Lipid Lectures

The lecture starts droning
and the kids stop chatting
and the heads begin to drop;
and a small pattering of keys
babble and yak to each other
like gnats, drowning the drone.

Then a key point is mouthed
to an ocean of Powerpoint light
projected before
a rapt lecture hall
that alternatively nods,
and nods off

which launches a thousand manic fingers
swelling and pulsating
over laptop keyboards,
like a salty ocean wave
that washes over a shore
raking the pebbles from their beach
on its regress.

And then the wave is pulled back
into the endless sea of a void
where knowledge goes
to procreate and die,
and the scattered key clicking
ticks and resumes,
like countless cockroaches
in basement cracks.

From the mouth of Wu Ming 1

Wu Ming 1 explains the group's (Wiki) aversion to being photographed or filmed by the media:

"Once the writer becomes a face... it's a cannibalistic jumble: that face appears everywhere, almost always out of context. A photo is witness to my absence; it's a banner of distance and solitude. A photo paralyses me, it freezes my life into an instant, it negates my ability to transform into something else. I become a "character", a stopgap to hurriedly fill a page layout, an instrument that amplifies banality. On the other hand my voice - with its grain, with its accents, with its imprecise diction, its tonalities, rhythms, pauses and vacillations - is witness to a presence even when I'm not there; it brings me close to people and doesn't negate my transformative capacity because its presence is dynamic, alive and trembling even when seemingly still."

Collective Nouns

So, when naming groups of items [called collective nouns], you've heard of a pride of lions, an exaltation of larks, a conspiracy of ravens and a charm of finches. ... ... How about the following?


a hassle of errands,
a magnum of hit-men,
a quarrel of lawyers,
a shortage of dwarves,
a sulk of teenagers,
a plunder of goons.
an encroachment of fence-builders.
a fascination of on-lookers/listeners.
an embellishment of fishermen.
a treachery of spies.
a thrombosis of heart specialists.
a vagary of impediments.
a minuscule of sub-atomic particles.
a conflagration of arsonists/pyromaniacs.
an assassination of gangsters.
a mixture of pharmacists.
an incantation of witches/wizards/warlocks.
a density of meatheads.
an obfuscation of philosophers/politicians/economists.
a clutch of mechanics.
a phile of lovers.
a spider of webmasters.
a clique of computer mice.
a plurality of collectives.
an enterprise of trekkies.
a 404 of lost web pages.
a ___ of nihilists.
a brace of orthodontists.
a somephony of music critics.
A clique of photographers. - Lydia Ross (lydiarossATaol.com).
A barf of bulimics. - Steph Selice (redheditorATaol.com).
A surfeit of spammers. - Peter Moore (petermoore1ATgmail.com).
A blather of bloggers. - Scott S. Zacher (scottzATnorthwestern.edu).
A contingent of understudies. - Ben Yudkin (ben_yudkinATonetel.com).
A flight of runaway brides. - Michelle Geissbuhler (goathillATcolumbus.rr.com).
A Covey of highly effective people. - Esther Krieger (estikriegerATjuno.com).
A pinch of shoplifters. - Jim Vander Woude (jvanderwoudeATmacatawa.com).
A stupor of television viewers. - Rabbi Vander Cecil (rabbiATaataa.org).
a remora of lawyers. -- (if you're not familiar, look up 'remora' - it's worth it)


via Chet Meek's Page of Puns

"Studenting"

The world sways this way when the hawk bends
its beak threshing and punctating the black night

And the ink bleeds in droplets like the florescent
bulbs twisted just right into the soiled ceiling

Above my cubby. Of a desk. What waste
the life of youth studenting all suns

And moons that roll the waters to and fro
yet unseen blocked by the wooden walls of this,

Purgatory couldn't be said to be as promising
me i'll be a drug one day to be useful

job security;
But where are those days? the night? when

Wrappers strewn as leaves on the bare skin
and eyes beturned and talk confused
and blood running and mind boiling
and skin skeaming and stars there

Stories rubbished, sin reputed,
the missed wave passed on the freeway

for the eyes were too open and fists too paunchy
to close

Viduus Moore

Tonight

Mansur Al-Hallaj

I was researching the layers of the pericardial sac for our first anatomy exam, which is Thursday, and I ran across Mansur Al'Hallaj, a 9th-10th century Persian mystic/revolutionary, maybe not an unusual combination in its day, and his description of God through a beautiful anatomically-relevant analogy:

God is He "who flows between the pericardium and the heart, just as the tears flow from the eyelids."

Linguistic Relativity

John Lucy has identified three main strands of research into linguistic relativity. The first is what he calls the structure centered approach. This approach starts with observing a structural peculiarity in a language and goes on to examine its possible ramifications for thought and behavior. The first example of this kind of research is Whorfs observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi and English. More recent research in this vein is the research made by John A Lucy describing how usage of the categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers in the Mayan language Yucatec result in Mayan speakers classifying objects according to material rather than to shape as preferred by speakers of English.

