erratio

So as part of phonetics class we watched a documentary about deafness (no, I'm not entirely sure why this was in phonetics class either) called Sound and Fury, following two related families with deaf children and their discussions about whether or not to get the kids cochlear implants.

Anyway, in the end the deaf parents with the deaf 5 year old girl decided not to get her a cochlear implant, while the deaf 11 month old with the hearing parents from deaf families decided to get him the implant. I can't help feeling that in the end all the justifications and reasoning given came down to wanting their kid to be like them. And I've moved from thinking that it's their kid and they have the right to raise them in their culture to thinking that raising them in your culture is fine but they should probably also get the implants.

Reasons given by the deaf parents (and other people in the deaf community) for not wanting the implant:
* it's unnatural, it will make them like a robot
* it's their body, they should be allowed to make the decision themselves when they're older (except that if you don't learn how to speak relatively young it's basically impossible to learn to speak fluently later)
* you must be ashamed of Deaf culture/you think we're not good enough/the child won't have a Deaf identity/I'm deaf and I did just fine
* it doesn't even work that well (I think the figure was 20% getting good usage out of it, and the kid has to spend a lot of time in hearing environments or they'll fall back on signing too much)
* Deaf culture will go extinct if everyone gets implants

Reasons given by the hearing parents and grandparents for wanting the implant
* The kids should not have to grow up isolated and made fun of or stared at for being deaf
* It's a disability, if your whole family was crippled you would jump on a treatment that fixed it. Why should deafness be any different?
* It will give them access to both the Deaf and hearing world/it will open up more potential choices
* A lot of deaf kids get terrible education; the average reading level of a deaf highschooler is 4th grade (might be partly cos deaf kids are effectively forced to learn a foreign language to read, since sign languages have wildly different syntax and morphology to English, and the phonology is completely untranslateable)

The family who opted to keep their kid implant-free ended up moving to Maryland to live in a much bigger deaf community next to an awesome school for the deaf, where random people in the supermarket and restaurants would often know a bit of sign. One thing the father said as this move was in process really stood out for me as hammering home just how much identity politics plays a role in deafness in the US: "[at our old home] I felt caged in, like they wanted to jail me. Here, I feel comfortable and safe". The grandmother accuses them of trying to escape and of trying to put up a fence, both of which felt apt to me. If the hearing world wants to cage deaf people, then by moving into a deaf community the family is basically just choosing a big enough cage for themselves that they can pretend the walls don't exist.

Also of interest: some of the deaf community did have managerial jobs in hearing workplaces. They relied heavily on email, writing and interpreters, but they got by okay. And the hearing mother, whose parents are both deaf, had a crappy time growing up - she had to get years of speech therapy because her deaf family couldn't provide a speech environment for her to learn from, she had to put up with the other kids making fun of her parents and deaf people constantly, and she spend a lot of her time playing interpreter for her parents.

Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

I acquired this book seven or eight years ago, when the awesome lecturer in my first-year compsci course kept telling us what a great book it was and how we should all read it. I then spent the next six  or seven years getting a couple of chapters in before getting distracted (sometimes by the exercises he gives the reader, more often by the constant references to fugues, which give me the urge to go listen to some), then coming back to the book later and deciding that I couldn't remember the first chapters well enough and needed to start over. I finally got through a large chunk of it during the summer. I've now stalled again but this time I don't expect to go back to it anytime soon.

The book is about the nature of mind and computation, with side-excursions into language, music, and lots of other areas. Each chapter is preceded by a Dialogue between Hofstadter's characters of Achilles and the Tortoise (and later some others), with the topic of the Dialogue foreshadowing the material covered in the chapter.  Hofstadter writes like a philosopher, albeit a more interesting one than most. For those who've had the good fortune to never have read a philosophy paper, I mean that his writing style is long-winded and meandering. I get the impression that he's way too impressed with his own writing cleverness for his own good, and would have benefited from an editor making him cut the length in half. Even some of the Dialogues suffer from this.

