Seasons

Fascinating!

That is fascinating. I can't see why it wouldn't be spectacular.

Psimagus:

I wonder if this might be useful or at least interesting to you:

http://lcl2.di.uniroma1.it/termextractor/

And this seems relevant to learning the grammar of a word:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part-of-speech_tagging

Thanks! Those look interesting.

It would indeed be odd if there were no intelligent aliens. There are so many stars in the known universe, and we know that many of those near us have planets. Could Earth possibly be so special that it is the only one to give birth to intelligent life?

Any one read about the trouble they are having with voice recognition and accents, funny
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20081119/tc_afp/britainusitinternetcompanyapplegoogleoffbeat

A new voice-recognition search tool for the iPhone has problems understanding British accents, leading to some bizarre answers to spoken queries, a newspaper report and users said Wednesday.

The free application, which allows iPhone owners to use the Google search engine with their voice, mistook the word "iPhone" variously for "sex," "Einstein" and "kitchen sink," said the Daily Telegraph.

Comments left by users on the application's website seemed to confirm the problem. "Awesome job google. only problem is every time I say the word 'fish' it registers as 'sex'," wrote one, identified as Kevin.
A Welsh accent gave the suggestions "gorillas" and "kitchen sink."

"I've got a traditional Kentish accent and the thing kept on spitting back ridiculous things," said Roger Ellinson, 26, from Maidstone in Kent, southeastern England.

"I asked it to find my nearest pizza take away and it came back with something about volcanoes," he added.

One British user, Edward Parsons, says on the site's comments board: "This is fantastic, except for the North American accent bias.

"It actually works pretty well, but I have to disguise my (North London) accent with a terrible folksy Texan tourist voice to get results. I can see this is going to be the source of much amusement and confusion."

Serves 'em right-- all the speech to text programs I know of before that were biased for European men. Does the iphone app have training like Dragon Naturally Speaking?

I can see how things like six, sax, and sex could get confused. I can't figure out pizza to volcano. I would even go into gorilla to kitchen sink. I wonder if someone just has a rotten sense of humor?

Perhaps it's highly contextual. The fellow said, "We had everything in there but the gorilla!"

Interzone wrote:

The creation of a "hybrid race" might not even be true in a literal sense, but rather, it's only our human cultural rendering of a vastly more complex reality - a reality which may ultimately be incomprehensible to us in its entirety.

Nothing is comprehensible to us in its entirety. A grain of sand, for example, is so complex that we will never understand it.

But if you say something, and then say, "Oh, by the way, that wasn't true in a literal sense," I am not left with very much.

You're right Irina, a grain of sand is just as incomprehensible - Buddhists know it, mystics know it, shamans know it, agnostics know it... It is also true that this limit as to what can be known applies to rational, analytical mind, first and foremost. A grain of sand still remains accessible, in its entirety, to mystical insight. Meditation, shamanic journey, trans, etc... intuitive and entirely subjective as they are, these are all perfectly valid epistemological tools, from the point of view of world's many mystical schools of thought and traditions. Also, there is a lot of ground to be covered between here and now in human history/ evolution, and that (upper) epistemological limit postulated by agnostics, a lot of good work to be done, even for the most rational of minds.

A grain of sand can inspire us to think beyond obvious, and wonder about mysteries of being. Aliens, by the very nature of their own being, force us to do so. Their reality - their everyday, common reality - includes what we call "psychic". They are at home, so to speak, in the psychic realm, as well as here, in our 4-D environment. For them, these are merely two aspects of a larger whole which is their domain, their home. It may be that they have achieved this by means of some advanced technologies. Personally, I think it's their nature, so to speak, a result of their (natural) evolution - they have evolved to the point at which they got fully integrated with, and are fully consciously aware of, this larger reality. They are "fully operational" in this extended Universe, as well, just as we are in our own world of material objects and physical forces.

Now, every time aliens interact with us, be it a simple UFO sighting, or an elaborate "abduction" episode, the physical aspects of an event are only a partial representation, a partial manifestation of the (ontological) being of the alien (realm). There is always another, equally important, component to it - you guessed it! - a psychic one. It is our inherent inability to reconcile the two, and view such an event as one integrated whole, that makes the aliens so elusive. They will keep eluding us forever - or - until we move past this present stage in our evolution, and extend our own consciousness, and with it, our notion and very perception of reality. I would suggest that alien presence here has to do, among other things, with catalyzing our evolution from where we stand now, to someplace closer to where they are. In doing so, they appeal to our creative imagination, intuitive insight, and our emotional selves too, as much as they do to our rational, analytical mind - they must win our hearts, as well as our minds

Historically, discussion on the nature of UFO phenomenon, and, by extension, alien presence here, was largely based on a reductionist assumption that they are "something like us, but from another planet". The truth is, UFOs cannot be fully understood only in terms of very advanced nuts 'n' bolts spacecraft manufactured on another planet; the so-called alien abductions, then, are perhaps not just simply "for the purpose of creating a hybrid race".

I was referring to John Mack interview in order to illustrate a notion of coexisting, interacting realms; I do not think he's describing a literal reality there. John Mack didn't think it neither, although it's perhaps not so obvious from that short clip alone.

The aliens are real. Various (quasi)medical procedures, complete with intricate, surgical type wounds left behind, are real too, and so is the hybrid race. However, alien overall reality, if you will, is not identical to ours. Also, we shouldn't assume that we are at the center of their activity and attention, in the center of alien Universe. We don't even know where they derive their sense of meaning and purpose from, to begin with, or, in plain English: what makes these aliens thick?

to be continued


p.s.

Believe it or not, Irina, I not only like Turkish coffee, but actually know how to make it! Here, have a cup, and tell me what you think!