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[Pabappa]

Im not sure people with prosopagnosia would fail the mirror test. I have it, as it is common among people with Asperger syndrome, and I have a difficult time recognizing people even that I have seen many times, even housemates, or people who I have spoken to just a few minutes earlier. But I think it's a different part of the brain that tells us the person in the mirror is us. After all, even someone with very poor vision would still understand what mirrors are, and even if they could only see a blurry smear of colors they would know who they were looking at.

And likewise, I think the patients who fail the mirror test are often capable of recognizing the person in the mirror .... they even will sometimes remark on how similar they are in appearance to the patient. It's a different part of the brain that's misbehaving for them.

hmmm .... i wonder if faceblindness is why so many of the people i meet in my dreams are generic and interchangeable.

[Xwtek]

(And some animals can do it, notably chimps, dolphins, and magpies.)

I forgot to put "some".

[Xwtek]

Asperger syndrome

What'? I can recognize myself in the mirror.

[Travis B.]

Asperger syndrome

What'? I can recognize myself in the mirror.

Pabappa didn't say all or even most people with Asperger's syndrome.

[alynnidalar]

Interestingly, I only recently learned that people with ADHD also often have difficult with names and faces--although it's not face blindness (they often have no difficulty telling the difference between people/recognizing a face), but rather a difficulty matching up names and faces, perhaps tied to an aversion to eye contact. Just another piece of evidence to toss on the pile that I'm ADHD! I've had this problem my entire life (I have to force myself to look most people squarely in the face, and routinely forget the names of people I've known literally my entire life*) but never realized that might be what's causing it.

(*to expand: it's like there's a list of names in my head and a list of faces, and the two lists often don't overlap. So for example, I know the names of most people who work in my office. I also know their faces. I just have no clue what name goes with what face, with the exception of people I work with very frequently. Or another example, I've known people at my cousins' church since childhood; I've been there many times over the years and my family is good friends with many people at the church. If you showed me a picture of many people who attend that church and asked me if I knew them, I would say yes, but wouldn't be able to tell you their names. If you showed me a name, I would also recognize it, but couldn't tell you what they looked like. It's like they're completely separate in my head, despite obviously referring to the same people.

One horribly embarrassing occasion about ten years ago, I literally did not recognize my brother-in-law's parents, despite having met them several times prior to that. I knew I knew them, because they looked familiar. I just had absolutely no idea whatsoever what their names were. Luckily I think the only person who realized I genuinely didn't recognize them was my mom, who gracefully kept mum about it! I've become very good since at interacting with people without letting on that I don't know who they are...)

[Kuchigakatai]

When I was a kid I used to have trouble picturing my parents' faces in my head from memory. I noticed it because at school we'd have an activity now and then in some years where we were asked to draw our parents, and I couldn't really remember their faces. It felt strange that I'd have an easier time picturing the face of some random quiet kid in the class I never talked to, or for that matter my uncles and aunts, but that was the situation. It annoyed me but it didn't distress me, since it's not like I had any problem recognizing them. I'd see them again and be like, "oh yeah, those are their faces", but I'd forget them again.

For the activity, I'd get around the problem by drawing them with big sunglasses and a hat while doing some funny thing outdoors to distract any teacher from my problem (it's good to prevent teachers from thinking you're strange in a bad way), like maybe I'd draw my family in a park talking while sitting ("funny" because most of my classmates simply drew their families standing next to each other staring towards the front), consciously remembering that my mother has some long-ish type of face countour while my dad's is a bit less oval and more square-y at the jaw.

By my later teen years, I started to be able to remember their faces, so I don't have this anymore. It just amuses me in hindsight.

