I wasn’t reading for any particular purpose, just browsing through when something in particular caught my eye–a section that discussed Polo’s Persian travels and a recounting of some of the Christian Nativity story that was contained therein.

I’ll quote the two relevant chapters, and the notes that go with them, after the jump, but before I get into that let me point out a couple of things: Before descending into my current cocky atheism, I was raised in a more-or-less Protestant household, and had lots of exposure to the nativity story, and in particular to the Three Wise Men/Kings/Magi bit.

Knowing trivia is one of my things, so for as long as I can remember, I’ve known the names of those wise men, and I’ve known that they brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh as their gifts. As part of that learning I vaguely remember that I had to find out what frankincense and myrrh were, but I don’t remember ever asking myself “why would Wise Men bring these particular things?” It was just part of the story that was repeated to me so many times before I ever thought about it that I just took it for granted. Polo’s book and the notes that accompany the text, go far to closing that gap, and explaining the why of those items and the symbolism of their use, and that (as well as the fact that I had this blind spot) is pretty interesting to me.

Also interesting to me is the story of what happened to the wise men after the nativity story–another thing I never wondered about, and another blind spot that seems obvious once recognized. In the case of Polo’s book, the idea that the Christian nativity story lead to miracle stones, fountains of never-ending flame, and a whole country of people worshipping fire, is pretty fascinating. Not to mention amusing–the idea that the same God who whipped up the Commandments would cause a whole country to worship fire… well, it seems funny to me. Good story, though.

CHAPTER XIII.

OF THE GREAT COUNTRY OF PERSIA; WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THE THREE KINGS.

Persia is a great country, which was in old times very illustrious and powerful; but now the Tartars have wasted and destroyed it.

In Persia is the city of SABA, from which the Three Magi set out when they went to worship Jesus Christ; and in this city they are buried, in three very large and beautiful monuments, side by side. And above them there is a square building, carefully kept. The bodies are still entire, with the hair and beard remaining. One of these was called Jaspar, the second Melchior, and the third Balthasar. Messer Marco Polo asked a great many questions of the people of that city as to those Three Magi, but never one could he find that knew aught of the matter, except that these were three kings who were buried there in days of old. However, at a place three days’ journey distant he heard of what I am going to tell you. He found a village there which goes by the name of CALA ATAPERISTAN,[NOTE 1] which is as much as to say, “The Castle of the Fire-worshippers.” And the name is rightly applied, for the people there do worship fire, and I will tell you why.

They relate that in old times three kings of that country went away to worship a Prophet that was born, and they carried with them three manner of offerings, Gold, and Frankincense, and Myrrh; in order to ascertain whether that Prophet were God, or an earthly King, or a Physician. For, said they, if he take the Gold, then he is an earthly King; if he take the Incense he is God; if he take the Myrrh he is a Physician.

So it came to pass when they had come to the place where the Child was born, the youngest of the Three Kings went in first, and found the Child apparently just of his own age; so he went forth again marvelling greatly. The middle one entered next, and like the first he found the Child seemingly of his own age; so he also went forth again and marvelled greatly. Lastly, the eldest went in, and as it had befallen the other two, so it befell him. And he went forth very pensive. And when the three had rejoined one another, each told what he had seen; and then they all marvelled the more. So they agreed to go in all three together, and on doing so they beheld the Child with the appearance of its actual age, to wit, some thirteen days.[NOTE 2] Then they adored, and presented their Gold and Incense and Myrrh. And the Child took all the three offerings, and then gave them a small closed box; whereupon the Kings departed to return into their own land.

NOTE 1.–Kala’ Atishparastan, meaning as in the text. (Marsden.)

NOTE 2.–According to the Collectanea ascribed to Bede, Melchior was a hoary old man; Balthazar in his prime, with a beard; Gaspar young and beardless. (Inchofer, Tres Magi Evangelici, Romae, 1639.)

CHAPTER XIV.

WHAT BEFELL WHEN THE THREE KINGS RETURNED TO THEIR OWN COUNTRY.

