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2004-02-13 late (utc)

How to learn German ideally without learning any German

So Crooked Timber is named from a celebrated quote of Isiah Berlin quoting Kant (and I'm pretty sure on the transitivity of this one):

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

And in the Timber's deathday post somebody asked if what and where Kant really said that. This is of course a very excellent question to research if, like me, you don't know German, so I did.

It's from Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltb�rgerlicher Absicht (the celebrated "Idea to a general history with world-civil intention"), which says:

[A]us so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden.

[F]rom so bent wood, when from which humans are made, can nothing completely straight are gezimmert.

And how true that is, how very true. (Recycled here for my convenience and to fix markup; translations with a little help from the fishy; appalling ignorance of everything author's own.)

Somebody else asked how to get started reading Kant, and I generously neglected to share my opinion that the obvious way is to learn German first. I'm toying with the idea of the French translation, but I just don't trust the Engleeshophones to get philosophy right.

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2004-02-13 afterblah (utc)

Two (2) kinds of things of which there are two (2) kinds

�1. Bessel functions.

There are two kinds of Bessel function: Bessel functions of the first kind, and Bessel functions of - wait for it! - the second kind.

�2. Persons.

There are two kinds of person: those who delight in the Eurovision contest, and those who do not. As an instance of a person of the first kind, I am delighted to see the first symptoms of its return. (Ist! An! Bul! 15th May - between Knudella's big day and the Norwegian party on the 17th. A long weekend and a half, that one.) Meanwhile, why not enjoy the Eurovision 2003 album? Or perhaps �msir - Eurovision 1986-2003:

Eurovision 1986-2003 is an upgrade of the old album, Eurovision 1986-2000. This new album is double and has 41 songs. Including all of Icelands pre-winners from Gle�ibankinn to Open your heart. Also it has 25 songs from the icelandic preliminary including 4 songs from this years contest.

A double album of Iceland's Eurovision entries is a thing I would very much like to have. And could this be Iceland's year? (They've never won it, h�las.) Allegedly France has an up-tempo number this year, so anything could happen!

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2004-02-13 not samwidge (utc)

Republicans! The rabble is unroused!

So there, taunts la-di-dah DN:

Drygt sju av tio svenskar eller 72 procent vill ha kungahuset kvar, visar unders�kningen som �r gjord bland 1.000 svenskar under de senaste tre dagarna d� debatten om kungens uttalande under statsbes�ket i Brunei rasat som v�rst.

A good seven out of ten Swedishes or 72 percent want to keep the royal family, according to a survey of 1000 Swedishes during the last three days that the debate has raged about the king's remarks during a state visit to Brunei.

I think we can all agree that the king is rather too blunt an instrument to be used for much in the way of foreign relations, but I have never claimed otherwise. Sending him off on state visits to absolutist monarchies to meet their absolute monarchs and then complaining that he's nice to them just isn't very sporting.

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2004-02-13 ooh, samwidge (utc)

The Morpheme Liberation Front

Some words are made out of bits. Take, for example, "unhappily" - it's made up of the negation "un-", the adjective "happy" and the adverbialiser "-ly". The bits of such words that are made out of bits (and the whole of words which aren't) are called morphemes. As I was just saying elsewhere:

Incidentally, the usual term in linguistics for a morpheme which looks like it should be able to stand on its own but can't is a cranberry morph, since un-as-with strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, or gooseberries, there's no such thing as a cran.

But one of the defining characteristics of Chinese is that every morpheme is a syllable, and every morpheme can, at least in principle, go it alone. (The popular version of this is that "all Chinese words are monosyllables," but this begs a lot of questions about what you mean by "word" which are well worth unbegging.)

And it seems to me that if the Engleesh is going to maintain its status as the default world language - which is a lot more precarious than it might look as any French can tell you, often without even having to be asked - then it can't afford to stand still!

What we clearly need is a concerted effort to make sure our glorious language - the language of Shakespeare and Milton, themselves (except for all the stuff Milton wrote in Latin, of course) which the Engleesh are quicker to point out than to read - remains competitive in the demanding market place of the 21st century, when Chinese is sure to become a serious challenger for its title.

