Elvish is Easy

The hardest part of writing something in Elvish is figuring out what to say.

Once you've done that, everything else just follows naturally. First, you have to see if there is a reasonable translation. (Remember, it's Elvish, there are no words for spaceship.) Obviously Sindarin is the specific language to go with, as it is the primary language of the elves in Middle-Earth (most of the high elves having gone over the sea into the West) - but if you are going to be particularly poetical or if you want to translate a wizard's spell, Quenya might be worth the effort. Either way, simply look up your words in an online dictionary (Sindarin or Quenya (pdf)) and write them down for later. This is your starting point, but if you simply string these words together you would sound like a crass dwarf. Elvish is anything but crass.

The next step is to consult this guidebook to figure out how to pluralize your nouns, conjugate your verbs, and especially how each word might be changed based on what other word is before or after, known as lenition or soft mutation. This is all really quite simple. If you want to say "friends", change the "o" in mellon to "y" and there you have it: mellyn nin, "my friends". You don't have to change the "e" to "i" because it occurs in the first syllable. If you want to say something about Ents, both "o"'s in Onod get mutated, the first to "e" and the second to "y" to get Enyd (but sometimes the first "o" is not mutated, so you will just have to know when it is right to do it). However, if you are talking about the Ents as a people, instead of just two or more Ents, you don't pluralize any vowels but instead add -rim to get Onodrim. Similarly Amon for "hill" gets changed to Emyn for "hills" as in the Emyn Muil. You get the point. Quite easy.

Now if you want to say "my friends" in the middle of the sentence instead of the beginning - such as in the King's Letter: e aníra ennas suilannad mhellyn în, "he wishes there to greet his friends" - you must add a soft mutation to change the "m" to "mh" (or usually "v", of which "mh" is a nasal variant). Most other consonants are lenited when preceded by a vowel, such as the article i meaning "the": "the friend" becomes i vellon.* Also, p, t, and c become b, d, and g while b and d become v and dh (which is voiced th), and g drops altogether as in Galadriel's opening words in the FOTR movie: a han noston ned 'wilith, "and I can smell it in the air", where the word for "air" is gwilith. This is all very straightforward. Now your set of Sindarin words may bear only a vague resemblance to the initial Sindarin words you had from the dictionary. But you probably shouldn't have tried to mutate your nouns before dealing with the verbs.

* Of course "the friends" becomes i mellyn since the plural article in triggers the nasal mutation which changes in to i before an "m", since of course "m" is already nasal, whereas in + gelaidh becomes i ngelaidh ("the trees"). Obviously.

First figure out what kind of verb you have, whether it is a derived verb (called A-stem because they end in "a"), or the more complex basic verb (I-stem because their present tense ends in "i" though they usually have no suffix), and of course notice whether your A-stem verb has a mixed conjugation or whether it is irregular. As you can see, it should be quite obvious which type of verb you have. Then simply follow the rules and conjugate to your heart's content, paying attention to the pronoun you require. So for example, the present tense of nosta- above is identical to the word itself: nosta, "smell", but to say "I smell" you add the ending -n, which changes the "a" to "o": han noston, "I smell it". This should all go without saying.

I will of course assume that you have all read the pronunciation guide in the back of The Silmarillion and have not been butchering the language by saying mae govannen as "may" instead of the correct "mai". That means it will be quite easy to take your Sindarin sentence and transliterate to one of the runic alphabets, such as the blocky Cirth preferred for stone work, and by the dwarves, or the more elegant Tengwar such as appears on the One Ring. The tengwar are created by combining telcor (stems) and lúvar (bows) based on where the sound is spoken in the mouth and whether it is voiced or voiceless (see figure). Then of course there are additional letters, which can be written both normally or upside-down, but that should pose no difficulty.

