Keith Chen, an economist from Yale, makes a startling claim in an unpublished working paper: people’s fiscal responsibility and healthy lifestyle choices depend in part on the grammar of their language.

Here’s the idea: Languages differ in the devices they offer to speakers who want to talk about the future. For some, like Spanish and Greek, you have to tack on a verb ending that explicitly marks future time—so, in Spanish, you would say escribo for the present tense (I write or I’m writing) and escribiré for the future tense (I will write). But other languages like Mandarin don’t require their verbs to be escorted by grammatical markers that convey future time—time is usually obvious from something else in the context. In Mandarin, you would say the equivalent of I write tomorrow, using the same verb form for both present and future.

Chen’s finding is that if you divide up a large number of the world’s languages into those that require a grammatical marker for future time and those that don’t, you see an interesting correlation: speakers of languages that force grammatical marking of the future have amassed a smaller retirement nest egg, smoke more, exercise less, and are more likely to be obese.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

Epicurus himself, while dismissive of the claims of all religions, was no “luxurious sensualist.” Known for the simplicity of his life, he was born on the Greek island of Samos in 341 BCE, studied philosophy in Athens with a disciple of Plato’s and eventually founded a school of his own there, over which he presided until his death, in 270. Breaking with the Idealism of Plato, his thought, influenced by the Atomism of Democritus, was thoroughly materialistic in its description of the universe and — though its starting point was quite different — similar in many of its conclusions to that of the Stoics. The physical world, he held, was all there was and was composed of differently shaped atoms whose various combinations formed all matter; there were no divine laws or divine rewards or punishments for human actions, and hence no moral codes that human beings were obliged to obey. The only rational goal was to live life as pleasurably as possible.

And yet, Epicurus wrote: “When we say that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice or willful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry, not sexual lust, not the enjoyment of the delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life…. We cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, honorably, and justly, nor live wisely, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly.”

{ The Jewish Daily Forward | Continue reading }

A couple of years ago, I was asked to give a talk about “The American Novel Today.” It wasn’t my first choice of topic, frankly, partly because I read as few contemporary novels as possible, partly (here we get into cause and effect) because most of the novels that get noticed today (like most of the visual art that gets the Establishment’s nod) should be filed under the rubric “ephemera,” and often pretty nasty ephemera at that. I do not, you may be pleased to read, propose to parade before you a list of those exercises in evanescence, self-parody, and general ickiness that constitute so much that congregates under the label of American fiction these days. Instead, I’d like to step back and make some observations on the place of fiction in our culture today, A.D. 2012. It is very different from the place it occupied in the 19th century, or even the place it occupied up through the middle of the last century.

We get a lot of new novels at my office. I often pick up a couple and thumb through them just to keep up with what is on offer in the literary bourse. The delicate feeling of nausea that ensues as my eye wanders over these bijoux is as difficult to describe as it is predictable. The amazing thing is that it takes only a sentence or two before the feeling burgeons in the pit of the stomach and the upper lip grows moist with sweat. (…)

I do not deny that there are good novels written today. I think, for example, of the spare, deeply felt novels of Marilynne Robinson, especially Gilead, her quiet masterpiece from a few years back. It might even be argued (I merely raise this as a possibility) that there are as many good novels being written today as in the past. It is sobering to reflect that between 1837—when Victoria ascended the throne and Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published—and 1901—the year of Victoria’s death—some 7,000 authors published more than 60,000 novels in England. How much of that vast literary cataract has stood the test of time?

{ Roger Kimball/Weekly Standard | Continue reading }

Jonathan Turley wants to keep lies legal:

Alvarez … is a liar. … After his election to a water board in California, he introduced himself at a public meeting as “a retired Marine of 25 years,” a repeatedly wounded warrior and a Medal of Honor recipient. … He was found out, publicly ridiculed and hounded out of office. … [He is] one of the first people prosecuted under the Stolen Valor Act, … [which] makes it a crime to falsely claim “to have been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the Armed Forces of the United States.” …

The problem with the law they may have broken is not just that it is unnecessary, but that it can be dangerous to criminalize lies. After all, with the power to punish a lie comes the power to define the truth — a risky occupation for any government. (…)

Turley’s arguments are surprisingly weak. We needn’t let government set the truth on all topics to outlaw very clear cases of lying. Lies being common in social talk doesn’t require us to legalize all lies.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading | Read more: Arguments in United States v. Alvarez delve into whether fibbing is free speech. }

photo { Square America }

The world’s population is burning through the planet’s resources at such a reckless rate – about 28 per cent more last year - it will eventually cause environmental havoc, said the Worldwatch Institute, a US think-tank.

