Research Update

I've talked a lot recently about how I've been learning to cook a few things. It's time for a research update... Research tends to feel kind of spurt-y to me. There are periods that seem intensely fruitful, and others when I feel like I'm just treading water. Fortunately, the current period is one of the fruitful ones. I recently wrapped up teaching a course this semester on Speech Acoustics via webcast to the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The experience was great, and a small handful of the students put together a nice conference paper based on one of the lab assignments (it's going to be presented at the upcoming Interspeech conference in Brighton, UK). One of the final papers for the class was a very well done research project which I hope the student is going to submit to the upcoming ICASSP conference, or another similar conference. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I finally wrote up the paper based on a poster I presented at the ASA conference back in November and submitted it for publication in the conference proceedings (online only). The ASA proceedings are a new ASA publication, and this was the first paper I had submitted to it. I was very happy to find out in only one week that the paper was accepted. In the meantime, I've been working on another paper based on a poster I co-presented at the ASA conference in May. This paper is closely connected with the previous one, as well as with the final paper of my student in Budapest. I am hoping to submit this paper by the end of this week, but we'll see. And finally, I've also started writing a full journal paper with my May ASA co-presenter and my Budapest student, combining the results of all three projects into one, streamlining it, systematizing it, and adding some new findings. It will take a substantial amount of work, but it should be a nice paper when all is said and done.

One thing that I have discovered in the last week (when all this writing has been taking place) is that it is much easier now for me to write my papers than it used to be. Specifically, it is getting to be very easy to write Introduction and background sections. Methods sections are generally straight-forward, and it's getting easier to write Discussion and Conclusion sections. Presenting the new results is still a bit challenging. I just think it's interesting how easy it has become to write Introductions, in particular. I guess it's because I've written enough Introductions on this topic (my specialty), and as I learn more and collect more data and write more papers, there's more to say and it just comes more naturally. It's nice. :-)

I'm now starting to think about writing a paper specifically for phonologists/phoneticians. Most of my papers so far have been a little outside the scope of what a linguist would typically read. But I think that linguists would be interested if it were presented to them appropriately. So I'm thinking of trying to get a small number of people from a wide range of langauge backgrounds to record, and write a paper about the vowels and consonants with respect to subglottal acoustics in a cross-linguistic study. We'll see how far I get with that any time soon. :-}

Oh, I also need to write a proceedings paper based on a second poster that I co-presented in May. That paper will be more difficult to write.

I don't plan to attend any more conferences this year (too expensive), but the ASA next November (2010) is in Cancun.....Hmmmmm..... Might be a nice place to visit. :-)

So that's it. Research is going well. Can't wait to have my own lab with my own students some day...

Greek!

M & C are a couple in our community group at church. C needs to translate a certain amount of Plato (yes, in Greek) to fulfill degree requirements, and both of them have done some NT Greek in college. And I am very rusty in classical Greek and looking for a way to brush up on it a bit. So I joined them today for our first meeting to translate a section of the Republic. Now, we were supposed to do as much of the translation as we could ahead of time, but it seemed that our initial assignment was too much - in fact it was a bit overwhelming for me and I just didn't do as much as I probably really had time for. But that's just to say that we went rather slowly today. And it was great fun! It's been almost 8 years since I last translated classical Greek with any degree of seriousness. Let's just say that there was a lot of rust. Fortunately for all three of us, I think we are all at about the same level - I was afraid I would end up being a drag on the conversation/translation. And our strengths are all a bit different, so it's a nice complementarity. One of the fun things about translating Plato with M & C is that they both have some real background in philosophy (whereas I only pretend now and then to know something about philosophy). So the discussions about how best to translate a certain clause, what's the main verb, is that a participle?, and so on - these discussions were punctuated with revelations about the philosophical implications and how great it is to read Plato in Greek. So I learned some things about Plato's system, shook off a little bit of rust, and over all had a great time. I think it was decided after today's session that we really want to start at the beginning and translate all of the Republic. At the rate we're going that's probably a multi-year project, but even if we never finish it will be great fun and very educational. :-)

In other news, I got to teach a Speech Acoustics course this semester via webcast between here (St Louis) and a group of grad students in Budapest. That was also a lot of fun, and a lot of work. I'm afraid I started stronger than I finished, but my teaching has definitely improved since the first time I taught a version of this course (a year ago at MIT), and I have plans for improving the course for its third iteration, whenever and wherever that may be.

