I just finished watching The Happiness of the Katakuris, a very strange, but very good film. Some reviewers called it a "Comedy-Horror Musical". It also has some claymation scenes, and it's strange and touching too. I've never seen another film like it. In a strange way, it's helped me deal with Wally's death.. Anyhow, if you don't mind subtitles, it's a film worth seeing, and if you can speak any Japanese, even better. I may be slightly biased -- I like strange films (Beetlejuice being one of my favourites), speak a little bit of Japanese, and tend to like musicals. Still, I'm recommending it to most people I know.

Right now, I'm reading a bit on Supersymmetry.

Today in class, we reviewed an experiment on the role of phonology in written word recognition (particularly priming). Basically, the specimens were exposed to various types of priming for short words, and their reaction times were measured in ANOVA tests between phonology-specific, letter-specific, and some other effects. One of the things that's interesting is that, to rule out letter-specific priming, they primed with capitals, and the actual tests were performed on lowercase words. It's interesting that, in written languages that lack lower-case forms of orthography, this step could not be performed. Indeed, although the focus was on phonology, it makes me wonder about orthographic priming and recognition in two languages that I know a little bit about -- Japanese (which I speak a bit of) and Hebrew (which I don't, but may learn someday). Both languages lack a lower-case, but that's incidental to the interesting effect -- Hebrew has most of its vowels either interpolated from context (cn y rd ths?) or sometimes written with marks beneath the consonants which are written. Japanese has its letters either representing a consonant-vowel pair, a bare vowel, or "n". So, a Japanese person would be NI-HO-N-SA-I (I don't want to bother figuring out how to make those characters in my BLOG -- just look at this) Anyhow, not shown on that chart are two modifiers that can be applied to most of the characters -- a quote character and a circle, both of which appear in the upper right area of the letter. They both cause a consonant shift, so KI with a quote turns into GI. I'm interested if, in both languages, the modified character would prime for the unmodified (or in hebrew, differently-voweled) character, and if so, if the priming would be as strong as the same-version letter. Priming in hebrew when the vowels are not marked must be very strange -- perhaps when learning the language, priming is not as much of a use and is done less. Things are even more interesting in Arabic, which is related to Hebrew, but also has word-positional forms of letters -- I wonder if all forms prime to all forms, to specific forms, and generally how that works. English grammar apparently makes heavier demands on certain language centres, and as a result, lesions to those areas affects English more than it affects speakers of other languages. I wonder if each language has a kind of 'signature' as to how it uses various areas of the brain.. It would be very amusing if people who get certain kinds of lesions are told they can live a fuller life learning another language and moving to a new country. Speaking of non-surgery ways to treat things caused by brain lesions, I would love to see, for people with Prosopagnosia (damage to face-recognition specialized centres of the brain), portable computers, and LCD glasses, being used to 'tag' people, using the recent work in face-recognition done for security purposes. Remember upside-down glasses and the studies showing people can adapt to them and attain full function in a matter of weeks recieving entirely upside-down input? Perhaps altered glasses for people with damage to the vision-processing systems could scoot damage from those fields in with undamaged areas, and people could adapt and attain nearly full visual functionality again.

Anyhow, I'm demoing some code for work tomorrow. Time to go home and make sure it's ready to go.