In its annual State of the World 2010 report, it warned any gains from government action on climate change could be wiped out by the cult of consumption and greed unless changes in our lifestyle were made.

Consumerism had become a “powerful driver” for increasing demand for resources and consequent production of waste, with governments, including the British, too readily wanting to promoted it as necessary for job creation and economic well-being.

More than £2.8 trillion of stimulus packages had been poured into economies to pull the world out of the global recession, it found, with only a small amount into green measures.

But the think tank warned that without a “wholesale transformation” of cultural patterns the world would not be able to “prevent the collapse of human civilisation”.

The think tank found that over the past decade consumption of goods and services had risen by 28 per cent — with the world digging up the equivalent of 112 Empire State Buildings of material every day.

The average American consumes more than his or her weight in products each day.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

In the last decade or so, the study of networks has had a profound effect on the way we understand the spread of everything from fashion and ideas to forest fires and disease.

But this better understanding of individual networks has revealed a gaping hole in our knowledge of how networks interact with each other. That looks to be hugely important. Many systems, rather than being individual networks, are actually networks of networks: the financial system, the economy, our brain and our genetic control system to name just a few.

What’s puzzling about all these systems is that they demonstrate emergent behaviour that single networks alone cannot reproduce.

So it’s no surprise that with the triumphs in understanding single networks under their belts, complexity scientists have set their sights on the more ambitious goal of understanding ‘networks of networks’. Consequently, this area is set to become one of the fastest growing in science.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

artwork { Mike Kelley, Riddle of the Sphynx, 1991 | knitted afghan, stainless-steel bowls, and offset photolithograph }

Every fall into love involves [to adapt Oscar Wilde] the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping that we will not find in the other what we know is in ourselves – all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise and brute stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one, and decide that everything that lies within it will somehow be free of our faults and hence loveable. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through union with the beloved, hope somehow to maintain [against evidence of all self-knowledge] a precarious faith in the species.

{ Alain de Botton | Continue reading }

artwork { Jeremy Geddesart }

For most of us, the set of behaviors we call personality, or self, forms initially in a family of three, four, or five individuals, then develops as it is exposed to the larger worlds of school and, in our teens perhaps, our town, our country. The richness of our individual personalities is a measure of the complexity of the relations that sustain us.

{ NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Veerle Frissen }

The noun ‘sin’ is feminine in German (die Sünde) but masculine in Russian (rpex). (…)

They investigated 790 paintings of German, French, Italian and Spanish artists that represent a personification of abstract entities such as sin, love, time and justice. Afterwards they compared the personified gender with the grammatical gender of the artist’s mother tongue.

What they found out: Personified gender matched the grammatical gender in 78% of the cases. (…)

It may give answers to German women who always have to wonder why southwestern European men are so much more charming: In Italiy, France and Spain the sin is a man.

{ United Academics | Continue reading | More: Frontiers in Psychology }

photo { Juergen Teller }

Ever since I left my native village in the Bavarian Forest more than 25 years ago, I have been returning for regular, even if infrequent, visits. Over the years, there have been many changes and two of them have been particularly noticeable to me:

(1)  Language shift: When I left, I knew how to read and write German but I couldn’t speak the national language. In that I would have been a typical representative of my generation. This has changed dramatically since then and most people I meet are now bilingual and switch between German and Bavarian with various degrees of comfort. (…)

(2)  Commercial sex: When I left, the availability of commercial sex was invisible. For all I know, it didn’t exist. Now, as you travel east from Munich on the autobahn, there are numerous billboards signaling the presence of the sex industry, including a huge structure saying “Sex shop” somewhere close to Landshut that is visible from miles away. With the commercials in the papers and the fliers advertising for the sex industry, the semiotic landscape is similar to the one I described for Switzerland in this article. Furthermore, tales of the exploits of men who visit prostitutes just behind the border in the Czech Republic and the marriages that have fallen apart as a result of all this are now a ubiquitous part of village gossip.

