When I read stories like this one, about a man who "sees" without being able to see, I'm filled with a kind of joy and wonder that is difficult to accurately describe.
There's so much that we still need to understand about how our brain works and one of the best ways to learn is to study truly bizarre cases like that one, or like the "split brain" cases.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
The problem with opposition to health care reform by reasonable americans
Maybe I'm stating the obvious. But here it goes.
It is my experience that reasonable americans (not the real crazies who shout like idiots at those town halls, but the ones that might nod in agreement when someone else does), these regular people who are, generally but not always, conservative leaning and happen to have a problem with "the government option" to health care reform; these generally decent reasonable americans who are kind and usually thoughtful and that don't really think Obama is Hitler or some other crazy hyperbolic thing like that, these people typically haven't given a lot of consideration to the current system in America.
I've had a chance to interact with these reasonable people who think that a public option will cost too much money, and that a large chunk of the population is very corrupt and will game the public system and not play by the rules and cause it to cost more money, and that a public option will make their private plan (which they are happy with) turn to shit, and so on. I think a lot of these worries are grounded in reality, but that's not the point.
These interactions have taught me that, in order to have a meaningful conversation with these reasonable americans, it is useless to try to just simply defend a public plan. To defend a public plan is to defend a hypothetical, to collect evidence from nothing more substantial than a thought experiment (what happens in other countries is generally inconsequential to many of these reasonable people). In order to have a decent, intelligent conversation about truly changing health care, and to set up a good reason to incorporate the government/public option, we all first need to get educated about the current system.
Everyone involved first needs to understand the absolute horrible state of the health care PAYMENT industry as it currently stands. People need to understand that, even though their situation appears to be just fine, that there are problems in the system that are going to potentially affect their individual, "fine" situation negatively.
It is my experience that when people really consider the problem with making health-care a commodity, when people truly understand how the BUSINESS of paying for health care works, when people put themselves in the shoes of an insurance company executive and think about how he/she has to deal with share holders AND NOT SICK PEOPLE, when people are made aware of the actual stories of poor bastards with pre-existing conditions who are denied coverage, then they begin to understand why the current American system is not necessarily the best we could do. They begin to understand why a standard capitalist model is not really compatible with providing access to healthcare, just like it isn't compatible with providing education, and fire/police departments, etc. It is my experience that when a person understands this, then they become open to thinking about what we might do to FIX the current system. That doesn't mean they will be any more keen on the public option. But they'll at least realize that there's a problem and it needs to be fixed FAST. And what we need in this country now is to get everyone on the side of REFORM.
The problem as I see it is that there is an opposition to any kind of reform in the health care payment industry because all reform is being characterized as socialist. The whole discussion should have started with making every single american understand why the current system is unworkable, how it is broken. Once the vast majority of the country is on this same page, then we can take an incremental step toward fixing it.
Instead, what's happening is that these reasonable americans, who are busy trying to keep their jobs and doing other things and so don't have time to educate themselves about the status quo, these reasonable americans who are getting their information from sensationalist and piss-poor reporting by the 24 hour news channels, these reasonable americans are being (and letting themselves be) consciously and sub-consciously turned against any kind of reform.
If you have an opportunity to communicate with these reasonable americans or if you happen to be one of these reasonable americans, I suggest you start fresh. Forget all that you may have learned about the current state of the health care payment system and research the basics for yourself. Use what you learn to form the basis of your conversation, when you're discussing health care reform.
Here is an example of how this strategy is used explicitly to promote the government/public option:
It is my experience that reasonable americans (not the real crazies who shout like idiots at those town halls, but the ones that might nod in agreement when someone else does), these regular people who are, generally but not always, conservative leaning and happen to have a problem with "the government option" to health care reform; these generally decent reasonable americans who are kind and usually thoughtful and that don't really think Obama is Hitler or some other crazy hyperbolic thing like that, these people typically haven't given a lot of consideration to the current system in America.
I've had a chance to interact with these reasonable people who think that a public option will cost too much money, and that a large chunk of the population is very corrupt and will game the public system and not play by the rules and cause it to cost more money, and that a public option will make their private plan (which they are happy with) turn to shit, and so on. I think a lot of these worries are grounded in reality, but that's not the point.
These interactions have taught me that, in order to have a meaningful conversation with these reasonable americans, it is useless to try to just simply defend a public plan. To defend a public plan is to defend a hypothetical, to collect evidence from nothing more substantial than a thought experiment (what happens in other countries is generally inconsequential to many of these reasonable people). In order to have a decent, intelligent conversation about truly changing health care, and to set up a good reason to incorporate the government/public option, we all first need to get educated about the current system.
