The family in the shop round the corner were pretty sure that this would be better for my bite than Mopiko, my first choice, and though I think that was mainly because they didn’t have any Mopiko in stock their recommendation’s held good so far. I loved the elegance of the blurb inside the packet:

AXE BRAND UNIVERSAL OIL

1. The handy medicine for every household
2. It has many effective uses and is low in price
3. A few drops will do
4. It is so convenient to carry about

Prepared from a formula by Dr. Schmeidler, the Axe Brand Universal Oil consists of valuable ingredients in accurate proportions. It is pure in colour, pleasant in odour and entirely free from irritating substances. It is mild yet positively effective in action and is suitable for use by both adults and children. That it is a useful medicine for home, travel, estates and mines is testified by its ever increasing sales since its introduction.

In order to avoid imitations, buyers should particularly mention “Axe Brand Universal Oil” and see that it bears the genuine Trade Mark.

Update: we’re all friends again, and it’s very likely it was entirely in my head. But I think the things below still puzzle me.

I’m skirting an argument with a prominent neuroscientist, in which I feel both of us are slightly puzzled that the other one shows signs of thinking less respectably than we might have thought at first meeting, and I think it comes down to the language we use. Of course it does, you say, and you’re right to point out the triviality of my insight, but it’s important to me to understand exactly where our individual assumptions about the world are being reflected in our speech, and you are not even real. So I am going to try and collect some examples of language that troubles me — that’s all, just causes me concern — so that I stand a chance of understanding our miscommunication and avoiding what would be a disagreeable falling-out, one that would damage me professionally far more than it would them.

The tendency of neuroscientists to use the word “learning” where other people might say “recall” is pretty widely acknowledged, I think (and came up again today, with a speaker from a neuro background).

One of the articles sent to me by the academic first referrred to uses phrases like “…the part of the brain responsible for…” (not going to quote for Google reasons), and this bothers me: using the word “responsible” implies agency, and this seems to indicate some assumptions about identity, mind and body, causality and so on that are, to my knowledge, still reckoned as unresolved by most people who have given it some thought. Far better to stick to the positivist roots and say “..the part of the brain where we see a certain kind of activity when we see someone display this behaviour”.

Actually, this is the kind of things that got Susan Greenfield into trouble at her recent book launch: a crowd of philosophers and theologians and psychologists gently (for the most part) pointing out that for a long time other people have been thinking about aspects of mind and behaviour that neuroscience has only just begun to recognise, and that perhaps she ought to stick to doing very good neuroscience instead of very bad philosophy.

I think it’s starting to look as though my problem lies with what I percieve to be a lack of self-awareness on the part of some neuroscientists, in that the language they use reveals assumptions about the world that for them are unchallenged, and yet to those who have given them a little more thought are far from certain. When they talk about the brain and their experimental data I am enthralled and fascinated: when they extrapolate naively into domains that have been much more thoroughly examined by others they do so with no respect for the traditions of thought that might teach them to be less confident in their generalisations.

Probably better I put that here than in an email. To be continued, I think: there’s something big here to be given more thought.

I have a thought, unformed, recorded here to await the fingers of an overenthusiastic evening class, manipulations I am sure that will be distinguished more for their earnestness than their deft nature or sureness of direction, yet still the thought stays here, and if I haven’t handcuffed it to the side of the burning page and left a hacksaw it should count itself lucky. Here it is.

Internet language, by which I mean hip internet language, the sort used by twenty-four-year-olds who have been twenty-four for long enough now to understand tax returns and how to make money from selling t-shirts that carefully mean nothing, the sort of approach to communication that thinks “i have an extra controller do you want to play as luigi i know that’s not much but this is my house” is a good sort of a thing to say on a masthead, the kind of speech that reckons that, if ordinary metaphor is two kinds of meaning and intertextual metaphor is three and that’s better, then metaphor which is likely shorn of any referent for your audience is NONE times THRIFTEEN better which is win, this kind of language is, I intend to propose once I’ve thought this through a bit better and the flashing lights have gone from my peripheral vision, this kind of language is a perfectly good response to the problem of having a thousand and two billion people at risk of reading your words.

By which I mean, analysing memey language (the language of lol and of fail and having all of things belong us, not specifically memetic language that copies and replicates extant modes of communication) according to computing history, or the affordances of the technology present when a certain kind of speech was established, or the prevalent youth codes active in the populations that propagate these ways of talking online might not be as elegant a way of approaching this indefinable (really) but instantly recognisable (honestly) internet trait as coming to see it as a way of preserving self through obscurity, a tacitly recognised capitulation to the need to remain unknown to most people (this is normal and healthy) while still being available to all. If I use a metaphor that makes no sense (“scratch and sniff” for “have a look at the archives”) then maybe what I’m really doing is looking for the least (not most) relevant yet meaningful connection I can make, in a signal that, if you understand, even inarticulately, my reasons for doing that, then you will understand.

