Balafon

A beluga calf at the Vancouver aquarium died last night because its airway was blocked with rocks and pennies!?!?!?!?!!

What kind of fucking morons stand there and throw debris and spare change into a baby whale’s airway? Or let their kids do same? Ooh, let’s make a wish!

How would you like a few loonies shoved down your own throats, you retards?

I sincerely hope there’s some good security camera footage that will put them away for good and all.

I am not interested in living in a world where people feel they are justified in killing others simply because they’re offended.

Therefore, I am participating in Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. If you are offended by depictions of your prophet, I apologize, but I feel that the principle of freedom of religion is more important than not offending you. If you say that it’s only a few extremists who would want to kill people over this, then I say to you: clean your own house, then we’ll talk. If you’ll stand up in your mosque tomorrow and condemn violence against blasphemers, then we’ll talk.

The picture below is a miniature illustration on vellum from the book Jami’ al-Tawarikh (literally “Compendium of Chronicles” but often referred to as The Universal History or History of the World), by Rashid al-Din, published in Tabriz, Persia, 1307 A.D. It depicts Mohammed supervising the rebuilding of the Kaaba.

In other words, it’s an image of Mohammed drawn by a devout Muslim. There are many such images.

Since my lights are powered by nuclear fusion¹, I will not be turning them off tomorrow night.

Instead I will be turning on all that I can, in order to celebrate human ingenuity and technology.

If you really care about the earth, why don’t you spend a month naked in the woods, without fire, which, after all, produces carbon emissions!

I’ve seen a few posts lately regarding the “problem” of deponency and/or the middle voice in ancient Greek. One blogger even suggests that we use a different word than “middle”, which is a dumb idea, because “middle voice” is a term of art, with a specific meaning that has only a tenuous relationship to the ordinary use of the word.

To a linguist, this is all very bemusing. Trying to build elaborate models and explanations to help English speakers wrap their minds around the idea that ancient Greek speakers used middle or passive constructions in contexts where English would use the active is just pandering to Anglo-centrism — all the models are attempting to explain Greek in terms of the writers’ English-language categories.

Look, folks, news-flash: ancient Greek is NOT English! The categories of ancient Greek are not those of English, and the ancient Greeks’ reasons for using a particular voice in a particular situation may simply be quite different from those of modern-day English-speakers.

And they may indeed have not had reasons! Far more of language is made up of arbitrary convention than most scholars of language would like to admit. A search for “reasons” (or “deep structure”, cough cough) is often at best an exercise in historical linguistics.

It might have been better had Greek been further grammatically from English — it’s hard to shoehorn an ergative-absolutive system, for example, into English-speakers’ conceptual framework — they just have to learn it on its own terms.

So in teaching ancient Greek it’s not a cop-out to say “that’s just how they did it”. The idea of “deponency” is actually a barrier to thinking in ancient Greek, because it tries to keep the learner using English concepts, instead of forming Greek concepts! I think sometimes language pedagogy goes overboard in trying to teach systems of rules. Languages are in general messy, and the most useful and interesting parts of language are often exceptions to the rules.

I’m brushing up on my Attic Greek right now by going through Reading Greek, which I cannot recommend highly enough, but for my own amusement, I’m not bothering with making sure I’ve got all the paradigms, or even memorizing new vocabulary. Of course, I did have the advantage of memorizing lots of paradigms back in school days, but I’m surprised at how much structure and vocab I’ve been picking up simply inductively. It helps that the texts are interesting, colourful and thus memorable.

Came across some fascinating stuff today in the area of cognitive science.

The first bit is a mention of Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, in which he puts forward a trenchant argument against dualism: if the soul is to affect the body (i.e. when “I” want to move a part of my body), then it must apply energy to the neurons to change their state. Where does the energy come from? We could put a person in a calorimeter and verify that the energy of heat that they put out is no greater than the energy of the food they consume. A corollary I immediately thought of is: why does thinking (or praying, for that matter) consume a measurable amount of glucose from the blood? Why should a “soulish” activity consume matter?

I have long maintained that whatever is meant by the Biblical terms (e.g. psyche) translated “soul”, it cannot consist of matter or energy, but must consist of information. Dennett’s thought experiment is further support for this view.

The second fascinating item is an Edge talk by Stanislas Dehaene. His research on cognition and consciousness has progressed to the point where it is possible to determine from a real-time brain scan if and at which moment a person becomes consciously aware of a stimulus.

I’ve recently been reading Sydney Lamb’s work in neurocognitive linguistics; Dehaene’s work seems to tie in nicely.

I shall be interested to read his papers on the cognition of number and compare with Dan Everett‘s work with the Pirahã, whom he claims do not use numbers.