massage

Today, kartiksg gave me a very painful, hopefully very therapeutic back rub. He told me that muscles "clicking" are a sign of knots.

So I have multiple knots in my back (though not as many as before Kartik started), which is apparently a common symptom in the cluster, especially among people taking "OS" (stress + sitting for a long time). I wonder if they are knots in the literal sense. Doing some Googling, I found pages on "muscle knots" / "myofascial trigger points" (1, 2), which seem to be fat, painful bits in stringy muscles. Does that picture correspond to that funny round lump next to my shoulderblade? The multimedia isn't good enough yet.

A collaborative massage group at CMU sounds like an excellent idea. Students can't afford to pay for professionals, but they can trade with other students, for significant health benefit. I'd like someone to start this club. They should make sure, when advertising, that nobody gets the wrong idea. Maybe the right way to start it would be in the context of a class: people will need each other to practice on. From there, we just have to make sure they won't go away when they graduate.

Russian-Germanic cognates

I just learned some Russian words from cozmic1, at KGB food + dance lesson event.

Here's my list of German-Russian cognates (no Latin, Greek words allowed).
kupi = kaufen (Dutch "kopen") (to buy)
raboto = arbeit (to work)
lyub = lieben (to love)

(I trust my readers to correct my Russian.)

It's kinda surprising how many cognates there are, since they are in different language families (the only known common ancestor being some branch of PIE). I vaguely remember reading that old Germanic borrowed heavily, and had little vocabulary of its own.

human conversation protocol

Questions Under Discussion and Dialogue Moves

Broadly, the topic of this paper is the relation between agents' information states and dialog moves (i.e. questions and answers). It's about information goals, and planning of how to get them. It explains some simple pragmatic phenomena: the question "Do you know the time?" indicates a desire to know the time, which is how listeners know that a literal answer is not desired.

The paper is about comparing and combining the QUD model (basically, a stack of questions to be discussed, i.e. goals and sub-goals) with the "classical" BDI (which, in general, might need full-blown epistemic logic (to focus only on the "B" from "BDI")). Despite their discussion at the end of section 4, my inclination is to just adapt BDI (the more expressive formalism) to deal with those issues. But I'll readily admit that I'm not familiar with these formalisms.

As with all papers with logic content, I wish this came with an applet to allow me to play some of these formal dialog games.

It's a very neat sort of thing, because it formalizes common-sense. I can even imagine this applied to tutoring social skills to autistic people.

an attentional theory of autism: volume/equalizer analogy

This is a new theory of autism for me.


Matt Belmonte - Physiological Studies of Attention in Autism: Implications for Autistic Cognition and Behaviour

(quote of the abstract and emphases have been removed due to a complaint by the author)


Highlights:

slow attentional shifts -> fewer things are perceived (albeit more intensely) -> ritualized behavior

cinema analogy

The author , who has a CS background, is also interested in cultural aspects of the disorder, literature and narrative, and philosophy of science. He has also written a Hofstadterian book, reminescent of Goedel, Escher, Bach. He's an Assistant Prof. at Cornell's Department of Human Development.

Here is a sort of personal biography, and a sort of blog.