And when they had ridden many days they said they would see what the Child had given them. So they opened the little box, and inside it they found a stone. On seeing this they began to wonder what this might be that the Child had given them, and what was the import thereof. Now the signification was this: when they presented their offerings, the Child had accepted all three, and when they saw that they had said within themselves that He was the True God, and the True King, and the True Physician.[NOTE 1] And what the gift of the stone implied was that this Faith which had begun in them should abide firm as a rock. For He well knew what was in their thoughts. Howbeit, they had no understanding at all of this signification of the gift of the stone; so they cast it into a well. Then straightway a fire from Heaven descended into that well wherein the stone had been cast.

And when the Three Kings beheld this marvel they were sore amazed, and it greatly repented them that they had cast away the stone; for well they then perceived that it had a great and holy meaning. So they took of that fire, and carried it into their own country, and placed it in a rich and beautiful church. And there the people keep it continually burning, and worship it as a god, and all the sacrifices they offer are kindled with that fire. And if ever the fire becomes extinct they go to other cities round about where the same faith is held, and obtain of that fire from them, and carry it to the church. And this is the reason why the people of this country worship fire. They will often go ten days’ journey to get of that fire.[NOTE 2]

Such then was the story told by the people of that Castle to Messer Marco Polo; they declared to him for a truth that such was their history, and that one of the three kings was of the city called SABA, and the second of AVA, and the third of that very Castle where they still worship fire, with the people of all the country round about.[NOTE 3]

Having related this story, I will now tell you of the different provinces of Persia, and their peculiarities.

NOTE 1.–”Mire.” This was in old French the popular word for a Leech; the politer word was Physicien. (N. et E. V. 505.)

Chrysostom says that the Gold, Myrrh, and Frankincense were mystic gifts indicating King, Man, God; and this interpretation was the usual one. Thus Prudentius:–

“Regem, Deumque adnunciant
Thesaurus et fragrans odor
Thuris Sabaei, at myrrheus
Pulvis sepulchrum praedocet.” (Hymnus Epiphanius.)

And the Paris Liturgy:–

“Offert Aurum Caritas,
Et Myrrham Austeritas,
Et Thus Desiderium.
Auro Rex agnoscitur,
Homo Myrrha, colitur
Thure Deus gentium.”

And in the “Hymns, Ancient and Modern”:–

“Sacred gifts of mystic meaning:
Incense doth their God disclose,
Gold the King of Kings proclaimeth,
Myrrh His sepulchre foreshows.”

NOTE 2.–”Feruntque (Magi), si justum est credi, etiam ignem caelitus iapsum apud se sempiternis foculis custodire, cujus portionem exiguam, ut faustam praeisse quondam Asiaticis Regibus dicunt.” (Ammian. Marcell. XXIII. 6.)

NOTE 3.–Saba or Sava still exists as SAVAH, about 50 miles S.W. of Tehran. It is described by Mr. Consul Abbott, who visited it in 1849, as the most ruinous town he had ever seen, and as containing about 1000 families. The people retain a tradition, mentioned by Hamd Allah Mastaufi, that the city stood on the shores of a Lake which dried up miraculously at the birth of Mahomed. Savah is said to have possessed one of the greatest Libraries in the East, until its destruction by the Mongols on their first invasion of Persia. Both Savah and Avah (or Abah) are mentioned by Abulfeda as cities of Jibal. We are told that the two cities were always at loggerheads, the former being Sunni and the latter Shiya. [We read in the Travels of Thevenot, a most intelligent traveller, "qu'il n'a rien erit de l'ancienne ville de Sava qu'il trouva sur son chemin, et ou il a marque lui-meme que son esprit de curiosite l'abandonna." (Voyages, ed. 1727, vol. v. p. 343. He died a few days after at Miana, in Armenia, 28th November, 1667). (MS. Note.--H. Y.)]

As regards the position of AVAH, Abbott says that a village still stands upon the site, about 16 miles S.S.E. of Savah. He did not visit it, but took a bearing to it. He was told there was a mound there on which formerly stood a Gueber Castle. At Savah he could find no trace of Marco Polo’s legend. Chardin, in whose time Savah was not quite so far gone to decay, heard of an alleged tomb of Samuel, at 4 leagues from the city. This is alluded to by Hamd Allah.

