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Scrubs is not consistent

• Turk, season 2, episode 19:

  See, JD, the thing that I always liked about you was that you were just yourself — you never cared about what people thought.

  Turk, season 3, episode 3:

  [to JD] Even in college, you cared way too much about everybody liking you.



• JD, season 1, episode 19:

  If I believed in karma, I might be a little more cautious about giving these guys a hard time.

  JD, season 2, episode 16:

  I dunno. Me, I think karma keeps the universe in order.



• Elliot, season 1, episode 13:

  I, um... I've never even had an orgasm.

  Elliot, season 3, episode 9:

  I slept with Jenny Johnson's older brother in high school, and then he decided to tell all of his friends what my orgasm face looked like.



• Dr. Cox, season 4, episode 21:

  Yeah, I pretty much freak out over staff infections, blood disease, mumps, measles, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and definitely all registered independents.

  Dr. Cox, season 7, episode 4:

  I'm a lot of things: I'm a Scorpio, a registered independent, a foodie, a parrothead — yes I do love that Jimmy Buffett, always have, always will — a leg man...

Scrubs top episodes

I found a site with fan-generated ratings of all Scrubs episodes. Being curious, and the site lacking a way to sort that table by any column other than the first, I wrote a quick script to sort them by rating. Here’s the result. The rating (out of 10) is displayed first, then the season number, then the episode name.

9.84  3  My Screw Up
9.77  5  My Lunch
9.66  5  My Way Home
9.60  1  My Old Lady
9.58  1  My Occurrence (1)
9.53  2  My Overkill
9.52  5  My Fallen Idol
9.50  1  My Last Day
9.50  6  My Long Goodbye (2)
9.49  6  My Conventional Wisdom
9.48  5  My Half-Acre
9.48  6  My Cold Shower
9.47  6  My Point Of No Return (2)
9.44  2  His Story
9.44  4  My Cake
9.44  6  My No Good Reason (1)
9.42  2  My Philosophy
9.41  2  My Interpretation
9.41  6  My Rabbit (1)
9.41  1  My Hero (2)
9.39  2  My Fruit Cups
9.38  5  My Jiggly Ball
9.37  2  My T.C.W.
9.34  5  My Transition (1)
9.33  1  My Two Dads
9.33  5  My Day At The Races
9.33  5  My Bright Idea
9.32  1  My Bed Banter & Beyond
9.31  3  My Butterfly
9.28  5  His Story III
9.27  4  My Best Moment
9.27  5  My Chopped Liver
9.27  1  My First Day
9.27  4  My Best Laid Plans
9.27  4  My Last Chance
9.26  4  My Old Friend's New Friend
9.26  7  My Growing Pains
9.25  5  Her Story II
9.25  7  My #1 Doctor
9.25  3  My Porcelain God
9.25  5  My Urologist
9.24  1  My Way or the Highway
9.24  3  My Catalyst
9.22  5  My Rite of Passage
9.22  2  My Monster
9.22  3  My Fifteen Seconds
9.22  7  My Bad Too
9.21  4  Her Story
9.21  2  My New Coat
9.20  4  My Unicorn
9.20  1  My Bad
9.19  1  My Drug Buddy
9.19  2  My Dream Job
9.18  5  My Extra Mile
9.18  6  My Road to Nowhere
9.17  2  My Big Mouth
9.17  1  My Nickname
9.17  5  My Own Personal Hell
9.17  6  My House
9.16  1  My Blind Date
9.15  2  My Drama Queen
9.15  2  My First Step
9.15  6  My Best Friend's Baby's Baby and My Baby's Baby
9.15  6  My Scrubs
9.15  1  My Balancing Act
9.15  3  My Tormented Mentor
9.15  1  My Fifteen Minutes
9.15  5  My New God
9.14  5  My Cabbage (1)
9.14  2  My Karma
9.13  4  My First Kill
9.13  3  My Fault
9.13  2  My Sex Buddy
9.13  4  My New Game
9.13  3  My Lucky Night
9.13  3  My Advice to You
9.13  3  My Own American Girl
9.12  4  My Office
9.12  7  My Identity Crisis
9.11  3  My Dirty Secret
9.11  2  My Lucky Day
9.11  2  My Nightingale
9.10  1  My Best Friend's Mistake
9.10  6  My Coffee
9.10  4  My Big Move
9.09  5  My Buddy's Booty
9.09  2  My Own Private Practice Guy
9.09  3  My White Whale
9.09  1  My Old Man
9.09  3  My Self-Examination
9.09  5  My New Suit
9.09  5  My Big Bird
9.09  3  My Best Friend's Wedding
9.09  2  My New Old Friend
9.08  4  My Female Trouble (2)
9.08  3  My Friend the Doctor
9.08  1  My Sacrificial Clam
9.08  3  My Choosiest Choice of All
9.08  1  My Mentor
9.08  5  My Five Stages (2)
9.08  1  My Student
9.07  2  My Brother, My Keeper
9.07  3  My Rule of Thumb
9.07  4  My Boss' Free Haircut
9.06  1  My Super Ego
9.05  1  My Day Off
9.05  2  My Case Study
9.04  3  My Clean Break
9.04  6  My Words of Wisdom
9.04  4  My Lips Are Sealed
9.04  3  His Story II
9.04  2  My Kingdom
9.02  6  My Musical
9.02  6  My Turf War
9.02  3  My Journey
9.02  4  My Ocardial Infarction
9.02  3  My Brother, Where Art Thou?
9.01  3  My Moment of Un-Truth
9.01  1  My Heavy Meddle
9.01  2  My Big Brother
9.01  6  My Friend With Money
9.01  7  My Own Worst Enemy
9.01  1  My Tuscaloosa Heart
9.00  4  My Lucky Charm
9.00  4  My Drive By
9.00  5  My Déjà Vu, My Déjà Vu
9.00  4  My Roommates
8.99  1  My Own Personal Jesus
8.98  4  My Changing Ways
8.98  4  My Common Enemy
8.97  4  My Malpractical Decision (1)
8.97  5  My Missed Perception
8.96  6  Their Story
8.96  4  My Life in Four Cameras
8.96  6  My Mirror Image (2)
8.93  4  My Hypocritical Oath
8.93  6  My Perspective
8.92  6  My Therapeutic Month
8.92  7  My Hard Labor
8.89  7  My Inconvenient Truth
8.88  4  My Quarantine
8.86  5  My Intern's Eyes
8.78  4  My Faith in Humanity
8.76  6  My Fishbowl
8.44  6  His Story IV
6.73  6  My Night To Remember