How to meet this challenge, you ask? It's simple: we need to ensure that all of our morphemes can stand alone, and match Chinese on its putative strength. The consequences of ducking this test could be literally catastrophic (strophic, that is, in the manner of a cata, and the sooner these both mean something the better!)

I don't know what a cran is, Varied Reader, any better than you do - and that is surely saying a lot - but I put it to you that it is imperative for our future security that it should be something!

And in closing, I should like to take the opportunity to denounce the Morpheme Freedom Foundation. Splitters!

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2004-02-13 blah (utc)

And the carriages could be ever so drafty...

Opprobrium, heaped:

Prinsesse Ragnhild h�ber hun d�r f�r sin bror kong Harald - s�dan at hun slipper for at opleve kronprinseparret blive kongepar.

Prinsess Ragnhild hopes she dies before her brother Harald - so that she won't experience the kronprinscouple's becoming the royal couple.

By an uncanny uncoincidence, this bladet has recently secured the services of the very fictional prinsess Regnmoln (lit. "Raincloud") as a commentator on royal hices of Scandewegia:

It's not like it was when I was a young prinsess. In those days you had to make your own entertainment with whichever servants you could find. We couldn't just jet off to Brazil whenever we felt like it - we had to commission the royal yacht and jolly well sail there. They don't know they're born, these youngsters!

And that Mette-Marit! No breeding at all! Simply common as muck! And she's a bitch with it as well. In my day prinsessor were expected to be models of discretion and grace. Discretion and grace, that's not something you see much of these days, of course, but that's what it was like, back then.

[Linkage ju via Birgitte, tack!]

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2004-02-13 mornin' (utc)

Quand j'ai p�ch� pour deux...

The Grauniad maintains not one but two dossiers on the Yoorpean Onion (evrol�ken), which is half as good as having one and don't let them kid you it's otherwise, and also hosts a regular diary column by Denis "Denis" MacShane, Yoorp minister in the current government, which is usually about Yoorp in no small measure. The latest installment is not linked from both Yoorp pages, or even from just one, but from neither, and easy to find it certainly was not. Bad Grauniad! A propos nothing in very particular, he remarks:

I heard a warm word of support for Margaret Thatcher from one of the former socialist ministers. He told me that when the 1981 attempted coup took place and a mad Colonel ran with his machine gun into the Cortes, the clearest and most immediate solidarity came from the Tory prime minister. "While General Haig, the US secretary of state, was saying this was an internal Spanish affair, Mrs Thatcher said that if Spain reverted to non-democratic rule all of Europe would shun Spain. It was an excellent declaration of support and solidarity and we do not forget her clear lines." I report this as a footnote in the history of UK-Spanish relations, which between Maggie and Felipe were good and are excellent today.

And sadly, I have sworn a solemn vow that whenever the Thatcher's unyieldingly ferocious advocacy for democracy is mentioned I will point out, as is the case, that she invited Chilean tyrant General Pinochet round for tea when she was prime minister.

But you have to like this:

Spain is the EU's greatest success story. When I left university it was still haunted by memories of the civil war, still ruled by the odious Franco, still locked into backward economics. As I arrive in Madrid I marvel at the change. Spain has advanced more in the last 20 years as an EU member state than she did in the previous 200. In 1960, Spain had the same income per head as Mexico. Today, Spanish income per capita is 86% of EU average. There are 32 flights a day from the UK to Barcelona. In addition to David Beckham, about 500,000 thousand Brits now have homes in Spain. This is the free movement of workers that anti-European press are so keen to sabotage. The energy of Madrid is awesome.

A skeptic might say that ditching Franco was the crucial bit, but then there's still Portugal and Ireland to explain away. The EU is good at turning fairly poor countries into fairly rich countries, and this is a thing well worth doing.

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2004-02-12 tea (utc)

Refreshing Minty Goodness!

That's the Danish national mint, of course:

Nationalbanken vil udsende en erindringsm�nt for at markere Kronprins Fredrik og Mary Donaldsons bryllup 14. maj. Hvordan m�nten helt pr�cist kommer til at se ud, er endnu ikke fastlagt.