Everyone involved first needs to understand the absolute horrible state of the health care PAYMENT industry as it currently stands. People need to understand that, even though their situation appears to be just fine, that there are problems in the system that are going to potentially affect their individual, "fine" situation negatively.
It is my experience that when people really consider the problem with making health-care a commodity, when people truly understand how the BUSINESS of paying for health care works, when people put themselves in the shoes of an insurance company executive and think about how he/she has to deal with share holders AND NOT SICK PEOPLE, when people are made aware of the actual stories of poor bastards with pre-existing conditions who are denied coverage, then they begin to understand why the current American system is not necessarily the best we could do. They begin to understand why a standard capitalist model is not really compatible with providing access to healthcare, just like it isn't compatible with providing education, and fire/police departments, etc. It is my experience that when a person understands this, then they become open to thinking about what we might do to FIX the current system. That doesn't mean they will be any more keen on the public option. But they'll at least realize that there's a problem and it needs to be fixed FAST. And what we need in this country now is to get everyone on the side of REFORM.
The problem as I see it is that there is an opposition to any kind of reform in the health care payment industry because all reform is being characterized as socialist. The whole discussion should have started with making every single american understand why the current system is unworkable, how it is broken. Once the vast majority of the country is on this same page, then we can take an incremental step toward fixing it.
Instead, what's happening is that these reasonable americans, who are busy trying to keep their jobs and doing other things and so don't have time to educate themselves about the status quo, these reasonable americans who are getting their information from sensationalist and piss-poor reporting by the 24 hour news channels, these reasonable americans are being (and letting themselves be) consciously and sub-consciously turned against any kind of reform.
If you have an opportunity to communicate with these reasonable americans or if you happen to be one of these reasonable americans, I suggest you start fresh. Forget all that you may have learned about the current state of the health care payment system and research the basics for yourself. Use what you learn to form the basis of your conversation, when you're discussing health care reform.
Here is an example of how this strategy is used explicitly to promote the government/public option:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Estonians rock?
There was a time, once, when I thought absolutely nothing good could ever come out of the republic of Estonia (except, of course, Brandon Fraser via Encino Man which also starred a young, de-hobbitized Samwise Gamgee, but I digress...).
That is no longer the case thanks to Opium Flirt.
Several years ago, I downloaded the title track from Opium Flirt's first album "Saint European King Days" and thought it was pretty good (I found it on the very decent music blog "said the gramophone"). So I saved it along with the rest of the mp3s that I download weekly from the internets. As often happens, these single track downloads get lost in that sea of mp3s that fill up my hard drive. And because I've got my itunes playlists set so that I only listen to music that I haven't heard in the past 6 months, it was at least a year or two after I downloaded it that this Opium Flirt track pleased my ears again.
But upon a second listen I became mesmerized. Opium Flirt's "saint European King Days" is a hauntingly wonderful song. So I checked out some more songs by the band and discovered that they are all over the place (in terms of style). This is a sure plus for any band, in my book. You might be able to categorize Opium Flirt as "ambient psychedelic", but then you'd only be accurately describing about half of their songs.
Anyway, I highly recommend taking a listen. Three words of warning:
That is no longer the case thanks to Opium Flirt.
Several years ago, I downloaded the title track from Opium Flirt's first album "Saint European King Days" and thought it was pretty good (I found it on the very decent music blog "said the gramophone"). So I saved it along with the rest of the mp3s that I download weekly from the internets. As often happens, these single track downloads get lost in that sea of mp3s that fill up my hard drive. And because I've got my itunes playlists set so that I only listen to music that I haven't heard in the past 6 months, it was at least a year or two after I downloaded it that this Opium Flirt track pleased my ears again.
But upon a second listen I became mesmerized. Opium Flirt's "saint European King Days" is a hauntingly wonderful song. So I checked out some more songs by the band and discovered that they are all over the place (in terms of style). This is a sure plus for any band, in my book. You might be able to categorize Opium Flirt as "ambient psychedelic", but then you'd only be accurately describing about half of their songs.
Anyway, I highly recommend taking a listen. Three words of warning:
- listen to the whole song and not just the intro (their intro's are often long and can be monotonous)
- listen to more than one track
- the song "Saint European King Days" would make me want to cry, if I wasn't such a manly masculine man
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Saturday, August 8, 2009
porn on the floor? possibly knotcaphe fourwirk
Is this the greatest music video of the current generation? Probably not. But it's still frickkin awesome.
Major Lazer "Pon De Floor" from Eric Wareheim on Vimeo.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Singlish + comedy = singlish comedy?
