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August 26, 2004
Mars Bug Extinct
A topic of dissention for many years, the possibility of life on Mars has been hotly debated. Scientists now have conclusive proof of the former existence of the so-called "Mars bug". The creature is, unfortunately, extinct. Earthly entomologists and xenobiologists unanimously concur that flaws in the bugs' protective coloration scheme are to blame for the rapid downfall of the species.
Swiped this clever picture off of a Fark thread on Photoshopping animals as if science were run by corporate sponsors. Hilarious picture.
Posted by John at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2004
Universal Language and The Pirahă Tribe
A study appearing today in the journal Science reports that the Pirahă tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon basin are the only known group of humans to have no concept of numbering and counting. The study is only available to Science subscribers, but here's the press release from Columbia University.
When adult Pirahă asked anthropologists to teach them numbers and counting, they have been totally unable to learn it, even though they took basic math lessons for months at a time ...
This tribe was discovered several decades ago, and written about by Daniel L. Everett, Department of Linguistics at The University of Manchester. But they got little attention outside of academic circles. This study by Peter Gordon from Columbia University seems to be getting a little bit wider play. While others are more critical of the study and the methodology, I am astounded by how fundmentally different from our own embedded cultural linguistic standards this tribe's language is, and the corresponding (cause? or effect?) cultural differences that accompany it. They don't sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day. Even when food is available, they frequently starve themselves and their children, Prof. Everett reports. They communicate almost as much by singing, whistling and humming as by normal speech. They frequently change their names, because they believe spirits regularly take them over and intrinsically change who they are.
It gets even wierder...
a. Pirahă is the only language known without number, numerals, or a concept of
counting.
b. Pirahă is the only language known without color terms.
c. Pirahă is the only language known without embedding.
d. Pirahă has the simplest pronoun inventory known and evidence suggests that
Pirahă's entire pronominal inventory may have been borrowed.
e. Pirahă has no perfect tense.
f. Pirahă has perhaps the simplest kinship system ever documented.
g. Pirahă has no creation myths – its texts are almost always descriptions of
immediate experience or interpretations of experience; it has some stories about the past, but only of one or two generations back.
h. The Pirahă in general have no individual or collective memory of more than
two generations past.
i. Pirahă people do not draw, except for extremely crude stick figures representing the spirit world that they (claim to) have directly experienced.
j. Pirahă has no terms for quantification, e.g. 'all', 'each', 'every', 'most', 'some', etc.
Though Pirahă is an extreme case, it teaches us something about the deep loss inherent in the death of any language, even if the people survive. When Portuguese-speaking Muras visit the Pirahă today, as happens, howbeit rarely, the Pirahă do not envy them. They see them as simply second-rate, false Brazilians. The Pirahă say that 'We are not Brazilians. We are Pirahăs.' Without their language or their culture, they would fail to be Pirahăs. Their language is not endangered by their own attitudes, certainly. But it is endangered, as are many others, because the Pirahă themselves are endangered by ever more-intrusive presence of settlers, Western diseases, alcohol, and the inexorable changing world that we live in. For the rest of us, this beautiful language and culture, so fundamentally different from anything the Western world has produced, has much to teach us about linguistic theory, about culture, about human nature, about living for each day and letting the future take care of itself, about personal fortitude, toughness, love, and many other values too numerous to mention here. And this is but one example of many other endangered languages and cultures in the Amazon and elsewhere with 'riches' of a similar nature that we may never, ever know about, because of our own shortsightedness.LanguageHat has the best discussion thread on this topic.There is a more urgent need than ever before for field researchers to document these languages and for more individuals and foundations to follow the lead of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Document Project and donate to support research on these languages.
Posted by John at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
August 14, 2004
Morally Bankrupt Politics
I was in the Charlotte airport yesterday and I saw "Bush Must Go" in the window of the bookstore. It looked like a children's book! I thought to myself, how low are these liberal muckrakers going to stoop in this election?!
Then I saw this.
Tommy and Lou’s lemonade stand is hit with many obstacles.
Liberals keep appearing from behind their lemon tree, taking half of their money in taxes, forbidding them to hang a picture of Jesus atop their stand, and making them give broccoli with each glass sold.
Law after law instituted by the press-hungry liberals finally results in the liberals taking over Tommy and Lou’s stand and offering sour lemonade at astronomical prices to the customers.
Errr, ahem. It seems neither side of the debate is immune from the tendency to act like children. Bitter, spiteful children.