As for the content... I would have loved this book if I'd read it when I first got it, seven or eight years ago. He does a good job of illustrating Goedel incompleteness, recursion, and most of the other topics in the mind and computation cluster. But I've yet to read anything in GEB which is new to me, because my interest in those topics means that I spent the last several years learning them in more digestable chunks. Overall, my recommendation for this book would be to skim the Dialogues, and then only read the accompanying chapter if the Dialogue shows you some really interesting ideas that you've never encountered before.

The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

These are the first two books of what Rothfuss promises will only be a trilogy. The fantasy series starts in the present day, where Kote the innkeeper lives in a quiet village, while a war goes on somewhere far away and there are rumours of monsters and strange creatures being seen nearby. A chronicler comes in, forces Kote to admit his identity as the legendary Kvothe, and gets him to tell his story, so that it can be recorded for posterity. The bulk of each book then follows Kvothe's retelling of his past, with occasional interludes to the present day. Kvothe, we learn, is both extremely clever and very dextrous. He learns music, acting, and general social skills from his extended family, the Edema Ruh (read: Gypsy equivalents, but without the criminal aspects), magic from the University he eventually ends up in, swordwork from a warrior race, and lovemaking from one of the Fae. Lest you think that Kvothe is completely without flaw, he's also arrogant, proud, impatient, and sometimes far too clever for his own good. He also spends a ridiculous amount of time mooning over his ladylove, a mysterious woman who seems to be calling herself a different name every time he sees her and alternately welcomes him and pushes him away.

Patrick Rothfuss is an amazing writer, tying together the present-day narrative, the retelling in the past, and lots of stories, songs, and legends recounted by various characters at various points. Unlike Lord of the Rings, where the poems and songs were distractions from the narrative, nothing that Rothfuss writes is completely irrelevant; but he also manages to avoid Checkhov's Gun syndrome since he doesn't go out of his way to point at any of the foreshadowing but instead lets it do double-duty as world-building background and possible foreshadowing. The story is character-driven, with a large cast of memorable characters, some of whom are awesome and some of whom I wanted to punch in the face for being so vivdly annoying. There's also more plot than you can shake a stick at, but it sneaks up on you rather than being given centre stage - you feel like you're reading about the day to day life of Kvothe the student, and suddenly you realise that if you connect all these background points, there's lots of stuff going on or potentially going on in all the different time periods that he describes.

I would recommend the books to everyone who likes fiction. I got through each book in a couple of days, despite their being large enough to clobber a mugger with.

Yesterday I woke up at 4am to go to the TEDxSydney live broadcast event of TEDxLong Beach. For anyone who's been living under a rock, TED is an organisation whose tagline is "ideas worth spreading". Their basic mode of operation is to get people who have done interesting things or have interesting ideas, and get them to explain it to an audience with the aid of a slideshow. And then they upload high quality recordings of those talks to their website and let people watch them for free. Oh and they also have the TED prize, which involves giving some money and a nifty sculpture to someone who is awesome, who then makes a a wish for that money to be spent towards, and then random people from the audience, who are themselves usually influential, amplify that wish by offering extra money or contacts or whatever.

Anyway, so the TEDxLong Beach event was staged in four sessions throughout the day, with the first starting at 3:30am Sydney time. I did not make it to that session, unsurprisingly. I did however make it to the other three, and thought it might be worthwhile to write my impressions up for those poor friends of mine with jobs who couldn't take the day off to listen to a bunch of people monologuing about how to change the world. I'll be writing up each session in a separate post, partly because my sleep cycle is still shot to hell and I'm ready to fall into a bed at any moment, partly because I'm terrible at finishing long posts, and partly because I saw at least twelve different talks and that's a bit too much information to read in a single sitting. I'll be using this post to put links in to the session posts as I get them done.