Keith Johnston and Kiepert put Avah some 60 miles W.N.W. of Savah, on the road between Kazvin and Hamadan. There seems to be some great mistake here.

Friar Odoric puts the locality of the Magi at Kashan, though one of the versions of Ramusio and the Palatine MS. (see Cordier’s Odoric, pp. xcv. and 41 of his Itinerary), perhaps corrected in this, puts it at Saba–H. Y. and H. C.

We have no means of fixing the Kala’ Atishparastan. It is probable, however, that the story was picked up on the homeward journey, and as it seems to be implied that this castle was reached three days after leaving Savah, I should look for it between Savah and Abher. Ruins to which the name Kila’-i-Gabr, “Gueber Castle,” attaches are common in Persia.

As regards the Legend itself, which shows such a curious mixture of Christian and Parsi elements, it is related some 350 years earlier by Mas’udi: “In the Province of Fars they tell you of a Well called the Well of Fire, near which there was a temple built. When the Messiah was born the King Koresh sent three messengers to him, the first of whom carried a bag of Incense, the second a bag of Myrrh, and the third a bag of Gold. They set out under the guidance of the Star which the king had described to them, arrived in Syria, and found the Messiah with Mary His Mother. This story of the three messengers is related by the Christians with sundry exaggerations; it is also found in the Gospel. Thus they say that the Star appeared to Koresh at the moment of Christ’s birth; that it went on when the messengers went on, and stopped when they stopped. More ample particulars will be found in our Historical Annals, where we have given the versions of this legend as current among the Guebers and among the Christians. It will be seen that Mary gave the king’s messengers a round loaf, and this, after different adventures, they hid under a rock in the province of Fars. The loaf disappeared underground, and there they dug a well, on which they beheld two columns of fire to start up flaming at the surface; in short, all the details of the legend will be found in our Annals.” The Editors say that Mas’udi had carried the story to Fars by mistaking Shiz in Azerbaijan (the Atropatenian Ecbatana of Sir H. Rawlinson) for Shiraz. A rudiment of the same legend is contained in the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy. This says that Mary gave the Magi one of the bands in which the Child was swathed. On their return they cast this into their sacred fire; though wrapt in the flame it remained unhurt.

We may add that there was a Christian tradition that the Star descended into a well between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Gregory of Tours also relates that in a certain well, at Bethlehem, from which Mary had drawn water, the Star was sometimes seen, by devout pilgrims who looked carefully for it, to pass from one side to the other. But only such as merited the boon could see it.

(See Abbott in J. R. G. S. XXV. 4-6; Assemani, III. pt. 2, 750; Chardin, II. 407; N. et Ext. II. 465; Dict. de la Perse, 2, 56, 298; Cathay, p. 51; Mas’udi, IV. 80; Greg. Turon. Libri Miraculorum, Paris, 1858, I. 8.)

One form of the old Church Legend was that the Three were buried at Sessania Adrumetorum (Hadhramaut) in Arabia, whence the Empress Helena had the bodies conveyed to Constantinople, [and later to Milan in the time of the Emperor Manuel Comnenus. After the fall of Milan (1162), Frederic Barbarossa gave them to Archbishop Rainald of Dassel (1159-1167), who carried them to Cologne (23rd July, 1164).--H. C.]

The names given by Polo, Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, have been accepted from an old date by the Roman Church; but an abundant variety of other names has been assigned to them. Hyde quotes a Syriac writer who calls them Aruphon, Hurmon, and Tachshesh, but says that some call them Gudphorbus, Artachshasht, and Labudo; whilst in Persian they were termed Amad, Zad-Amad, Drust-Amad, i.e. Venit, Cito Venit, Sincerus Venit. Some called them in Greek, Apellius, Amerus, and Damascus, and in Hebrew, Magaloth, Galgalath, and Saracia, but otherwise Ator, Sator, and Petatoros! The Armenian Church used the same names as the Roman, but in Chaldee they were Kaghba, Badadilma, Badada Kharida. (Hyde, Rel. Vet. Pers. 382-383; Inchofer, ut supra; J. As. ser. VI. IX. 160.)