This is what a lot of my in-laws sound like when they speak English:
It's pretty awesome.
It's pretty awesome.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
You and me, in the nude, if that's what you're into
Further evidence of the supreme greatness of Flight of the Conchords.
(old clip, but one of my favorite songs)
(old clip, but one of my favorite songs)
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Lewontin wrote a book with Chomskey and it has fuck-all to do with linguistics
Nicely put: "Humans and chimpanzees are nevertheless very similar in their proteins, on the average, but vastly different in the sizes of their brains and their ability to write books about each other.”- R. Lewontin 1998. Very clever, so long as you pick the appropriate referents for the reciprocal expression.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Science can be creative (and fun)
Events in my life have conspired to create an interesting state in my academic life. It appears that I will be spending a good portion of my near future designing an experiment which studies human gesture and the development of phonology (or sub-lexical compositionality) using a fucking WII-mote.
There's a small, but significant part of me that is giddy at that proposition. That is the WII-msical side of me which causes me to spend a good part of my free time playing video games. The serious, pragmatic, scientist part of me is apprehensive, concerned about the aspect of these events that leads to the future state in which I'm, potentially, publishing the results of such a study (under, what is likely to be, a very clever title).
One really awesome aspect of my recent work is that it's actually involving a lot more creativity than I've experienced in much of my previous academic work. I love doing simple research, but there's something really appealing about stepping in new territory, the kind of territory where a linguistically trained graduate student is programming an unintuitive input/output mapping from a fucking WII-mote to a three dimensional space represented in a computer screen. If you would have asked me in my undergraduate days whether I thought that computer programming for academic purposes would become one of the few creative outlets of my future career, I may have laughed at the question.
Speaking of creativity: I'm just loving the band "Immaculate Machine". At their best, they sound like an interesting mix between "the new pornographers" and a classic rock cover-band. At their worst they sound like a classic rock inspired folk rock group (which actually doesn't sound so bad).
Even though it doesn't sound anything like what I just described, I'm particularly taken by the song "Dear Confessor" from their 2007 release "Fable" (see video).
They later re-recorded that song in what I think is Mandarin Chinese (see Wo Xian Tanbai below, from "wont be pretty", their 2008 7-inch EP) which I think is really awesome because, up till now, the vast majority of music I've heard in Mandarin has been boring top 40 adult contemporary.
It's always fun to hear foreigners sing rock (see l'aventurier for an example of how cool the 80's were for France, though I prefer the more recent ska version made by a bunch of CANADIANS) (I'm being tongue-in-cheek condescending here. No hate mail please).
Anyway, Immaculate Machine, along with "Fanfarlo" and a few others, are setting up 2009 to be the year of group-chanty-folk rock for me.
There's a small, but significant part of me that is giddy at that proposition. That is the WII-msical side of me which causes me to spend a good part of my free time playing video games. The serious, pragmatic, scientist part of me is apprehensive, concerned about the aspect of these events that leads to the future state in which I'm, potentially, publishing the results of such a study (under, what is likely to be, a very clever title).
One really awesome aspect of my recent work is that it's actually involving a lot more creativity than I've experienced in much of my previous academic work. I love doing simple research, but there's something really appealing about stepping in new territory, the kind of territory where a linguistically trained graduate student is programming an unintuitive input/output mapping from a fucking WII-mote to a three dimensional space represented in a computer screen. If you would have asked me in my undergraduate days whether I thought that computer programming for academic purposes would become one of the few creative outlets of my future career, I may have laughed at the question.
Speaking of creativity: I'm just loving the band "Immaculate Machine". At their best, they sound like an interesting mix between "the new pornographers" and a classic rock cover-band. At their worst they sound like a classic rock inspired folk rock group (which actually doesn't sound so bad).
Even though it doesn't sound anything like what I just described, I'm particularly taken by the song "Dear Confessor" from their 2007 release "Fable" (see video).
They later re-recorded that song in what I think is Mandarin Chinese (see Wo Xian Tanbai below, from "wont be pretty", their 2008 7-inch EP) which I think is really awesome because, up till now, the vast majority of music I've heard in Mandarin has been boring top 40 adult contemporary.
It's always fun to hear foreigners sing rock (see l'aventurier for an example of how cool the 80's were for France, though I prefer the more recent ska version made by a bunch of CANADIANS) (I'm being tongue-in-cheek condescending here. No hate mail please).
Anyway, Immaculate Machine, along with "Fanfarlo" and a few others, are setting up 2009 to be the year of group-chanty-folk rock for me.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
11 year old alcoholics
I used to think that having a drinking age, denying 18 year olds the ability to imbibe, played a big role in creating the allure of alcohol and thereby being largely responsible for causing alcohol related troubles like binge drinking.
