Culture & Society

It is a singular fate to be the last of one’s kind. That is the fate of the men and women, nearly all of them elderly, who are—like Marie Wilcox, of California; Gyani Maiya Sen, of Nepal; Verdena Parker, of Oregon; and Charlie Mungulda, of Australia—the last known speakers of a language: Wukchumni, Kusunda, Hupa, and Amurdag, respectively. But a few years ago, in Chile, I met Joubert Yanten Gomez, who told me he was “the world’s only speaker of Selk’nam.” He was twenty-one. - Halil

If the pen is mightier than the sword then words are probably more lethal than bullets, and that makes Oxford Dictionaries the most powerful military force in the world. This metaphor helps explain two things: why I’m not a very successful writer, and why a group of authors are so concerned that a variety of words relating to nature were culled from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. - Halil

Wait, wait, wait. They took me out of the dictionary? WTF. But seriously, at least half of those are common words. I don't understand this at all. - Heather

"Network optimality has been described in genes, proteins and human communicative networks. In the latter, optimality leads to the efficient transmission of information with a minimum number of connections. Whilst studies show that differences in centrality exist in animal networks with central individuals having higher fitness, network efficiency has never been studied in animal groups. Here we studied 78 groups of primates (24 species). We found that group size and neocortex ratio were correlated with network efficiency. Centralisation (whether several individuals are central in the group) and modularity (how a group is clustered) had opposing effects on network efficiency, showing that tolerant species have more efficient networks. Such network properties affecting individual fitness could be shaped by natural selection. Our results are in accordance with the social brain and cultural intelligence hypotheses, which suggest that the importance of network efficiency and information flow through social learning relates to cognitive abilities." (...) - Amira

"Species with frequent opportunities for information transmission and social learning should more readily respond to selection for managing social relationships. As for cultural complexity, species with more efficient networks should show higher cognitive abilities55, 60. Future work that manipulates social network efficiency (by modifying individual centralities, information or disease flow for instance) could assess how the fitness of group members is affected and how individuals subsequently adapt their behaviours and manage their relationships to optimise their social networks within environmental constraints." - Amira

"Ms. Merkel, who speaks Russian and grew up in East Germany, has long tried to balance a deep understanding of Russia's political interests and frustrations with a skeptical view of Mr. Putin's intentions. Her knowledge of Russia and her relationship with Mr. Putin, who speaks fluent German, thanks to his time as a KGB officer in Dresden, are now being put to their most serious test yet. In her calls with Mr. Putin, some lasting as long as an hour, the two leaders switch between German and Russian as the chancellor parries the president's lengthy statements of the official Kremlin line. Ms. Merkel and Mr. Putin often speak in German, a language Mr. Putin commands well -- but Ms. Merkel confided to Mr. Hollande over a January 2013 dinner that the Russian's "soft and low voice" when speaking in her mother tongue sometimes reminded her of a "man of the Stasi," the East German secret police." - Adriano

cf. 2014-03-13, days before the Crimea referendum on separation from Ukraine... Russia holds war games near Ukraine; Merkel warns of catastrophe! http://mobile.reuters.com/article... - Adriano

Note to historians: Merkel and Hollande did absolutely *nothing* while Putin swiftly took over Crimea. Bodes very bad for the future of continental Europe. - Adriano

maybe |:-) - Adriano

"This study suggests that there is a level at which every human society is actually very similar," said Scott Ortman, assistant professor of anthropology at CU-Boulder and lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS ONE. "This awareness helps break down the barriers between the past and present and allows us to view contemporary cities as lying on a continuum of all human settlements in time and place." - Halil

Q: Is there a line between art and science, and where does it start to blur? Cormac McCarthy: “There’s certainly an aesthetic to mathematics and science. It was one of the ways Paul Dirac got in trouble. He was one of the great physicists of the 20th century. But he really believed, as other physicists did, that given the choice between something which was logical and something which was beautiful, they would opt for the aesthetic as being more likely to be true. When [Richard] Feynman put together his updated version of quantum electrodynamics, Dirac didn’t think it was true because it was ugly. It was messy. It didn’t have the clarity, the elegance, that he associated with great mathematical or physical theory. But he was wrong. There’s no one formula for it.” - Amira