[Frislander]

I haven't been terribly active on here recently and there's a good reason for that, so here's a bit of a life update. My final year of undergraduate is coming up and now I'm near the end I've realised that serious theoretical linguistics really isn't for me. So I've decided to apply for an MA in Language Documentation and Description at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London. As part of my attempts to secure funding for such a venture I am currently in the process of applying for a couple of scholarships, notably an Economic and Social Research Council grant, which comes with PhD funding attached. This of course has the downside that I've already had to think about what I would want to do as a PhD, but since I'm applying for what is basically a fieldwork Masters I've decided to go all-in and propose a fieldwork-based PhD, namely I'm interested in studying the Kiwaian family of the Fly River Delta in Papua New Guinea, which in my experience has been relatively understudied (I've found a relatively recent short grammar of Urama plus a grammar of Kiwai from 1932 but pretty much nothing else).

Of course this is all still yet to be sorted out, since I have yet to actually put in the application, but it's still new developments nonetheless.

[dhok]

I haven't been terribly active on here recently and there's a good reason for that, so here's a bit of a life update. My final year of undergraduate is coming up and now I'm near the end I've realised that serious theoretical linguistics really isn't for me. So I've decided to apply for an MA in Language Documentation and Description at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London. As part of my attempts to secure funding for such a venture I am currently in the process of applying for a couple of scholarships, notably an Economic and Social Research Council grant, which comes with PhD funding attached. This of course has the downside that I've already had to think about what I would want to do as a PhD, but since I'm applying for what is basically a fieldwork Masters I've decided to go all-in and propose a fieldwork-based PhD, namely I'm interested in studying the Kiwaian family of the Fly River Delta in Papua New Guinea, which in my experience has been relatively understudied (I've found a relatively recent short grammar of Urama plus a grammar of Kiwai from 1932 but pretty much nothing else).

Of course this is all still yet to be sorted out, since I have yet to actually put in the application, but it's still new developments nonetheless.

Excellent! I hadn't heard of Kiwaian and the Wikipedia articles on the languages are sparse--why that family in particular? (Of course, there doesn't have to be a reason other than "it's understudied," and maybe there shouldn't be a reason--is "language A seems to have a wackier verbal complex than language B" a sufficient reason to keep language B understudied? But of course, resources are always constrained, so choices have to be made somewhere along the line...)

[Frislander]

I haven't been terribly active on here recently and there's a good reason for that, so here's a bit of a life update. My final year of undergraduate is coming up and now I'm near the end I've realised that serious theoretical linguistics really isn't for me. So I've decided to apply for an MA in Language Documentation and Description at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London. As part of my attempts to secure funding for such a venture I am currently in the process of applying for a couple of scholarships, notably an Economic and Social Research Council grant, which comes with PhD funding attached. This of course has the downside that I've already had to think about what I would want to do as a PhD, but since I'm applying for what is basically a fieldwork Masters I've decided to go all-in and propose a fieldwork-based PhD, namely I'm interested in studying the Kiwaian family of the Fly River Delta in Papua New Guinea, which in my experience has been relatively understudied (I've found a relatively recent short grammar of Urama plus a grammar of Kiwai from 1932 but pretty much nothing else).

Of course this is all still yet to be sorted out, since I have yet to actually put in the application, but it's still new developments nonetheless.

Excellent! I hadn't heard of Kiwaian and the Wikipedia articles on the languages are sparse--why that family in particular? (Of course, there doesn't have to be a reason other than "it's understudied," and maybe there shouldn't be a reason--is "language A seems to have a wackier verbal complex than language B" a sufficient reason to keep language B understudied? But of course, resources are always constrained, so choices have to be made somewhere along the line...)

Well now that you mention wacky verb complexes, I should mention that part of the reason I'm going with Kiwaian is that from what I've seen it strongly departs from the Trans-New-Guinea norm in terms of its verb complex morphology being 1 mostly prefixing, 2 not fusing tense and subject marking and 3 having separate marking positions for subject number, object number, and the presence of a 1st person argument (among other things).

Plus the lowlands of New Guinea seem to get relatively little attention anyway, e.g. the Trans-Fly group seems to be in a similar state.

[MacAnDàil]

That is really cool, Frislander! I hope it goes well for you!

[Pabappa]

Poortown truck drivers are donating toy trucks to Richtown school children for Christmas. These annual toy truck truck drives are so famous that Poortown Toy Co has produced a die cast model of the most famous toy truck truck. It's so popular that the list of toy trucks to be distributed on the toy truck truck drive will include this toy toy truck truck and Poortown truck drivers have decided to deliver them on a specially requisitioned toy toy truck truck truck.

