24 June, 2009
Is the California Revolt Starting?
I just got an email from Jerrol LeBaron – who runs a screenwriting web site – (we’re talking Hollywood, here) with a link to Honor in Office.
I’m already on the record as wanting a law to force legislators to actually read the legislation they vote on. I may quibble with the wording here, but the idea is great.
Hey, Sacramento: When Hollywood comes gunning for you, maybe you’ve finally made more enemies than you can handle.
A Free Market Response to Piracy
From Russia, with love.
Wealthy punters pay £3,500 per day to patrol the most dangerous waters in the world hoping to be attacked by raiders.
When attacked, they retaliate with grenade launchers, machine guns and rocket launchers, reports Austrian business paper Wirtschaftsblatt.
Passengers, who can pay an extra £5 a day for an AK-47 machine gun and £7 for 100 rounds of ammo, are also protected by a squad of ex special forces troops.
Wait — That’s about $12.50 US for 100 rounds? Twelve and a half cents per round? That’s less than half of what you’d pay here in the US for the ammo if you could find any. You could take the cruise, conserve your ammo, and pay for the trip by selling your surplus stateside!
In case you weren’t aware, ammo is scarce in the U.S. ever since some anti-gun moron got elected president. I waited too long to try to stock up, and now I can’t find any.
How Language Shapes the Way We Think
A really fascinating article that quantifies what, to me, seemed obvious.
Scholars on the other side of the debate don’t find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse, encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don’t include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn’t mean that English speakers aren’t paying attention to the same things; all it means is that they’re not talking about them. It’s possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.
Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it’s distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentiality in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.
I’m only bilingual, but one of the first things I noticed upon becoming fluent in Spanish was that I thought different things and in different ways in each language. I can’t believe that those who think language doesn’t shape our thoughts are polyglots.
Playing Games with DNA
“In theory, it is possible to use the Sudoku method to sequence more than a hundred thousand DNA samples,” says CSHL Professor Gregory Hannon, Ph.D., a genomics expert and leader of the team that invented the “Sudoku” approach. At that level of efficiency, it promises to reduce costs dramatically. A sequencing project that costs upwards of $10 million using conventional methods may be accomplished for $50,000 to $80,000 using DNA Sudoku, he estimates.
I’ll Remember You
but maybe not the way you think I will.
“The old theory is that once a memory is wired in your brain, it stays that way,” explained Nader, William Dawson Scholar and EWR Steacie Fellow in the Department of Psychology. “But our discovery shows that once you remember something, it doesn’t stay wired in your brain, it becomes unwired and needs to be restored again – reconsolidation.”
