Yasutada.sudo

In his latest video, C. G. P. Grey explains the incredibly convoluted rules governing succession to the British throne.

At The Conversation, neuroscientist Melissa Hines talks about what little biological basis there is behind the idea of heavily gender-coded toys for children. It's true that male and female fetuses are exposed to different hormones before birth and that might affect what kinds of toys they're interested in later. But it's also true that there is natural variability in both hormone levels and interests within the sexes and (intriguingly) human babies all prefer reds and pinks, regardless of their sex. (Meanwhile, human adults prefer blue colors, regardless of sex.)

Seriously now. Why don't people in central Oklahoma have basements to protect them from tornadoes? The answer, according to the engineers and geologists I spoke with for a column at Ensia magazine, is almost entirely cultural. In fact, people who study disasters say that all natural disasters are really cultural ones — created when environmental forces run headlong into complex human social systems. And that presents an interesting question: How do you protect people from tornadoes in a state where most people don't want a basement?

[Click for large view.] Author and blogger Matt Alt writes from Japan:

Ah, Seventies Japan! A Sharp Abacus-Calculator. Owned by Frederik Schodt, Japanese manga expert and all around great guy. (His book "Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics" is THE must-read on the topic). Abacuses were widely used throughout Japan up until fairly recently (the 1990s or so) and there are still a handful of schools out there who teach the techniques. "These aba-calcs were really used by people who wanted the best of both worlds," he told me.

Following an earlier vote by British legislators to allow same-sex marriage, the plans cleared both houses of Parliament this week. USA Today:

Now, all the bill needs is official assent from Queen Elizabeth II, which is expected to come later in the week.

Like the Queen would say no, even if she may! It'll be next year before marriages start taking place, though, due to legal formalities. (Update: Scotland's version of the bill is expected to pass there presently)

Earlier this month we posted an excerpt from an interview in which linguist Noam Chomsky slams the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, along with the late French theorists Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, for cloaking trivial ideas in obscure and inflated language to make them seem profound.

“There’s no ‘theory’ in any of this stuff,” Chomsky says to an interviewer who had asked him about the three continental thinkers, “not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it.”

Chomsky’s remarks sparked a heated debate on Open Culture and elsewhere. Many readers applauded Chomsky; others said he just didn’t get it. On Friday, Žižek addressed some of Chomsky’s criticisms during a panel discussion with a group of colleagues at Birckbeck College in London:

Žižek’s remarks about Chomsky don’t appear until about the one-hour, 30-minute mark, but Sam Burgum, a PhD student at the University of York, has transcribed the pertinent statements and posted them on his site, EsJayBe. Here are the key passages:

What is that about, again, the academy and Chomsky and so on? Well with all deep respect that I do have for Chomsky, my first point is that Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical, accurate, not just some crazy Lacanian speculations and so on… well I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong in his descriptions in his whatever! Let’s look… I remember when he defended this demonstration of Khmer Rouge. And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.” And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe and so on, his defense was quite shocking for me. It was that “No, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn’t yet know enough, so… you know.” But I totally reject this line of reasoning.

For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there. For example, Khmer Rouge: Even if we have no data about their prisons and so on, isn’t it in a perverse way almost fascinating to have a regime which in the first two years (’75 to ’77) behaved towards itself, treated itself, as illegal? You know the regime was nameless. It was called “Angka,” an organization — not communist party of Cambodia — an organization. Leaders were nameless. If you ask “Who is my leader?” your head was chopped off immediately and so on.

Okay, next point about Chomsky, you know the consequence of this attitude of his empirical and so on — and that’s my basic difference with him — and precisely Corey Robinson and some other people talking with him recently confirmed this to me. His idea is today that cynicism of those in power is so open that we don’t need any critique of ideology, you reach symptomatically between the lines, everything is cynically openly admitted. We just have to bring out the facts of people. Like “This company is profiting in Iraq” and so on and so on. Here I violently disagree.

First, more than ever today, our daily life is ideology. how can you doubt ideology when recntly I think Paul Krugman published a relatively good text where he demonstrated how this idea of austerity, this is not even good bourgeois economic theory! It’s a kind of a primordial, common-sense magical thinking when you confront a crisis, “Oh, we must have done something wrong, we spent too much so let’s economize and so on and so on.”