Double letters (such as "nn" in govannen) aren't written twice but are instead denoted by adding a special symbol under the letter, and nasalized letters have a symbol over the top. The vowel sounds also have their symbols placed on top (or under) the consonant preceding (Quenya) or following (Sindarin) the vowel. When there is no available consonant carrier, a special short or long carrier is used, based on whether the vowel sound should be short or long. This is all so logical that you have probably derived it from first principles already, but I mention it here for clarity.

Now all you need to do is download some true type fonts for tengwar, of which there are many. If you are going to put your Elvish phrase into your Ph.D. thesis, for example, it will also help to have a LaTeX package that will place your choice of font neatly into your pdf, and all you have to do is type out the Quenya names for all of the letters and symbols that go into your words.

There you have it. Was that so hard?

The Face of Racism

The killing of Trayvon Martin has been on my mind all week. Monday I read the stories and listened to the 911 calls in shock and horror. How has his killer not yet been charged? How has such a thing happened? He was only a child in a hoodie wielding a bag of skittles, which has contributed to there being a national outcry over the incident. How many times has a similar thing happened to a grown man that we have not heard about?

The sad thing is, it is all too easy to understand. As many blog posts have explained, this is the cost of being a young black man in America today. Some people have questioned whether this is about race, perhaps because the killer was latino... but white people are not the only ones capable of racism. We as a people need to be aware that this is the face of racism in America today, both individually and on a systemic level: it is less often about outright discrimination and more often about subtle unconscious biases that are never examined.

George Zimmerman didn't think to himself, "I hate black people so I am going to kill this boy," though those crimes still happen; he saw a person he identified as suspicious, was angry that "These assholes always get away," and took it on himself to.... well, to commit violent murder! I am at my limit of trying to understand how people can do these things and convince themselves they were in the right; how people can blame the killing on a hoodie; how the police can "correct" a witness, take a killer at his word, and hold themselves blameless. I can no longer find it fascinating to try to understand their intentions. It is easy to understand. This is the face of racism, operating on a subconscious level, and we as a people need to grow up and deal with it.

What that requires is a lot of personal responsibility, even for those of us reading about this killing with disgust. We cannot respond by pointing the finger somewhere else: at the police; at those racists in Florida; at the culture of white privilege; at ignorance. We first have to look into ourselves and critically examine the attitudes that we have about groups of people different than us. We have to make a conscious effort to analyze our emotional reactions. We need to call out our friends and family when they make racially-charged remarks (or other stereotyping behavior).

In writing this I remembered Barack Obama's famous speech on race during his 2008 campaign and am listening to him now, as he talks about his own grandmother expressing racist attitudes and discusses the history of slavery. If we do not take Trayvon Martin's killing as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and about the context of race in America then we have failed in our responsibility as human beings, as thinking and feeling creatures, as spiritual people, as rational individuals. We are the face of racism.

Immensity

Merry looked out in wonder upon this strange country, of which he had heard many tales upon their long road. It was a skyless world, in which his eye, through dim gulfs of shadowy air, saw only ever-mounting slopes, great walls of stone behind great walls, and frowning precipices wreathed with mist. He sat for a moment half dreaming, listening to the noise of the water, the whisper of dark trees, the crack of stone, and the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound. He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Return of the King," p. 64

This is why I will always be reading and re-reading Tolkien. I may put LOTR away for a few months or more, but when I'm ready, I will find my bookmark and read something beautiful. I must have read this paragraph 10 times before, but this time it was new and powerful. I want to go to a mountain and listen to the whisper of dark trees! I want to listen to the vast waiting silence that broods behind all sound! And especially, I want to return from the mountains to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.

Experiences of awe such as Tolkien describes can be overwhelming; one can lose oneself in the vastness. At first this feeling can be exciting: sit on a mountain, or gaze at the stars, and you become small in relation to your experience, but at the same time you become part of the immensity itself. "Formless! Boundless!" (to roughly quote the Tao Te Ching...) You lose you to become the experience. This can be thrilling, but it can also be frightening. After all, we are used to thinking of ourselves as ourselves and not the entire universe. When Middle-earth gets too huge we look for a safe place to be ourselves again.

