languages and automata while the rest of the class was utterly bored and wondering "When are we ever going to use any of this shit anyway?"

But "Rovira Diagrams", which I shoved your way back in episode msb-0195, were, to me, a natural recasting into graphical form of a formal language that I had developed, way back when I was asked to solve a very real problem: documenting online systems.)

But is everybody else is thinking in terms of "verbs"? (When the use of nouns and a formal grammar and syntax are a much more rational way to describe computer systems.)

Now I wonder "why" people use these linguistic constructs, these "construals" to quote the book, even when these are not the most descriptive or accurate. (I tend to see relationships as discrete objects and I describe them as such using nouns, while the quote "normal way" unquote uses verbs [as in phrases like "Object A has many Objects B" {I use instead "Relationship R links One Object A and many Objects B". (The "links" are instantiated in connections.) (This leaves me with an explicitly defined relationship, which is manipulatable, instead of just something implicitly defined through the initial use of "has", which leaves you wondering why it is, what it is, where it is and what do you do with it?)}])

The difference between the "verbalizing" and my "objectification of the relationships"
may explain much. (The first part of dealing with a situation [in this case, its my extraterrestrial point of view on life, the universe and everything] comes with the language used to describe it.)

---- "Small " by: "adrienne pierce" http://www.adriennepierce.com/

"Conclusion:"

"The Stuff of Thought" by "Steven Pinker", (ISBN: 978-0-670-06327-7) is a book which is providing me with wonderful insight that may be more widely applicable than first meets the eye.

Sorry, but I have to read some more now.

---- "Insignificant" by: "Oscar Trim" http://www.garageband.com/artist/oscartrim

Outro

Yeah, I'm, avoiding things by focusing on minutia rather than seeing "the big picture"; the big picture is pretty freakin' scary.

Can you blame me?