And finally, at long last, I have been reading Tolkien. All through college and grad school my friends would tell me I needed to read Tolkien, but I never was interested enough to put it very high on my To Do list. But after moving to St Louis I read the Silmarillion, and then M and I read The Hobbitt together, followed by The Fellowship of the Ring, and we are currently reading The Two Towers. Once we finish that, we will of course read The Return of the King. Then... We might return to the Silmarillion, since M has never read it. Anyway, I am now a Tolkien fan.

The weather in St Louis has been awesome this week. I find that each time I go outside in this weather, I feel like reading Milton or Pope, or something similar. It stems from my time living in Cambridge, when I was reading Paradise Lost (spread out over a couple of years) and found that it was very pleasurable to read it outside in a little park on a sunny day. A few weeks ago when I was reading a few pieces by Pope, I did go out to Forest Park and found a nice bench to sit on and read - on sunny days. But that only happened two or three times (Pope's stuff is much shorter and easier than Paradise Lost). Anyway, apparently sunny days (without humidity!) are Milton/Pope reading days for me...and Milton/Pope are best read outside. :-)

Various

I've been meaning to write down some thoughts and observations I've been making in my personal Bible study times. Since M is working tonight and I'm done working for the day, I thought this might be a good time to do so. So......

I've been trying to get a better handle on the book of Job. It's been kind of slow in coming. One of the things I was curious about is how the tone and content of each of Job's friends' speeches change over time. But between the first and second speech of Eliphaz, for instance, there are three other speeches, so that I've found it hard to keep the first one in mind by the time I get to the second. So I decided to skip the intervening speeches and just read all three of Eliphaz' speeches one right after the other; then do the same for Bildad, then for Zophar, etc. Here are just a few observations:

1. Language Describing Visions and Textual Criticism

In Eliphaz' first speech, he says the following (4:12-14):

Now a word was brought to me stealthily;
my ear recieved a whisper of it.
Amid thoughts from visions of the night,
when deep sleep falls on men,
dread came upon me, and trembling,
which made all my bones shake.

In Elihu's speech, he says the following (33:14-):

For God speaks in one way,
and in two, though man does not perceive it.
In a dream, in a vision of the night,
when deep sleep falls on men,
then he opens the ears of men
and terrifies them with warnings...

These two passages use very similar language to describe visions from God, and they are also similar to another passage (Genesis 15:12-13a):

As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram.
And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him.
Then the Lord said to Abram...

As far as I'm aware, this kind of language ("deep sleep", "dread") to speak of visions and revelations from God is not used anywhere else in the Bible (the closest is Genesis 2:21 - "So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man..."). This similarity of language between Job and early Genesis seems like one more piece of evidence that the story of Job occurred around the time of the patriarchs - that this kind of language was typical of that time period but not of later times.

For that matter, my pet theory is that Moses was largely the editor of Genesis rather than the actual author - I wonder whether Joseph himself might not have written/edited much of the book. It seems reasonable that he could have written the accounts of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, being only the 4th generation of patriarchs, being well educated in Egypt, and clearly demonstrating the faith of Abraham (Genesis 50:22-26). Furthermore, the accounts of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Genesis 10-35) have some continuity with each other and some contrast with the story of Joseph (Genesis 37-50). First, both Abraham and Jacob have their names changed by God, but this does not happen to Joseph or anyone else in the Old Testament. Second, God appears to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and speaks directly to them, sometimes in dreams, whereas Joseph has dreams that must be interpreted. Third, the two sections are separated by the genealogy of Esau. On the other hand, the story of Joseph might have been written by Joseph as well, or by someone close to him - it includes details that presumably only Joseph would know, such as Genesis 43:31, as well as the conversations between Jacob and Joseph, and Jacob's final blessing of his sons and then his death. Joseph could have had something to do with Genesis 1 as well, since he lived around the time that similar "creation epics" were being written in Mesopotamia. ...But all of this is pure speculation.

One last observation on Jacob and Joseph: he was 17 when Jacob lost him, but then Jacob got another 17 years with him in Egypt before he died. The story of Jacob has similarities to Job: i) Both of them are wealthy men with many children, ii) both of them lose everything (from drought in Jacob's case), including children (only Joseph in Jacob's case), iii) both of them get everything back twofold in the end (in the case of Jacob, he not only gets Joseph back, but also claims Joseph's two sons for his own).

2. To the Third and Fourth Generation...

Several times in the Bible, God says that He will "visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me" (see, for instance, the 10 Commandments: Exodus 20:5). This brings us back to Job. At the very end of the book, we find out that (Job 42:16-17)

Job lived [another] 140 years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons,
four generations. And Job died, an old man, and full of days.

Back to the Pentateuch (Genesis 25:7-8):

These are the days of the years of Abraham's life, 175 years.
Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age,
an old man full of years, and was gtathered to his people.