It takes courage to lose yourself in immensity. The deep ocean, the high mountain, the crowded city center, the vast waiting silence that broods behind all sound... Most of us don't have the time (or the will) to experience vast strangeness, like Merry on an epic journey he could not anticipate, finding himself bereft of his friends. We don't often willingly put ourselves into a situation where nothing is familiar, without guarantee of security or a safe way home again. Those who do are praised as heroes. But although we may think of a hero as an Aragorn figure with a destiny for greatness, clarity of purpose, strength and kindness and a long stride, most heroes (and most of us) are more like the hobbits, who dream of eggs and bacon and a seat by the fire, and for whom Middle-earth is best experienced through stories brought from far away; but the immensity is there for us all, waiting for us to enter.

Uncertainty Sucks. Happy Leap Day!

I'm taking this leap day opportunity to 1) fit in a post in February, and 2) veer from my usual Abandon Certainty mantra. It turns out that uncertainty sucks!

In some sense it is a luxury to abandon certainty, in terms of opening yourself up to the wonders of being alive, without assuming that you know the answers, and embracing change over stability. But there is little wonder in the uncertainty of not knowing where or whether you will be employed, when that next paycheck will come in, whether you will have enough food to feed your kids, and similar issues that too many people worry about every day. Perhaps the difference is in whether you are actively abandoning certainty or whether uncertainty has been thrust upon you.

Over the years I have interpreted this in terms of both Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and the Hindu Chakras. Before one can take an existential leap (pun intended!) into the unknown, one must first deal with the basic needs of nutrition, health, personal safety, etc. This is similar in spirit to the chakra hierarchy, where the three basal chakras dealing with survival, pleasure, and willpower must be opened before the heart chakra, which deals with openness and love. So perhaps the uncertainty that sucks is about basic needs which, if not met, become a barrier to experiencing the uncertainty that is awesome.

As this current and prolonged period of uncertainty about my future continues (seriously, this is a painfully slow metaphorical death), I am finding it quite hard to experience anything awesome about uncertainty. It sucks and I hate it and it is causing stress, anxiety, and depression. I'm losing sight of where I am and where I'm going as if my life is guided by some existential uncertainty principle. My existential wave function had better collapse soon. Is the existential cat metaphorically alive or dead??

OK, OK, enough with the quantum physics analogies. Happy leap day everybody. Today is a day to remember that the Earth takes 365.25 days to travel around the Sun. Enjoy the fact that this is yet another day where you can eat, sleep, and breathe, and worry about everything else another day.

Theory vs. Observation

In astronomy there are theorists and observers. Theorists do scary things like path integrals and observers do tedious things like data reduction, and somehow the field has managed to inch forward over the centuries to advance our knowledge of the universe. At one point astronomers were often both, but these days that is rare.

This year, Cosmology on the Beach was populated by many non-astronomers and certainly many theorists, so that might be why the question, "You said ellipticals don't have disks; does that mean they don't have star formation?" was not too out of place. The theorist lecturer answered, basically, yes, and then went on to muse on why there is this difference between spirals and elliptical galaxies. It occurred to me that an observational astronomer might have went into some detail about what different galaxy surveys have found, examples of observed star formation in ellipticals, and the properties of both. By glossing over details and giving the simple answer (yes), the theorist's answer was perhaps less true than my hypothetical observer's answer. The real world is more complicated. But instead of detailed examples and caveats, the theorist's attempt to answer "why" was perhaps more meaningful.

Thus I am writing this instead of listening to discussion which has now moved on to the subject of inflation theories (both less true and less meaningful). I wonder if the statement: "Observers are concerned with what is true; theorists are concerned with what is meaningful" is either true or meaningful. Observers (and experimentalists) collect facts about the universe. Theorists try to put these facts together into a coherent whole and derive new facts. Obviously both would argue that they care about both what is true and what is meaningful, and they would be correct, but not in a meaningful way. ;-)

Most theories end up being falsified by observations, so I think it is easy to accept the first half; but what about meaning? Can meaning even exist without truth? I would say yes, but it is not obvious. I think meaning is really found in connections, processes, and dependencies, whereas facts are static. Facts are independent of other facts. Regular readers may not be surprised that I prefer change over stability and processes over products, and perhaps that is why I'm not an observer.