{ Language on the move | Continue reading }

artwork { Mike Worrall }

The infinity or nunc stans [eternal Now] of thought (…) arises only when the arrow of infinite future possibility or anticipation meets with the infinite trajectory of the past as uncovered in memory. Infinite, here, does not mean eternal. It simply means that, so long as one lives, there is a non-denumerable infinity of possible future willings or anticipations, as well as of possible interpretations of past memories; there are a non-denumerable, unfixed number of possible past moments and future anticipations while one continues to live, as life is not absolutely predetermined. The present is described as a “diagonal” that intersects or transverses the past and the future. The constitutive moments of time, namely, the past, the present, and the future, are called “forces.”

{ The Role of forgetting in our experience of time | Parrhesia | | PDF }

photo { Alexander Harding }

{ Thanks Tim }

Researchers found that name pronunciation plays a major role in the way people are perceived by colleagues and friends - and that those with more complicated names suffer at work.



The team of American and Australian scientists claim that the easier a person’s name is to say, the better their success in the work place and the more likely they are to get promoted.

{ Marie-Claire | Continue reading | Thanks Tim! }

photo { Pari Dukovic, Backstage at Prada, Milan }

I’m sure you’ve had the conversation, at some point in your life, where you’ve discussed the fact that some words have prefixes or suffixes that indicate an antonym, but no antonym exists. For example, we say someone or some act is uncouth, but not couth; our hair can be unkempt, but not kempt; you can be disgruntled, but not gruntled. Those examples all depend on simple prefix removal, but such words need not be constrained in that way. Consider, for example, feckless, which might be matched with a term like feckful (but isn’t). These terms are frequently referred to, unimaginatively, as unpaired words.

A related issue is the cranberry morpheme, one of my favorite terms in linguistics. (…) Cranberry morphemes don’t have a meaning separate from their particular bound morphemes. You know what pre- means even if I don’t type out the rest of a word. Contrast that with the most common cranberry morphemes, such as -ceive in perceive, receive, or conceive. -ceive is not a suffix; it has no meaning outside of the context of the morphemes it attaches to. (…) So with cran-: unlike, say, the black in blackberry (an unbound morpheme), cran- has no intrinsic semantic definition.

{ Fredrik deBoer | Continue reading }

artwork { Robert Indiana, Source I, 1959 }

When you think about science fiction theme tunes, chances are there are a few that are especially stirring and heroic. Star Wars. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Superman: The Movie. And all of these theme tunes have something in common: they rely on the same basic intervals.

We talked to music experts — including legendary composer Bear McCreary — to find out why so many famous theme tunes use the “perfect fifth” for their hook.

Most people will instantly recognize the first few notes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was originally known as “Also sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss. It starts with a low C, and then goes up five notes to a G — that’s a perfect fifth right there. And then the next note is another C, up an octave from the first C.

But the Star Wars theme, by John Williams, relies on a similar progression. The first few sustained notes in Star Wars are a G, going up a perfect fifth to a D, and then a higher G. Williams also plays with a descending perfect fifth in the Superman: the Movie score. And his E.T.: The Extraterrestrial theme also starts with an ascending perfect fifth. (…)

“It has its basis in physics,” says McCreary. “It’s a physical reality.” There’s an actual physical phenomenon behind the perfect fifth, and the octave above that, called the “overtone series.” Here’s how it works, according to McCreary:

{ Wired | Continue reading }

“Nor” expresses a negative condition. It literally means “and not.” You’re obligated to use the “nor” form if your sentence expresses a negative and follows it with another negative condition. “Neither the men nor the women were drunk” is a correct sentence because “nor” expresses that the women held the same negative condition as the men. The old rule is that “nor” typically follows “neither,” and “or” follows “either.” However, if neither “either” nor “neither” is used in a sentence, you should use “nor” to express a second negative, as long as the second negative is a verb. If the second negative is a noun, adjective, or adverb, you would use “or,” because the initial negative transfers to all conditions. e.g., He won’t eat broccoli or asparagus. The negative condition expressing the first noun (broccoli) is also used for the second (asparagus).