The national bank wants to put out a commemorative coin to mark Kronprinsfred and Knudella ("Mary") Donaldson's wedding on the 14th of May. Exactly what the coin is going to look like hasn't been finalised yet.

I think we should change Knudella's surname, too, now she's Danish. Donaldsen is much more Danish, don't you think?

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2004-02-12 12:13

Kantiversarykontinuation

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.

The Philosopher's Song (Monty Python)

Tonight I'm gonna party like it's categorically imperative, wuhoo!

Tell it like it is revisionistically being told that it was, Grauniad person:

[A]ccording to three new biographies, the celebrated German philosopher Immanuel Kant was not such a dry stick after all. Far from being a dour Prussian ascetic, the great metaphysician was a partygoer. He enjoyed drinking wine, playing billiards and wearing fine, colourful clothes.

He had a sense of humour, and there were women in his life, although he never married. On occasion, Kant drank so much red wine he was unable to find his way home, the books claim.

Although K�hn's biography is the big scholarly one that's getting most of the press, the Shpeeg suggests Geier's Kants Welt for newbies. (At least I think they do: "Ideal f�r Einsteiger. Dank der eleganten Essayform werden Leben, Werk und Bedeutung lebendig.")

While we owe to annezook the link to Deutsche Welle's interview with Joschka Fischer on the occasion:

Which aspects of Kant's thinking are still relevant to politicians today?

The obvious answer would be in matters of moral law. But if you want to avoid obvious answers, then one could cite his emphasis on reason, and the importance of maintaining a rational view of the world while also recognizing the limits of reason. I think the most important lesson that politicians can learn from Kant is that our world is a rational one. The principle that it's based on an ethical foundation is part of that, as is accepting the limitations of reason. Politicians have to be aware that sometimes people act irrationally, and they have to be prepared for this eventuality.

Russian intellectuals have a very different response to Kant. Is he too rational and German?

I couldn't say. I'm not an expert. But I always wanted to go to K�nigsberg (Kaliningrad) and see Kant's grave. And now I'm actually going to, because the Consulate General is opening the same week as the 200th anniversary of his death. He's been one of my biggest influences, along with Hegel and Marx. Like I say, Kant subscribes to the theory of a rational world. He's a highly modern thinker!

Gentlepersons of gender and otherwise, a toast!

To a modern thinker in a postmodern world,
Prophet of reason and reason's decline!
As ratiocination's proud banner's unfurl'd
Let's drink to our limits of finest red wine!

Hoorah for reason, hoorah for reason's limits and hoorah hoorah hoorah for red wine! Oh and Kant, obviously.

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2004-02-12 mornin' (utc)

Happy deathday, Immanuel!

All together, follow the bouncing ball:

Happy deathday to you!
Happy deathday to you!
Happy deathday, dear Kant,
Happy deathday to you!

Bonus points are most certainly available in abundance for pronouncing "Kant" � la German, to rhyme with English "punt".

This nice article sets the career of the celebrated Russian idealist in its geographical context, and even includes rich historical irony - the historical equivalent of rich Corinthian leather - as standard at no additional cost, and it'd be pure lunacy to want to critique that; am I right or am I right, Manny?

One rich historical irony is that if Kant returned for a visit, he might well be neither nonplussed nor immediately displeased. As Manfred Kuehn reminds us in Kant (Cambridge University Press, 2001), his doggedly researched biography of the philosopher, Russians occupied K�nigsberg from 1758 to 1762 after defeating the Prussian army in the Seven Years' War. When, during that period, Kant applied (unsuccessfully and for the second time) for a professorship of philosophy at the University of K�nigsberg, his application needed approval from the empress in St. Petersburg, not the Prussian king in Berlin.

According to Kuehn, Kant, who spent his entire life (1724-1804) in K�nigsberg and its countryside, welcomed "the change in the cultural climate" brought by the Russians, who liked everything "beautiful and well-mannered." He thought they brightened up a sometimes somber city too influenced by Pietist ideas. Kant proved quite popular as a guest of the Russians and, writes Kuehn, "became a person of elegance during this period, someone who shone at social events with his intelligence and wit."

[...]