A parade is a group, and I’m not a group animal. I think a mob, no matter what it happens to be doing, is the lowest form of living thing, always steaming with potential murder. Several things I could write on my placard and then carry it all by myself down empty streets.

UP WITH LIFE. STAMP OUT ALL SMALL AND LARGE INDIGNITIES. LEAVE EVERYONE ALONE TO MAKE IT WITHOUT PRESSURE. DOWN WITH HURTING. LOWER THE STANDARD OF LIVING. DO WITHOUT PLASTICS. SMASH THE SERVOMECHANISMS. STOP GRABBING. SNUFF THE BREEZE AND HUG THE KIDS. LOVE ALL LOVE. HATE ALL HATE.

Carry my placard and whistle between my teeth and wink and smirk at the girls on the sidewalk watching the nut with his sign.

–JDM, A Tan and Sandy Silence (1972)

The book focuses on just what cool things our eyes are, and on how they got that way. Lots of what’s in it is well, well beyond what I expect Sarah to understand, but there were lots of things for us to talk about anyway.

In honour of the fun we had going through that book, I present one of the best optical illusions I’ve seen in a long time.

So, how many colours would you say are in that image? (You may ignore the single black pixel in the center–that’s not the point.)

Unless you’re colour-blind the answer is obviously 4, orange, pink, a cyan-like blue, and a green from the yellow end of the green spectrum.

Except there’s not. There’s only three.

What you are seeing as blue and green are actually the same colour. You can open the file in an image editor to confirm this¹–what you see as blue and green are all actually pixels with an RGB value of (0,255,150).

Look, I’ll zoom in a bit on the picture:

For me at least, you can start to see the trick break down at that level–it kind of looks like the inner section is blue, the next green, and then the outer one is a third colour–a combination of the blue and green.

If I zoom in again, on the edge of the section I’m seeing as blue, I get this:

Now you can see that the colour is actually a bluish green. This is the only shot of this set in which you can actually see the colour of the pixels–both the cyan-blue, and the much more yellow green that appear in the first image are actually pixels of this bluish green colour, but the contrasting colours trick your brain into perceiving the pixels as two quite different colours.

I think that’s pretty cool.

(I got the image from Buzzhunt. No idea where they got it from.)

