Long Compound Noun Alert

When I was a grad student at Brandeis, I always enjoyed the sign that said Volen Center for Complex Systems Building -- a single noun consisting of six words. From today's Slashdot comes Chinese Internet Addiction Boot Camp Prison Break. Not only is this compound noun seven words long; it doesn't even use a preposition! The number of possible bracketings (word groupings) of such a string is 429, as determined by the Catalan number with n = 7; however, the bracketing that makes the most sense to me is

[[Chinese [[internet addiction] [boot camp]]] [prison break]]

Avatar: Best. Review. Ever.

Best smackdown review yet of a disappointing movie that I couldn't even make it through.

Cognitive Science vs. the Zombies

Place your bets.

Moral particularism vs. scientific morality

An OpenCulture.com blurb about Craig Ferguson, on the Late Late Show, interviewing Jonathan Dancy, prof of philosophy at UT-Austin, about moral particularism. In contrast to Sam Harris, at a TED conference, saying "Science can answer moral questions."

The Open Culture page heads a little tree of interesting pieces: the two videos, a written intro to moral particularism, and a rebuttal of Harris by Sean Carroll.

Boing Boing discovers Sinewave Speech

Meara O'Reilly is a sound designer, instrument builder, and singer who is guest blogging at Boing Boing. On March 16, 2010 she had a nice article called "Whistling Speech" that describes some of the work over the years at Haskins Laboratories and Columbia University by Philip Rubin, Robert Remez, Jennifer Pardo, and others, on sinewave speech.

IEEE Spectrum on Cyborg Life

An article by Antonio Espingardeiro, called "When Will We Become Cyborgs?", in IEEE Spectrum online ponders our cyborg future. Check it out.

Autistici . Detached Metal Voice

Autistici, a UK-based composer and sound designer, is releasing a new commercial CD on March 22, 2010, called Detached Metal Voice - Early Works (Vol. I). Modisti, an interactive virtual environment for new music, describes it as "A collection of tracks exploring the raw extrusion of the human condition. Bringing together early works, Detached Metal Voice is characterized by abstract narrative exploring the anxiety of disconnected elements striving to find connection in a world digital communication. ... There is an homage to voice synthesis including excerpts taken from many of the early laboratory attempts to produce the human voice through the mode of synthesis, including work pioneered by Philip Rubin from the Haskins Laboratories, Tom Baer, and Paul Mermelstein. This synthesizer, know as ASY, was based on vocal tract models developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s by Paul Mermelstein, Cecil Coker, and colleagues. In tracks such as “Babyman” Autistici illustrates a fascination in hearing machines talking about emotive subjects, emulating emotive tonal changes and yet having no real connection to the subjective emotional experience."