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The Ghats (along the side of the river) in the holy city of Pushkar, has worshippers and travelers alike, who gather to view the awesome sunset. That is when, the stick and poi performers collect for their evening practice/performance…
His Master's Toys
“All is but toys: renown, and grace, is dead; The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of” --- William Shakespeare
Month: June, 2005
Performer – The Pushkar Videos [1 min]
The Great Camel Fair – Pushkar [46 secs]
Pushkar is that magical place where the world meets to celebrate the Camel Fair. For a week, the quiet pilgrimage transforms itself into Fair grounds. Many travelers call it a paradise, and few never leave. This video is an invitation to come experience Pushkar at CSFVlog. Once every week, for the next two months, we will be covering quirky facts, clips and sound-bites from Pushkar, Rajasthan.
Meet your Meat
“Once you see for yourself the routine cruelty involved in raising animals for food, you’ll understand why millions of compassionate people have decided to leave meat off their plates for good.” says Alec Baldwin on the website.
This video, forwarded by blogger PeanutButterandGreenChutney, blasts the viewer with its striking images, and leaves one with a dilemma – is humanity causing evolution to take an unnatural path?
FrameNet
From the project website:
The Berkeley FrameNet project is creating an on-line lexical resource for English, based on frame semantics and supported by corpus evidence. The aim is to document the range of semantic and syntactic combinatory possibilities (valences) of each word in each of its senses, through computer-assisted annotation of example sentences and automatic tabulation and display of the annotation results. The major product of this work, the FrameNet lexical database, currently contains more than 8,900 lexical units (defined below), more than 6,100 of which are fully annotated, in more than 625 semantic frames, exemplified in more than 135,000 annotated sentences.
Computational lexicography and semantics has been a long standing challenge in NLP, and one of the major hurdles in natural language understanding. An interesting paper which charts out the history of frame semantics can be found here (Frame Semantics, Miriam R. L. Petruck).
True and complete language understanding will remain out of reach for sometime, as OBJET PETIT M wrote in an email:
What is a bit problematic here is “pairing word with a meaning” that
is constitutive of a lexical unit (LU) and its constitutive Frame
Elements (FEs) etc. To do this we have to establish a clear-cut
connection between when something makes sense and when something does
not – its dialectical opposite: non-sense.
So a word such as BEER must lead to GETTING DRUNK (or whatever would
be ‘evoked’ by the word because of its ‘range of semantic and
syntactic combinatory possibilities (valences) of each word in each of
its senses.’ However, the problem here comes when we say for example
BEER leads to SEEING PURPLE BUTTERFLIES CRACKING ON A FRYING PAN LIKE
POPCORN.’ Are we not stretching the level ‘ of semantic and syntactic
combinatory possibilities’ towards the level of non-sense, madness.
And in such a case who gets to decide the bondary between sense and
non-sense, between meaning and insanity?
But … then again, is not the beauty and richness of language – and
consciousness in general – exactly in its infinite possibility of
semantic and syntatic combinatory possibilities that transverse the
universe at the speed of thought. Is not most creative literature and
poetry written in the bifurcating boundary between (the artifical
division of) sense and non-sense? And is not limiting them down to
‘accepted’ semantic possibilities merely reproducting/repeting
tradition?
Deleuze says in the ‘Logic of Sense’:
The play on words would be to say that nonsense has a sense, the sense
being precisely that it doesn’t have any. This is not our hypothesis
at all. When we assume that nonsense says its own sense, we wish to
indicate, on the contrary, that sense and nonsense have a specific
relation that can not copy that of the true and the false, that is,
which can not be conceived simply on the basis of a relation of
exclusion. This is indeed the most general problem of the logic of
sense: what would be the purpose of rising from the domain of truth to
the domain of sense, if it were only to find between sense and
nonsense a relation analogous to that of the true and false? …The
logic of sense is necessarily determined to posit between sense and
nonsense an original type of intrinsic relation, a mode of
co-presence. For the time being, we may only hint at this mode by
dealing with nonsense as a word which says its own sense. (Deleuze,
1990, p.68)
Now, how then would we create an algorythm that defines ‘co-presence’
is the interesting question I think!
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