My second point, cynicists are those who are most prone to fall into illusions. Cynicists are not people who see things the way they really are and so on. Think about 2008 and the ongoing financial crisis. It was not cooked up in some crazy welfare state; social democrats who are spending too much. The crisis exploded because of activity of those other cynicists who precisely thought “screw human rights, screw dignity, all that maters is,” and so on and so on.

So as this “problem” of are we studying the facts enough I claim emphatically more than ever “no” today. And as to popularity, I get a little bit annoyed with this idea that we with our deep sophisms are really hegemonic in the humanities. Are people crazy? I mean we are always marginal. No, what is for me real academic hegemony: it’s brutal. Who can get academic posts? Who can get grants, foundations and so on? We are totally marginalized here. I mean look at my position: “Oh yeah, you are a mega-star in United States.” Well, I would like to be because I would like power to brutally use it! But I am far from that. I react so like this because a couple of days ago I got a letter from a friend in United States for whom I wrote a letter of recommendation, and he told me “I didn’t get the job, not in spite of your letter but because of your letter!” He had a spy in the committee and this spy told him “You almost got it, but then somebody says “Oh, if Žižek recommends him it must be something terribly wrong with him.”

So I claim that all these “how popular we are” is really a mask of… remember the large majority of academia are these gray either cognitivists or historians blah blah… and you don’t see them but they are the power. They are the power. On the other hand, why are they in power worried? Because you know… don’t exaggerate this leftist paranoia idea that  ”we can all be recuperated” and so on and so on. No! I still quite naively believe in the efficiency of theoretical thinking. It’s not as simple as to recuperate everything in. But you know there are different strategies of how to contain us. I must say that I maybe am not innocent in this, because people like to say about me, “Oh, go and listen to him, he is an amusing clown blah blah blah.” This is another way to say “Don’t take it seriously.”

via Partially Examined Life

Related content:

Noam Chomsky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Empty ‘Posturing’

Noam Chomsky Calls Postmodern Critiques of Science Over-Inflated ‘Polysyllabic Truisms’

John Searle on Foucault and the Obscurantism in French Philosophy

Philosophy with a Southern Drawl: Rick Roderick Teaches Derrida, Foucault, Sartre and Others

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The terrible and wonderful reasons why I run long distances.

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“Look at the teeth on him. Oh he’s ferocious.”

Blind since birth, Tommy Edison entertains his followers by answering the question “Can Blind People Draw?” by drawing a kitty cat, a car, and then himself.

When you picture Neanderthals, you might imagine subhuman brutes grunting -- but new research suggests these ancient hominids might have been more articulate than previously thought.

A recent paper, authored by Dutch scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics, argues that not only did Neanderthals and humans interact and interbreed -- but they also likely shared some elements of speech and language.

In fact, this new research claims that modern language and speech date back to the most recent ancestor we shared with the Neanderthals, Homo heidelbergensis. And it's even possible that the languages we speak today retain some elements of Neanderthal language.

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More on Evolution

Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880 – 5 June 1963), was a British Army officer of Belgian and Irish descent. He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War, was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear, survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp, and bit off his own fingers when a doctor refused to amputate them. He later said, "Frankly I had enjoyed the war." - Wikipedia (Thanks, Matthew!)

Somini Sengupta in the NYT reports on Twitter's agreement this week, after months of legal battling, to ID several users who posted anti-Semitic comments on its service, whom French authorities want to prosecute for violating hate speech laws.

The case has important implications for Twitter users worldwide, as governments increasingly try to extract user information from the service. Legal experts say Twitter could have insisted that the French authorities seek to extract the user data by filing a claim in the United States, where the company is based.

From a sphere, to a tetrahedron, to a cube, to a dodecahedron, bubbles can build a variety of shapes as they join together. The geometry changes as the bubbles share walls to save their soapy material, creating new shapes inside the morphing spheres. 

In this clip from the BBC’s The Code, bubbleologist Tom Noddy demonstrates nature’s quest for efficiency to Marcus du Sautoy as more and more bubbles come together.

via Kiddley.

Related videos: bubbles, geometry, shapes.