My god it’s hideous, this thought, so different from the pure and snowy notion that drifted in just two paragraphs earlier. The class have been cruel in their passion, stubby and unco-ordinated fingers blurring essential features, warping what were harmonious qualities into the kind of ghastly shape I hope never has a pulse. Obviously, understanding the need for obscurity through language has been a hallmark of youth talk since things were copacetic, and the imperative to say things to be got rather than have them contain things to get is what makes cool things cool (if you have to ask, then…). But it seems to me that in this lies a possible defence against the relentless flaying of our social skins by the sharp demand for transparency issued by the web, that in defying Wittgenstein and making languages private we might find a way to wriggle out of the riddle posed by socially-targeted ads and Amazon recommendations, by googling new employees and only posting our good shots on flickr, and that maybe the development of the notion of ‘cool’ in the twentieth century is what will help us hang on to the concept of ‘self’ in the twenty-first.

That, and rooting bare-fingered through the slime and detritus of flooded cities for anything we can burn for fuel, or course. This might be a worry only for a very short time. But still: it’s an idea I’d like to record, to leave in its various stunted forms on the shelves of my inner art store, to wander about and reconstruct in its Platonic glory from the absences present in these muddled sentences. It says “notebook” up there for a reason, after all.

The latest xkcd proposes an alternative to the captcha anti-bot test: Matt Webb notices that it’s the Voight-Kampff test applied to the web (I have no idea how Harrison Ford managed to sound the second “f”, but apparently other people know it and have used it). I love it: focussing on what makes a human a human to weed out the bots, beyond our image-processing and language skills, concentrating on accepting interaction with entities that are capable of empathy and value judgements and can recognise the answer we’re most likely to be after.

But it doesn’t work. For one, a yes/no answer just means that a bot has to try twice instead of once, which reduces it to a problem of bandwith. But even if there was a greater choice of answers, any replicant capable of landing a job interview would surely have wifi. My phone has wifi. Even cameras have wifi now, and they would not pass many job interviews (“how do you get on with other people?”, “I click well”). The combination of connectivity and Amazon’s HIT service means that given enough time, any net-enabled replicant could just ask an army of skint humans to come up with the statistically probable answer.

Of course, the crucial element is time. For the HIT strategy to work, replicants would have to be questioned in an environment that would allow them to pause for a while before answering: this implies that they’d be best off applying for jobs in the civil service or the media, where a dilatory approach to qualifying their suitability for a role would be acceptable. Soon, Goldsmiths and Millbank would be staffed with replicants dedicated to working against all that true humans stand for, while the private sector looked on aghast and tried to concoct ways of avoiding working with either for as long as possible. So far, the story checks out: maybe wiser heads than mine are already working on a solution.

One way of avoiding the HIT approach might be to ask for responses that could only be answered through a deep knowledge of the milieu of the author: the purpose of the captcha then progresses from just weeding out bots, to weeding out people who aren’t cool enough to understand the question. In this way blogs can manage their appeal in a far more fine-grained way than at present. Serious tech blogs could bar Mac fanboys through judicious probing of their command-line fluency; political blogs could make sure that comments only come from those that articulate their allegiance in an acceptable fashion. No-one need ever hear from live-action roleplayers ever again.

But more elegant than this crude reification of web cliques would be the inclusion of a “dude this is so a trick question” button, perhaps placed elsewhere in the comments form (“was the question above totally manipulative or a fair chance to express your views?”). Perhaps in addition to the “yes” or “no” options in the two examples above, we might add a po or mu option, giving humans a chance to do what a robot can’t, at present: recognise an absurdity and claim the right to not answer.

There seem to be quite a few things about living in a different country that I find cognitively taxing in a small way – not enough to stop me doing anything, but enough that I keep finding simple tasks a bit more difficult.

I’m emailing a list of people who attended an event I ran last week, and I have no idea who’s who. Everyone I met that day introduced themselves to me with an English name: every email I have on my list uses a Chinese name. I’ve got the hang of patronymic followed by personal names, but relating that to English names chosen arbitrarily is a little trickier.

I guess that might be one more reason why using handphone numbers as personal identifiers might be appealing.