For about a year now I’ve been learning more about auxiliary languages, and the more I learn the more intrigued I become. The main point of auxiliary languages was to make it easier to have a global language with which to speak to one another for the purposes of academia, literature, and commerce. A lot of traditional languages have a mishmash of old and crufty rules (English being one of the worst!) Auxiliary languages attempt to drop the unneeded grammar and syntax rules such as gender articles and get straight to the simple constructs.

According to Uncle Wikipedia, an auxiliary language is defined as follows,

[auxiliary language] is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language. An auxiliary language is primarily a second language.

While there are over a dozen auxiliary languages, the language I’ve found particularly interesting is InterLingua. It’s based primarily in Latin, with resemblances to English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, with some secondary roots in German and Russian.

The interesting thing is that it’s the most widely understood auxiliary language, and people who speak or understand nearly any romance language (Latin-based) can understand it without effort.

We’re currently learning it in our family using the very cool ProVoc software. It uses a form of spaced repetition to help you remember faster and in less time.

To see what it looks like, here’s the Lord’s Prayer in Interlingua:

Nostre Patre, qui es in le celos,
que tu nomine sia sanctificate;
que tu regno veni;
que tu voluntate sia facite
super le terra como etiam in le celo.
Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,
e pardona a nos nostre debitas
como nos pardona a nostre debitores,
e non duce nos in tentation,
sed libera nos del mal.

Try it out, it’s pretty interesting!

Faceball, the national sport of Flickr, now with a video tutorial and action photos!

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When I first started playing guitar, I looked up to the great bands and musicians like demigods of creative expression. I thought they could do no wrong, and I would constantly think how far I had to go still when I couldn’t keep my timing down, couldn’t nail that fingering, or would get my twos and fours shifted.

So reading a recent post by Stewart Copeland of The Police made me feel like we’re all human, and apparently we all have those moments.

Next time I can’t remember if we’re on the second half of the first verse or the first half of the second verse, I’ll remember this story and remind myself that once the show is done, “Screw it, it’s only music. What are you gonna do?”

I haven’t been following up too much on the Presidendial candidates and their stance on major issues. However, today Barack Obama spoke at a park across the street from my office, and it being such a nice day with the windows open, I managed to get a free 20 minute speech from a presidential hopeful.

A woman who introduced him, first introduced herself as a long-time Reno resident and a small-business owner. She then began to talk about Obama’s health care plan, and how it will be wonderful for small businesses. My ears perked up, also being a small business owner. Once Obama took the stage there was a huge applause. Thing is, once he started speaking, he spoke passionately but not very specifically. So while I was sitting at my desk listening to him, I began looking up his universal health care plan and found this:

From the Washington Post

Like former senator John Edwards (N.C.), who outlined his health-care goals in February, Obama would pay for his plan, which could cost more than $50 billion, by increasing taxes for people earning more than $250,000 and reversing tax cuts that President Bush approved. Obama would require almost all employers to offer insurance to workers or face a tax penalty, an idea that many businesses abhor and that is also in Edwards’s proposal. This employer mandate drove much of the opposition to the Clinton plan in 1994.

Umm, Ms. small-business-owner MC, the one who introduced Obama, do you even realize what his health care plan means for you? It will require you to offer insurance to your employees. Where will you find the money for this? You won’t. Instead what will happen is you will either lay off a person or two, or renegotiate payrates because the money has to come from somewhere, right? So take from the paycheck and put it toward healthcare. Right on.

Argh, when is Washington going to learn that you cannot mandate the free market? You give to one area, you take from another. It would be so beneficial if we looked at a nationwide high-deductible HSA plan for Americans–as outlined in The Undercover Economist–and let each person decide how little or much healthcare they need. And as most investors and economists know, having the entire nation saving and investing in those HSAs with that amount of money will do great things for the financial markets, with the investment influx.

Just read today that Last.fm was sold to CBS for $280M. The cool little list of song tracks on the sidebar of this blog is courtesy of Last.fm. I’m not sure how I feel knowing that a huge conglomerate is now withing full access of my listening habits.

I liked Last.fm because they were independent. However, I’m not sure I’d do anything different if I were Last.fm. You need capital to keep going; you build up your passion into a useful service, and you consider the reward for all the late programming nights and lost weekends.

Wonder what they’ll do with all that data though–makes one wonder huh?