I think it's not much of a stretch to say that truth is stable, final, while meaning connects truths to each other and to people. Observations themselves lack meaning unless they say something about theories... so for example, observations of N stars and their positions, brightnesses, colors, etc. don't say anything meaningful about the universe until they are connected with a theory of star formation. On the other hand, observers collect beautiful truths that stand on their own while theorists only ever make models and attempt to describe reality with math. Observers touch reality itself, while theorists play around with representations of reality. Perhaps that's why I'm not a theorist either....

How much of this "theory vs. observation" divide is a result of personality differences, and how much is a result of the need to specialize? Theorists and Observers are both important and needed, and although both admit that the other has their uses, both have put themselves into a box of one or the other. Both make jokes at the others' expense: theorists aren't connected to the real world and observers fit lines through scatter plots. Sometimes I laugh at these and sometimes I find myself bothered by them. Can't we all just get along? Of course, whenever a joke is directed at me I can say "no, not an observer!" or "not a theorist!" And then I say "phenomenologist" and vanish in a puff of smoke.

But then I find myself in a puff of smoke! And I'm not even sure I can use the word "phenomenologist" legitimately. I simulate things and analyze the simulations, so I don't do scary integrals and I don't do tedious data reduction. I'm probably close enough to a theorist to be grouped with them, since basically my computer calculates the integrals for me. It turns out a lot of science can happen from inside puffs of smoke.

Death

I decided to pull out some Tarot cards today, and the first card was Death.

Don't worry, it's just a metaphor. And a pretty accurate one too. A lot of things are changing right now and a period of my life is ending. I'm in the middle of figuring out what the next stage of my life is going to be like. And before anything new can happen, the old has to become old. It has to die. Only with death can there be birth; only with birth can there be death.

Death is not an evil thing, nor always bad, but it is often scary, and sometimes painful. We become comfortable in the life we have and start to fear that it won't always be so comfortable, that at some point something will be different. Fear of death is fear of change, for death is the first step to change. I mostly mean metaphorical death here, as in ending, leaving, or being destroyed, but physical death too. Physical death is the ultimate change from which there is no changing back (in so far as anything can really be changed back). But we forget we have already gone through such a transition: birth. We come into this world and we go out, there is no escaping this truth, for the nature of life is change. Creation and destruction are the two sides of that change and merely different ways of describing a single event.

I was at a funeral recently and as I listened to the pastor, I became convinced that the nature of religion is to address in some way the fear of death. And in my opinion, most do this the completely wrong way, which is to get rid of death entirely. When you die you go to heaven. Death is not real, you won't really die, the people you love won't die, everything will be perfect in the light of God. "Others have to say 'goodbye', we get to say, 'see you later'." To me that means no growth can occur, no moving forward but always looking back - eternal stagnation and sameness - the absence of change and so the absence of life. The absence of life indeed - the very thing that was feared - but also the absence of death. What is left? No, I would rather say goodbye. I would rather be able to feel loss and sadness and pain. How can one grieve if there is nothing to grieve? How can I rejoice in the new if I never let go of the old?

I don't mean to be too hard on the idea of heaven, though. I don't mind if people believe in what gives them comfort, and I don't mind interpreting heaven as a metaphor even though people take it literally. ;-) But I will continue to say goodbye. And hello! (FYI that means to babies, in this analogy.)