I don’t know what the numbers in parentheses are about, by the way.

Couple of interesting things I noticed:

• There’s an obvious preference for serious episodes. Arguably four of the top five are (excluding My Way Home, the Wizard of Oz episode). Especially the top two are amazing episodes, but I feel like some non-serious episodes should have been more highly rated.
• Seasons 3 and 4 are rather poorly represented at the top, except for the lone serious episode in each one (My Screw Up and My Cake). I’m surprised — I rather like season 3.
• That clip show episode was a really bad idea.
• Thankfully, My Own Personal Jesus (the sappy Christmas special in S1) didn’t do so great either.

Getting more curious, I also had my script calculate the average rating of each season. Here they are:

Season 1: 9.20
Season 2: 9.20
Season 3: 9.15
Season 4: 9.08
Season 5: 9.25
Season 6: 9.02
Season 7: 9.10

Season 5 is the best? The hell? I suppose this is mainly because of the three really good episodes in it. I suppose on balance it wasn’t too bad. Season 2 (my favorite) didn’t do too badly for having very few episodes at the top, and I’m happy that seasons 4 and 6 came out pretty bad.

Next on “When Scrubs Fans Who Are Programmers Get Bored”: how well does a Naïve Bayes text classifier do in predicting the season an episode is from based only on its name? (or maybe not)

Why “Lipstick Jungle” Fails

I think I’ve discovered why Lipstick Jungle is such a failure. Here are some statistics I gathered about it and two other shows; I think you’ll see a correlation:

	Lipstick Jungle	Sex and the City	Desperate Housewives
Number of main characters	3	4	4
Perfect-looking main characters	3	1	1
Voiceover narration?	No	Yes	Yes
Had/has competition?	No	Yes	Yes
Creator(s)	Two women	A dude	A dude
Number of fans in my house	0	1	1*

Coincidence? I think not.

* not me

Are You Getting It?

I will now demonstrate the incredible, awesome versatility of the English verb “get” by describing a hypothetical day in the life without using any other verb. Watch me go.

I got up, after getting a good night’s sleep. I got dressed, then I got some breakfast. I got a shower, and got ready for work. I got in my car and got on the road. Right after I got off the highway, I got stuck in a traffic jam and got rather impatient. After a good long wait, I got to the office, where I got in a discussion with a colleague about a new assignment we’d gotten. At first I didn’t get what he was getting at, but after I got some coffee, he got his point across and we got somewhere. At twelve-thirty, I got lunch with some friends. After lunch, I got a phone call from my mom; she’d gotten a letter for me. Sometimes I still get mail at my parents’ house. Then I got to a meeting; it got boring pretty quickly. After I got out of the meeting, I got a lot of good work time in. As it was getting towards evening, I was getting tired. I got out of the office and got dinner with an old friend who had gotten a job in the area recently. We got into a bit of an argument over sports teams, but we got a good laugh out of it in the end. When I got home, I got some ice cream out of the freezer and got my fill of bad late-night TV. I got to bed before midnight.

I defy you to do that in any other language.

Worth It

Whatever your grade-school English teachers may have said, parts of speech in English are as complicated as all hell. Forget about words that have multiple parts of speech (e.g. “run”); what about words like “would”? Did you ever have to classify that? (Linguists actually call “would” and friends “modals”, but the exact properties of modals in English are not quite well understood.)

I got to thinking about parts of speech in the phrase “it was worth it”. That sentence is actually linguistically interesting in another way: how English speakers are able to resolve the pronoun “it” so easily. That’s not what I got interested in, though. What part of speech is the word “worth” in that sentence? I think most people would be tempted to say “preposition”, failing to fit it into any other category, but to me, a preposition is something that expresses a relation between two nouns, and that word doesn’t.