Q: What kind of things make you worry? Cormac McCarthy: “If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It’s more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it’s just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there’s a problem you can take to bed with you at night. (…) Well, I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.” - Amira

“The internet is not going to save the world, whatever Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires believe. (…) But eradicating disease just might. (...) “I certainly love the IT thing,” he says. “But when we want to improve lives, you’ve got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.” (...) It isn’t just governments that may be unequal to the task. On this analysis, the democratic process in most countries is also straining to cope with the problems thrown up by the modern world, placing responsibilities on voters that they can hardly be expected to fulfil. “The idea that all these people are going to vote and have an opinion about subjects that are increasingly complex – where what seems, you might think … the easy answer [is] not the real answer. It’s a very interesting problem. Do democracies faced with these current problems do these things well?.” - Amira

"[H]ow much more beautiful and authentic and sophisticated and accurate" our world would become if we could appreciate the key terminologies of all cultures. (...) We need to continue to translate, of course, in order to communicate. But when it comes to the key terminologies of a culture, "we should not translate them but rather we should adopt them," Pattberg says. "The only way, as I see it, to create the global language is really to find a scientific way to adopt as many key terminologies as possible and to unite all the languages’ vocabularies into one."" - Amira

A historical technique much faster than the known. The Danish archers Lars Andersen has rediscovered. an old and very fast way to shoot bows. - Halil

Interesting! - Son of Groucho

It only took a few years before Parkour started showing up in movies. How long till this kind of archery does, too? - bentley

Our first historical encounter with what we would recognise as a sofa evolved from the continental tapestry. Significant progress in 16th century technology meant that opulent gold-threaded patchwork war-scenes were no longer considered a necessary component of home insulation. Rather, there was much joy to be had in the celebration of this newfound freedom: the material was taken down from the walls and draped expertly around various pieces of furniture. The couch was born. Derived from the Old French couche or coucher (meaning ‘to lie down’, as in, “voulez vous coucher avec mon ami? Il s’appelle Jeremy.”), the couch would be laid upon by men and women of a more delicate, horizontal inclination. Once it was discovered that sitting upright was not only comfortable but also more socially conducive, horsehair, feathers and straw were replaced in 1828 by the spring. http://www.english-sofas.co.uk/article... - Halil

One hundred and twenty five years ago, a great conservationist - and imposter - was born in East Sussex. Known as Grey Owl, he was one of Canada's first conservationists and is said to have saved the Canadian beaver from extinction. - Halil

His message was 'you belong to nature, it does not belong to you'. Prof Don Smith University of Calgary - Halil

fascinating story :-) - Maitani

He loves me, he loves me not or She loves me, she loves me not (originally effeuiller la marguerite in French) is a game of French origin[citation needed], in which one person seeks to determine whether the object of their affection returns that affection or not. - Halil

A person playing the game alternately speaks the phrases "He (or she) loves me," and "He loves me not," while picking one petal off a flower (usually an oxeye daisy) for each phrase. The phrase they speak on picking off the last petal supposedly represents the truth between the object of their affection loving them or not. The player typically is motivated by attraction to the person they're speaking of while reciting the phrases. They may seek to reaffirm a pre-existing belief, or act out of whimsy. - Halil

Inspired by Jennifer's post http://ff.im/1fQQIE - Halil

To be fair, I think I copied it from Anna Haro. And besides, the flower is a liar :) - Jennifer Dittrich

