About Time!
I am finally getting the chance to post a brief blog!
Before I started working, I was so busy exploring and taking pictures that I didn’t write. Once I started working, I was so busy with work that I didn’t write. So it goes…
Things are going very well. I have decided there is something especially stressful about being in a location where maybe 2% of the things you hear are in a language you understand. I have also noticed that this distress tends to increase as mental fatigue sets in, and that the stress itself feeds back to increase the fatigue.
I offset this by learning as many words and phrases as I can. I can count to nineteen, greet, thank, and recognize functional things like “enter” and “exit.” I know random words from the Internet and newspaper like “information,” “search,” and “private.” I am starting to get used to typing on a keyboard with a left shift about the size of a normal key, pushed away to the far left edge of the keyboard.
So, it went from big things early on (eating, getting into the hotel, etc.) and has progressed to little things, like saying “twelve” (on iki) or “goodnight” (iyi something).
My pictures are all uploaded and mapped at http://picasaweb.google.com/bmccalip.
It really has been a great trip. I’ve had many surprises, both good and challenging. The most challenging was that the office is not really English-speaking as a matter of convention (most people are able to speak very well but mostly choose not to unless required). I’m just taking this as an opportunity to learn a lot more about the sounds and stresses of the language, which helps me pronounce words correctly when I read them. But it presents difficulty with fatigue as I said before.
I should get going soon, but I did have one thought about this fatigue phenomenon. Last night I compared it conceptually with static from a poor or malfunctioning television connection. If you try to compress this random data, the file comes out much bigger than would a normal picture with orderly, shapely things like football helmets or leopard spots.
This is because randomness (entropy) is the ultimate source of “information” (not in the “useful data” sense but in the “unique idea” sense). Compressibility is mainly determined by lack of information (like patterns, which are predictable to some extent). Orderly things are more expected (a flying football tends to move in an arc rather than all over the screen, etc.), so it takes less horsepower to describe them. Randomness cannot be described briefly, because the presence of meaningful patterns really discounts the randomness (monkeys and typewriters aside).
Anyway, I think the mind works the same way: on assumptions. If you hear “I love” on TV, there is probably a 40% chance or something that “you” will be the next word. Who knows, but what it means is that if you hear “oo” you can probably assume it was “you.” When there’s this meaningful but unintelligible rattle going on all the time in your brain, you are trying to hard to decode the signal you max out and wear yourself down.
Anyway, getting back to it…