To the delight and satisfaction of hundreds of our readers, we recently featured an interview in which Noam Chomsky slams postmodernist intellectuals like Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan as “charlatans” and posers. The turn against postmodernism has been long in coming, a backlash the political right has made theater of for years, but that thinkers on the political left, like anarchist Chomsky, Marxist Vivek Chibber, and self-described “old leftist” Alan Sokal have pursued with just as much vigor (and more rigor). In the interview clip above, Chomsky makes a blanket critique of what the interviewer calls the “left criticism of science” as imperialist, racist, sexist, etc. His answers shed quite a bit of light on what Chomsky perceives as the political ramifications of postmodern thought as well as the origins of the discourse.

Chomsky characterizes leftist postmodern academics as “a category of intellectuals who are undoubtedly perfectly sincere” (I suspect this is a bit of uncharacteristic politesse on his part). Nonetheless, in his critique, such thinkers use “polysyllabic words and complicated constructions” to make claims that are “all very inflated” and which have “a terrible effect on the third world.” Chomsky argues (as does Chibber) that “in the third world, popular movements really need serious intellectuals to participate. If they’re all ranting postmodernists… well, they’re gone.” His assessment of postmodern critiques of science echoes his criticism of Zizek and Lacan. (Chomsky appears to use the words “polysyllabic” and “monosyllabic” as terms for jargon vs. ordinary language.):

It’s considered very left wing, very advanced. Some of what appears in it sort of actually makes sense, but when you reproduce it in monosyllables, it turns out to be truisms. It’s perfectly true that when you look at scientists in the West, they’re mostly men, it’s perfectly true that women have had a hard time breaking into the scientific fields, and it’s perfectly true that there are institutional factors determining how science proceeds that reflect power structures. All of this can be described literally in monosyllables, and it turns out to be truisms. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.

This last point is something Chomsky elaborates on as the impetus for post-structuralism in the academy, saying “it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. Suppose you’re a literary scholar…. If you do your work seriously, that’s fine, but you don’t get any prizes for it.” He makes the claim that humanities scholars use mystifying jargon and cook up “theory” in order to compete with theoretical physicists and mathematicians, who get prizes, grants, and prestige for advancing incredibly complicated scientific work.

Even more than this general accusation against theorists in the humanities, Chomsky makes the political point that French intellectuals in Paris, “the center of the rot,” were the last group of leftists to be dedicated, “flaming” Stalinists and Maoists. In order to save face, such people had to suddenly become “the first people in the world to have discovered the gulags.” It’s a very damning characterization, and one he could no doubt support, as he does all of his claims, with a dizzying number of specific examples, though he declines to name names here. He does, however, reference Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s sadly out-of-print  Intellectual Impostures, a book that patiently exposes French post-structuralist thinkers’ abuse of scientific concepts. (Sokal, a physics professor, famously punked a well-regarded humanities journal in the mid-nineties with a phony article).

Chomsky’s cranky contrarianism is nothing new, and some of his polemic recalls the analytic case against “continental” philosophy or Karl Popper’s case against pseudo-science, although his investment is political as much as philosophical. The interviewer then moves on to religion. Chomsky’s thoughts on that subject are generally nuanced and fair-minded, but we don’t get to hear them here, alas, though he’s had plenty to say elsewhere.

Related Content:

Noam Chomsky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Empty ‘Posturing’

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV, 1971

Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Thierry Cohen began his professional career in 1985 and is seen as one of the pioneers of digital photography.

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At the opening baseball game for Doosan Bears at Seoul, Korea’s Jamsil stadium, rhythmic gymnast Shin Soo-ji threw out a very impressive first pitch.

image via Super Punch, video via MyKBO.net

via Super Punch

Engineering is imagination made real and useful.

“Honda Hands” is a creative short film by Honda that showcases the company’s engineering feats — from cars and motorcycles to robots and airplanes — using an engineer’s hands.

via Pasquale D’Silva

Scotland-based Feòrag NicBhrìde has created “The Essential Map of Europe and Environs” (larger version), a handy map that shows the word for “beer” in each region.

image via Feòrag NicBhrìde

via Digg

Useless Box of Surprises. Watch more inventions and other things made of wood.

via Wimp.

