Anton Chigurh is a Realistic Psychopath

Not realistic as in setting attainable carnage-causing goals, but realistic as in he resembles real-world psychopaths. (Of course this refers to the character in Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men.) That is, per Leistedt and Linkowski in the Journal of Forensic Sciences; summarized at Mind Hacks. More here on Chigurh's use of language as a tool to move around people-shaped objects, and how he seems to be about the only person in the movie with functioning frontal lobes.

RE No Country For Old Men: Chigurh's Brain

If you haven't seen No Country For Old Men, what's wrong with you.

The fascinating thing about this movie for me was the behavior of Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem) relative to other characters. Chigurh seems to be the only guy in this movie with frontal lobes, particularly in terms of his ability to model the other characters' behavior, while they're utterly at sea about his next action - like a human playing with a dog. The difference in the use of language is particularly striking: the rural hayseeds he victimized throughout the movie are uncertain, approval-seeking, making simple, naively truthful declarations. Chigurh only speaks to cause an effect - his words are noises that move things - and the effect is sometimes a certain behavior from one of the hayseeds, and sometimes to amuse himself. If he says something true, this is incidental.

What's so fascinating about this? Because although Chigurh might be the only person in the movie who has free will (as opposed to reflex and instinct), he seems not to believe in free will: he has placed his behavior, or believes it is inevitably, under the control of rules and fate. In this scene, he is (we assume) determining whether he'll kill a gas station attendant based on the flip of a coin:


The tension in this scene is among the best in the history of film. Do note the unplanned choking on the peanuts. There was no rule, no fate there, and it hurt him.

Later in the movie, when Chigurh is about to kill Woody Harrelson's character, he asks if "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" The ending is interesting in that Chigurh gets into a bloody, near-fatal car accident - accident.

Artificial Languages Talk, UCSD, April 19

Information here. The developers of Na'avi, Klingon and Dothraki will be speaking.

Markov Metal!

More on Markov chains here. These lyrics were (more or less) written by a computer; I was only the editor. If you're dubious that this counts as computer-lyric: could someone really write these in 15 minutes?

I generated them using the following as input: Metallica albums Kill 'Em All through the Black Album; Megadeth Peace Sells through Cryptic Writings; and Slayer Reign in Blood through Seasons in the Abyss. I then curated the best sentences and arranged it so it vaguely rhymed. I used this Markov site (and a synonym site for the title).  You'll see a familiar phrase every so often and if you really squint, you can kind of force a narrative coherence on some of the verses.  But be honest, is it really that much less coherent or borderline plagiarist than most metal lyrics?

A better metal-song generator would include song structure as well.  I'd like to do this for riff generation too but I've already wasted enough of my (and your) time.  Enjoy!


 SPIRIT VOID ONSLAUGHT

I hunger penniless
What might be unsteady
The flag of fire bursting with bated breath
The priest that they'll set free

When twilight blanket's welcome
But still has disappeared
But who's to cry out to each other again
Just leave you see it's crystal clear

Make a familiar face tomorrow, blackened
Dismembered destiny
A New World Order comes back
In bomb shelters filled with loneliness

I don't tread on your soul
Dethrone the word as bad omens in
Lie to myself, the murder's complete
There's nothing else I wonder as the past begins again

Come walk with fire with needles
This is an insane game
But I'll get caught up dead
My mother put him in like rain

Won't hesitate to take some crazy shit has passed
And the Reasons that cleanse you
Where I've seen it rise
Step outside in silent agony within you

Blistering of your mind
There's no more than my time has been stricken by bloodshed
Move can't  you want desire
Life overturned, spanning the God.

Now no mercy for you
Part of life is no remorse
The wall down now
No IOU's, forgotten children

Shortest Straw has found me
Iron fist coming Down in Vanity
Exploiting their Appetite they fury
We want the war to support the heavens to be

If you committed me
I can't feel velocity
Taken my name and reality
What evil I set free

Anonymous existence rendered useless
At the tone of war dreams
A child to recall, the night fall
Souls of machinegun fire screaming

When death staring down
Soon You will be done
Another fight to save the word
We go on the undead altar and beg salvation

Chill your life, I deal in hell
To cut off through the swords
Kept restrained, disapprobation, but you try again
No end until I miss the creations of sacrifice curse

Bones of placid faces
The basis of clay now to be
I burn deep down thinking its done
Feeling the Part of blood

Stretching out on numbered days,
Fragments of pain
To slay all this kingdom of the sound of arms
I can't say back somehow your master plan of war
 
Hear my head against the stake you'd crush me
I'll Take No recess and smashing your steeds
Kills the sheep, you feed me
Trust me luck deserted me

No deed or dying soul could it come to me
Welcome to kill, not see more seriously
Memories can't believe
Experience pleasures of misery

Voices oppress like the number that is the need
The destroyer born faceless without eyes and sweat
We lied to live again

Killing, you raise the school of life
Just empty gun fire
A plan of Living drives you through your life
While you're fighting to lie

