Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

Alright, so here’s an update. I really will try to update at a regular interval. Maybe Monday and Friday.

I wanted to talk about this. Most people in Utah have probably heard about the recent federal bust of illegal artifacts trading in San Juan County, Utah. Here’s an example of what was traded:

During a recorded conversation, the source witnessed hundreds of illegal artifacts while he followed “dealer” David Lacy, 55, around his house, according to documents. The source bought three items: a knife for $2,800, a turkey-feather-and-yucca-plant blanket for $900 and a digging stick for $1,000. The warrant also identified a storage shed full of artifacts.

During another meeting, the source paid $5,000 for several items ranging from sandals to a female loincloth that Lacy told the source were found at Baby Mummy Cave and Alkali Ridge — both BLM-owned properties.

The list of those indicted is rather impressive. The list includes the brother of the local sheriff, and a prominent doctor and his wife (the doctor committed suicide after his indictment came down). Naturally, there are some pretty silly comments on the Deseret News comment board.

I would be willing to bet that at least 75% of the residents in the four corners have some sort of artifact in their home…. weather it be an arrow head or a big hunk of pottery, thats just how it is down here. So untill (sic) you plan on searching every home down here stay in the city where all the drama and problems should stay.

–Give me a break

This is a common misunderstanding regarding what these arrests were about. People don’t seem to realize that the Feds aren’t targeting the people who, while hiking out in the San Juan countryside, see and arrowhead or a shard of pottery and pick it up and take it home. The accused took artifacts off federal and tribal land over several years and sold them for thousands of dollars. Sorry, but that’s not innocuous at all.

This is all part of a long-running tradition of our societies general contempt for those who occupied the land here before us. Keep something in mind when hiking in Utah. If you find any kind of artifact, leave it be. Let’s respect those who came before us.

I really hope that title isn’t too long.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this thing. I’ve decided I’m going to make a greater effort at this blog, and use the documents section as a paper dump of sorts to publicize some of my work.

Perhaps one of the reasons I’ve haven’t maintained this site more is because it doesn’t have any real theme. It was kind of a general observational blog. Sometimes I would write about linguistics, sometimes about whatever the hell was happening on the Deseret News editorial board, and sometimes about whatever video game I was playing. There was always too much going on, so now I need to decide what to do.

I’ve decided I want this blog to be more theme-based. Now that I’m finished with my first year as a graduate student in linguistics, having learned more than I feel I ever did in the three years I majored in linguistics as an undergrad, I feel content relating to that should make up a sizable portion of the blog. I don’t want it to end there, however. I’d like to also talk about things like whatever television show I’m watching or what game I’m playing…dammit, this is basically the same thing it was.

Well, here is the thing, there will actually be a lot going on over the summer and the next semester as I complete my thesis fieldwork. I intend to spend a fair amount of time documenting that here. There may even be pictures involved.

I’m currently a little bit annoyed. Not for the reason I’m about to list.

The Deseret News editorial page is always full of…anomaly. I figure Valentines Day is a good a day as any to talk about Sex Ed, so Consider the following:

In “Sex-ed bill removes birth-control ban” (Feb. 10), Action Council executive director, Melissa Bird, states that “research shows the majority of Utah’s high school students become sexually active before graduation.”

I would like Ms. Bird to publish the research she mentions. She needs to include the dates of the research, its source, the funders, the size of the studies and the qualifications and experience of the researchers.

I know plenty of high schoolers who don’t date or who date very rarely and will doubt Ms. Bird’s claim until she prints hard evidence to support it.

Barbara A. Lyman
American Fork

Okay, this really grinds my gears. I work with statistics a lot. Nothing annoys me more when I cite a statistical tendency and someone responds, “I don’t do that/I know someone who doesn’t do that, therefore nobody does that.” It’s especially aggravating to hear someone chastise somebody for not making research public, and then relying on anecdotes to prove their point. Grrrrrrr.

As the original article clearly says, the research was third party anyway. Maybe the letter writer could do some work and go look up the research herself.

Let’s have fun with comments:

So, Barbara, your assertion that Melissa Bird’s claim is incorrect is based on the fact that you know some high school students who don’t date or do so very rarely?

I want you to publish that research, including the dates of said research, its source, the funders, the size of the studies, and the qualifications and experience of the researchers. And let’s show some hustle.

–Dave Frazier

*Thank you*

arbara, I think you might be in denial about high-schoolers’ behavior. It might be true that you know plenty of students who don’t date - but that doesn’t mean a majority hasn’t engaged in some kind of sexual activity. Furthermore, if you want Ms. Bird to back up her claim with the research evidence, why doesn’t your claim require any evidence? No amount of wishful thinking will change the fact that many, many high school kids are sexually active, and sex ed and birth control can only help them.