Next year marks the bicentenary of Kant's death, and Vladimir Bryushinkin, chairman of Kaliningrad State University's philosophy department, says the university plans two international conferences. One hopes that there the authentic Kant -- the billiards player, the after-dinner wit, the natural scientist, the lover of Fielding and Richardson -- and not just the skeletal epistemologist invented by 20th-century analytic philosophers will flourish. Maybe participants will even find time to ponder the connections between Kant's theories of justice and the anomalous status of his hometown, a place where the safest maxim in regard to sovereignty is: "Don't mention it." Something like a "What Would Kant Think?" panel.

He goes on to suggest that K�nigsgrad could do with marketing a bunch of trinkets 'n' trash in honour of its famousest child, and I'll certainly lend my weight to that. We want Kant kitsch! We want Kant kitsch!

The Shpeegy-Shpeeg had a big cover story on the bicentennary, of which I have a copy waiting at home for the glorious day when I figure out how to read the language in which it is written. (I have several copies of th' Sheig, which is without doubt my favourite weekly news magazine in a language I do not know, and accolates don't come much higher than that, you will certainly not wish to dispute.) While we are all waiting, though, let's wheel on A N Wilson to whet up some appetite:

It will be interesting to see what the non-academic press makes of the fact that this year is the tercentenary of the death of John Locke. Whatever the serious weeklies do about it, we can be fairly certain that they will not devote as much space as the New Year issue of Der Spiegel gave to the fact that 2004 is also the bicentenary of the death aged 80 of Immanuel Kant. There is the sage of Koenigsberg on the cover with one of his most famous apophthegms: "The starry Heaven over me and the moral law within me." "Two hundred years after Kant," says the mag. Inside, there is an article of no fewer than 15 pages.

A very good article it is, too. In the course of it, the two authors quote Franz Schupp, the historian of philosophy and no Kantian, as saying that Kant is "the last continental thinker whom the English or the Americans can really understand". After him, the authors conclude, the road forks, stretching in one direction through the mountain mists of Fichte, the storm-clouds of Hegel and the volcanic wastes of Nietzsche on and beyond the barren lava of Sartrean and Heideggerian definitions of Being. The other path leads down to the sensible well-lit avenues of Anglo-American empiricism and pragmatism.

In the Torygraph, of all places, but the rest is nonetheless worth reading, although I should like, you should not be surprised to learn, to be excused from "the English or the Americans" in this sense. I am - in this as in much else - a Yoorpean at heart. Locke got his, incidentally, on the 28th of October 1704, and I see no let or hindrance to celebrating that just as hard when the time comes.

The festivities that have been announced for Kant in the 'grad are a bit more subdued than we would have planned, if consulted:

The first German General Consul to the Kaliningrad region will be sworn in next week during a visit to the former German territory by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, according to the ministry's web site. [...]

Fischer's visit will coincide with the 200th anniversary of the death of philosopher Immanuel Kant, the most famous son of the city. Kaliningrad, then known as Koenigsberg, was the capital of the German province of East Prussia for almost 700 years until 1945. The province was divided between Poland and Russia at the end of WorldWar II.

A visit to swear in a Consul, be still my beating heart. I think I shall celebrate instead with a good dinner and an intoxicating beverage (wodka would seem the obvious choice), whereupon I shall turn up the obfuscation on my prose style to 11 and Ponder Deeply. Although it'll have to be tomorrow because it's Swedish class tonight.

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2004-02-11 samwidge (utc)

Prinsessgossiproundup, fairly Knudella

"Bring me your tired, your poor," Denmark has long implored the world, "your huddled masses yearning to be queen," and poor, tired, slightly huddled and stateless Kronprinsess-elect Knudella (n�e Mary) Donaldson finally wins asylum ("indf�dsret"), hoorah!

But at a heavy cost, as Pernille Rosenkrantz-Theil pointed out in a Folkthing ("It's a folk thing!") debate:

�F�rst bliver hun tvangskristnet. S� bliver hun aftvunget en underskrift p�, at hun vil aflevere og forlade sine b�rn i tilf�lde af skilsmisse. Og nu s�ttes hun p� lommepenge efter Frederiks forgodtbefindende�.