Last week, low-level United frequent fliers such as myself got a bit of bad news. The airline is going to make it harder to gain elite status levels by adding a spending requirement to qualify on top of the existing mileage requirement. Delta did the same thing in January. So far, US Airways and American have avoided this move—but they’re in the process of merging, and airline mergers all but inevitably lead to some kind of downgrading of elite status. Airlines also tend to move in packs with policies like these, so presumably the new American will follow Delta and United’s lead when it combines its two frequent flier programs. This aviation news comes on the heels of devaluations of rewards programs at Hilton, Marriott, and IHG’s Priority Club.

"The wages offered on Mechanical Turk do not seem very enticing. Three cents for copying the product codes and prices from a digital receipt. Five cents for identifying a series of images as adult content. $1.13 for writing a verbatim transcript of a 4 minute and 2 second audio clip." Who would line up for a job that pays so little? The answer might surprise you. [priceonomics.com via Matt Richardson]

Paul Mathis, an Australian entrepreneur, proposes that the symbol Ћ become a logogram for the word 'the', just like the ampersand for "and". [The Age]

Suck it, coffee!

BuzzFeed explains the many reasons tea is better than coffee — including, but not limited to, the fact that tea is “the nectar of the gods” — in this hilarious video.

Tastefully Offensive has created a supercut video of cute animals yawning. You can view a full list of the individual videos featured on YouTube.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Developer Matt Jibson has created Go Read, an open-source Google Reader clone. His goals, as detailed in a recent blog post, were to create an RSS reader with a simple design relatively similar to Google Reader with the same keyboard shortcuts, a webpage with mobile support, and the ability to easily import existing Google Reader and OPML feeds. Jibson also wanted the reader to be fast and not require users to install additional software or plugins. Go Read is now open to the public, and prospective users can sign up now.

image via Matt Jibson

Tis the season for annoying bug bites, but a surprisingly simple remedy exists that can eliminate all of the itch within minutes.

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Novelist Adam Johnson meets Kenji Fujimoto, a man who became the Dear Leader's cook, confidant, and court jester:

"Many people envied me because I was a favorite of Kim Jong-il. At the parties, I poured sake for Shogun-sama, but Shogun-sama also poured sake for me, which was very rare. Every time Shogun-sama said to me, Do you like me? I answered, Of course, I like you so much. I was thinking about making a joke—I don't like you, I despise you. I wanted to say that as a joke, but I had no courage. Shogun-sama said, If you like me, why don't you kiss me on the cheek? I don't remember how many times I kissed him. A hundred times? A hundred kisses. We would go to the sauna together, naked. Shogun-sama said, Oh, you have a good body, a masculine body. I said, I'm good at sports. It's not too much to say I was a good playmate for Kim Jong-il. And every time he asked me to kiss his face, he always said to me, If you betray me, you will… Then he would go silent and make a gesture of a knife going into my stomach."

On pensait que les Etats-Unis n'oublieraient pas un tel nom. Edward Joseph Snowden. Et pourtant, c'est ce Joseph, ce deuxième prénom, qui aurait –entre autres– permis au lanceur d'alerte recherché pour avoir divulgué des informations classées sur l'Agence nationale de sécurité (NSA) de quitter Hong Kong. L'info est rapportée par le Wall Street Journal: alors que le passeport du fugitif indiquerait Edward Joseph Snowden, selon les autorités d'Hong Kong, les Etats-Unis auraient envoyé des documents afin de constituer un mandat d'arrêt comportant le nom Edward James Snowden, puis Edward J. Snowden dans le reste des documents. «Ceci, combiné à d'autres facteurs, a aidé à ralentir le processus. Par ailleurs, M. Yuen [le secrétaire de la justice d'Hong Kong, Rimsky Yuen] a ajouté que le traitement de la demande américaine a été ralenti par le fait que les Etats-Unis n'ont pas spécifié le numéro de passeport de M. Snowden.»
Le temps que les Etats-Unis rectifient l'erreur, le fugitif avait quitté Hong Kong pour la Russie. Aujourd'hui, ce passeport est révoqué, rapporte Quartz, mais cette histoire n'était probablement qu'une parfaite excuse diplomatique pour Hong Kong. Le passage de Snowden a en effet envenimé les relations diplomatiques entre la Chine, Hong Kong et les Etats-Unis. Selon le South China Morning Post, les documents révélés par Snowden ont prouvé que la NSA a également espionné la Chine, et a notamment hacké des agences de ... Lire la suite

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