Again, thank you. And thank you again for pointing out that it’s not physically impossible to have sex with someone without them buying you dinner first.

The way I feel is this: It’s one thing to believe pre-marital sex is wrong. It’s another thing to ignore the fact that it happens and has always happened, and leave uneducated kids to get diseases and unwanted pregnancies, leading to an increased burden on our health care system and an increased number of abortions.

Since we’re on the topic of abortion, I feel compelled to post the official LDS Church policy regarding abortion. The emphasis added is mine as always:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believes in the sanctity of human life. Therefore, the Church opposes elective abortion for personal or social convenience, and counsels its members not to submit to, perform, encourage, pay for, or arrange for such abortions.

The Church allows for possible exceptions for its members when:

• Pregnancy results from rape or incest, or

• A competent physician determines that the life or health of the mother is in serious jeopardy, or

• A competent physician determines that the fetus has severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth.

The Church teaches its members that even these rare exceptions do not justify abortion automatically. Abortion is a most serious matter and should be considered only after the persons involved have consulted with their local church leaders and feel through personal prayer that their decision is correct.

The Church has not favored or opposed legislative proposals or public demonstrations concerning abortion.

I’m going to piss off some people tonight. So, basically, it’s like any other night.

The other day, I came to an important conclusion about my personal musical tastes. I’ve decided that I hate all this music the kids are listening to. This “chill indie music.” Unfortunately, though, since “indie” is such a generic term, I can’t say I hate the crap college sophomores in skinny jeans listen to while drinking PBR without also saying I hate really excellent music, like Beirut. This problem aside, I’ll try my best to explain why I’ve come to loathe this music recently.

· All the indie music I’ve heard sounds the same. I actually think this is what triggered me to resent the genre initially. I’ve heard too many CDs and inquired, “Who’s CD is this?” only to be answered by, “It’s a mix.” I swear to God, I would never have known. It’s as if I could have randomly chosen a member of each band on the mix and put them together, and they would have produced the exact same thing.

· Too much lo-fi recording. As much as I like low fidelity recording techniques, they have their time and place, and should only be used for a reason,e.g. The Black Keys to illustrate their delta blues influences. Lo-fi does not transform generic music into high art.

· There is no depth or passion present in the music. The performers come across as either apathetic or insincerely upbeat, neither of which is good. I’m not saying the music has to be depressing or contain left-of-center lyrical themes, but please, please show us you give a damn about something.

Try something like this:

I’ve got a whole bunch of incoming links that I’m not linking too myself. I really need to fix that…and…fixed.

I’m at that point in my M.A. program where I have to put together my committee and decide on a thesis topic. This part kinda sucks. The two people I actually need on my committee, a sociolinguist and a phonetician (sort of), sort of…hate each other. Welcome to the world of academia!

My graduate coursework up to this point has been kind of silly. Having done my undergraduate work in the same department, there are so few classes that I can actually take in my specialty that will be of any use to me. Take this semester, for example. Only one of my classes is actually being offered through linguistics. I’ve had to go the Speech Pathology department to take an acoustics class (I’m sure I’ll have all kinds of hilarious stories about this), and I had to go the Middle East Center to take a historical linguisticky course.

To this point, all of my most interesting work has been outside of the classroom as a research assistant at the Center for American Indian Languages. Here I’ve actually been able to do leading edge (though perhaps not bleeding edge) work in sociophonetics. Basically, I’m excited for not having to deal with coursework anymore.

I’ve kicked around a few ideas for a thesis topic. It will inevitably be related to some phonetic feature in Utah English. Whether it will be a perceptual or acoustic study is up for debate, but I have cool ideas for both. Oh, wait…I’ve actually never written a paper longer than 25 pages. Okay, actually, I’m f****d.

I’d like to talk about a hot topic in Utah recently: the BCS and its fairness/legality. Our Attorney General, Mark Shurtleff, has been considering a probe of the BCS system to determine whether it violates anti-trust laws or something (link). I’m not sure if it’s because I really don’t care what happens in college football beyond the Utes being successful, or if the entire idea of investigating the BCS when our economy is tanking is just a stupid idea.

In a bizarre twist of events, a reasonable letter was printed in the Salt Lake Deseret Morning Tribune News opinion section yesterday. I know, I’m scared too:

Let’s get our priorities in order. I am a huge Ute football fan. And the BCS is the wrong format for determining the championship team, but there are other more important and higher priority items for our attorney general to look into. Being the No. 1 law enforcement officer in the state, he should focus his efforts toward crime and consumer rip-offs. For example, look into the college text-book racket. Someone is making a killing on text books. There are some real crimes to investigate.

