Language

Language

A sunny late Saturday morning in July. I put on my gym shorts, play a Davie Bowie album on my phone, and start running. “The seawall is beautiful”, I think. In English, and for a moment I find my subconscious’s choice of language surprising. Some thoughts pass through as voiceless, immediate concepts while others are a “voice” that talks to me. Of the latter, my head has been alternating between Hebrew, English, and Spanish for the large part of my life. About a third of my inner voice speaks to me in English, Spanish happens on extremely rare occasions, and Hebrew takes the majority.

Inner world

As I spend more and more time in Vancouver I feel like English takes a larger part in my inner voice, but it all depends on context. Thinking about what I’m going to say before saying it is almost exclusively English at this point. Thinking about computer science has been in English for years. Having growing up with my Spanish-only speaking chef for a grandfather, thinking about food is in Spanish. Math is exclusively Hebrew.

Perception

Different languages create different realities for native speakers. For good or bad. Having Hebrew as my native tongue makes me see the world in a dichotomy of male and female: busses and computers are male, bicycles and restaurants are female, cars can be either (אוטו Oto is male, מכונית Meḥonít is female, both words mean “car”)

I wonder how my friends whose native language is English see objects. I wonder what crazy world my Spanish native friends see when they look at a male restaurante. I wish I could switch my world view as easily as I can switch the language I speak.

Math

I try to switch to English when I’m thinking about numbers, so I’ll be less confused by day to day arithmetic and basically just to immerse myself in the local language. I pick two random numbers - “Eight times seven is fifty six”. Too easy. I run in front of a building numbered 786. “Eighty six times seven is…” abstract numbers churn inside my head until the answer spews: “…שש מאות ושתיים”. Shit. David Bowie sings “It Ain’t Easy” in my ears. Amusing coincidence. I shift my focus to something else. Maybe next time.

Accent

A while back I was talking to a friend about laptops and I mentioned something about the battery, it came out sounding like “buttery” and we both laughed at this. A few weeks later I mentioned wanting to find an accent elimination coach and he said he’s against it - he would miss my adorable accent induced funny times. “In two years, you won’t find it funny, but I will still sound out of place.” We didn’t really expand on this. I have a weird accent in English. Almost nobody can guess where I’m from, not even other Israeli expats. I don’t have any theory as to how this came to be.

Vocabulary

Studying in English felt surreal at first. Most of the English lectures I had in my life were on YouTube or TED. Getting used to having this as a daily reality took some time. Teaching a lab in English is a doubly new experience, I didn’t even know what was going on there for the first few times. My students are sweet and they don’t even react when I stutter, misuse/mispronounce a word, or pause for a couple of seconds to think of the right word to use. Having an active social life in English still feels weird, and I’m not sure why that is. I’ve noticed that I feel more comfortable and can convey more complex thoughts when I’m speaking with friends who are also non-native English speakers (who are not Hebrew speakers) and I stutter and shy away more when there are native speakers in the crowd. It feels as if every deep, subtle word in my vocabulary is erased.

…

Languages shapes your world and I struggle to keep mine complex.

Probability function of reading a section in an academic paper

P(abstract) = 0.99

P(introduction) = P(effect of assignment on prof's opinion of me) × P(I care about prof's opinion of me)

P(related works) = P(introduction) × 0.9 when related works is the second section

P(related works) = 0.01 when related works is the second to last section

P(discussion) = 1 - P(I'm reading this paper after midnight)

P(conclusion) = P(introduction)

P(future works) = P(I'll get asked to discuss possible future works in class)