[Kuchigakatai]

A beautiful map 2018 UN report on the Human Development Index, from Wikipedia. Three of the five categories are in colours that are peculiarly difficult for humans to distinguish, namely mid-dark shades of purple. What are the chances this is intentional as opposed to incompetent? A possible motivation would be to highlight countries that have a low HDI score.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... Report.svg
(not a direct link to the SVG file, just an info page)

I also notice that the small nations of Oceania, Europe, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean are pretty much invisible, as it is usually the case in maps on Wikipedia and elsewhere. I've noticed before that there are occasional maps where these small entities are represented by disproportional circles, like in this map of Russian as an official language. I wish this was more common...


While we're talking about colours, this three-dimensional object representing the human colour space is very interesting:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... _mesh.webm

I wonder what its equivalent would be for people with different types of colour blindness. Also whether such a thing would make sense. I mean, people with classic deuteranomaly (the more common type) see red as some kind of greenish brown, because that's what the cones manage to be stimulated as. Maybe the intensity of the red would be lower, resulting in a less fat 3D object.

[Kuchigakatai]

There is quite a bit of variety in terms of the possible physical states of matter, but more than half of them require extreme cold or heat and/or extreme pressure. In everyday Earth conditions however, four basic or classical types can be identified:

* solid ("earth")
* liquid ("water")
* gas ("air")
* plasma ("fire")

[Pabappa]

Looks like the database of the old ZBB has gotten partly corrupted and some of the posts are now blank. On the off chance someone wants the dream thread and didnt save it, I saved all 73 pages so I could type up my own dreams and post them to my website. The dream thread seems to be more intact than most other threads, though, so most posts are still there.

[Kuchigakatai]

Oh man, yes, I see a lot of my old posts now appear blank, that sucks.

However, considering the errors I see at the top when looking at a page with posts:



...I think the database is just fine, the actual problem is that the PHP runtime was updated to version 7 on the hosting server, so the PHP code of incatena.org's forum is now outdated.

Specifically, PHP7 is now complaining about the use of
the / e (e v a l) P C R E modifier
in the function
p r e g _ r e p l a c e ( ),
since it has now been completely removed due to being a cause of serious security vulnerabilities. In other words, the phpBB authors of incatena.org's forum wrote bad, potentially exploitable code, and now we're paying the price.

(I had to type those links with the letters s e p a r a t e d because this forum's Apache server has mod_security activated, so it won't let me post if my post resembles any real PHP function call...)

[Kuchigakatai]

For zompist:

An update to the phpBB forum there on incatena.org might solve the problem. Apparently the current latest phpBB forum software (version 3.2) runs on PHP7 just fine. Some people report needing to open config.php and changing the database binding from "mysql" to "mysqli" but that's about it.

Note that this might eventually need to be done here on verduria.org too. If I remember correctly, this forum runs on phpBB 3.1, which will also fail the moment the server host gets rid of PHP 5.6 in favour of PHP 7. (But maybe we're already on phpBB 3.2, I don't know.)

[zompist]

We're on 3.2.2 here. The old one was 3.0.12.

The incatena.org site is backed up, so nothing should be lost permanently.

I don't know how hard it is to upgrade phpbb over there. I'll take a look later.

[alice]

There is quite a bit of variety in terms of the possible physical states of matter, but more than half of them require extreme cold or heat and/or extreme pressure. In everyday Earth conditions however, four basic or classical types can be identified:

* solid ("earth")
* liquid ("water")
* gas ("air")
* plasma ("fire")

Incidentally, these are the two (independently-orginated) different sets of terms to refer to the basic blocks in Jet Set Willy.

[Kuchigakatai]

I just found it incredibly amusing that the Ancient Greek elements correspond neatly to the basic states of matter in everyday Earth physics/chemistry.

[zompist]

Sometimes procrastination pays off! The tagline under the board name is appropriate again.