Richard Turnbow

Kaysville

Even if we choose to limit ourselves to potentially criminal activity in academics, there are much bigger fish to fry. While I was lucky enough to have a useless major where books rarely costed more than 60-dollars each, the students who are actually studying things that are, well, practical are getting screwed having to buy 4 200-dollar books each semester. I’d go on and elaborate how ignoring this problem and focusing on the BCS is an example of the dumbing down of American higher education or even of increased militarism in American society, but honestly, I really don’t care. My school pays my tuition these days.

Sorry undergrads.

EDIT: Since I’m committing to reinvigorate this blog, I’ve updated my bio page and added a current CV, if you’re interested.

I returned from the LSA conference this last week. I generally like conferences. I liked this one, too. I saw some good talks, did some good networking, got some good deals on books, had some good food, etc. I also saw a couple rather bizarre talks.

For example, there was a workshop on sociophonetics. What’s interesting, is that there was only one sociophonetician on the panel, the rest were a bunch of LabPhon people and, for some reason, an Optimality Theorist. Some of the points were as follows:

· Phonetic convergence is primarily a social phenomena, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude it from being automatic. I agree with this conclusion, and incidentally, it was also the only talk given by a bona fide sociophonetician.

· Listeners have different “phonetic expectations” for talkers of different presumed ethnic groups. This is kind of where the sociolinguists in the audience (like myself) and the more traditional phoneticians in the audience split. Penny Eckert mentioned to the speaker that often there are other implicit presumptions listeners carry with them that correlate with ethnicity that can explain the experimental results as well. This is why sociophonetics needs *needs* the “socio” part.

· Listeners utilize different phonetic spaces when addressing different genders. In this experiment, they tested how men and women talk to males and females, which is a very simplistic view of gender, but hey, who’s counting?

· Edward Flemming (the OT guy) got up and talked about linguistic constraints on sociolinguistic behavior. That’s bassackwards. Multivariate analyses consistently show that linguistic variables are never independent variables.

I started classes this semester. I feel slightly ripped off that I didn’t get much of a break at all, but it’s nice to have something different to do, I guess. I’m signed up for Ugaritic, Acoustics of Speech and Hearing, and Research Seminar in Sociolinguistics. I’ll let you know how they go.

Trust me, I’d like to talk about what’s going on in Gaza, but I swore to myself that I would steer clear of talking about Israeli-Palestinian politics in polite company. It’s killing me. Let’s see how long it takes for me to break down.

One of my Christmas presents was the video game Mirror’s Edge. I finished it tonight. I’ll share my thoughts.

You play as the character Faith, a “runner” in a future totalitarian city-state like thing where citizens are under constant. Your job is to run goods from point A to point B in an extralegal manner, keeping primarily to the rooftops. Generally, the cops leave you alone. Faith, however, discovers corruption in City Hall, and now she finds herself as public enemy number one trying to save her sister who has been framed for killing a prominent mayoral candidate.

The game works pretty well as a concept. It’s the kind of game I’ve been waiting for for some time. The game focuses more on running away from enemies than confronting them. I like games where running is the object of play. It doesn’t work well beyond this though, and the game has numerous shortcomings. In the earlier levels, the acrobatics are interesting and are conceivably within grasp of any athlete. Later in the game, they just seem…bizarre. Complex acrobatics require impeccable timing, and the game can be rather unforgiving as a result, causing some of the obstacles to be more aggravating than interesting. Some obstacles took me upwards of 20 attempts to clear. Once you finally move past an obstacle, there is a sense of accomplishment.

The game has the potential for a good story. However, the components of the story aren’t well put together. The story probably would have been more interesting if it focused more on the life of a runner than the conspiracy theory story, which didn’t even resolve itself.

Visually, the game is stunning, and it’s certainly worth playing at least once. There are rumors on the internets that a Mirror’s Edge 2 is in the works. I think they have a good foundation here. I just hope they improve on it. I’d give it a 7/10.

With that rating, I feel no urge to hang onto to it for too long. I’ll probably trade it in and pick up Fable 2 (assuming I can find someone to co-op with) or Soul Calibur IV on the Xbox 360. Right now I’m playing a fair amount of LittleBigPlanet on the PS3 with Emily.

I’ve come to loathe MMORPGs. I used to love them, now I want them to burn. BURN.

This post is not about MMORPGs. This post is about nothing in particular. Yesterday was Christmas, which I spent with my family. It was a pleasant day for the most part. Dealing with the massive amounts of snowfall last night wasn’t great, but otherwise it was good. My family usually sees a movie on Christmas day. Last night we chose to see Valkyrie. Anyone who says the movie sucks is a communist. By my appraisal, it’s one of the best movies of the year. The major criticism of Valkyrie is how Tom Cruise sticks out like a sore thumb as the sole American amongst a team of seasoned British actors. I recognize that it was a little jarring at first, but the other options weren’t any better: either Tom Cruise could fake an accent (either English or German), or they could have cast someone else. The former would have been terrible. British actors rarely fake accents. Cruise would have looked even more retarded if he was the only one. The latter wouldn’t have worked either, in my opinion. All the actors chosen looked like the men they represented (Cruise himself is the spitting image of Stauffenberg). I don’t know. I thought the movie was great.

