I saw a video recently by a flat Earther. (Never mind for now how it came about that I was watching such a thing -- largely by accident.) What was odd was the bit where the flat Earther earnestly tells us that he doesn't want to be a flat Earther. It is, after all, a pain in the ass being an 'out' flat earther. It involves expounding on a conspiracy involving NASA and the analogous agencies of several other governments, lots of other people and institutions, etc., and it involves trying to dislodge everybody else's prejudice in favor of stuff that they have been taught since first grade. He doesn't want to be entangled in all this, our video host assures us. Because he'd much rather be about his day job. What's the day job? Warning people about chemtrails. I kid you not. Personally, I know how he feels. I'd much rather not blog about the faeries who threaten vengeance upon us as a species for the cancellation of Sabrina the Teen-Aged Witch. ...
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On March 19, Anna Stubblefield pleaded guilty in a very high profile criminal case. I don't know off hand whether I have written about it in this blog before. [Later Insertion. I have not specifically mentioned Stubblefield here -- I have discussed an underlying controversy ....] Stubblefield has pleaded guilty to aggravated criminal sexual contact with a man known to the public only as DJ, a man with severe cerebral palsy. She has claimed that she has been communicating with DJ through "facilitated communication" (FC) and until agreeing to this guilty plea she had taken the view that they had a consensual romantic relationship, consent conveyed through the FC. [Later insertion. The validity or otherwise of FC is the underlying controversy mentioned in the first use of brackets above. Nearly two years ago I posted here my review of the Donvan/Zucker book about autism. I briefly discussed FC in that context. Autism was not part of DJ's condition.] Senten...
Recently in my twitter feed I encountered a use without explanation of the initials NLP (of course tweets don't allow for much by way of explanation). I wasn't familiar with them, so I did some googling, and was left unsure whether the tweeter had meant "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" or "Natural Language Processing." Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP1) is a fringe-science therapy in the manner of EST or even Scientology, using language that suggests a Chomskian foundation, though the impressive language is just for show. Natural Language Processing (NLP2) on the other hand, is a field of computer engineering that seeks to give computers the ability to understand and speak English, French, Mandarin, etc. ... and ideally to pass the Turing test. The phrase behind NLP2 seems straightforward and commonsensical, although it refers to a demanding and technical body of scientific work. The phrase behind NLP1, on the other hand, seems like it must refer to s...