Suffering From Back Ache?

This may not come as relief to those who suffer from chronic back pain, slip disc, herniated disc, etc., but at least you know who to blame. (When you are in pain, it is good to curse someone).
So here goes ...
The human spine, for example, is a lousy solution to the problem of supporting the load in an upright, two-legged creature. It would have made a lot more sense to distribute our weight across four equal cross-braced columns. Instead, all our weight is borne by a single column, putting enormous stress on the spine. We managed to survive upright (freeing out hands), but the cost for many people is agonizing back pain. We are struck with this barely adequate solution not because it is the best possible way to support the weight of a biped, but because the spine's structure evolved from that of four-legged creatures, and standing up poorly is (for creatures like us, who use tools) better than not standing up at all.

So you know who to blame.
Evolution!

And no. I have no idea if Gary Marcus, the author of this delightful little book called Kluge, suffers from back pain.

Do You Have a Teenager?

This extract from Gary Marcus's Kluge will not give you any solution, but will certainly help you understand your teenager.

Teenagers as a species seem almost pathologically driven by short-term rewards. They make unrealistic estimates of the attendant risks and pay little attention to long-term costs. Why? According to one recent study, the nucleus accumbens, which assesses reward, matures before the orbital frontal cortex, which guides long term planning and deliberate reasoning. Thus teenagers may have an adult capacity to appreciate short-term gain, but only a child's capacity to recognize long-term risk.

Hmmm.... Does the human orbital frontal cortex ever mature? Think rain forest, environment, financial meltdown, wars, nuclear arsenal ... I rest my case.

Philosophy at an Early Age

There are so many innovations happening all around the world. I wish there were some way to check it all out. And this one that I picked up at the fag end of Kluge by Gary Marcus is supposed to be more than 30 - that is not a typo, it is thirty - years old. And it goes by the name Philosophy For Children.

Studies in teaching so-called critical thinking skills are showing increasingly promising results, with lasting effects that can make a difference. Among the most impressive is a recent study founded on a curriculum known as "Philosophy for Children," which, as its name suggests, revolves around getting children to think about - and discuss - philosophy. Not Plato and Aristotle, mind you, but stories written for children that are explicitly aimed at engaging children in philosophical issues. ... Kids of ages 10-12 who were exposed to a version of this curriculum for 16 months, for just an hour a week, showed significant gains in verbal intelligence, nonverbal intelligence, self-confidence, and independence.

Two questions:
1) Why didn't I know about it till date?
2) Why are my children still studying moral education at school? Instead of P4C?

Are you being over paid?

Are you over-paid?
No?
Are you bored of your job?
Yes?
Then you are perhaps being over-paid.

Consider this ...

[I]n the late 1950s, Leon Festinger did a famous series of experiments in which he asked subjects (undergraduate students) to do tedious menial tasks (such as sticking a set of plain pegs into an (sic!) plain board). Here's the rub: some subjects were paid well ($20, a lot of money in 1959), but others, poorly ($1). Afterward, all were asked how much they liked the task. People who were paid well typically confessed to being bored, but people who were paid only a dollar tended to delude themselves into thinking that putting all those pegs into little holes was fun.

I love my job!
I think it is time to ask for a pay revision :D

The above is extracted from Kluge by Gary Marcus.

An idea for Dan Brown

I see more and more non fiction writers referring to Internet in their books. More often than not these are consigned to the footnotes so that the flow of the text does not break. And you know what such references actually enhances the pleasure of reading such books.

Here's an example from Kluge by Gary Marcus ...

If you should mishear John Fogerty's "There's a bad moon on the rise" as "There's a bathroom on the right" so be it. Or Jimi Hendrix's "Excuse me while I kiss the sky" for "Excuse me while I kiss the guy." If you, like me, get a kick out of these examples, Google for the term Mondegreen and find oodles more.

And so I did and now I know what Mondegreen means. I also recollect an old Hindi joke of an extremely bad taste where Mondegreen was used. "There was a cold day" was heard as "Darwaza khol dey" (open the door) when the person singing is taking a shower in the bathroom whose door wouldn't latch.

Here's another from the same book ... [I]f you are into [memorizing digits of pi, such as 3.1415926535], refer to http://www.ludism.org/PiMemorisation

for some basic tips.

Ok! Here's a take away for Dan Brown or a would-be Dan Brown. :D

How about writing a fiction with clues hidden on Internet?
The interested readers would be invited to search the Internet to figure out the clue for themselves. Of course, the skill lies in writing so that even those who are too lazy to search the Internet for clues would enjoy the story. Now that would be something.

Artificial Language - Loglan

A few posts ago, I discussed Esperanto as a language that failed ("used to day by only a few million speakers (with varying degree of expertise), one tenth of 1 percent of the world's population"). Clearly I am an ignoramus. For there is a language that is an even greater disaster.

The following is a from a delightful little book called Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus.

To my knowledge, only one person ever seriously tried to construct an ambiguity-free, mathematically perfect human language, mathematically perfect not just in vocabulary but also in sentence construction. In the late 1950s a linguist by the name of James Cooke Brown constructed a language known as Loglan, short for "logical language." In addition to a Wilkins-esque systematic vocabulary, it includes 112 "little words"that govern logic and structure. ... The English word he, for example, would translate as da if it refers to the first singular antecedent in a discourse, de if it refers to the second, di if it refers to the third, do is it refers to the fourth, and du if it refers to the fifth. [It is not as difficult as it seems - it merely follows the vowel sequence of a, e, i, o, u - da, de, di, do, du] ... To see why this is useful, consider the English sentence He runs and he walks. It might describe a single person who runs and walks, or two different people, one running, the other walking; by contrast in Loglan, the former would be rendered unambiguously as Da prano i da dzoru, the later unambiguously as Da prano i de dzoru.

But Loglan has made even few inroads than Esperanto. Despite its "scientific" origins, it has no native speakers. On the Loglan website [http://www.loglan.org/], Brown reports that at "The Loglan Institute ... live-in apprentices learned the language directly from me (and I from them!), I am happy to report that sustained daily Loglan-only conversation lasting three-quarters of an hour or more were achieved," but so far as I know, nobody has gotten much further. For all its ambiguity and idiosyncrasy, English goes down much smoother for the human mind. We couldn't learn a perfect language if we tried.

I wonder if it possible to write poetry using Loglan.