Humans vs. computers

In response to a reader's question at The Washington Post, Ken Jennings gave a nice analogy explaining why computers won't take over the jobs of game show contestants any time soon:

I don't think this means it's lights out for trivia or quiz shows.  The analogy I use is track and field: humans keep running races even though cars and trains have been faster than us for more than a century.  It's all about the human psychology of the contest, not just the outcome.

Deafness and Wizarding

A former student of mine once made a rather clever (to my mind) analogy between the wizarding world in the Harry Potter novels and Deaf society in America. After the break are the main areas of comparison he made:

Language is like a building: Phonetics vs. Phonology

There is a great analogy over at dialectblog.com explaining the difference between phonetics and phonology:

To illustrate the difference between these two terms, imagine that human language is a building. (Bear with me.) Somebody studying phonology would look at the fundamental structure of the building, its engineering, its shape, its square footage, etc. Somebody studying phonetics, on the other hand, would study the actual materials used to make the building: the particular type of steel, whether it’s brick or wood, the glass in the windows. Phonetics studies the raw materials of language; phonology studies how these raw materials are used.

Christmas cards and Twitter followers

Finally got around to hanging up all the Christmas cards that came two months ago. I also only recently joined Twitter. The juxtaposition made me realize that one could calculate a Christmas card sent/received ratio the same way that you calculate a Twitter follow/followers ratio. I would bet that these ratios are probably much the same for any given person.

CSI and ASL

While it's always fun to see so many great Deaf actors together on TV (Phyllis Frelich, Marlee Matlin, and Ty Giordano), the recent CSI episode they were all featured in had a very annoying plot point involving American Sign Language.  The bad guy turned out to be a hearing man who was pretending to be deaf in order to get some sort of grant money.  Fine so far. His ASL is supposed to be so good it fooled everyone at the school for the deaf where he resides. Also fine, since he admits to being raised by Deaf parents. So what's the problem?

For some arcane reason the writers felt the need for him to claim to be a visiting student from England. The CSIs catch onto him in part because they find him using LSQ (Quebec Sign Language) signs, which proves he's actually Canadian, as if that's important. Marlee Matlin's character even gives a nice lecture about how all sign languages are different. But a Deaf student who claims he's from England shouldn't be using flawless ASL at all! He should be most comfortable with BSL (very very different from ASL) and his ASL should be accented and second-language like. Not one person on campus ever commented on this (Gee, isn't it weird how the British guy knows perfect ASL and never uses BSL?) They're just stunned that he turns out to be Canadian. This is so nonsensical it drove me crazy. I don't even understand the point of making him foreign at all, especially if they're going to get it all wrong. And Marlee Matlin's character, who is supposed to be the foremost authority on Deaf culture in the world (and is even sleeping with the suspect!), is the most clueless of all.

What is this like? It's like having a bad guy who's trying to pass himself off as a Spanish exchange student even though he's really from Mexico, and you're convinced that he's Spanish because of his flawless use of Quechua. It's that dumb.

Don't get me started on how badly all the hearing characters signed. It's to be expected.

Rebooting

Restarting (or rebooting) your computer is like making your bed.

When you first get in a freshly made bed, the sheets stay relatively neat. But as the night goes on and you toss and turn, the sheets get more and more tangled up, to the point that you need to make the bed before you can effectively use it again. It seems like this is what happens when I use my computer.

My work requires me to manipulate large HD video files (5 or 6 GB each) for long stretches of time, and to switch back and forth between multiple files all day. While this works well enough after a fresh restart, the longer I work with the vids, the more likely they are to exhibit start delays and choppy playback. The memory storage allotments have tangled up like the sheets on my bed, requiring me to restart. But I hate restarting (since I often have several windows open) and always postpone the inevitable.

What would be great would be if there was a way to remake the bed (=restart the computer) without having to leave the bed (=without having to close all the current programs). If there was a button I could push which would straighten out the memory storage just like someone lifting the sheets off of me and straightening them out without making me get up first.

Why doesn't this exist?  Or if it does, what is it called?

FWIW I currently use a Dell laptop PC with 8GB RAM and 500GB hard drive running Windows 7.