There are rules for pronouncing American English given the spelling; there are just a lot of them, and they’re ugly.  No one’s going to get educated people to change how they spell–they’ve invested too much in learning it, and there’s too much legacy.  But the way people speak, their dialect, varies widely with geography.  So why not intriduce a new one that pronounces words as they’re written?

I started a blog to record my Gospel Doctrine lessons.  It’s called ankylodoxy, as opposed to orthodoxy.

My grandfather, Jesse Stay, died this morning. My cousin, Jesse Stay III, wrote up a nice eulogy, as did my sister Karen.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Category_theory#Categorical_programming

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mpf23/

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=more-common-questions-abo-2003-04-14&print=true

Consider some javascripty pseudocode:

  aPoint = {x:3, y:4};

This is an object that responds to four messages: “x”, “x =”, “y”, “y =”

  >> aPoint.x
  [ {x:3, y:4}, 3 ]

  >>  aPoint.y
  [ {x:3, y:4}, 4 ]

  >> aPoint.x = 15
  [ {x:15, y:4}, null ]

  >> aPoint.x
  [ {x:15, y:4}, 15 ]

An object consists of code and state, and responds to messages; in the process of responding to a message, the object can change its state. In essence, an object is a function

  obj:STATE x MESSAGE x INPUT  STATE x OUTPUT

except that objects provide encapsulation: the internal state of the object is never directly accessible; the only way to see or change the state of an object is through the object’s response to messages. So we define an object to be a lambda term of the form

  Y ((self, state, message, input)  [
      self(new_state(state, message, input)),
      result(state, message, input)
    ]) (initial_state)

where ‘Y’ is the fixpoint combinator, the notation (x y) is an alternative notation for , brackets [-, -] denote a pair, and the terms ‘new_state’ and ‘result’ evaluate to objects on all terminating inputs.

Let makePoint be the term

  Y ((self, state, message, input)  [
      self(
          if (message == "x =") then [ input, state(1) ] else
          if (message == "y =") then [ state(0), input ] else
          state),
      if (message == "x") then state(0) else
      if (message == "y") then state(1) else
      null
    ]).

Then aPoint = makePoint([ 3, 4 ]) =

  (message, input)  [
      makePoint(
          if (message == "x =") then [ input, 4 ] else
          if (message == "y =") then [ 3, input ] else
          [ 3, 4 ]),
      if (message == "x") then 3 else
      if (message == "y") then 4 else
      null
    ].

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

http://farms.byu.edu/display.php?table=jbms&id=112

Some excerpts:

“Also worth noting is the relative strength of comparative linguistic evidence. The nature of comparative linguistic evidence provides large bodies of data—several thousand words per language—that is nonforgeable. Ruins and buildings yield some facts, though who built them is not always one of the facts revealed. Words of a translation can be debated endlessly, and written records can feasibly be forged, but no one can fabricate a language family of several Native American tribes speaking a variety of related languages…

“In addition to numerous lexical similarities, some features of Northwest Semitic morphology are still productive in UA, i.e., are still functionally active, such as the masculine plural suffix and niqtal prefix, while much more is fossilized, i.e., nonfunctional “frozen” patterns are detectable such as the feminine plural, qittel forms, hiqtîl and huqtal forms, etc. With that in mind, consider a few of some 1,000 identified similarities between Hebrew and Uto-Aztecan…

“Among Latter-day Saint scholars are a few Semitists, to whom queries regarding the validity of the Semitic data can be directed. As for Latter-day Saint Uto-Aztecanists, I know of no others besides myself. Therefore, because it may be difficult for nonspecialists to assess the merit of proposed linguistic connections, it may be well to mention that I have privately shared this material with five Uto-Aztecanists (linguists who have studied and published in UA linguistics) and four of the five were quite overwhelmed at the quantity and quality of the evidence—two spoke very highly of it; two, in surprise, could hardly speak at all after seeing it; and the fifth did not like the proposal generally, but offered no substantive refutations.”

With really cool bugs!

http://www.langorigami.com/index.php4

Mimosa pudica – this stuff was all over the place in Guatemala.  The tender leaves fold up, drop down, and expose lots of thorns.