Today I heard this headline on BBC radio: Milan to enforce teen drink ban. The article talks about the problems with underage drinking in Milan. To my (mostly) american ears, that meant that 18 or 19 year olds are overdoing it. But Italy's drinking age is 16. The underage problems the article talks about involve 11 year olds. 11 year olds with drinking problems...
I guess no matter what you do, what laws you pass, what limits you arbitrarily install, there will always be people taking things a bit too far. I guess that in itself doesn't come as a shock. But paired with the notion of drunken 11 year olds publicly urinating: oh yeah, shock.
Today I heard this headline on BBC radio: Milan to enforce teen drink ban. The article talks about the problems with underage drinking in Milan. To my (mostly) american ears, that meant that 18 or 19 year olds are overdoing it. But Italy's drinking age is 16. The underage problems the article talks about involve 11 year olds. 11 year olds with drinking problems...
I guess no matter what you do, what laws you pass, what limits you arbitrarily install, there will always be people taking things a bit too far. I guess that in itself doesn't come as a shock. But paired with the notion of drunken 11 year olds publicly urinating: oh yeah, shock.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
300th post: revisitng intuitiveness and sports science
Talk about counter-intuative:
When I was a young'un playing baseball, on the on-deck circle I would practice swinging a bat with a weight on the tip. When I was up to bat, the weight-less bat felt incredibly light and I felt like I could swing much harder.
Well, someone went ahead and actually tested whether practicing with a weighted bat actually made a difference to your swing in the batter's box. It turns out that it actually slows you down rather than speeds you up. If you want to swing faster, you actually have to practice with a lighter bat, not a heavier one.
Now, swinging faster doesn't necessarily mean you'll hit better. It may, for example, be detrimental to your accuracy. But, what I find fascinating is that, from personal experience, it certainly feels like you're swinging a normally weighted bat twice as fast if you've just practiced with a weighted bat. And this is likely why baseball players have practiced on the on-deck circle with weighted bats since... well who knows since when, but they do it all the time (see photo above).
I fucking love science, and I'm especially becoming enamored with Sports Science. I heard on the BBC radio station earlier this week an obituary for one of the first Sports scientists in the UK. A fellow, whose name I forget, who did his PhD in the sixties on how football (soccer) players injure themselves. He was also an expert on altitude effects on athletes, which is on a lot of Europeans' minds these days as the world cup next year will be held in South Africa, where many of the stadiums are significantly above sea level.
Sports science doesn't even have to be psycho-physical or biomedical in nature. It can be about counter-intuitive statistics as the 60 minutes video below will explain:
I suspect there's a general intuition that academics who excel in the science fields are likely to be nerds who care little for sports. Maybe that intuition is accurate of the mean, we'd need more data to find out if that's true, but some of the most interesting things happen when science moves into new territories which are typically not noted for drawing scientists.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
science v culture multiplied by infants
I often joke around about all the crazy psycho-social experiments I'm going to put my children through. I kid about how I'll make a conscious effort to fail to invert auxiliary verbs in the appropriate contexts, or that I'll only read adult science fiction for their bedtime stories, or that every weekend they'll be getting training on how to 'cheat' on IQ tests.
Today I stumbled across this story. The scientist with me is intrigued while the human in me is horrified. I'm fairly certain that both of those reactions are inappropriate.
Leave it to the swedes, I guess.
Today I stumbled across this story. The scientist with me is intrigued while the human in me is horrified. I'm fairly certain that both of those reactions are inappropriate.
Leave it to the swedes, I guess.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Sybiotic birds
Usually, when you see a symbiotic relationship between birds and large mammals, it is a mutually beneficial one, such as the case with the oxpecker and large grazing mammals in africa.
Not this time.
That is scary. I would not want to be a whale who's getting eaten alive by seagulls...
Not this time.
That is scary. I would not want to be a whale who's getting eaten alive by seagulls...
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
How things are done on one side of the Atlantic
In order for me to get 24 hour access to the academic building I'm currently making use of, I had to go through a 'fire induction tour'. This was an event that sounds more interesting than it actually was. I pictured some kind of hazing ritual, or at least something which required the use of a torch. However, a 'fire induction tour' is actually inherently interesting to someone who has never experienced one before.
Basically, since I would be given stewardship of the building on those odd cases where I might be the only one within it, they had to teach me what to do in case of all kinds of emergencies (such as if I were to suddenly bite into my own flesh with my teeth, accidentally, and needed something to staunch [the blood] with).
