On not minding what happens

Over-involvement in the future must be our most maladaptive trait.

Back in the 1970’s in Ojai, when Jiddu Krishnamurti drew enormous crowds to his extemporaneous talks, he touched on the liberation that comes from releasing the pointless hold on the future.1

Do you want to know what my secret is? You see, I don’t mind what happens.

Jiddu Krishnamurti Lecture, Ojai,California, USA; late 1970's

That’s it. Of all the teachings from the broad wisdom traditions, his one secret was not minding what happens. Notice that Krishnamurti didn’t say “I don’t care what happens.” It’s an important distinction. I can care about my own wellbeing and that of others in some future. But it’s pointless to hold onto that future in its imaginary state. As Oliver Burkeman put it:

I don’t mean to imply you can reason yourself out of worry entirely. But there’s some liberation in realising the truth: when you worry, you’re demanding reassurance, yet this is something you’ll definitely never get from the future, for the simple reason that it hasn’t occurred yet. Certainly, it’s worth taking action in the present to increase the probability that things will go well. But that’s as far as your influence extends. In a profound sense, the future itself is none of your business.

Oliver Burkeman Worried about the election? Don’t – it’s as futile as rewriting the past, The Guardian December 6, 2019

In some sense, life usually just works out. It doesn’t stop and wait for us to catch up. When things don’t work out the way we thought, then we adjust and others adjust and we manage to still go about our lives. It’s letting fitting things into a box. If it doesn’t all fit, you give it a shake. Things move around and just work themselves out.

The COVID-19 pandemic, the incipient fascism in the U.S. are all inviting real worry about the future. But it’s liberating to allow the future to be as it will be anyway. Do your best to be prepared and to steer the future in the right direction then let it go.

  1. There doesn’t seem to be a video of this particular lecture - at least not that I’ve been able to find. But Jim Dreaver, writing about it back in 2005 has a first person account that’s worth reading. ↩︎

We're all imposters

Reading Oliver Burkeman’s last advice column in decade-long series in The Guardian, I was struck by his advice on the imposter syndrome:

The solution to imposter syndrome is to see that you are one…Humanity is divided into two: on the one hand, those who are improvising their way through life, patching solutions together and putting out fires as they go, but deluding themselves otherwise; and on the other, those doing exactly the same, except that they know it. It’s infinitely better to be the latter (although too much “assertiveness training” consists of techniques for turning yourself into the former).

Remember: the reason you can’t hear other people’s inner monologues of self-doubt isn’t that they don’t have them. It’s that you only have access to your own mind.

Oliver Burkeman The eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life

There’s a tension between wanting to express yourself in something you enjoy and wanting to be publically good at it, even expert. The tension is worse now because of the declining role of real experts. How do we reconcile a genuine amateur’s desire to produce acceptable work with the expert’s hard-won skill and knowledge? Maybe it’s impossible to resolve except in the doing of the thing we enjoy, keeping Burkeman’s advice in the back of our minds. We’re all just winging it.

The Buddha was a list-maker

Beginning with “The Four Noble Truths”1, “The Noble Eightfold Path”2, and so on, the Buddha was a list-maker. I recently found a wonderful book, now out of print but freely available as a pdf. By David Snyder, Ph.D., it is called “The Complete Book of Buddha’s Lists - Explained”

Snyder does a brilliant job of reinterpreting these lists and framing them in the context of what the social sciences say about how we function individually and in groups.

Beginning to experiement with Stanza for natural language processing

After installing Stanza as dependency of UDAR which I recently described, I decided to play around with what is can do.

Installation

The installation is straightforward and is documented on the Stanza getting started page.

First,

sudo pip3 install stanza

Then install a model. For this example, I installed the Russian model:

#!/usr/local/bin/python3
import stanza
stanza.download('ru')

Usage

Part-of-speech (POS) and morphological analysis

Here’s a quick example of POS analysis for Russian. I used PrettyTable to clean up the presentation, but it’s not strictly-speaking necessary.

Automated marking of Russian syllabic stress

One of the challenges that Russian learners face is the placement of syllabic stress, an essential determinate of pronunciation. Although most pedagogical texts for students have marks indicating stress, practically no tests intended for native speakers do. The placement of stress is inferred from memory and context.

I was delighted to discover Dr. Robert Reynolds’ work on natural language processing of Russian text to mark stress based on grammatical analysis of the text. What follows is a brief description of the installation and use of this work. The project page on Github has installation instructions; but I found a number of items that needed to be addressed that were not covered there. For example, this project (UDAR) depends on Stanza; which in turn requires a language-specific (Russian) model.

sed matching whitespace on macOS

sed is such a useful pattern-matching and substitution tool for work on the command line. But there’s a little quirk on macOS that will trip you up. It tripped me up. On most platforms, \s is the character class for whitespace. It’s ubiquitous in regexes. But on macOS, it doesn’t work. In fact, it silently fails.

Consider this bash one-liner which looks like it should work but doesn’t:

# should print I am corrupt (W.Barr)
# instead it prints I am corrupt by W.Barr
echo "I am corrupt by W.Barr" | sed -E 's|^(.+)\sby\s(.+)|\1 (\2)|g'

What does work is the character class [:space:]:

Partitioning a large directory into subdirectories by size

Since I’m not fond of carrying around all my photos on a cell phone where they’re perpetually at list of loss, I peridiocally dump the image and video files to a drive on my desktop for later burning to optical disc.1 Saving these images in archival form is a hedge against the bet that my existing backup system won’t fail someday.

I’m using Blue-Ray optical discs to archive these image and video files; and each stores 25 GB of data. So my plan was to split the iPhone image dump into 24 GB partitions. H

More chorus repetition macros for Audacity

In a previous post I described macros to support certain tasks in generating source material for L2 chorus repetition practice. Today, I’ll describe two other macros that automate this practice by slowing the playback speed of the repetition.

Background

I’ve described the rationale for chorus repetition practice in previous posts. The technique I describe here is to slow the sentence playback speed to give the learner time to build speed by practicing slower repetitions. By applying the Change Tempo... effect^[Change tempo effect in the Audacity manual] in Audacity. In my own practice, I will often begin complex Russian sentences at -50% speed and progress to -25% speed before practicing the pronunciation at native-level speed. By practicing at slow speeds, it gives the learner time to appreciate how syllables are connected to each other. The prosody is more apparent.

Audacity macros to support chorus repetition practice

Achieving fluid, native-quality speech in a second language is difficult task for adult learners. For several years, I’ve used Dr. Olle Kjellin’s method of “chorus repetition” for my Russian language study. In this post, I’m presenting a method for scripting Audacity to facilitate the development of audio source material to support his methodology.

Background

For detailed background on the methodology, I refer you to Kjellin’s seminal paper “Quality Practise Pronunciation with Audacity - The Best Method!” on the subject of chorus repetition practice. The first half of the paper outlines the neurophysiologic rational for the method and the second half describes the practical use of the cross-platform tool Audacity to generate source material for this practice.

Scripting Apple Music on macOS for chorus repetition practice

This is an update to my previous post on automating iTunes on macOS to support chorus repetition practice. You can read the original post for the theory behind the idea; but in short, one way of developing prosody and quality pronunciation in a foreign language is to do mass repetitions in chorus with a recording of a native speaker.

Because in macOS 10.15, iTunes is no more, I’ve updated the script to work with the new Music app. It turns out that it’s a lot simpler. No need to dive into the application classes.