One of my favorite movies is The Fountain and its major theme happens to be death. As the husband struggles to cure his dying wife, he spends less time with her. By trying to have her forever, he loses her now. And the wife instead becomes fascinated with the story of the Mayan creator god, who plants the tree of life from his own dying body: "Death as an act of creation." "Death is the road to awe." (One could say, the road to "awesome!" But one wouldn't.) And in the picture on the Tarot card, the dead one is placed in the fetal position in the womb of the earth. The snake sheds its skin to permit new growth. Or, to put it a little grossly, phallic and wombic imagery come together to create new life. (They make baby imagery.)

Having said all that, I'm not looking forward to my own metaphorical death at all! But I have to remind myself that Fear won't help anything... and then I have to eat some chocolate and calm down.

P.S. Almost forgot to mention another thing about The Fountain. I remember thinking the credits looked a bit like cosmological structure formation, but I didn't take it quite this far. Pretty awesome.

Simulacra

I recently bought new ear buds. I wasn't sure I even wanted them, but they would be small and good for traveling. The ones I had came with my media player and were cheap, too big, and the felt covers were coming apart. The earphones I use at work I like, but the wire is a bit too short, and anyway I wanted some for traveling. So I bought some mid-level ear buds and jesus, they feel nice and have some sweet bass!

And it got me thinking... the difference between the music I was listening to then and what I'm listening to now is purely due to the little tiny speakers in my ears (which I still find pretty annoying and weird). So which one is right? Obviously neither is the right way for the music to sound... it's not like my new ear buds are some how tapping into what the musicians thought the music should sound like. What they created with their instruments (synthesized or acoustic or whatever) is lost forever... it was captured by certain equipment, and what is played back is only a cheap copy. Then the sound people do what they do and change the levels and it becomes a different thing altogether. The musicians and the sound people decide on what the copied and played-back music is supposed to sound like, and they produce it.

And the journey has only begun! The music is consumed in various ways... on the radio, as CDs, or, and I say this with some disgust, bought as mp3s. Neither is what the musicians actually created, but at least the CDs represent what they think the music should sound like, instead of castrated and decapitated mutant-clones that contain a tenth of the original information. But then these digested forms of music are played with some kind of speaker and finally make it to your ear according to what the speakers can do; how do we believe that the speakers' interpretation of your music-playing software's reconstruction of whatever mutilated audio file that was torn from the original digital copy of music that was captured out of the air in some box where the actual music was created... how do we believe it represents that actual music?

It is actually a simulacrum; a "likeness" or "similarity." It is not the actual music, but we are used to taking symbols to mean the thing that they symbolize. I will admit that I only know the word "simulacrum" (plural: simulacra) because Jean Baudrillard's philosophical book "Simulacra and Simulation" was discussed in the behind the scenes DVD of The Matrix and referred to when Morpheus tells Neo, "Welcome to the desert of the real." The music that we listen to is a simulacrum of the music that it represents, and I don't mean to suggest that there is anything actually wrong with this way of listening to music, but it is interesting to think of it as it is and not what it appears to be. The journey from music creation to music appreciation, unless it takes place at a concert (and even then to some degree...), occurs through the degradation of meaning. The true form of the music (maybe Platonic, but maybe it's too late for me to be speculating on Platonic forms) exists in the act of music creation. Once the music is played, everything else is a copy, a likeness. (A shadow on the cave?)

I think the deep thing I'm going for here is that the creation of music is a process, and so it can't be captured, not by any audio equipment, and it certainly can't be sliced-and-diced until it's finally regurgitated into your ears. It exists only in the moment of its creation and is gone outside of that moment. BUT, listening to music is itself a process. All of my violent imagery aside, most of the true essence of the music survives this degradation of meaning, so that when you listen to some sweet beats it is an experience! Maybe the bass isn't all there and so some of the power of the moment is lost. Maybe it's an mp3 so it lacks complexity and fullness of sound... the complexity and fullness of the moment. But maybe listening to that combination of rhythym and melody is enough to bring you out of yourself and into your moment. Your attention is captured and you are fully aware of the music.

Even though the music may be a simulacrum, your experience of the music never is.