Young Writers Society

Ayer's Verification Principle

I could not tell how
humans can know right from wrong,
not even this bridge
can predict energetic
flashes of watery light.


An attempt to define meaning: a sentence S is meaningful if and only if its truth value can be verified (by observation). It ruled out a lot of sentences that seem meaningful, as meaningless, including moral statements. The verificationists later admitted the kinds of meaning this can accommodate is really quite narrow.

Text Analytics Abcedarian

Alphabet soup left to dry
becomes an alphabet fossil.
Clusters of words coalesce,
dancing dust motes overhead.
Effortfully meaningless, the eater must
find the head and tail of it,
give it a life.

High temperatures, a stuffy restaurant
in the dark corners of downtown.
Juice bar, abandoned: only Jupyter.
k-means little, the static, the noise.
Lullaby for unsuspicious dreamers.
Meddling is a must, so we
needle our way through
or crack the surface.

Pie is the next available alternative.
Questions upon questions, we
rack our library stacks to answer.
Standardisation of the salt shakers,
terror of the tumeric.
U don't put tumeric
victoriously into
Western cuisine.

X-axis is running late, runs out of time, eventually.
Y-axis only had the chance to finish lunch, on the
zebra crossing -- a splash of spilled soup.


An absurd abcedarian about timed lunch, trying to make sense of text similarity models and the Python Standard Library.

Spectrogram Worlds

Our voices paint
black ocean waves
and some dark comets
streaking, racing each other
over a sky of noise.

Every so often
a portal opens --
the sound sizzles
into silence

only to resume
tracking paths
along the mountainsides
as though the water
never ceased.

We try to chart maps
of these movements
in red, peppering
the winding routes
and forming
constellations that sigh
with the wind.


Spectrograms are really hard and I need to romanticise them. They look quite beautiful, actually, when you switch off the formants layer and can see the actual, well . . . Formants.

There was a front vowel

There was a front vowel who tried
to run from the linguist and hide,
it hiked up its skirts
and heaped up its shirtsː
a tumbling lateral disguiseǃ

You've got to watch out for those vowel transitions! And also hope you don't mistake one for what is actually a whole other vowel entirely @_@ An overly high formant 1 (or fundamental frequency) could mean either there's something about the [i] being influenced by an adjacent sound, or that's not actually an [i] at all, but an [ɪ]. Hmm, the more I write this note, the more I'm thinking it might be the latter . . .

Outline: A story about a philosophy student

Just a bunch of idea notes for now!

ValueError Mismatch

Code: Select all

ValueError: Length of list vectors must match length of `data` when both are used, but `data` has length 39 and the vector passed to `languages` has length 20.

(we are operating at a surplus of talk
an unbalancing surplus of talk.)

file = os.path.join(ai.data_dir, "The_World.gz")
df = pd.read_minds(file)
print(df)

#doesn't work

(we are unbalancing talk
an embarrassing surplus of talk.)

#still trying to debug this
type('languages')
directionless.core.too_much.too_little

The problem of having a lot of one kind of data and not enough of the others.

Nominalisation

I drew {a diagram of the musculature of the arm}
in my year seven Science notebook.

It was a hard and lonely little thing
pressed into paper
coloured a powder red
having won itself ten marks.

Real muscles are always losing,
pulling against each other, giving way,
shedding dead cells like
sawdust flakes.

But all I had was {a diagram of the moving
of the musculature of the arm}
now
locked in place until the paper rotted.




I was reading a paper (Fang 2004) today about scientific literacy and features of scientific language. One of the features described was abstraction. When someone tries to write, say, a science textbook, they prefer to write nouns and noun phrases where in spoken language, they might have used verbs and adjectives. The paper argued this was because nouns allow something to become a participant in a sentence and so allowed more use of general statements, such as 'the moving of the musculature of the arm allows us to manipulate objects of interest'. :] I thought it was interesting, because it shows an area of difficulty. Reading these super long noun phrases and making sense of them is hard, and yet somehow they are necessary for talking about science in a 'scientific' way. (The paper also cited a study showing that instances of 'messy' mixing of informal and scientific registers tended to confuse students even more, because they were unable to acquire the language of science in full.)

