What do we already have right?

In studying bioinformatics, so I have a general interest in movment that goes beyond any specific project.

At the moment one of my projects is to build a new constructed language. A logical language like Lojban but better than Lojban.

Lojban takes a lot of semantic distinctions that exist in natural language for granted and doesn't reorganise them.

One example would be months. You don't need a seperate word for every month. It's much better to call them with compound words like month-4 and month-6. At the moment my design provides for 5 letter compound words for months and week days that use numbers. That reorganisation cuts down the number of words that you have to learn. It puts you never in the situation to ask yourself whether July or June comes first.

As part of that semantic reorganisation I think talking about human movement is in need of reorganisation. It's hard to describe some Salsa steps in English. Example sentence: "Keep your weight of the heel of your right foot while your move your left foot so that's in an angle of twenty degrees in front of your right foot and that the foot touches the ground with the toes."

That sentence is quite long. I could imagine that a semantic reorganisation would allow your to cut the sentence to a third or a fourth. Because it's hard to use English language to describe the movements I don't have Anki cards to learn Salsa steps.

If I would have a language that would allow me to describe this precisely I could make Anki cards for it. That means I get a benefit for using the language. This gives people incentives to learn the language.

Of course I don't want the language to be specialized on Salsa steps. I want the language to capture as much human movement as possible. Having an academic ontology would help because I could simply copy the structure of that ontology and make the words shorter and integrate them with general concepts I created elsewhere in the language.

An area where I already did the reorganisation are relationships. If you look at mathematical graph theory you see that it borrows concepts such as parent and child. If you design a language from the ground up that doesn't make sense. You start with the graph theory. That allows you to have a word for node A is connected to node B that doesn't define whether node A is the child or the parent.

In a graph parent gets a three letter word. A biological parent (as defined by inheriting something) gets an additional letter and is a 4 letter word. And you can add the same letter to turn graph child into biological child. Father is then simply a male parent with means that it adds a 2 letter syllable at the end. The design allow to also easily have a 6 letter word for my older parent.

A word like grand-grand-grantparent gets replaced by a 6 letter word with parent plus the syllable for the word three.

HamNoSys notation seems very interesting. I will try to make the language able to express those distinctions.

If I type "notation for systems of physical therapy" into Google the top results I get are Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation, Benesh Movement Notation and Laban Movement Analysis.

They are system made by dancers. They are general enough that they can also be used for describing non dancing movement.

In case I have missed something, do you know of a general system used by physical therapists which an controlled vocabularies that available online?

There a lot of money that goes in diagnosis equipment like fMRI"s, but not much for recording human movement in a analyzable way. Computer game designers who worked at Microsoft did work on the issue for kinect, but kinect isn't really designed to be used for research purposes.

You can"t throw 10,000 dollar worth of high resolution camera's at it to get clearer data. It would be nice if there would be open source bioinformatics software available for tasks like that. I think we could learn a lot about how humans work by analyzing data like that instead of investing so much money into fMRI scanners and gene sequencing.

Do not mess with Internet Atheists. Ha. :)

I guess it depends on how broadly you define "theologian". My definition would begin with those who study a religion suspending judgement on the question of whether the presupposition of the particular god existing is true.

For instance, whether or not they believe it, I expect X Christian theologian to be able to clearly articulate the doctrine of Original Sin and Substitional Atonement.

I think non-scholarly Christian proponents often come along and cite X theologian as proof of the existence of Adam or the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a mistaken idea of what theologians, according to my definition and understanding, do.

There are people who make argument to support the presupposition of God...but I don't know if they fall into the category of theology.

This can't be true, otherwise giving someone head would be fatal.

Yes. And, conditional on induction being valid, everyone who doesn't reject induction gets it right. And very few people reject induction.

Well, it doesn't establish that induction is always valid, so I guess we might not really be disagreeing. But, pragmatically, everyone basically has to assume that it usually works, or is likely to work in whatever the particular case is. I think it's a good enough heuristic to be called a rational principle that people already have down.