Göbekli Tepe is regarded as an archaeological discovery of the greatest importance since it could profoundly change the understanding of a crucial stage in the development of human society. Ian Hodder of Stanford University said, "Göbekli Tepe changes everything".[3] It shows that the erection of monumental complexes was within the capacities of hunter-gatherers and not only of sedentary farming communities as had been previously assumed. As excavator Klaus Schmidt puts it, "First came the temple, then the city."[41] - Halil

The tell includes two settlement phases dating back to the 10th-8th millennium BC. During the first phase (PPNA), circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars were erected. More than 200 pillars in about 20 circles are currently known through geophysical surveys. Each pillar has a height of up to 6 m (20 ft) and a weight of up to 20 tons. They are fitted into sockets that were hewn out of the bedrock.[5] In the second phase (PPNB), the erected pillars are smaller. They stood in rectangular rooms. These rooms had floors of polished lime. Obviously, the site was abandoned after the PPNB-period. Younger structures date to classical times. - Halil

Dr Kate Loveman, from the University of Leicester, said she found the recipes in manuscripts which belonged to the Earl of Sandwich in 1668. At the time, the chocolate treats came with a health warning for damaging the stomach, heart and lungs. The research also shows some of the regular themes in chocolate advertising across the centuries. Dr Loveman, a senior lecturer in 17th and 18th Century English literature, said she was looking through a Samuel Pepys journal when she came across a 30-page section on chocolate. - Halil

"It's not chocolate ice-cream, but more like a very solid and very dark version of the iced chocolate drinks you get in coffee shops today. "Freezing food required cutting-edge technology in 17th Century England, so these ices were seen as great luxuries." The Earl's recipe was written about 100 years before his great-great-grandson allegedly invented the sandwich. Dr Loveman said: "In the 1660s, when the Earl of Sandwich collected his recipes, chocolate often came with advice about safe consumption. - Halil

"The papers included quite stern warnings about the dangers. It was a drug as far as people of the 17th Century were concerned. - Halil

"[The] method which is similar to the page-rank algorithm that Google uses to rank websites. The basic idea is that a thinker is important if he or she is influences the most important sources of discussion. (...) The most influential thinkers are those that are linked back to by other influential blogs. In other words this is a pagerank-type listing in which a thinker is deemed influential if he or she influences other influential thinkers. (...)" - Amira

“The era of the great authorities seems to be over.” (...) Instead, the list is filled with specialist thinkers who focus on niche topics and whose work is generally unknown outside their field. (...) Second, write a book. They point out that every thought leader on their list, bar two, is the author of a book about their ideas. “Writing a book is key,” they conclude." - Amira

Underlying assumption is that somehow the blogosphere is a good indicator of influence. I'm not sure that's so. - Todd Hoff

tl;dr :-P (kidding!) - Eivind

What is something worth? A very basic question which has many complicated answers. Friedman, a Nobel prize winning economist, shares a short story without any mathematical equations which illustrates the point that valuation is an emergent property of collective beliefs. Even gold in central bank vaults is like that huge stone shown in the photograph above. - Adriano

It sounds like Bitcoin. :-) - Amira

"All educated Arabs learn the Koranic-based language that linguists call "modern standard Arabic". It is used in political speeches, news broadcasts and nearly all writing—but nobody speaks it spontaneously in the marketplace or over the dinner table. Most people struggle to write it correctly." \\ Spoken dialects lack mutual intelligibility. http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWeb... - Adriano

"[R]ecently, Caleb Everett, a linguist at the University of Miami, made a surprising discovery that suggests the assortment of sounds in human languages is not so random after all. When Everett analyzed hundreds of different languages from around the world, as part of a study published today in PLOS ONE, he found that those that originally developed at higher elevations are significantly more likely to include ejective consonants. Moreover, he suggests an explanation that, at least intuitively, makes a lot of sense: The lower air pressure present at higher elevations enables speakers to make these ejective sounds with much less effort. (...)" - Amira