"First she becomes forcibly Christianised. Then she's forced to sign papers to the effect that she will deliver and abandon her childrens in the event of divorce. And now she's granted pocketmonet after Kronprinsfred's forgodtbefindende."

(But at least she's ahead of his fiskekutte!)

Denmark is of course a very different culture, and royalty is even differenter than that. The voices campaigning for prinsess's rights to custody of childrens and the right to eschew the tiaras which custom prescribes should be worn in the hair are as yet still feeble and disorganised, but we at this bladet certainly hold that prinsessor's rights are wimmins's rights, which are human rights, and that it is by no means otherwise, and nor should it be.

Meanwhile, there is a Government site devoted to covereurs of the royal wedding ("kongeligebryllup"). Perhaps one day they will have it responding to HTTP connections also, but that day is not presently at hand.

One charmante touch is that the gold for the wedding rings has been mined in Greenland, in the Kingdom of Denmark itself, and another is that a Rock 'n' Royal [sic] concert is being arranged to commemorate the nuptuations, which is set to feature Swan Lee's karismatiske frontfigur Pernille Rosendahl, and if she rocks as hard as her name then they'll be rocking hard in Denmark that night [7 maj], for sure.

But where are all the Guildenwhosits?

[All linkages, and several corrections, via Birgitte, hurra s� mycket! All remaining defects in accuracy of translation or fact are the responsibility of the editor, which is me.] [Permalink]

2004-02-11 11:26

Monday review of stuff

The Ra Expeditions, Thor Heyerdahl.

The Kon-Tiki Expedition, Heyerdahl's account of crossing the Pacific on a balsa-wood raft, is an acknowledged classic, especially by me, since I read it while cruising leisurelily up the coast of Norway on a boat which sold beer. Preempting my review of the book under review, it is that book you should read, and thus that you should read it.

The Ra expedition sets out to cross the Atlantic on a boat of papyrus reeds, and you might be excused for not finding the difference all that interesting, and the prose occasionally drifts off into Fine Writing, which isn't. (And it is, of course, the International Year of Translation, so I'm not going to apologise for missing out on the delights of the original.)

If, even if not quite only if, you've read the Kon-Tiki expedition and have an unquenchable thirst for more of very much in many ways the same, then you should certainly read this book, carefully neglecting to believe a word of the wilder anthropological/archeological speculations (which is all of them) which are a source of great hilarity to the professionals in the discipline.

Best quote (from memory, since I have foolishly left my notebook at home today): "An experienced ski-jumper is seldom flexible enough to make a good parachute jump."

Best interpersonal dynamics: the Safi the monkey vs. Sinbad the duck rivalry on the first expedition.

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2004-02-11 morning (utc)

Cloacicism kaboom!

Like every town, Prague produces a considerable amount of sewage and industrial wastewaters. Their mixture with water from atmospheric precipitation is called municipal wastewater. Regular and reliable draining of a town's area and efficient purification of collected wastewaters are fundamental preconditions for safe and healthy life both in the town and in the downstream receiving waters. Towns and cities without proper wastewater treatment represent one of the most serious sources of environment pollution.

A History Of Prague Sewer System And Wastewater Treatment is certainly among the things I had not realised I wanted. And even though my browser can't pronounce the name of its author, he or she is certainly owed a debt of gratitude for this observation:

It is interesting to note that the content of cesspools was often used by medieval artillery as "an explosive" in bombshells. For example in 1422, during the war between the protestant people army (Hussites) and the catholic king Sigmund the Luxemburg, the Hussite army emptied all cesspools in Prague during the blockade of royal castle Karlstein nearby Prague. Unfortunately, the garrison of the castle resisted successfully the attack by this unusual ammunition.

[again via PF, via the the eudaemonist, hoorah!]

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2004-02-10 fakery (utc)

Herr Bessel and his performing functions!

Gentlepersons of gender and otherwise, your warmest hand please:

Bessel functions appear as coefficients in the series expansion of the indirect perturbation of a planet, that is the motion caused by the motion of the Sun caused by the perturbing body. In 1824 he developed Bessel functions more fully in a study of planetary perturbations and published a treatise on them in Berlin. It was not the first time that special cases of the functions had appeared, Jacob Bernoulli, Daniel Bernoulli, Euler and Lagrange having studied special cases of them earlier. In fact it was probably Lagrange's work on elliptical orbits that first suggested to Bessel to work on the Bessel functions.