Edit: Another point that made me sort this under 'Epistemology' was also that nominalization tends to 'fix' things in place, make them unchanging, whereas in real life things do change and flux all the time. So that reminded me of something we discussed regarding the Western construct of 'knowledge' in Philosophy classes. For example, when we discuss muscles that move in the abstract, we kind of take it for granted that the muscles do indeed always move this way, so we can classify this movement, maybe even put it in a taxonomy, etc. Whereas an alternative view might be to see not a general 'moving of the muscle', but to see many diverse instances of muscles that move, each in different ways. However, this way of viewing it makes it more difficult to discuss, generalise, compare and synthesise, which are all operations that are staples in Western Science. Ultimately, I think the paper by Fang is trying to describe Science as this mode of meaning(or knowledge) making.

This isn't all Scientific language though, just what the Positivists think it is
Feyeraband has argued against it extensively (tho I think I've mentioned him previously too)

@Starve Sure! I'm just writing to capture the point of that paper I read. There could definitely be room to work with a different definition of Science.

Oopsie

Berkeley's Haiku

These blue curtains are
bluer if my eyes would just
receive more blue light.
-
The retina cups
one-out-of-five of my world:
bed, blanket and chair.
-
There may not be a
bed in my room, but there is
certainly softness.
-
Breathe in the white clouds --
'Matter' does not matter,
this bright mid-morning.


Haiku from George Berkeley's perspective, whose thought shaped the philosophical position known as idealism. For Berkeley, the existence of things boils down to what we can perceive of them with our senses. A chair is the hardness of the chair, the colour of it, the motionlessness, which we can tell by touch, sight, etc. He denied the existence of and the necessity of mind-independent objects, and argued that all phenomena are still explainable and every physical thing still usable even if everything is ideas.

From what I gather, Berkeley seems to be the kind of person that focuses on the here-and-now. Being a bishop, he's convinced that the regular everyday happenings of the world, like the sun appearing to rise and set, are better evidence of the Christian God's greatness than miracles are. With that in mind I wrote the above haiku, based on some things I could see from my writing desk.

Remix: A Cup of Them, They Was Not Of (Of)

We had fun at the Remix Poetry Workshop today! One of the remixes I did was of a NaPo 2022 poem that itself involves remixing some images from a 2020 poem. (That was a very loose remix though! Looking at it now I think there's a lot of difference between one and the other.)

At the workshop I did a cut-up remix, rearranging the words from the original to make a new poem. It was looking really good at first but the problem was I was intent on using ALL of the words in the new poem, and I had a lot left over. It made me realise there were a lot of function words like "of" and "they" especially that I hadn't really needed to get across the imagery of the original poem. That was interesting because reducing function words was one of the things I had been striving for in NaPo 2022.

In any case, I tried incorporating the function words leftover as much as possible. I even cut up the original title to give me at least one noun to spare and then meshed it with the function words to make a new title xD. Here is the poem:



While I liked the additional movement that some of the function words added, like "but" for contrast, this version felt a lot more cluttered and unnecessary compared to before I added in those function words. So then I tried cutting out 'some' of the function words and ended up with this second (third? fourth? what am I counting from lol) version.

Ooo! This is great! I really didn’t notice it until after I read the second version but without the function words it sounds really nice. I think like you said earlier the different really did affect it. I feel like the first flowed really but the general feel of the second poem was nicer and flowed in its own way. To use a metaphor, I feel like the first poem was like rapids but there were also logs (function words) blocking the way and the second one was like a calm river, there was time to look around and really enjoy the atmosphere and setting.

Thanks for those comments @Moonglade! Really insightful

The Tangerines

Someday I will
take responsibility
for the tangerines
that fell out of my pocket
even if
not today,
not entirely.

I scribble on my to-do list
to get bigger pockets, to learn to sew,
among other things
like picking up the peels
and licking the juice from my fingertips.



__
Mostly here for documentation. May revise, maybe not.