•nd•rst•nd•ng t•xt w•th••t v•w•ls

In written language, consonants are more informative than vowels simply because there are more of them and each one occurs less often. You c•n •nd•rst•nd t•xt q••t• w•ll w•th••t v•w•ls, because the consonants carry enough information to determine the words.

But •a• •ou u••e•••a•• •e•• •ui•e •e•• •i••ou• •o••o•a••s? No you can’t! (That was : can you understand text quite well without consonants?)

(Ancient Hebrew was, I believe, written with consonants only, which leads to occasional ambiguities, in instances where a word could plausibly contain more than one variant vowel, yielding different meanings.  This has given rise to difficulties in interpreting early manuscripts of the Hebrew bible, though I don’t have an example to hand.)

But in spoken language, it’s the other way round. In contrast to text, studies of people listening to speech show a ‘vowel superiority effect’; that is, vowels seem to carry more information, because listeners perform more accurately when understanding sentences with missing consonants than with missing vowels.

The categories of vowels and consonants, however, are problematic as units of information. Researchers are looking for new categories such as using phoneme transitions, onsets and offsets, and other more fine-grained components. 

Did I understand that last sentence? No! I haven't a clue!  But the first bit about vowels and consonants was cool.   

It’s from an article in the 12th August edition of Nature, headed Information Theory, by one Michael S. Lewicki.   I visit the Boole Library at University College Cork once a week on average and I always make it my business to look through recent copies of Nature.  Often an article will catch my eye where I can only glean a few nuggets of information before having to abandon the enterprise entirely, but even so, it’s worth it!
 

Fruit on my trees! A real windfall!

Plums!

90 years old?

First time in 15 years

Unreasonably excited about my apples and plums. None of these trees has ever fruited before.  

Red apples : I planted this tree 15 years ago (with 4 others) and till now they have proved a huge disappointment. 

Green apples : this tree is probably 90 years old and looks sickly. I've heard that a tree will fruit prolifically just before it dies, and I wonder if this is the case here. 

Plums : this tree seeded itself 5 years ago, along with half a dozen others. Or maybe they are suckers from a plum tree that I planted but which died.  A couple of people told me they were plum trees, but until now but I didn’t believe them.

Windfall is a strange word. The OED tells us that it has carried the meaning of a benefit which is unexpected and maybe undeserved, since 1542. Yet I'm told a windfall apple is actually a bad thing and not a good thing because it can't be stored due to bruising. How then did the word acquire its figurative meaning, and so early too?

Coalition will end war on the motorist

Just seen these two stories.  Lord, give me strength

Daily Telegraph

Daily Mail

Why I love physics

Here’s the blurb from a Scientific American article that I may not get time to read.  It’s headed “Could Time End?”

Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that time ends at moments called singularities, such as when matter reaches the center of a black hole or the universe collapses in a “big crunch.”  Yet the theory also predicts that singularities are physically impossible.

A way to resolve this paradox is to consider time's death as gradual rather than abrupt. Time might lose its many attributes one by one: its directionality, its notion of duration and its role in ordering events causally. Finally, time might give way to deeper, timeless physics.

Your Excellency – save this seed bank

Russian plum (Prunus rossica)
growing at Pavlovsk
(Global Crop Diversity Trust)

I've written to the Russian Ambassador in Dublin seeking an appointment to protest at the imminent destruction of the Pavlovsk seed bank, the world’s oldest, for development (of luxury flats according to one story I've seen).  Full story in The Guardian.  There's a more recent update, that President Medvedev has intervened and ordered an investigation into the decision.

During the siege of Leningrad, 12 Russian scientists chose to starve rather than eat the unique collection of seeds and plants they were protecting for humanity.  Whether they actually starved to death I don’t know, though The Guardian suggests they did.  But what foresight!  To recognise even in 1942 that biodiversity was being lost and once lost can never be replaced.

My letter to the ambassador says “This seed bank is a thing that your country must surely be justly proud of. It is without a doubt priceless. If there is any truth in the story as printed in the Guardian, then I consider it would be a matter of huge national shame.”

According to The Guardian the property developers argued that because the seed bank contains a "priceless collection", no monetary value can be assigned to it and so it is worthless. And a court upheld this reasoning.  Kafkaesque The Guardian called it. Although there’s no need to descend to vulgar abuse. It’s pure market economics. No monetary value = no value. End of discussion.  

The Russian agricultural minister has urged that the station be saved on the grounds that its heritage is crucial for food security as climate change grows more serious. The ongoing Russian heat wave and destruction of the wheat harvest will surely (surely?!) lend weight to this argument.

I struggled with myself before beginning my letter Your Excellency.  But sometimes you have to do these things.

The ape who drew the bars of her cage

Some years ago, researchers into the development of the primate brain gave a captive ape pens and a board to draw on.  For several months the only output of this experiment was meaningless scrawls. Until one day, on inspecting the ape’s writing board, the researchers found that she had created something which was clearly intended to be representational. What the ape had drawn, quite distinctly and unambiguously, were the bars of her cage.

A parable for our times.  I first heard this one on the Guardian books podcast.  Now we come to the point. Having tried to source this report of the ape drawing the bars of her cage, I drew a blank, and I conclude that the story is probably apocryphal.  So the question is : why does it matter?  That is does matter, to me at least, is quite definite. The story loses any traction unless it’s verifiable. But why isn't it good enough for it to be just to be a story, a parable?

CND 'Reality Radio'

Just listened to the first edition of this new internet radio show started by CND.  

Find it at  http://www.realityradio.org.uk  

The first show was a conversation between CND Chair Kate Hudson and Lindsey German, talking about Afghanistan, the Iraq Inquiry, the Wikileaks.  Forthcoming guests will include Jeremy Corbyn & Bruce Kent, apparently.