Find the archive of past entries at archive.htm. Today's entry is at daily.htm.
Friday August 2, 2002 To Maxville |
Ten o'clock, and soon to bed, for it's up at 4:30 tomorrow and into the car at 5:45 for the drive to Maxville where we'll compete and later eat, though the breakfast we ate will be long gone by half eight when I play away for the judge. And I just put way too many rhymes in my sentence. Still there's much to do. |
Wednesday August 7, 2002 What? |
I don't know if I've ever just deleted an entry wholesale like I just did. Ah well. I was writing and all angry, and now I'm not writing, I guess. Here's hoping tomorrow will be better. |
Monday August 12, 2002 Bagpipes on the mountain |
With the help of my dad, I played bagpipes on top of Mt. Jo down in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks. It was so good. I'd like to write more about it, but now isn't the time. I need to sleep, so I won't write more, but I wanted at least to have a cheerful entry up, so here is one. Yay! |
Thursday August 15, 2002 Meaning |
Oh, never mind. What is it about August that just seems to make everything hateful so much of the time? Oh, right, I shouldn't write this here, because everyone will now wonder what it means. Reading Godel, Escher, Bach tonight, where is the meaning in what I just wrote? I wrote it in English, apparently. But intention can be divorced from grammatical construction--regard the classic Swarthmore linguistics phrase "I saw her duck". Now, that one is easily explained because you can have separate parse trees for the duck example, ones that are obviously acceptable to any English speaker. One would be harder pressed to find alternate syntactic analyses of my earlier paragraph. But I wonder... where does meaning enter into the written word? Is it enough merely to read the words I write in order to understand how I was feeling, what I thought, what I meant with the words, or is a necessary component of the process of understanding my meaning that of predicting my mental state at the time of writing? If so, what happens if you get it wrong? Or right? This becomes a thornier issue if one considers machine-generated language, such as that which comes spewing forth from the various joke generators on the Internet. Generate a unique Theory Chick paper, a new Irish gaelic insult, whatever. If the truth of meaning is contained, in part, in the accurate perception of the author's intent at time of writing, is it possible for machine-generated language to have meaning? Can computers formulate intent? I wouldn't say that I've made any sort of an argument here (although I had one earlier this evening), but it is worthwhile to point out that much of the discussion depends on premises that are probably false. Still... interesting. Had my first solo piping lesson with Ed Bush yesterday, up in Canada. It was good, I think. It always takes a little while to get used to a new teacher's style, but I hope this will be productive, for at least a little while. On the way home, I saw many rabbits along the road. |
Saturday August 24, 2002 Success in competition |
North Lanark Highland Games. I got 2nd in Junior Amateur Piobaireachd, tied for fifth in strathspey and reel, and didn't place in march. The band won grade 4 and nearly won grade 3; we "settled" for 2nd place. A good day. |