"[H]e found that 87 percent of the languages with ejectives were located in or near high altitude regions (defined as places with elevations 1500 meters or greater), compared to just 43 precent of the languages without the sound. Of all languages located far from regions with high elevation, just 4 percent contained ejectives. And when he sliced the elevation criteria more finely—rather than just high altitude versus. low altitude—he found that the odds of a given language containing ejectives kept increasing as the elevation of its origin point also increased. (...) As a result, over the thousands of years and countless random events that shape the evolution of a language, those that developed at high altitudes became gradually more and more likely to incorporate and retain ejectives. Noticeably absent, however, are ejectives in languages that originate close to the Tibetean and Iranian plateaus, a region known colloquially as the roof of the world." - Amira

"We now know that the founders of the first advanced European civilization were European," said study co-author George Stamatoyannopoulos, a human geneticist at the University of Washington. "They were very similar to Neolithic Europeans and very similar to present day-Cretans," residents of the Mediterranean island of Crete. (...) The Minoan culture emerged on Crete, which is now part of Greece, and flourished from about 2,700 B.C. to 1,420 B.C. Some believe that a massive eruption from the Volcano Thera on the island of Santorini doomed the Bronze Age civilization, while others argue that invading Mycenaeans toppled the once-great power. Nowadays, the Minoans may be most famous for the myth of the minotaur, a half-man, half-bull that was fabled to lived within a labyrinth in Crete." - Amira

See also: Minoan civilization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

minoan bull leapers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - ufuk

"atNight project aims to constitute a first step towards the construction of nightscape image, a necessary first contribution to the (re)definition of the nigh-time identity. We have taken the opportunity to explore the potential of city's representation techniques -by means of data visualization and cartography- to generate an interpretative model of nocturnal landscape as a common framework for collective thought. (...) atNight is a research project based on the (re)definition of the term "nightscape"." - Amira

"Considering landscape in a broad sense, the research aims to build bridges between different technical and humanistic disciplines The research explores night urban landscape as a sensitive and cognitive relationship between people and their environment. The project focuses on the aesthetical process of identification of citizenship with their territory to emphasize the role of night in the definition of urban landscape –as the framework for leisure and socialization. We believe that the opportunity to reformulate the basis of nightscape design involves the construction of a valid representation of itself. atNight aims to build interpretative cartographies of nightscape main assets in order to create a new critical model to share, discuss and develop ideas about nightscapes transformation." - Amira

For upper class male consumers, DIY home improvement offers the means of unleashing the inner suburban craftsman who relishes in physical labor. In contrast to their day jobs, upper class men enjoy the process of toiling away on various projects and feeling self-fulfilled in the process. - Halil

For lower class male consumers, a different pattern emerges. Work around the house allows lower class men to assert their identities, and in particular, construct an identity of the family handyman relative to their female partners. In this way, lower class men find meaning in their DIY home improvement projects as a masculine form of caring for their families and providing them with better homes than otherwise possible due to their subordinate economic and social standing. - Halil

Why news is to the mind, what sugar is to the body... MUST READ, concentrate if you must :-) then diet. I'm starting today. Dobelli's paper articulates how I've been feeling lately (bloated), especially with yummy Android apps like Flipboard, Pulse, Currents, and Bloomberg. His arguments are reasonable and perceptive. \\ The German version is here: http://dobelli.com/... includes FAQS in English. - Adriano

So true... This is why lately I went back to the old habit of reading more books rather than newspapers. - Amira

another must read: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o... by Stef Lewandowski. - Adriano

"Alpha males almost invariably acquire authority by killing their enemies—think of the generals that Americans have elevated to the presidency. The general's ability to order people around is, paradoxically, a first step "in the direction of law." Yanomamö men fought over women and that this male conflict was not only the fundamental cause of war in simple societies but "the most important single force in shaping the evolution of political society in our species." [T]hese people are not "pure" or "pristine"; they are dispossessed. Their existence in small bands is reflective not of humankind's ancient past but of a shattered society that has preserved its liberty by retreat." - Adriano