“May” implies a possibility. “Might” implies far more uncertainty. (…)

“Since” refers to time. “Because” refers to causation. e.g., Since I quit drinking I’ve married and had two children. e.g., Because I quit drinking I no longer wake up in my own vomit. (…)

Contrary to almost ubiquitous misuse, to be “nauseous” doesn’t mean you’ve been sickened: it actually means you possess the ability to produce nausea in others.

{ 20 Common Grammar Mistakes | Lit Reactor | Continue reading }

{ Product Differentiation by Aesthetic and Creative Design: A Psychological and Neural Framework of Design Thinking, 2010 | Continue reading }

photo { Christian Patterson }

Scientists have disagreed for decades about how the brain processes metaphors, those figures of speech that liken one thing to another without using “like” or “as.” One camp claims that when we hear a metaphor—a friend tells us she’s had a rough day—we understand the expression only because we’ve heard it so many times. The brain learns that “rough” means both “abrasive” and “bad,” this camp says, and it toggles from one definition to the other. The other camp claims the brain calls on sensory experiences, such as what roughness feels like, to comprehend the metaphor. Researchers from both camps have scanned the brain for signs of sensory activity triggered by metaphors, but these past studies, which tested a variety of metaphors without targeting specific senses or regions of the brain, have come up dry.

Neurologist Krish Sathian of Emory University in Atlanta wondered whether using metaphors specific to only one of the senses might be a better strategy. He and his colleagues settled on touch and asked seven college students to distinguish between different textures while their brains were scanned. (…)

The result suggests the brain’s grasp of metaphors is grounded in perception, the team reports online this month in Brain & Language. “We were really excited. This is pretty clear evidence” for the metaphor-through-perception camp, Sathian says.

{ Science | Continue reading }

Discoveries of modern biology are forcing a re-evaluation of even the central pillars of neo-Darwinian evolution. Anthropologists study the processes and results of biological and biocultural evolution, so they must be aware of the scope and nature of these changes in biology. (…)

Three decades of intense microbiological, biochemical, and genome research have resulted in significant new understanding of the evolutionary process. Central to this understanding has been the sequencing and functional decoding of the genomes of many species, including Homo sapiens sapiens. In short, biology is currently negotiating a synthesis of the same gravity as the modern synthesis of mid-20th century.

In 2009 E.V. Koonin wrote that “in the post-genomic era, all the major tenets of the modern synthesis have been, if not outright overturned, replaced by a new and incomparably more complex vision of the key aspects of evolution.”

{ eJournal of
Anthropological and Related Sciences | Continue reading }

photo { Graham Smith }

Stanley Kubrick: I’ve always been interested in ESP and the paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been conducted suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its existence, I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of opening a book at the exact page we’re looking for, or thinking of a friend a moment before they ring on the telephone. But The Shining didn’t originate from any particular desire to do a film about this. The manuscript of the novel was sent to me by John Calley, of Warner Bros. I thought it was one of the most ingenious and exciting stories of the genre I had read. It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: “Jack must be imagining these things because he’s crazy”. This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing. (…) It’s not until Grady, the ghost of the former caretaker who axed to death his family, slides open the bolt of the larder door, allowing Jack to escape, that you are left with no other explanation but the supernatural. The novel is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is often all that really matters. (…)

I hope that ESP and related psychic phenomena will eventually find general scientific proof of their existence. There are certainly a fair number of scientists who are sufficiently impressed with the evidence to spend their time working in the field. If conclusive proof is ever found it won’t be quite as exciting as, say, the discovery of alien intelligence in the universe, but it will definitely be a mind expander. In addition to the great variety of unexplainable psychic experiences we can all probably recount, I think I can see behaviour in animals which strongly suggests something like ESP.

{ Visual Memory | Three Interviews with Stanley Kubrick | Continue reading }

image { Desiree Dolron | Entitled Xteriors, this group of nine seamlessly constructed works have the quality of Old Master paintings, although they are in fact digital photographic composites of several different faces. }