In reading a discussion boardrecently, somebody posted a YouTube video about just how simple it is to create a pop star these days. I won’t ruin it, but have a look if you’re morbidly curious like I was.

Is this a good or bad thing? I admit to owning the same software the audio engineer on the video used to automatically tune the singer’s voice. It makes things easier, but does it make talent easier? You can be off a semitone or more in your vocal pitch, and AutoTune will still fix you, making you sound as pitch-perfect as Ella Fitzgerald. In a way, knowing this technology exists and is used daily is a little disappointing because it feels like it cheapens those who really do have amazing talent and skills. But would I wish we didn’t have that technical capability? I don’t know. It causes one to stop and think though, doesn’t it?

However, I feel that becoming a peformer of any art purely for the sake of fame is incredibly inauthentic and shallow. And this movie makes me dislike mass-produced music more than ever. Support your local open mic! Get to know your local musicians! Actually go to their show and support them. These days are better than ever for the independent artist to support themselves, but only if you get involved.

Ever heard of WordNet? Really?

I hadn’t either, until I stumbled across it from another site dealing with linguistics. (Caution, nerd talk ahead.)

WordNet is a research project done at Princeton that has produced an extremely interesting lexical dictionary for use in fields from linguistics to psychology to artificial intelligence. Where normal dictionaries simply give you definitions of words, WordNet gives you synonym sets (like a thesaurus), as well as this concept of hypernyms, defined as “The generic term used to designate a whole class of specific instances. Y is a hypernym of X if X is a (kind of) Y.”

Ooh, can you imagine the cool things you could build with this database? Auto-analysis of random text. Creating general subject overviews of a particular person based on their writing. Build an intelligent search engine that analyzes your own word usage on your web site and then finds relevant news items that talk about not only similar words, but similar concepts. Or in the Psychology field, use it to find word density and psychological state based on content. Lots and lots of applications.

MIT press has a WordNet book published, for deeper study on the subject.

I initally bought the new Modest Mouse album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank because, quite frankly, I was curious how the album came out given that Johnny Marr (of The Smiths fame) has now joined the band. I’m a huge Smiths fan, so hearing that the Portland group brought Marr in forced the $10 out of my hand and into the iTunes coffers.

In short, it’s great. The big jangly guitars reminisce of The Smiths just slightly, but still keep a big obnoxious rock sound ala Franz Ferdinand. I’ve had the album on heavy rotation the whole weekend, and unlike a lot of albums these days–I’m still not tired of it.

I was excited about the earlier OpenCongress find, because for me it demystifies the process of our civic duty of observing the process of government. It’s hard to discuss the faults of government if it’s not even clear how it works or what the current issues are.

So it surprised me that I had not heard of the Fair Tax Act of 2007 until now. This is a big deal! It suggests to dissolve the IRS and everything we know about taxation. Instead of getting taxed on what you make, you only get taxed on what you decide to spend, and only on a personal level. All business purchases are tax-free. It seems to have good traction, as 37 58 representatives are sponsoring or co-sponsoring the bill.

(from fairtax.org)

The FairTax plan is a comprehensive proposal that replaces all federal income and payroll taxes with an integrated approach including a progressive national retail sales tax, a rebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes up to the poverty level, dollar-for-dollar revenue neutrality, and the repeal of the 16th Amendment.

This nonpartisan legislation (HR 25/S 25) abolishes all federal personal, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, self-employment, and corporate taxes and replaces them all with one simple, visible, federal retail sales tax – collected by existing state sales tax authorities.

The FairTax taxes us only on what we choose to spend, not on what we earn. It does not raise any more or less revenue; it is designed to be revenue neutral. So it is also cost neutral – the final cost for goods and services changes little under the FairTax. The FairTax is a fair, efficient, transparent, and intelligent solution to the frustration and inequity of our current tax system.

The FairTax:
• Abolishes the IRS
• Closes all loopholes and brings fairness to taxation
• Ensures Social Security and Medicare funding
• Brings transparency and accountability to tax policy
• Allows American products to compete fairly
• Reimburses the tax on purchases of basic necessities
• Enables retirees to keep their entire pension
• Enables workers to keep their entire paycheck

After reading how it impacts small businesses, median-level income households, real-estate and homeownership, I absolutely support this bill and really hope it gets pushed through as law for 2009.

I’m not huge fan of political persuasion, but if you think this would be a good bill to pass, you can sign a petition here.

Read more at OpenCongress or Fairtax.org.