Part 1

Part 2

Bonus review of Deb Roy (cognitive neuroscientist, one of the earlier speakers) from Wired

The plot is decent but manages to fall short of epic despite the usual "topple the world order to save it from evil" stuff, the characters start out incredibly annoying but eventually get less so (with the exception of Vanille, who has both the most annoying voice and the most annoying dialogue I've ever seen. Also my current lack of hatred for the characters might just be simple exposure). The mid to end part of the game where you're allowed to run around and do all the cool stuff is... disappointing. The world only has 5 or 6 (albeit large) areas to run around in, the only sidequest/minigame things you can do are bounty hunting (to be specific, killing monsters. No "retrieve my purse I left it in that lake" kind of thing) and treasure hunting from the back of a chocobo. There are no people anywhere that you can interact with, and the monsters all fit into a relatively small number of templates such as 'flan', 'behemoths', 'flying dragon thingies'. The graphics are gorgeous, the music is highly disappointing. The combat system has swapped in micromanaging your characters for micromanaging your party tactics, and the score you get from the battle (which fuels your "do awesome stuff meter" and includes summons) is dependent on finishing the battle as fast as possible, so it turns into something of a reflex-based/button-mashing experience. I personally enjoyed the combat as switching between party tactics is something of an art form, but it's not friendly towards people who like to have time to plan.

Overall, the game ends up being pretty average. The plot is disappointingly short, the world, usually a star exhibit in its own right, is physically large but conceptually tiny. I'm increasingly coming away from my gaming sessions with the feeling that they spent all the development money on graphics and voice acting, but forgot to develop the content to go with it. The end result is an interactive movie that's fine as long as you don't want to do anything outside of combat or gawking at the pretty scenery.

Because I'm bored but not yet bored enough to go do anything really constructive :p

Brisingr, by Christopher Paolini

The latest in the Eragon trilogy series. It's been so long since I read the first two that it was largly an exercise in remembering who the characters were and what the heck was going on and stuff. As such, I feel like I can't do a proper review. Instead I will rely on arbitrary point scores to point out what I did and didn't like. +10 points for turning into more than just a Star Wars clone. -30 points for turning from a trilogy into a four-parter. +20 for decent characterisation, especially Eragon, although I found myself wanting to slap the leader of the rebel forces for being such a control freak.  -40 for really horribly done foreshadowing near the end that led to a really predictable outcome about 10 pages later. +20 for Elva, the not-so-little girl cursed by Eragon to help everyone else (the resolution of that subplot is pretty cool imho). -20 for having dragons sound so retarded when he's narrating from their point of view. +10 for narrating from dragon point of view at all, so that we get to see what Saphira thinks about events.
Summary: It wasn't bad, it wasn't brilliant. At this point I'm still reading because I'm invested, rather than because I particularly enjoy Paolini's writing/plotting/characters.

Megarace 3: Nanotech Disaster, PS2

I picked this racing title up sometime around the Christmas/New Year period, hoping that it would be like Wipeout. Instead I got one of the worst gaming experiences I've ever encountered. It's completely single-player (in a battle-racing game). The track isn't distinctive enough against the background, leading to me frequently bouncing off the walls purely because I couldn't see the track clearly. There's no sense of friction or speed while you're racing. Inertia only rarely comes in when you deliberately choose a vehicle with lousy handling. The Arcade mode is so easy that at one point I crashed 3 times in a row and was still comfortably in the lead when I finally got back into the race. I can't comment on the Career Mode because it's mysteriously greyed out and nothing I do seems to unlock it (and I refuse to look online, because this should be basic). Your racer can switch between using it's energy for attack, defense or speed but to switch between them you have to press the direction stick, leading to many accidental changes of module. Furthermore, they don't even use most of the regular buttons so it's not like they couldn't have located it there.
Summary: This game fails on just about every level it's possible for a game to fail on. I'm sorry that I paid for it at all, and now have no idea how I'm going to offload it.