The tour was interesting in that it showed me the locations of the departmental dish washer and oven (why don't we have those?), the departmental first aid boxes (they've got one or two on every floor), the departmental printers, copiers, and supply cupboards (they've got armfulls of all kinds of stationary and stationary related products, none of which is under lock and key), and the departmental showers (that's right, 2 of them, about 20 feet within walking in from the front door of the building, you know, in case you walk, run, or cycle from home).
Basically, since I would be given stewardship of the building on those odd cases where I might be the only one within it, they had to teach me what to do in case of all kinds of emergencies (such as if I were to suddenly bite into my own flesh with my teeth, accidentally, and needed something to staunch [the blood] with).
The tour was interesting in that it showed me the locations of the departmental dish washer and oven (why don't we have those?), the departmental first aid boxes (they've got one or two on every floor), the departmental printers, copiers, and supply cupboards (they've got armfulls of all kinds of stationary and stationary related products, none of which is under lock and key), and the departmental showers (that's right, 2 of them, about 20 feet within walking in from the front door of the building, you know, in case you walk, run, or cycle from home).
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Artificial languages on 70's television
I just learned that the late Vicky Fromkin was hired by the producers of the 1974 television series "land of the lost" to create an artificial language for that tv show's characters "the Pakuni" people.
That's awesome.
That's awesome.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Jack Churchill was a badass
Jack Churchill. He did more than just invent a new kind of surf board. When I first heard about him I assumed that Neal Stephenson had based his 'Shaftoe' characters (from cryptonomicon and the baroque cycle trilogy) on him.
Total badass.
Total badass.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
You have to be rich to be poor
This is one of those articles where, if they're even only accurate on about half of what they claim/suggest, things look pretty bleak indeed.
Things cost more in poor neighborhoods.
I have no idea what can really be done about that. One of those cogs in the perpetual cycles.
Things cost more in poor neighborhoods.
I have no idea what can really be done about that. One of those cogs in the perpetual cycles.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Komodo Dragons are still cool, just less so
I remember how giddy I was when I first learned about Komodo Dragons. (yes, I was probably a geeky teenager) They were these prehistorically scary lizards that could kill and eat even humans, those who were silly enough to decide to live on the island upon which Komodo Dragons existed.
The coolest thing about the Komodo Dragons was that they killed their pray, not with poison, or sheer strength of their jaws. No, what they did was something totally crazy: They cultivated killer strains of bacteria in their mouths and, upon biting pray, would transfer that killer bacteria to the poor animal, killing it in a relatively short time. At which point, the komodo dragon would simply have to track the dying animal and feast. It sounded pretty crazy, but totally cool. Symbiosis on a killer-cool level (much cooler than the human-ecoli crap we get).
Well, it turns out all that is bullshit. Komodo Dragons use venom. I hate it when herpetologists get their shit wrong.
I guess it'll be up to me to prove that you can kill prey with a bio-bite.
The coolest thing about the Komodo Dragons was that they killed their pray, not with poison, or sheer strength of their jaws. No, what they did was something totally crazy: They cultivated killer strains of bacteria in their mouths and, upon biting pray, would transfer that killer bacteria to the poor animal, killing it in a relatively short time. At which point, the komodo dragon would simply have to track the dying animal and feast. It sounded pretty crazy, but totally cool. Symbiosis on a killer-cool level (much cooler than the human-ecoli crap we get).
Well, it turns out all that is bullshit. Komodo Dragons use venom. I hate it when herpetologists get their shit wrong.
I guess it'll be up to me to prove that you can kill prey with a bio-bite
Thursday, May 14, 2009
English is English, except when it's not
Susan Boyle. If you don't know who she is, you can google her to find out. The minimum you need to know is that she's from an area in Scotland near Edinburgh
She appeared on Oprah, with subtitles. I don't really know what to think about that. The linguist part of me says that this is acceptable as the phonological differences can be very difficult to parse and would make comprehension difficult even though the syntax might be familiar. But there's a part of me that wishes that Americans had more experience TRYING to understand (learn to listen to) the myriad of world Englishes that exist out there.
I wonder what it's going to be like, communicating with Edinbrughers.
She appeared on Oprah, with subtitles. I don't really know what to think about that. The linguist part of me says that this is acceptable as the phonological differences can be very difficult to parse and would make comprehension difficult even though the syntax might be familiar. But there's a part of me that wishes that Americans had more experience TRYING to understand (learn to listen to) the myriad of world Englishes that exist out there.
I wonder what it's going to be like, communicating with Edinbrughers.
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