I Just Felt Like Babbling

Please allow me to do so. And also a bit of grumbling if you don’t mind. Let’s start with the grumbles first.

So, I’ve been living in a very unhealthy way these past few days… in a total seclusion, 80% of the day sitting in my room facing the laptop, with a completely abnormal schedule. It all started since last Friday evening, after one meeting with my thesis supervisor, which ended with an ultimatum to finish writing by the end of this week… completely, like, the perfect complete draft until the very last chapter of conclusion.

Since then, my schedule goes like this: start gathering the mood, ideas, and thoughts to write after dinner, then drink coffee, start writing *around midnight, I found myself the most creative after midnight*, continue writing and writing until I get unbearably hungry *around 9 in the morning*, have breakfast, take a shower, directly go to bed *after set the alarm for two hours later* since I get absolutely exhausted, wake up two  *or three* hours later, have lunch, revise what I wrote before and add details if needed, have dinner, then… repeat the cycle. It’s amazing that I’m still alive and considerably sober.

Of course I have a little break once in a while, watching some movies or writing a totally different kind of writing, like now. Although.. I still can’t get myself out of the scientific writing style, hence explaining the choice of words and dull sensation of each sentence. I’m sorry about that, I’ll get rid of it as soon as I finish writing my thesis.

Now, continuing with the babbles. These freaky thoughts suddenly slipped into my head, and I couldn’t stop myself from babbling about them here.

Noam Chomsky, usually referred to as the father of linguistics,  once said…

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

In other words, the process of reading and writing –corresponds with the interpretation and use of words, respectively– requires a great amount of creativity. And I’m completely agree with that. There were times when I knew exactly the concept or meaning or whatever inside my head, but somehow I couldn’t find the right word to express that. This process of finding the appropriate word is itself a creative process.

It’s easy if I know the word in Bahasa, just use Google translate then I’m good. Sometimes the word is not exactly what I want, that’s when thesaurus.com becomes my best friend. Especially when I don’t remember the word in any language, starting from the most close concept I could just jump from word to word until I found ‘the hidden word’.

But sometimes, even after I spent a lot of time racking my brain to find it, that f*cking word is kept hidden. The solution is once again using the creativity to somehow paraphrase the sentence, avoiding using the-word-that-refuse-to-come-out-of-the-brain.

Words, their meaning, and how they’re stored or represented in human brain are really an utter mystery that one still cannot explain comprehensively. And here I am, trying to build (and then write about) approximate computational models that could make the the computer understands words and their meaning. The computer may be able to compute complicated mathematical functions, but really, making babies understand words and language is definitely an easier job.

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And yes, even for this post I’m using thesaurus.com, I’m kinda addicted to it. Maybe I should put it in my Acknowledgement page.

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