In other news, I got a rice maker.

Yes, it’s been too damn long since I’ve updated the blog. I’ll do better. Seriously, this time I mean it, even if all I do is comment on stupid Salt Lake Deseret Tribune News posts.

I’ve always felt I was comfortable with death. I was introduced to it pretty early on. I’ve had several people close to me die. They were old and sick. To me, that makes sense. Death is what happens to old and sick people.

My admittedly simple world view was challenged this past week. My good friend and fellow linguistics grad student died in an avalanche last Sunday. It was hard to come to grips with the fact that people my age die so unpredictably.

At funerals, I’m generally the stoic one. I rarely cry at the funeral or upon news of the death itself. Later on (sometimes much later on) I’ll break down randomly. When I first heard of Heather’s death, I spent more time pondering the meaning of death. My conception of death is forged by my Mormon upbringing and my Masonic practice. Pondering this is generally a distraction from the emotional pain of death. Today at the funeral, I ran out of philosophical quandaries to ponder. Today at the funeral, I shed actual tears.

Heather loved to dance. She would dance spontaneously, even at times when it seemed to me to be inappropriate. A beautiful hymn was played — “Lord of the Dance”, set to the tune of the Shaker hymn “Tis a Gift to be Simple.” During the fourth verse, I couldn’t contain myself:

I danced on a Friday when the world turned black
It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back
They buried my body, they thought I was gone
But I am the dance, and the dance goes on

Dance, dance, wherever you may be
I am the lord of the dance, said he
And I lead you all, wherever you may be
And I lead you all in the dance, said he

We’ll miss you Heather. Keep on dancing.

I’m not going to bother apologizing for delayed posting.

Anyway, every election cycle I have a tradition of endorsing candidates here. Sure, it’s not like a) anybody reads this or b) my endorsement carries any weight, but someday when I’m making millions as a linguist, my opinion will be sought from far and wide.

First, a little truth-in-advertising moment. I am not a registered member of any political party. I’ve given myself several labels, but the best I can come up with is “Resentful Centrist.” I’ve never voted a straight ticket, and likely never will. I support both liberal and conservative causes, but I generally favor establishing a consensus between the two extremes. Now, let’s begin.

President: Barack Obama (D)

Once upon a time, I considered John McCain a different kind of politician. He bucked the party line on, what I consider, moral issues pertaining to detainee treatment and Republican doctrinal issues like tax cuts. I was even willing to overlook his stance on the Iraq war. A lot has changed since he started running for president again. He started to show his true colors: pandering to the religious right, backtracking on tax cuts, and faltering on his stance on detainee treatment. Enter Barack Obama. This man is a new kind of politician. One who I genuinely feel will heal the wounds this country has suffered over the last eight years. Despite what the Republican machine (especially here in Utah) keeps spouting, Barack Obama is not calling for handouts. Barack Obama is not a socialist (though, for my LDS readers, look here. He seeks only to restore dignity to the American working man and woman. In Obama, I see a chance for the United States to become united once more.

Governor: John Huntsman, Jr. (R)

This is driving some of my friends insane. Let me explain myself. John Huntsman has performed the job he was elected to do in 2004 brilliantly. While I have my share of complaints (he’s a little too academic in his approach to government), I’ve been very satisfied with my vote in 2004. His stances on climate change and alcohol laws are very favorable. What I like most about Huntsman is what I would like to see in more Republicans in Utah: while the majority of those who elected him are Mormons, he understands that, in a secular society, he has to govern for non-Mormons as well. I think Huntsman will go down in history as one of Utah’s best governors.

U.S. House District 2: Jim Matheson (D)

Since I’ve been able to vote I’ve been voting for Matheson. He’s a moderate and a compromiser. I doubt his challenger will be the same.

State Legislature District 25: Christine Johnson (D)

I’m going to be up front. I’m only voting for her because Utah Republicans generally frighten me. I’ve only been in this district for a month, so…if I lived two blocks north, I’d be endorsing Joe Jarvis (R) for his health care credentials, but he won’t win up there anyway.

Attorney General: ??

I haven’t decided on this yet. I have issues with Mark Shurtleff, but he’s done well at what he’s been elected to do. I’ll let you know how this goes.

I know nothing about school board races

Constitutional amendments

A, B, C, E: Yes

D (redistricting): No

Bond elections

Zoo: Yes

Aviary: Yes