I suppose foreign residents can keep their family names? I’d like to live in Iceland someday, but I don’t want to change my name to Carl Edwardsson!
—Someone, on Icelandic names (statement changed cosmetically for anonymity).
The language ego permeability hypothesis argues that adults have difficulty learning foreign languages because they are reluctant to give up control over self-presentation. Giving up this control is necessary to learning a new language.
(via Mark Beadles on StackExchange; see also comment by jlawler: “Guiora told me that the two-drink level was optimum. Any more and mechanical performance and memory suffer; any less and normal social anxieties constrain performance and learning.”)
These cases are in fact symptomatic of a serious problem with evolutionary psychology: its research program shows a curious tendency to invert itself. You might think that convincing evidence that a particular form of behavior is inherited usually leads to attempts to explain how and why it evolved. But often what happens is the reverse: the fact that we can conceive of an adaptive tale about why a behavior should evolve becomes the chief reason for suspecting it’s genetic. Why, after all, does Pinker think human neonaticide might be genetic? Where are the twin studies, chromosome locations, and DNA sequences supporting such a claim? The answer is we don’t have any.
These days, when I lay down to sleep, I’ve been catching myself trying to check my email, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, or Google Translate telepathically. I make the queries and get puzzled that there’s no useful answer; a couple brain-cycles later, I realize what I’m doing and feel utterly silly.
Is this a common phenomenon? How much more must we wait until IPv7 is deployed?
Depression is like diabetes in that it’s treatable but chronic. The best one can do is to learn to identify it, to see it coming and going, to isolate factors and conditions. (more…)
I was reading an essay on the Internet. It was about War and Peace. (People say you can’t read in dreams, but they’re wrong; I’ve had more than one of those where there’s actual text and I read it without any problems). As the text went on, the arguments and line of thought grew more and more familiar, until I realized it was an old post of mine. But the moment I noticed this, all of its problems jumped at me—the faulty punctuation, the misspellings, the clumsy English, the misplaced idioms and so on—and I wanted badly to edit it, but the site (leonardoboiko.com) wasn’t mine. I contacted the domain owners, saying that I don’t mind sharing, but I’d like an account to edit and improve the texts. They said that no, they created that highly-publicized site specifically in order to post immutable snapshots of all my past texts, preventing me from deleting or fixing them, and making it clear to the world what a lousy writer am I.
I dreamed this after hacking together this week’s post at the Nikki, guiltly, at 2am. I suppose I might have some confidence issues.
1. For some reason I can’t remember, I had always though that a) latin “ae” was written “æ” and b) pronounced [æ]. Turns out it was [aj] in Old Latin and the Classical period, then [ae] by the 2c (as noted by Terentius Scaurus and others), then [ɛ]. The ligature “æ” is quite late and points to the monophthong.
2. Given the mystery surrounding rhotics, I had always thought the precise value of Latin “r” was unknown. There are in fact some complications regarding prehistoric Latin, but for Classical there’s lots of evidence showing that it was a trilled alveolar, including this passage by Terentianus Maurus:
uibrat tremulis ictibus aridum sonorem, has quae sequitur littera.
…Well, ok then.
Thanks to the use of alphabetic writing, the loans from and to other alphabetic writings (Greek etc), and countless statements by grammarians, the job of reconstructing Latin phonology seems WAY easier than Japanese or Chinese. The above was from Allen’s Vox Latina, a wonderfully concise and insighful little book that gives you rationales for everything, not just proposals.
I wrote a long post about the problems I have with Libertarian ethics, manipulation as coercion, and the ethics of “picking up girls”. But it got preachy, bitter, and boring. Then I tried to sum up how I feel in a single paragraph:
If you’d like to have sex with someone, it’s a matter of personal responsibility to be upfront about it. If you’re trying to sneak sex disguised as friendship, don’t blame them when they accept the friendship and reject the sex. If, like a tobacco company, you’re trying to dress it up as adventure and romance, don’t blame them if they’re more interested in adventure and romance than sex. Consent means informed consent made under sound judgement, without pulling on emotional strings or other crafty manipulation. Yes, if you’re honest most people will say “no”. Yes, that fact sucks. But, even though it hurts, it’s correct answer; because the fact is that, unfortunately, most people you like are simply not interested in using your body for sensual pleasure. Instead of trying to trick them into saying “yes” against their will, find someone else who’s actually willing. There are seven billion people in the world; you’d be surprised at how many of them are willing.
…I still don’t like the tone, but at least it’s a single paragraph.
Is a tabletop RPG that’s 1) a classic (no “balanced” WoW 4E crap for me, ’offa my lawn!); 2) set in a full-featured world including a set of conlangs in various stages of completeness, and 3) all that being not eurocentric!!!‼‼ Why didn’t anyone show me this, like, earlier?
1. Quando você convive com pessoas inteligentes e progressivas, às vezes fica confortavelmente alheio de problemas de gênero. Mas vivemos numa sociedade retrógrada, e fatalmenta você vai esbarrar numa intrusão do Real de tempos em tempos. Por exemplo, um conhecido de Curitiba acabou de contar que recebeu uma nota da escolinha da filha dele, avisando que as professoras estavam preocupadas porque ela só gostava de coisas de menino (super-heróis, etc.); e que estavam tentando sanar este problema ensinando-a a brincar com Barbies. Precisei de alguns momentos pra conciliar esta notícia com o fato que vivemos em 2012 e não 1942.
Se não faz sentido, você não deve ser linuxeiro: o comando para imprimir um documento no terminal é lpr -P<nome_da_impressora> documento.ps, com o nome da impressora imediatamente depois da opção -P, tradicionalmente sem espaço. Então a opção fica -PAnda, -PIlha, -PInk etc.
(Não fui eu quem bolou isso, já estava assim quando vim.)
I start with phonology; if I’m reading on language X, I read the “Phonology of X” article in wikipedia. Sometimes the article is less than stellar; in this case I find paper articles.
Now listen: There’s a conspiracy out to get every other conspiracy. The conspiracy of conspiracies. They’re a secret society so secret that not even their members know they’re in; and if they find out, they’re murdered immediately.