I never quite figured that one out (I don’t think linguists have either), but it led me to something else. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “it was worth it” is a very idiomatic phrase in English, and the words that comprise it are hard to classify into parts of speech. Then I started thinking about how other languages express it.

En français, on dirait « Ça valait la peine ». Literally translated, that phrase means “that had the value of the cost”. “Valait” is a conjugated form of the verb “valoir”, a word that is related to a slew of modern English words: “value”, “valor”, “valiant”, and even “available”. Properly translated, we’d have to say “valoir” means “to be worth”, but that kind of defeats what I’m trying to do here. The phrase, then, is basically saying that the value of the first “it” in “it was worth it” is at least enough to overcome the cost.

In Japanese, it’s also an idiomatic phrase: 割に合った. This is pronounced approximately “wari ni atta” (if you don’t know what Japanese sounds like, don’t even try). Literally, it means something like “it met with profit”. This actually makes a lot more sense to the English speaker than a lot of Japanese idioms. Something that was worth it is profitable; i.e. the benefit is greater than the cost. I’m starting to think the Japanese might even make more sense than the English.

I have a bunch more to say about “it was worth it”, parts of speech, and idiomatic phrases, but right now, my attention span has run out.

(It’s entirely possible that one day I will write about something other than linguistics or computers. However, today is not that day. In fact, neither is tomorrow; I’ve got a neat language-related post lined up for tomorrow.)

HueSkew

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be colorblind? I’ve tried to describe it in the past, but I think it’s probably the sort of thing you have to experience.

Well, in the aforelinked post I mentioned, “There’s no way to simulate this to normals, short of a game that actually does change the colors of game pieces on the fly. If I get bored one day...”

I wasn’t actually bored today, but I wanted to a) work a Cocoa project through to completion for once, b) try out the Leopard dev tools, and c) try out Git, so I decided to write a color-matching game that changes the colors of game pieces on the fly. I called it HueSkew, and you can download it here. It’s Leopard-only (for the dumbest reasons, actually — the only Leopard features I use are NSGradient for the pre-game tile gradients, and Core Animation for fading the window out on quit).

In case you’re tempted to yell at me over some feature that’s not “fair” or is “annoying”, let me tell you that even though this went from New Project in Xcode to the download above in less than 12 hours, I’ve put a fair amount of design effort into it. If you find something about it annoying — well, that’s because it’s annoying to be colorblind, and the game is fulfilling its purpose. Read the explanation in the app. If you get frustrated, stop playing and be glad you’re not colorblind.

Lost in Translation again

I’m sure there’s some long-dead guy who’s ruminated on this before, but it’s striking me now how we constantly re-evaluate and interpret past experiences based on later ones. I’m thinking right now of “Lost in Translation”, which if you’ve been reading since September, you’ll know is my favorite movie of all time.

A lot about me has changed since I’ve started studying linguistics in earnest. I’ve mostly stopped getting irritated over speech errors; I see them as interesting, since I’m getting to see the language changing right in front of me. I’ve become even more fascinated by accents, and a lot better at identifying and imitating them. I’ve gained a limited ability, in case I can’t identify an accent, to use a foreign speaker’s grammatical mistakes to figure out what their native language is. I’ve stopped seeing languages other than English as “foreign” — really, when you think about the amount of variation there could be in language, there is not a whole lot. I’ve finally crossed the line from “fluent” in French to “truly bilingual”, ever since I starting analyzing French instead of just using it (I remember exactly the moment when I crossed the line: without even thinking about it, I spat out a sentence that a native speaker judged as “a nice turn of phrase” — I’ve been waiting for that moment for over 10 years). I’ve gotten better at Japanese without even taking any Japanese classes. Most importantly, I’ve seen just how important, powerful, and central to human life language is, which I feel is a distinct advantage in a world where very few people even think consciously about language at all.

Those last two points are what have allowed me to build another layer of personal meaning on top of Lost in Translation, after I watched it again — not even all of it, really, mainly the commercial-filming scene. After learning more about how the Japanese language is and how Japanese people use it, several things happened to my appreciation of that scene. First, I started to sympathize with the incompetent interpreter — Japanese really is something approaching impossible to translate into English. I also actually understand the Japanese dialogue, so it’s approaching possible for me to take a shot at translating it, but I still wouldn’t want to have to. For example, the director starts out speaking formally, then after Bob screws up the first time, he starts speaking as if he’s scolding a little boy. How do you express that in English? The scene also reminds me of what a language barrier looks like to a non-linguist.

So my study of linguistics has changed the way I enjoy that scene of Lost in Translation. I’m sure there are other ways I can be caused to see it differently. Part of the reason it’s such a great movie is that it’s a very rich canvas for these kinds of reinterpretations.

I was trying to make a philosophical point in this post, which maybe isn’t the best thing to try when I’m not necessarily sober. It really doesn’t matter; nobody reads this anyway.

Man, when I reread this post, all I can think is, “Wow, whoever wrote this is a total twat”. Oh well.

From the GMTD archives

Back when I was less old, less wise, and less good at writing. Still relevant.