As soon you'll do lying dying time
Foreclosure of the hatred comes Burning inside
like a couple grains of demise
Seeking life

Will I know it to be written
Now you're next to kill a kiss
Shouting to begin whipping
On judgment day looking back to live

I realize you see how to live
For you hear evermore you've lost my soul
Fire so grim, I say you will kill
I can subdue but me through the shadows

Eternally rot amidst the gods
As I see won't take my soul without
I am stalking the things are a god
Don't pay dying one, command you for now

Oh so far beyond the needle
Diffused compulsions
I don't care
Bombard 'till submission

No repent, we are no end of sleeping in blood
So be looking back to mankind strapped in
Peace find in blood possessed with hell
Upending the way across the end

The kingdom of puppets
Another child draws near Inferno's coming
Dying to each other lover
The rising immortal in the hour from the dark.
I'm stoned 

More Fun With Markov Chains - And Language Learning

This is cross-posted to my cognition and evolution blog.

Once I started playing with Markov chains I couldn't leave well enough alone, so I went back and played with Markov chains at the character level again, this time with several languages. As you add more elements to the state, the output text starts "looking more like" the language that it came from. To measure this, I checked to see if Google Translate's language autodetect could still tell what it was looking at. This led to a prediction about language learning.

Using the Spanish Wiki entry for Apollo 11, at a 1-character state out of 5 trials the computer thought it was seeing Estonian twice, and then Welsh, Irish, and Galician. Using the English Apollo 11 article, it thought it was seeing Welsh three times, then Afrikaans and Engilsh. With 2-character states for both languages, the translator guessed correctly 5 out of 5.

Then I pulled a dirty trick: I used Old English (from the introduction to Beowulf of course) complete with thorns and diphthongs, and used that as input. With 1-character states, the translator consistently thought it was seeing Welsh 5 for 5. With 2-characters, it still answered Welsh four times, and German once (remember, with the modern languages it could already reliably detect languages scrambled at this level). With 3-element states the translator said English twice, then Icelandic, German, and Welsh. Surprising that this was the first it responded with Icelandic, with all those thistles and thorns floating around.

Finally I started giving it blocks of unmolested Old English text. Unsurprisingly, it couldn't consistently say that this was an ancestral form of English (how many literate modern English speakers would, if they'd never seen it?) The translator said English three times and Danish twice. What!? We translator-Danes in the days of Markov! Feeding it full blocks of Canterbury tales, it had no problem seeing that Middle English was English.

Finally, using an online string generator as well as a little Excel function I wrote, I fed it totally random strings. The response was consistently Maltese.

Why Maltese? Maybe because of the X's, who knows. But I'm not trying to reverse engineer Google's translation engine. I'm more interested in whether its wild guesses on Old English and the low-element-state-scrambled Markov chains reveal something. One obviously is the possible relationship between languages; that Danish and Icelandic should appear in the translator's guesses with scrambled Old English is interesting but not surprising. But the preponderance of Welsh was also interesting. It's unlikely that the translator is noticing anything about a Celtic deep substrate of English, especially since it couldn't see the more recent Old English substrate of English! More likely there's something about Welsh that makes it a good guess in badly scrambled text, as possibly with Maltese. More sound combinations allowed? Lots of single-letter words? If this is true, then the languages that permit the most sounds and sound combinations will:

a) be the "last resort" guesses for translation engines, and

b) should take longer for children to start speaking.

Why b.? When children are learning their first language, imagine the difficulty of identifying individual words. All they're getting is a stream of sound. Now, when you learn a new word, you recognize the other words around it; not so when you're twelve months old. There is evidence that what kids are doing is trying to find word boundaries, and that part of the input comes from looking for sound combinations that appear less frequently, as in "worD Boundary" - English doesn't allow "db" to occur at the beginning or end of a word (although some languages do), but we allow d and b to run up against each other between words. In a language with sound combinations that are less constrained, it will be harder for kids to identify the word boundaries, and it will take them longer to start speaking. This prediction has verified parallels in morphosyntax. Cree and Fulani are notorious for being horribly irregular in terms of verbs and plurals, respectively. In most languages, children are proficient grammatically around age 5, but grammatical maturity is delayed in these languages for several years by the irregularities.

So my prediction is: if the orthography of Welsh and Maltese corresponds to their phonology and a less constraining set of rules about what sounds can occur together, then I predict that children's vocabularies will grow more slowly in those languages relative to most others. The most extreme would be Khoi-San, i.e. the famous "Bushman" click languages, which have the richest sound inventory of any language on Earth (not just the clicks). I'm not familiar with the phonology, just that their inventory is huge, and I'm presuming in my prediction that those sounds aren't severely constrained in terms of how they can appear in combination with each other.

Constructed Languages in Science Fiction

Check out this post at author Marshall Maresca's blog about conlangs and the merits of fully elaborating one in the interest of complete world-building.