P(acknowledgements) = P(my name is in that section) = 0

Otherwise P(section i) = P(section (i-1)) × 0.9

Route 443

Read this first: http://www.btselem.org/freedom_of_movement/road_443 This is a map of route 443 and how it compares to highway 1: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=215695422329710637677.0004d5751d60dafee9b0e Highway 1, in red, and route 443, in blue, are about the same length (both in distance and time it takes to get from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and vice versa) - but to get from Jerusalem to Modi’in it doesn’t make much sense to use Highway 1. Both of them have very beautiful views. In 2005 two cousins moved to Modi’in, and their parents followed a year later. I was living with my parents in Jerusalem at the time. Whenever we were driving to dinner at my aunt’s place we used Highway 1 because my parents were afraid of the violence on road 443. As the time passed the violent attacks became a distant memory and my parents got more comfortable driving to Modi’in on 443 and eventually started using it to get to Tel Aviv, where my brother and I had moved. My brother and I also got comfortable using route 443 to visit our parents in Jerusalem. I always knew there was some moralistic problem with this road, but it was just a way to get from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for me. Whenever I got to where 1 and 443 split I just let my GPS app decide for me, based on which road was less congested at the moment. But the feeling that I’m playing a small part in something wrong was always there at the back of my head. Every couple of years the military checkpoint on the side of the road that’s closer to Jerusalem moved farther away from Jerusalem and into Palestinian land. It wasn’t by much, 500 meters at first, 2 km after, but the general feeling was that “we” are enforcing a new reality by silently annexing that land. The checkpoints also changed from ad-hoc tents to semi-permanent structure, to full-blown construction projects I can only estimate in the hundred-thousand dollars range (at least.) All the while, Israeli settlers were feeling more and more comfortable on the road; it was mostly the billboards: “5 rooms villa in Bet Horon.” Very affordable. Last week I was driving to Jerusalem and my GPS app told me to take 443, I blindly followed. This was the first time I drove there during the day in months. About ten minutes beyond the checkpoint after Modi’in I saw something new: a huge sign with the name ”Benjamin” and the image of a roaring lion. All of a sudden the feeling from the back of my head came forward and I was filled with disgust. Benjamin was one of the twelve tribes of Israel, the tribe that lived in this area thousands of years ago. These settlers, with the tiny gesture of placing this sign, are claiming historic connection to the tribe of Benjamin and by extension to the land. I Don’t know if they believe it themselves or are just using it to further their cause. I don’t know if that matters. I want to consider myself a moralistic person, it's amazing how easily one losses track of what they believe is right and what is wrong, because it's comfortable to just drive on 443. I don't want to do that anymore.

Picking a lab desk

I started going to weekly research meetings in the Software Practices Lab (SPL), which is the lab that I intend on joining and doing my research in after I finish with my courses (maybe even before?)

There are twelve personal desks in this lab, numbered on top in the following diagram:

Given the choice, I would prefer a desk where I wouldn't have my back to the corridor, so either 3, 4, 7, 8, 11 or 12.

But, given that I'm me, I won't be satisfied with a finite set of six numbers. I need to math it.

Wolfram|Alpha to the rescue! The series we want is:

Because… you know… this is preferable to doing stuff I actually need to do.

My love/hate relationship with Christmas

My hate towards Christmas begins annually around October when Starbucks replaces their standard white cups with their festive Christmas cups. The cups don’t explicitly celebrate Christmas, they celebrate the “winter holidays”, but in reality they use a red/green theme with drawings of snow flakes, evergreen conifers, and triangular hats with a pompom at the top. Of course, none of these is individually a Christmas thing, but no person with the slightest shred of critical thinking will doubt which holiday Starbucks really wants us to celebrate.

The white-orange traffic cone logo of VLC (a video player desktop application) dons a Santa hat throughout December. Some people complained on the support forum that they find the icon offensive. The lead developer at first defended his position saying that the Santa hat has nothing to do with Christmas (take a moment to let the irony of this statement sink in), completely dismissed the complaints as overly sensitive, and told people that if they don’t like it they can wait until the end of December or rewrite the app since it is open source. Later on they added a setting to disable “automatic icon changes”. The setting is hidden deep inside the advanced settings menu and is enabled by default. The developers assume that I want to celebrate Christmas, because they assume the only users that matter are Christians or have a Christian background.

Facebook added snow to the chat heads. Now I can’t chat with anyone without being reminded of Christmas. What if I don’t want to celebrate that holiday? What if I don’t live in the northern hemisphere, or a region where it snows at all?

Going outside is just as bad. Being surrounded constantly by Christmas trees and lights, hearing Christmas music being blasted from every speaker, reading the thinly veiled “holiday” greetings on shops, are all constant reminders that my religious beliefs (or lack thereof) are only secondary here. I’m being tolerated, not respected or celebrated.

People who celebrate Christmas always try to play down the Christian part of it (have you noticed the shared stem of those two words?) and insists that it’s a Canadian holiday (or American, or whichever country you’re from) — in effect this just ties Christianity to the entire country even more.

Of course, Christmas isn’t inherently bad. People celebrate it by being with their family and friends. They exchange gifts, they enjoy good food, they are having fun.

I celebrated Christmas this year with my boyfriend in Paris. Everything around me was pretty, the food was incredible, my boyfriend and his family were happy and I received more gifts than I could imagine. I was genuinely happy. How could I complain?

But still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m celebrating someone else’s holiday.

“If our society ever opted for Orwell's Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person's activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.” —Brawne Lamia

From Hyperion (1989), by Dan Simmons