I should kill my enemies… - Amit Patel

"An alpine town, the Eiffel Tower, the whole Manhattan skyline… China is replicating the world's architectural gems. (...) The issue of China and its attitude to intellectual property rights has now been reignited, following claims that a project in Beijing by Zaha Hadid is ­being replicated by "pirate ­architects" in Chongqing, the megacity in the south. It could even be finished ­before the original is completed next year. The British architect's globular ­complex of pebble-shaped towers – an office and retail development called Wangjing Soho – is itself something of a copy of her recently completed Galaxy Soho, also in Beijing, and both projects are in keeping with the city's new vernacular of bulbous UFOs, kicked off in 2007 by Paul Andreu's ­National Grand Theatre. (...) It also launched an advertising slogan in response to the furore: "Never meant to copy, only want to surpass." - Amira

"In many copycat cases, though, the architects are either long gone or ­impossible to name. In ­Tianducheng, near Shanghai, a 108m-high Eiffel Tower rises above Champs Elysées Square; while in Chengdu, to the south-west, a residential complex for 200,000 recreates Britain's Dorchester. The ­attention to detail can be ­astonishing: a ­doppelganger Queen's Guard ­patrols Shanghai's Thames Town, which abounds with statues of Winston Churchill; gleaming ­replicas of the White House dot ­Chinese cities. It all adds up to a surreal ­catalogue of ­"duplitecture", brilliantly ­documented in the book Original ­Copies: ­Architectural Mimicry in ­Contemporary China by Bianca Bosker." - Amira

See also: China spends $940 million to clone one of Austria's most picturesque villages http://friendfeed.com/world-p... - Amira

MoMA show < 15 April 2013 http://www.moma.org/inventi... \\ See also http://infosthetics.com/archive... E.g. here's the graph for Paul Klee http://infosthetics.com/archive... - Adriano

When humans were predominantly hunters, dogs were of great use, and thus were domesticated long before cats. Cats, on the other hand, only became useful to people when we began to settle down, till the earth and—crucially—store surplus crops. With grain stores came mice, and when the first wild cats wandered into town, the stage was set for what the Science study authors call "one of the more successful 'biological experiments' ever undertaken." The cats were delighted by the abundance of prey in the storehouses; people were delighted by the pest control. - Halil

For some reason, however, cats came to be demonized in Europe during the Middle Ages. They were seen by many as being affiliated with witches and the devil, and many were killed in an effort to ward off evil (an action that scholars think ironically helped to spread the plague, which was carried by rats). - Halil

Kevin Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for — and increasingly controlled by — algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. “We’re writing things (…) that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible, and we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made. (…) “We’re running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster, all for a communications framework that no human will ever know; that’s a kind of manifest destiny.” - Amira

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you? // People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. // The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it’s to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.” — Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget (2010) - Amira

if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence - don't think so. We just over estimated how little it took to seem human. We can feel sorry for a very basic puppet with a vaguely human face, so it doesn't take much; Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans - not really, it was a scam so all they needed to do was bamboozle customers into thinking it was possible; Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? - we know it doesn't know what we want and the results are simply better than we had before - Todd Hoff

Here is the thought experiment: Suppose we set up the worst-case scenario, one where cities have no recourse to reduce crime other than arranging where people live. And suppose a city was assigned a set number of high-risk (economically disadvantaged) places, a set number of low-risk (highly prosperous) places, and some in between. Now we ask, how should the city arrange those places to create the most safety and the least amount of crime? - Halil

The bottom line is, just as we cannot arrest our way out of crime problems, we also cannot economically segregate and isolate our way out either. That approach is self-destructive and has led to many of the problems our cities face today. Figuring out how to fix those mistakes is at the core of creating prosperous places. - Halil

I don't think gated communities help, many of the new private flats/homes being built in Haringey at least, are gated homes with CCTV, cutting themselves off from their poorer neighbours, implying that we are somehow not worthy of mixing with them! - Halil