@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

The last two days have seen the announcements of MSFT’s new Bing search platform as well as the to-be-launched Google Wave:

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler decided to make a joke out of MSFT’s choice of brand name:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/the-bing-definition-microsoft-probably-doesnt-want-you-to-get-in-your-fortune-cookie/

and this has been followed by all manner of inaccurate (but quite amusing) threads by people attempting to translate and discern what the word “bing” means. According to the TC post it’s “death”.

Fortunately, one commentator does note:

“According to Dr. Qi Lu, who thought about going back to live in his native China before accepting Steve Ballmer’s offer to head up Microsoft’s search effort, Bing means something a little more positive in Chinese:

“Bing” also resonates with an audience Google is yet to dominate: China.

“The actual Chinese characters are two characters, ‘Bi’ and ‘Ying’ and combined these two characters mean ‘very certain to respond’ and ‘very certain to answer’,” Dr Lu said.

“That’s a terrific representation of what our brand stands for in the Chinese language.””

For me, MSFT marketing has made the mistake of thinking they can compound two Chinese characters 必 应 “bi-ying” and anglicize them into BING — as in Chandler Bing from Friends and the Soprano’s “bada bing” — and not double-checking whether the hybrid loses something in the re-translation. One of the homophonic translations of “bing” is indeed “disease”. However there are the other translations; it all depends on the tone for the letter i in the word. Like the French language, Chinese has acute, grave, bass and double acute accents (ì, í,  ī, etc.). The difference is that in French the accents are used purely for pronunciation assistance whilst in Chinese the accent completely determines the word, its pronunciation tones and its meanings.

Here are some possible meanings for “bing”:

http://www.nciku.com/search/all/pinyin/bing

Incidentally, a TC commentator provided the link to translations for “ping” instead of “ding” (and this is why our brain cells are dying and academic research says we’re only using 10 percent of our intelligence — LOL!).

Instead of jumping straight to the “disease” translation, TC’s journalist could have opted for the version of bing which means “ice” and “consult” so the word’s English connotations with search would be “cool consult”.

As for the commentator on that TC thread who says Google’s Wave in Chinese sounds and translates as “death” 危 ……….NOWHERE does that word appear on nciku online for the Chinese translation of “wave”:

http://www.nciku.com/search/all/wave

Actually the only constituents of the character for “wave”, 波浪 are: water, ball and cool. This is appropriate since waves in Chinese are envisioned as ball curls over cool water, so Google’s WAVE loses less kinetic energy and power in translation than MSFT’s BING, that’s for sure.

Also, as you can see in my explanations, Chinese people think poetically, harmonically and in natural Zen because it’s incorporated in the structure of our language (written characters, homophonic pronunciations and radicals replacements etc.) itself!

Anyone lucky enough to be multi-lingual would fall about laughing all the time at the intentional and unintentional double entendres and lost in translations of all sorts of brand names and other popular terms. Previously, I’ve tried to explain that a bridegroom was getting “cold feet” to my mother — not to marrying me, btw, but in the US comedy film, The Bachelor. She said the guy should simply put on some socks!!!

That’s an example of lost in translation……….LOL.

Yesterday something happened on the Global Sense-Making site that made me think again about senses of humor and whether we share or don’t share it with others and how this affects our insights, innovation, progress and plain old enjoyment of the Web. Then I thought wider about the social implications for the Global Brain.

Firstly, my own sense of humor encompasses this type of material (in no particular order):

(i.) Bringing Up Baby — directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn

(ii.) Life of Brian — ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ by the Monty Python crew

* http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPOzQzk9Qo

(iii.) Subprime crisis — John Bird & John Fortune on the Bremner, Bird & Fortune show, Channel 4

(iv) City Lights — Charlie Chaplin

* http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zskO9O3hF78

(v.) Duck Soup — the Marx Brothers

(vi.) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

·      http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml

(vii.) Cyrano de Bergerac — the Nose scene, starring Gerard Depardieu

(viii.) Pick a Star — the Harmonica Scene, Laurel + Hardy

·      http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2FS8DBqiQWQ

(ix.) Mr Vampire — Chinese comedy horror movie starring Sammo Ho

·      http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GStgl36V6ck

(x.) Chinese spoofs of Western pop songs — Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson

There’s lots more; above are just some examples.

LULU LOLS A LOT!

I have a particular fondness for naturally smart comedy (especially mistaken identity / fish out of water / idiot savant) rather than the gross out or Punk’d type, and it can be in any language or from any culture. The LOLs and funny bones are exercised regardless of those.

One of my good friends calls me “crazy little Chinese chica” because when she calls I tend to take something straightforward she told me previously, mash it up with something I’ve observed about life’s tragic-ironies and then make her laugh with what is off-the-wall tangential yet connected humor that she gets and likes.

WHITHER THE WIT?

However, I appreciate that humor doesn’t necessarily translate — particularly if the other person:

(a.)          has a humor by-pass.

(b.)         doesn’t like you, full-stop.

(c.)         doesn’t share the same linguistic or experiential reference points.

(d.)         is not privy to your group’s history of “in-jokes”.

(e.)         is simply a t-r-o-l-l. [Shhh! Don’t say the word aloud or they show up --- LOL.]