Posted by John at 03:23 AM | Comments (0)
Disinfect the Core
Disinfect The Core is sort of like Othello on a larger scale, with a really, really good opponent. Once you lose a few games to the computer to get familiar with it and are able to start strategizing, it's pretty fun.
Posted by John at 03:07 AM | Comments (0)
August 11, 2004
15 Bites
I can get the pie in 16 bites, but I can't get 15.
Posted by John at 11:01 PM | Comments (1)
Cyrkam airtos
This is one of those crappy real-life-pictures-in-silhouette games with limited movement, written in Flash so the controls are really jerky, and it's French.
What else could possibly be wrong with it? And yet... and yet... it's fun. It's even mildly addictive. You're this guy, see, and you're just sitting in your office chair and your buddy starts throwing balls of paper at you. So you catch them, and throw them into the trash can. That's all there is to it. Heh heh.
Posted by John at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)
[] That close to being a headline
OK, so, I was just a kid, like 12 years old, ok? So... I did this incredibly stupid thing and lived to tell about it, and then today, here's a guy doing the exact same thing who had to go to the hospital.
The way we did it, we took a .38 caliber bullet and wedged it into a board, in which we had drilled a hole the right size. We then propped up the board and crouched behind a tree and took turns shooting at the firing pin on the back of the bullet with our BB guns. I hit the pin, and got a lesson in Newton's Third Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The shell casing came out of that board flying backwards and ripped a chunk of bark out of the tree about 4 inches from my face. Gee... didn't think of that.
Posted by John at 06:09 PM | Comments (0)
Spectacular wipeout
Cruising eBaum's world this evening, and came across this video clip from an evening news program showing a fantastic forced motorcycle wipeout.
"After recent terrorist attacks, Spanish police
are in no mood for leniency."
Posted by John at 12:44 AM | Comments (0)
That About Says It All
Posted by John at 12:32 AM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2004
Parallel parking
How bored do you have to be to play a game that tests your ability to parallel park? Kind of like playing "virtual stuck behind a bus". Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, and established a personal best of 5.36 seconds. But then, I'm a Parker.
Posted by John at 11:38 PM | Comments (0)
This beautiful Earth
You convince yourself you can write then you read Stephen King, you call yourself a juggler then you go see Cirque du Soleil, you say 'I can play golf' and then you watch Tiger Woods. I thought I could take a pretty good photograph, then I saw Yann Bertrand's work More here, too.
Posted by John at 10:20 PM | Comments (1)
August 07, 2004
Rockwell's retro-encabulator
This is brilliant. Of course, it clashes with my decor, so I'm not buying one until they make them available in colors. And reposition the hydrocoptic marzelvanes so the ambifacient lunar waneshaft is in a negative side fumbling configuration with the single-ended girdlespring, of course.
Posted by John at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)
August 04, 2004
Big shout out to MT-Blacklist
Every once in awhile, some knucklehead comes along and leaves a comment linking to a pR0n site, or a site selling V1agra, or some other nasty, trashy site that good practioners of the fine art of keelhauling should have nothing to do with. Or with which they should have nothing to do. Whatever.
I, of course, as your diligent site host, have it set up so that I get an email whenever a comment is lodged, and so I promptly go in and zap the offending comment into free electrons, and permanently ban the IP address of the offender.
Today, I got 1439 emails.
Yes, I got keelhauled.
But I have keelhauled a few folks in my time, so I knew there was nothing for it but shrug off the ropes, tend the wounds and get to work.
Apparently, some "clever" (read "spawn of Satan") spammers have now written programs to spam weblogs like this one that leave the "Comments" feature open. Movable Type allows you to delete comments, but it's a laborious one-comment-at-a-time process - capture the IP address, delete the comment, rebuild the weblog entry, switch over to "IP banning" and paste the offending IP address, then go to the next comment, rinse and repeat.
Suspecting that far more technically savvy people than yours truly have encountered this problem already, I quickly Googled "spam Movable Type comments" and up popped MT-Blacklist. It not only will allow you to do bulk deletes of offending comments (I could only get it to work up to about 20 comments at a time, but that's WAY better than one-by-one), but has it's own community list of offending spammer domains (over 1,000 URLs), AND a set of rules to analyze the content and block any violators. In less than an hour, Keelhauling is now inoculated against future spam attacks, and the mess is cleaned up.
Thank you, Jay Allen.
Posted by John at 01:35 AM | Comments (1)