Oh, c'mon! If you were called "Bessel" and you ran across a bunch of "Bessel functions" wouldn't you be just a bit intrigued, with or without Lagrange's admittedly excellent work on elliptic orbits?

(It is a longstanding problem of mine that I grok not of the Sturm-Liouville theory of which Bessel functions are a part, which has lately cropped up again. Fakery o'clock, is the time that it is, for sure.)

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2004-02-10 confused (utc)

Sigh.

It is time...
It is time...
It is time
For stormy teacups.

["Stormy teacups", les Lutins]

The king of Sweden, who is in no way a prinsess and thus of no particular interest for the most part, has annoyed many persons by some ill-judged remarks on Brunei's sultanate, which he appears to have mistaken for a good thing. The criticism is hardly fair, it seems to me, since he didn't get the job on the basis of his insight or acumen, and being nice too and about people is what he mostly does. He has, it seems to me, been stitched up a treat on this one, andI suspect a plot.

"The king must abdicate," reads the headline of a front-page article in Stockholm tabloid Aftonbladet.

In it, a university professor writes that a constitutional crisis is occurring in Sweden and predicts the eventual fall of the monarchy.

(You can have a link to the article, but I'm certainly not going to translate it.)

As a university employee myself, although far from a professor (next door but one, actually, but you know what I meant), I would point out that a thermodynamic crisis is occuring in the cosmos, and I predict the eventual heat-death of the universe, which is much more impressive.

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2004-02-10 meltdown! (utc)

On the death of William Wombe, a cleanser of latrines (mundatoris cloacarum)

I'm scripting my way through a supercomputermeltdown, h�las, so here's some toilety goodness, via PF, via the the eudaemonist, or possibly vice versa, depending on your models of transitivity in information propagation.

Friday after the Feast of St. Petronilla [31 May 1339] the same year, information given to the aforesaid Coroner and Sheriffs that William Wombe lay dead of a death other than his rightful death in the Thames near Flete Bridge, in the parish of St. Bride, in the Ward of Farndone Without. Thereupon they proceeded thither, and having summoned good men of that Ward, they diligently enquired how it happened. The jurors-viz.: William de Waltham, Thomas de Toppesfeld, Robert Cole, Henry de Petresfeld, Richard atte Barre, John le Beste, Alan de Fysshbourne, Alexander de York, "taillour," William Bronde, John Waillshman, cordwainer, Peter le Sporier, and John de Boseworth, junior-say that on the preceding Wednesday, at the hour of curfew, the aforesaid William entered the river at le Heywharf to wash himself, being alone, and was accidentally drowned; that the corpse was not found until the Friday aforesaid when the tide had carried it as far as Flete Bridge. The corpse viewed, &c. Four neighbours attached, viz. : Simon Larmourer, by Thomas de Bandone and Robert le Sherman. William de Toppesfeld, by Robert Rabi and William Sterre. Robert de Asshe, by Gilbert atte More and Stephen le Keu. Reginald de Thorpe, by Andrew le Hornere and William de Stanford.

Dead of a death other than one's rightful death is no way to go, for sure.

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2004-02-09 enough! (utc)

They read 'em so you don't have too.

A review (by H Allen Orr) of Mr Richard Dawkins's new papperbok, which distinguishes between his admirable work in biology, his silly but entertaining harangues against religion and the thoroughly lamentable self-serving pseudoscientific bafflegab he has perpertrated in the name of "memetics".

You would, if you happened to be me, think that anyone peddling something as transparently bereft of actual content as this "memetics" would blush to gloat over the Sokal hoax, but apparently you would, if you happened to be me, be mistaken on this point.