LOST IN TRANSLATION

I remember once being in a cinema watching Infernal Affairs — which was subsequently remade into The Departed by Martin Scorcese, btw — and there is a really witty romantic scene in the psychiatrist’s office which was the culmination of the flirtation between the two leads and………..NO ONE laughed in the cinema except me.

Yup, I released my LOLs regardless into the darkness.

Why? Well, my mother tongue’s Cantonese, which is what the film was made in. I read the subtitles they provided for Westerners and there was definitely “lost in translation” at work, so by the time the comedy climax came…………..only I, the native speaker, picked up on the laughter cues all along the way. It’s subtle. It’s nuanced. It’s there.

We’re CONSCIOUS of it.

HUMOR AS A GLOBAL BRAIN SYNAPSE

So what does this have to do with the Global Brain?

Well, it seems no one’s really given humor much thought yet much less application. Technologists are still focusing on the issue of spirituality and conscious self-awareness of AI. In fact with a simple search on Google with the terms “global brain humor” there hardly elicits many entries! I counted less than a dozen relevant ones.

Following is a rare link which does includes some glimpses and I’m blogging about it because it’s also a great read on David Bohm’s theories of quantum mechanics — which is what the SemWeb and the Singularity brigade and the science fiction futurologists are all trying to simulate.

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t51235.html

The article says:

“You have many special mental faculties: humor, spirituality, eroticism, music, mathematics, aesthetics, nurturing, gossip and narration.”

My impression of the SemWeb and Global Brain movement to date is that they’re still adopting and refining the mathematical approach to semantic social graphs. They may say and spin they no longer use the statistical approach, to try and delineate their rankings algorithm from that of Google’s, but I’ll bet you a can of Coke the algorithm is still driven by mathematical concepts rather than humor, nurturing or narration.

To my mind, these are the key constituents of sense-making rather than the mathematical ones.

We do calculate the risks and probabilities involved when we make decisions but invariably if the narration, the nurturing (or positioning) and the humor is good this over-rides whatever mathematics we generate in our mind because we reason that, “Who knows? So the likelihood of failure is 60%. So I’m paying a premium of 10% over cost. So I can’t really afford it……..but I’m going to enjoy and have fun with it while it lasts!”

It’s the ego and the will acting in conjunction to opt for personal happiness, even momentary, in place of rational responsibility. Sometimes, it can save us from ourselves and the rigidity of society.

By no means am I saying that the mathematical element should be completely abstracted from the building of the Global Brain. I’m simply stating that the other N-dimensions also have to be taken into account. At the moment, thinking about the Global Brain is somewhat linear, uni-dimensional and disconnected from how our brains really work: the AI and neural nets branch of mathematics is being deployed to proxy consciousness, there’s taxonomies and semantics but no smart wit.

Humor is a major synapse that’s currently missing in the formulations of how to build the Global Brain. Humor actually plays its role in our ability to reflect upon the information we’re intaking from external sources and also internally how we perceive and deal with the folly of our own absurdities and idiosyncrasies as well as those of others.

This is another aspect which highlights how important perception is. What one party regards as “genius wit” is seen by another as “juvenile silliness”.

We should factor this into the Global Brain postulations, imo.

HUMOR AS A METAPHYSICAL CONSTITUENT

Dr Branko Bokun, a graduate of the Sorbonne’s sociology department, argues in his book, Humour Therapy, (published by Vita Books) that the brain is also a gland, and that its glandular activity can be manipulated by thoughts or ideas created by the brain’s mental activity.

He believes that humour therapy helps us to realise that both unhappiness and gloom are infectious.

‘That is why the pursuit of personal happiness only acquires a realistic meaning if it becomes the pursuit of other people’s happiness.’

Bokun proposes humor courses, to help restore our inborn disposition towards playfulness, joy of living, curiosity, exploration and flexibility. His suggestions include:

(i)            Develop a sense of self-ridicule, for instance by talking to oneself in the mirror;



(ii)          See amusing and happy films and plays, and read humorous books and magazines;




(iii)         Dedicate a corner of one’s home to toys, as the mere sight and feel of them lessen tension. Hang pictures of children and animals on the walls rather than staid or gloomy ancestors;




(iv)         Find a hobby, but change it the moment it is taken over-seriously. Preferably choose a hobby that cannot go against nature’s harmonies, such as sailing or gardening;



(v)          Have a pet and talk to it;




(vi)         See life through a haze of analogies to memorised jokes and anecdotes;



(vii)       Repeat three times every morning ‘I am not the centre of the universe’;

 and

(viii)      Remember the eleventh commandment ‘thou shalt not take thyself too seriously.’

These seem to be reasonable suggestions — although, if you get caught talking to yourself in the mirror…………someone may wrongly assume you’re being narcissistic rather than exercising your humor! LOL.

I like point (vi), though. Life is richer and funnier if you can quote analogies from a wide variety of sources spanning Shakespeare to ‘The Simpsons’ to Jackie Chan — yes, seriously; he’s a naturally hoots guy in Chinese and in English!

CONCLUSION: LOL LEADS TO ENLIGHTENMENT

I close this blog post with a quotation:

If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane. — Jimmy Buffett

Jon Stewart + Stephen Colbert (The Daily Show) in Rolling Stone

So….the Global Brain has the opportunity to LOL and make sense or……..go mad / cuckoo, short-circuit because it has no GSOH (or release values) and have a nervous breakdown.

LOOOOOOOOOL!