The second strand of research is the "domain centered" approach, in which a semantic domain is chosen and compared across linguistic and cultural groups for correlations between linguistic encoding and behavior. The main strand of domain centered research has been the research on color terminology, although this domain according to Lucy and admitted by color terminology researchers such as Paul Kay, is not optimal for studying linguistic relativity, because color perception, unlike other semantic domains, is known to be hard wired into the neural system and as such subject to more universal restrictions than other semantic domains. Since the tradition of research on color terminology is by far the largest area of research into linguistic relativity it is described below in its own section. Another semantic domain which has proven fruitful for studies of linguistic relativity is the domain of space. Spatial categories vary greatly between languages and recent research has shown that speakers rely on the linguistic conceptualization of space in performing many quotidian tasks. Research carried out by Stephen C Levinson and other cognitive scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has reported three basic kinds of spatial categorization and while many languages use combinations of them some languages exhibit only one kind of spatial categorization and corresponding differences in behavior. For example the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr only uses absolute directions when describing spatial relations — the position of everything is described by using the cardinal directions. A speaker of Guugu yimithirr will define a person as being "north of the house", while a speaker of English may say that he is "in front of the house" or "to the left of the house" depending on the speakers point of view. This difference makes Guugu yimithirr speakers better at performing some kinds of tasks, such as finding and describing locations in open terrain, whereas English speakers perform better in tasks regarding the positioning of objects relative to the speaker (For example telling someone to set the table putting forks to the right of the plate and knives to the left would be extremely difficult in Guugu yimithirr).

The third strand of research is the "behavior centered" approach which starts by observing different behavior between linguistic groups and then proceeds to search for possible causes for that behavior in the linguistic system. This kind of approach was used by Whorf when he attributed the occurrence of fires at a chemical plant to the workers' use of the word empty to describe the barrels containing only explosive vapors. One study in this line of research has been conducted by Bloom who noticed that speakers of Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counter-factual questions posed to them in a questionnaire. After a study he concluded that this was related to the way in which counter-factuality is marked grammatically in the Chinese language. Another line of study by Frode Strømnes examined why Finnish factories had a higher occurrence of work related accidents than similar Swedish ones. He concluded that cognitive differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process where Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker. Other research of importance to the study of linguistic relativity has been Daniel Everetts studies of the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon. Everett observed several peculiarities in Pirahã culture that corresponded with linguistically rare features. The Pirahã for example have neither numbers nor color terms in the way those are normally defined, and correspondingly they don't count or classify colors in the way other cultures do. Furthermore when Everett tried to instruct them in basic mathematics they proved unresponsive. Everett did not draw the conclusion that it was the lack of numbers in their language that prevented them from grasping mathematics, but instead concluded that the Pirahã had a cultural ideology that made them extremely reluctant to adopt new cultural traits, and that this cultural ideology was also the reason that certain linguistic features that were otherwise believed to be universal did not exist in their language.Critics have argued that if the test subjects are unable to count for some other reason (perhaps because they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary.

More on the Worfian hypothesis and Linguistic Relativity via Wikipedia

And check out the article at the Theory and History of Ontology for a more in-depth and contextualized history with tributaries and distributaries into other related disciplines.

Nicolai (crater)

Nicolai is a lunar crater that is located in the southern hemisphere of the Moon, in a region that is less disturbed by significant impacts than most of the highlands. It is 42 kilometers in diameter and reaches a depth of 1.8 kilometers. The outer wall of this crater is worn, with a number of tiny craterlets lying along the rim. The most notable of these is a tiny crater located across the northern rim. The satellite crater Nicolai B is attached to the exterior of the southwest rim. The inner walls slope down relatively smoothly to the flat interior floor filled with lava. The only marking on the inner surface is a tiny craterlet in the northern part of the crater.



Nicolai has a tolerably regular ring-plain, with a border, rising more than 6,000 feet above a level floor, on the north side of which Schmidt shows a minute crater. The bright plain surrounding this formation abounds in small craters; and on the east is a number of curious enclosures, many of them overlapping.

Nicolai is from the Nectarian period, which lasted from 3.92 billion to 3.85 billion years ago.

Alternative takes on Obama-Crowley-Gates party

1. “The Sheriff at the Gates: A Farce in Three Acts’’

Act One

(A street in Cambridgeham. Most Exalted University Professor HENRY LOUIS GATES, freshly returned from the Land of the Asian Khan, is rattling the door of his keep. Enter a WENCH.)...

From The Boston Globe

----------------------------------------------------------------------

2. A Beer with Obama

The Oval Office. Late. President Obama sits across from Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Officer James Crowley, who share a couch. They sit amidst several empty beer bottles. No one’s wearing shoes...


Posted by John Kenney in The New Yorker

Bowman's "Irony without Irony"

When my oldest son was a Boy Scout in England 20 years ago, I once watched his troop play a game in which the boys formed a circle around a troop leader holding a soccer ball. The leader proceeded to throw the ball to the boys at random, saying as he did so either "head" or "catch." If he said "head," the boy was supposed to catch it; if he said "catch," the boy was supposed to head it. Anyone who slipped up and caught the ball when instructed to catch it or head the ball when instructed to head it, was out and had to leave the circle. Eventually, only one scout was left standing. That boy, as I have often had occasion to think since, must have been one of nature’s ironists. He and the others had certainly had an education in the central principle of all ironic — and, for that matter, non-ironic — discourse, namely that meaning depends on context. A boy who’d said that he would just love to play such a game could have meant either that he’d love to play it or that he’d absolutely hate it, and all but the most literal-minded would have been able to tell which it was on hearing the words spoken in their context.

The ability to read that context, to pick up the cues indicating irony or its absence, depends on a certain degree of social skill and experience in complex social interactions. Irony, that is, belongs to the world of face-to-face communication, even when we encounter it in a book or a movie. If we are able to recognize the irony in fictional contexts it is because we have previously experienced it, or something like it, in real ones. Maybe that’s why, as we have begun to spend more and more of our time interacting with each other remotely and electronically, rather than face-to-face, it seems that our irony-reading skills have tended to atrophy, or else to go haywire, producing, on the one hand, a leaden literalism or, on the other, the sort of paranoia which supposes that everything must mean something other than what it says.

Continue reading James Bowman's article "Irony without Irony."

"What is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said." - Heidegger