Furthermore, (Genesis 50:22-23a):

So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father's house.
Joseph lived 110 years. And Joseph saw Ephraim's children
of the third generation.

Once you get to Abraham, people are generally living long enough that their grandsons and great-grandsons are born before they die, perhaps even their great-great-grandsons, but then they die. Before Abraham, people lived much longer and saw many more generations (if you do the math in chapter 11, you'll find that Abraham was born before Noah died - and there's 10 generations in between!). But by the time of the patriarchs, it seems that three or four generations is about as long as people lived. So I wonder if "to the third and the fourth generation" is an idiom meaning "all your life".

Again, note the common phraseology of Job and Genesis, further supporting the notion that they were written in the same general time period.

3. Job and the Anthropic Principle

The anthropic principle comes in few varieties. The strongest version states that the universe exists precisely because humans exist who are able to observe it. The weak version states that we know the universe exists because we observe it. Both versions are meant to address the question "Why is there something instead of nothing?", or "Why is the universe such that we can exist?" The universe is "tuned" so precisely that if any one of its basic parameters were tweaked ever so slightly, life would not be possible. On one side, one might argue that the perfection and balance of creation proves that God created it (or at least strongly suggests it, since the probability of a universe like ours coming together by pure chance is amazingly small). On the other hand, if you don't want to concede that God even exists, you can deal with this amazingly small probability by making it much less small - this is where the anthropic principle comes in. Since we obviously exist, our universe must exist in the special way it does, and that means that it did in fact come together, whether by amazingly small chance or not. The fact is that the universe is as it is, and this essentionally makes the probably equal to 1. Alternatively, you can get into theories about multiple universes and oscillating universes and the like, in which case you have any number of universes to choose from, and whatever the amazingly small chances, an amazingly large number of universes makes up for this small probability and here we are. (The problem is that we have no way to verify or falsify any of these theories. In fact, if I may accomodate Stephen J. Gould's notion of "Non-Overlapping MAgisteria" (NOMA, his description of faith vs. science), it might be equally applicable to science vs. theories of multiple universes.)

...But I digress. Theories of multiple universes deal with the weak form of the anthropic principle. The strong form is, well...different. It is akin to giving "No" as the answer to the age-old question: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to witness it, did it make a sound?" In fact, one might go so far as to say the tree didn't fall if no one was there to witness it. It's like Schroedinger's cat - it is neither alive nor dead until you open the box and observe it. The cat would not even exist unless you observed it - and for that matter, the universe would not exist until it was observed.

God's answer to Job (Job 38-41) clearly comes out against the anthropic principle (in any of its varieties). I highlight only one stanza (Job 38:25-27):

Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain
and a way for the thunderbolt,
to bring rain on a land where no man is,
on the desert in which there is no man,
to satisfy the waste and desolate land,
and to make the ground sprout with grass?

The highlighted words are, of course, my own emphasis.

4. Zephaniah

M and I read Zephaniah two nights ago. Zephaniah 1:2-3 sounds an awful lot like the Flood of Noah's time. But Zephaniah must have known about God's promise to Noah never to destroy the earth in a flood again. Zephaniah therefore begs the question, I think, what God will do in order to keep His promise. But he seems to answer the question a few verses later (Zephaniah 1:7):

Be silent before the Lord God!
For the day of the Lord is near;
the Lord has prepared a sacrifice
and consecrated his guests.

The question is raised again in Zephaniah 1:14-18 - which seems reminiscent of the Israelites' experience at Mt. Sinai (Exodus 19) - ending with the threat that "all the earth shall be consumed; for a full and sudden end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth." On Sinai, too, the people were saved by God's institution of the Mosaic covenant, in which sacrifice was the central ingredient. The threat is again repeated in Zephaniah 3:8b: "for in the fire of my jealousy all the earth shall be consumed," but now it is followed immediately by a very different tone (Zephaniah 3:9):

For at that time I will change the speech of the peoples
to a pure speech,
that all of them may call upon the name of the Lord
and serve him with one acord.

This echoes Jeremiah 31:33-34:

But this is the convenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

Jeremiah, of course, is also hearkening back to the Mosaic covenant.

Zephaniah never really answers the question "How?" How can he go seamlessly from 3:8 to 3:9 (from threats of destruction to making a new covenant)? At this point I think 1:7 is the key - "the Lord has prepared a sacrifice." The answer to the question "How?" is not made explicit until Jesus' death and resurrection, but Zephaniah had a glimpse of it.

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So there you have it. Some of these ruminations are more speculative than others, but they are the things I've been observing and mulling recently.