But there's another problem, one that has little to do with the gene-meme analogy but that's at least as serious: unlike the selfish gene view, the selfish meme view hasn't led anywhere. Where are the puzzling phenomena that have been explained by memes? Dawkins provides no examples and I suspect there aren't any. The truth is that the meme idea, though a quarter-century old, has inspired next to no serious research and has failed to establish a place for itself in mainstream cognitive science, psychology, or sociology. Though laymen often have the impression that scientific ideas die in decisive experiments, far more often they die because they didn't suggest many experiments. They failed, that is, to inspire a rich research program. Though I could obviously be proved wrong, and while I have no problem with the notion that some science of cultural change may be possible, I'm far less confident than Dawkins that memes will play an important role in any such enterprise.

"Memes" are an attempt to circumvent the sciences of man and replace them with half-arsed science fiction, and it is eloquent testimony to the inadequacies of the approach that, despite the abundant shortcomings of the former, the new "theory" is very far from being mistakable for an improvement. Or even a theory, really.

Dawkins's anti-religious fire and brimstone sermonisings are, of course, strictly for the choir. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, but I'm not about to spend my hard-earned cash on a what amounts to a collection of B-sides and studio out-takes on the theme, with which I count myself already sufficiently familiar.

[via Butterflies&Wheels]

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2004-02-09 14:23

Des von Bladet: "My geography shame"

I knew, of course, that cold-war era German was divided into two pieces, and that there was a wall through Berlin as part of this. What I hadn't realised until recently was that West Berlin was a tiddly ickle piece of righteousness in the heart of and surrounded on all sides by communist territory. Which, you have surely to admit, is not an especially sensible way to do things. Those who already knew that presumably also knew that the Bad Guys tried blockading it, as you would, and that the West called their bluff by airlifting in absolutely everything the city-sliver needed, at great expense and corresponding rhetorical firmness.

A thing that I may or may not have known, but which is less embarrassing either way, is that Mr I "Just" Kant, the celebrated philosopher the bicentenary of whose death we are currently celebrating with not inconsiderable delight, was a lifelong inhabitant of K�nigsberg, Prussia, which would probably have been a (disconnected) part of Germany if there had been any such thing at the time, which there wasn't, and which has since gone on to become Kalingrad in the (disconnected) part of Russia of the same name.

Bonus points are certainly available if you convince a Germanophone that you thought, on these grounds, that Kant was in fact a Russian philosopher, and that his best work was inspired by the problem of figuring out which were the hookers in the queue for the ladies' toilet in the local McDonalds.

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2004-02-09 samwidge (utc)

Moral high ground, slightly low down and dirty

Mycket effektiv men p� gr�nsen till skamgrep �r alla de former av "guilt by association" som kan skapas p� det h�r viset. Motorv�gsmotst�ndare och tr�dkramare brukar s�llan f�rsumma att p�peka att Hitler byggade motorv�gar, medan teknikv�nner tv�rtom g�rna framh�ller att nazismen �tminstone i teorin hyllade de flesta av gr�na v�gens ideal.

Very effective but bordering on foul play are all the forms of "guilt by association" which can be developed in this manner. Treehuggers and opponents of motorways rarely neglect to point out that Hitler built motorways, while technophiles, on the other hand, cheerfully point out that nazism at least in theory endorsed most of the green movements ideals.

G�ran H�gg, Praktisk Retorik, p.67

I'll review the book when I've finished it, but it is not too soon to warmly recommend it, which I do.

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2004-02-09 mornin (utc)

Of bebis and back-formation

Sometime in the 60s Swedish persons finally developed a need for a word meaning "baby", so they borrowed one from the Engleesh, who are of course old hands at that sort of thing. The Swedish word "Bebis", however, is singular, with plural "bebisar", and Anna K points out that the Norwegish word "muffins" is also singular, and it's a safe bet that it ends with [s] rather than Engleesh [z], because that always happens in 'Wegian, which has no [z] even allophonically.

Anyway, it is traditional to restore balance to the hilarities at this point by exhibiting some Engleesh words which got scuffed in the borrowing, and here are some from Mr Leonard Bloomfield's magisterial 1935 (British edition) Language:

Another example is Old English ['pise] "pea", plural ['pisan]; all the forms of the paradigm lead to modern pease, peas [pijz], and the singular pea is a backformation. Similarly, Old French cherise "cherry" was borrowed in ME as cheris, whence modern cherries; the singular cherry is an analogic creation.

So stick that on your toasts and grill it, silly Engleesh!

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