1. Yes, I actually did this.

• I’m quite impressed at the 16-year old (from the city where I did my university days) who managed to isolate plastic eating bacteria that can decompose plastic bags in a few months for a science fair project. The projection to a possible industrial solution is very interesting, although I’m not as blasé about the waste products as he is–even if it really is just water and CO₂¹, there’s still some work to be done to sell that at an industrial scale without adding yet more to our industrial carbon dioxide problems. Still, pretty damn impressive for a teen science fair, that’s for sure.
• I do wonder if all the people colouring things green to show support for Iranian democracy realize that they are symbolically aligning themselves with Moussavi–I suspect a large number never stopped to ask “why green?” Even of those who do know it, I wonder what percentage have any idea about Moussavi’s history. See previous Shirky comment on technology speed. Supporting democracy and the protestors seems like a good idea to me, but that doesn’t mean shutting down the critical faculties on the question of how to support them. (Oh, and if you want a cold-water-in-the-face antidote to the “Twitter is changing the world” meme, try this.)
• Generally speaking, I love when reviews of non-fiction books take on the entire sweeping area that the book being reviewed attacks, and attempt to place the book in a larger context as part of the review. Of those reviews I particularly love the ones that you can learn a lot from without ever actually reading the book in question. For instance, Laura Miller’s review of Richard Bernstein’s book The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters. The book sounds like something that would be interesting to read, with occasional bouts of being frustrating, and I’ll probably get around to it at some point–if for no other reason than to use it as part of a program of mockery of one of my friends who has a definite pro-Asian bias in his female aesthetics. That’s not really relevant to the fact that I quite enjoyed reading the review.
• In Alaska, you make your own fun on the long, cold winter nights, apparently. For some reason the pictures in that gallery make me think of Wondermark.
• I wonder how many people know even the basics of US-Cuba relations that are laid out in the recent Nation article. There were a few things in there that I hadn’t been aware of on the history side. I wonder about the progression of US-Cuban relations over the near term future. I’m inclined to be cautiously optimistic, but serious experts in Cuba (whom I’m related to by marriage) indicate that they don’t see much potential for any change in the near term.
• There’s certainly a portion of the population² for whom the received wisdom about the NSA is that they’re a scary-competent organization, who’ve recruited the best minds for a couple of generations, and who are probably a decade ahead of what’s public knowledge about cryptography and related fields of research. Certainly if you read something like Bamford’s Puzzle Palace, you’re left with the impression of a very competent organization that was very good at its brief… at least up to the end of the time period the book covers. Given that, it’s very interesting to read an article by a former CIA analyst who challenges that with an utterly different message: that the agency is “a secretive, hidebound culture incapable of keeping up with innovation, or even working with industry”. That fits in with another set of my prejudices–about large organizations, agility, and competence–and thus pleases me. Especially the bits about the “spectacular failures” of the projects with the MBAesque codenames.
• You know how passive RFID tags work, right? You send a radio signal at them, and the signal powers up the chip, which can use that power to send a response. Pretty simple. Well, now we’ve got some people saying “hey, there’s a lot of radio waves around all the time in the air–why not design some tools to essentially do that same turn-it-to-energy trick and then use that continual harvesting of tiny bits of energy to charge a battery?” Or, in simpler terms: can we make cell phones that charge themselves out of thin air?
• I am vaguely interested in the Longbox project. I mean I hate DRM as much as the next guy (unless the next guy is like Cory Doctorow or something), so I’m not particularly interested in trading my first-sale-doctrine-enabled, reusable, loanable, transportable, obsolescence-proof physical comics for a locked up digital file, but that might not matter. And it might not because the Longbox guys made the very smart decision to support existing non-DRM files, even though they will mostly represent pirate content. I would write at length about why this was a very smart idea if this weren’t a linkpost, but for the short version let me ask this: would anyone have become interested in iPods if they couldn’t play your existing MP3s? And how many of those were legitimate content? Q.E.D. Additionally, were the price correct, I could easily see myself doing more “taste testing” in the digital space for things I would eventually buy in a print collection–although I suspect my retailer might not be happy to hear me say so.
• I am already mildly disturbed at having had two non-trivial ant incursions into the house already this year. I don’t need to be worried about migrating fire ants invading my territory, than you very much.
• Here’s a pretty reliable test for whether or not you’re a Canadian computer geek: read this. Now, while you were reading that, did your pulse pick up? Face flush? Feel little thrill of adrenaline? You’re a big old computer geek³.
• It’s funny because it’s true.
• You know what might work even better than Buddy Christ marketing to get people to go to church? Free beer!

And, since you can’t really top religion making itself into an SNL commercial parody, that should probably do it for tonight.

1. What about heat? Required? Released?
2. The “tinfoil hat” cypherpunk types. You know who you are.
3. If any of those reactions occurred primarily in response to the machine working on the LHC calculations, then you might actually be a big old physics geek. Further testing would be required.

Absolutely. I’ve been saying this for a while — as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think.

Correct. And in some cases that’s a fine thing. In lots and lots of other cases, though, that’s the problem. In many, many cases it is essential that we learn to engage our damn brains before our emotions get involved to the points that it becomes nigh impossibly difficult to do so.

One of the topics that came up in various places in the process of chasing down that option was the extent to which language shapes thought. Does the language we use to think restrict or shape what we can think? ²

This was always presented as kind of an open question, with some heavily respected folks coming down on both sides, but I’ve always felt the answer was pretty obviously yes. I had read 1984 before running into any of this, so I was already a convert to the notion that altering language can alter potential thought and behaviour.

