Re: Re:

you would have been proud my friend the sec ge= of the council of europe thjorborn jagland had to give as spe=ch on terrosism to the security counsel. Last night I presented your arguments, re hypocrisy, he was shocked but loved 1..

Glad it worked. Hope that the s=eech was of some interest.

He is the head of the human rights court in strasbou=g. / former prime minister of norway. . . He=would be happy to have a dinner with us. . subj. =C2 drones. solitary confinement , death penalty ( europe does not have one , so if killing terrorist= is to be under an act of war, argument, then they, as enemies ,hav= war rights. ). tribalism, mafia, syria, ukraine, saudi, egypt. =AO libya, . We have a great friendship. - I give him his financial ABC's class. he gives me my pragmatic =olitics lessons. fyi great similarity now as the old political=guard seem toreflect the patterns of the old long term=C2 investors, ( skills of . planning. executing . =AO etc ) now confronted by media . and pressured to make quick decisions. ie behaving =AO like inexperienced short term traders. fyi I h=ve read a great number of language papers. many if not most, m=suse the concept of probability . making naive, erroneous uses of th=

Sounds like a most interesting person= And someone it would be very interesting to talk to. I presum= he spends time in NY. Hope we can work it out.

Would be interested in learning more =bout your critique of the use of probability in language work, mostly by computational cognitive scientists, as far as I know. I =80 ve written critiques of it too, but on different grounds: failure to =ccount for what they are trying to show, or even to understand the issue.=C2 There are, I think, some notable exceptions, like the recent work of Charles Yang, one of Bob Berwick's student=.

I think you might try to plan on late september, ta=ing my apt and spending a few days with valeria in the city, A= it is the openiing of the UN general assembly , as well as th= Clinton global initiative New york is rife with people with at least influence, if not new ideas. . I, we. can organ=ze many fun interactions. my house becomes a respite for the s=lect few, to take off their ties, and talk openly. You =ould be welcome to join as many create or participate as you prefer.=C2 yangs work deals with language as signals . his reliance on Zi=f like distributions is a good example of naive probablities. . =AO empirically zipf appears. but cannot be derived from any of his or anyo=es elses to date. so somewhat misleading to suggest the" probililty of word , x appearing, " it is=the mistake of frequency vs probablity, and careless common usage.

Valeria's not here right now,=so will have to check with her about late September. Really intrigui=g possibilities, and a delightful offer.

On Yang, I read his work quite differ=ntly. He does make use of word frequencies and probability distribut=ons, but as far as I am aware in pretty straightforward and innocuous ways. And he's quite sophisticated about these=matters. Smart and interesting guy. You might want to contact him di=ectly.

I don't recall his using Zipf=E2 s "laws," but it wouldn't matter much. =AO Mandelbrot showed back in the '50s that they were a statistical=artifact, near meaningless. I was, incidentally, surprised to see how he dealt with this result in his=autobiography. I think he called it his "Keplerian moment,=E2 or something like that.

Noam

1.1 will wait on valeria. we can craft a fun fe= days

2, try this on but only if you get a moment =AO , i know you are busy

it appear to me that ""language=quot; can be defined as the biological organizing principle that creates a shape space. &q=ot;coherent sentences " are defined as those that fit on the shape. The projections o= the sensory motors, allows communication. . There are an inf=nite digital number of sentences.that do fit on the shape , but orders of magnitude =AO more, that do not fit.- to attempt a naive representation, =AO imagine a hemisphere, ( symmetric), any continuous line drawn on it= surface , is a sentence. there are infinite numbers of lines that can be =rawn. however , trying to connect two points , directly without traversing the hemishpere is also infinitely possible but mos= solutions need to leave the surface. The principle that organiz=s the shape is NOT an input device. one can map inputs onto the=shape but it is not THE shape , ex, a hemisphere bowl in 3 space,=analogy, one can put marbles in the bowl and they will map a path to the bottom. but the shape of the bowl . determines how fast they move, an= in which direction, . the shape of the bowl is the language. =AO there is a shape for vision as well. . it exists without input,=C2 certain paths are more probable etc.

3. I will contact Yang