And then, there’s the classic example in the philosophical side, Quine’s discussion in Word And Object about gavagi. That discussion is all about language and “stimulus synonymy”, but the point from the discussion that always stuck with me was that it was actually possible for people to work from bases so different from mine as to make it almost impossible for us to communicate meaningfully.

I guess I should expand a bit, rather than force you to go read Quine if you haven’t (and really, if you haven’t, you need a native guide to get through it). For the purposes of this discussion I’ll summarize the relevant part of Quine like this: Imagine you’re the first person to meet a newly discovered tribe of people, who speak a previously undiscovered language with no relation any other language. In order to learn their language, or teach them yours, you’re likely going to do a lot of pointing at things and saying the words. The problem is that you don’t actually know what the words mean to the other person. The classic example is Quine’s gavagi: if a rabbit goes running by and one of these tribal folk points at it and says “gavagi”, you might think that this word means “rabbit”. Of course he might have meant “there’s a rabbit”, but he might equally have meant “there’s a one-second rabbit stage” or “there’s an instance of the rabbithood”, or “look ho, the mereological fusion of all rabbits” or whatever. In fact my favourite example from the class where I first encountered this was one the professor delivered with great relish: “…indeed he might well have meant ‘lo, it rabbiteth’ or ‘look, the universe is rabbitting over there’ “.

Quine will go off and get very concerned about the fact that you can’t tell which he means. I was (and remain) much less interested in that than in the possibility that there are people who actually think this way, and what that means not only for communication, but for the way they compose ideas and structure thoughts. While Quine’s talking about stimulous synonymy, I’m trying to imagine what the world looks like to someone who doesn’t recognize discrete objects, but instead views the world as a connected series of manifestations of object ideals. Fascinating. (This is also probably why the really alien aliens–and not in body, but in worldview, always fascinate me in science fiction: everything from Native Tongue to Darmok to Blindsight.)

None of that is what really sealed the deal in my mind, though. For me it was Irish Gaelic, and the instant it was explained to me that you can’t say “I am sad” in Gaelic, but rather that the closest you can get is really something more of the form “there is a sadness upon me”³. (Googling suggests the same is true in Scots Gaelic).

Just think about that, and what it means: that you literally can not identify with your emotions in the language; that your identity is a core thing that is influenced, and affected, by the emotions, but that isn’t identical to them. And also that it is, almost by nature, transient–it’s upon me now, but will not be at some point. There’s a lot of thinking to do in there, but I’ll glib over it with the observation that our fascination with depression (and for SSRIs) in the English speaking world is possibly something that couldn’t have happened in a Gaelic speaking society.

Anyway, the point is that I don’t really think of this as an open question, despite what the consensus state of philosophy and cognitive science may be.

And it looks like there’s now actual experimental results and proper science to back that up.

All of which is long introduction to me pointing you to Lera Boroditsky’s fascinating article at Edge, HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?

There’s a hardly a paragraph in there that doesn’t make you want to stop and think about it for a while before going on. (I almost can’t imagine how it would read to professional users of language–particularly writers of fiction, and even moreso poets.)

I can not recommend highly enough that you go read the article if you are even slightly interested in this. It’s great.

I’ll quote a couple of bits:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”

That, by itself is fascinating to me, but then the team uses that to do some experiments in how these differences might affect cognition, and those are fascinating in a whole different way:

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they’ll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role. So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don’t use words like “left” and “right”? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west.

This leads into lots more discussion of how linguistic patterns affect cognition, and how you can prove this with interference tests. It’s all great stuff.

Then later the paper gets into the effects of gendered languages on perception, leading to this:

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender.

That’s interesting in a couple of ways–both in the way the team intends it to be, and along a whole other “why are these kinds of descriptive words masculine/feminine” axis. (Surely there are cultures where feminitiy is associated with sturdyness or usefulness or jaggedness? There definitely are ones that associate it with dangerousness, c.f. George Lakoff’s example from the Dyirbal language, which has a gender/categorization specifically for “fire, women, and dangerous things”–an example cited by Boroditsky.)

Of course one also recalls Stephen Pinker’s quip: “just because a German thinks a bridge is feminine, doesn’t mean he’s going to ask one out on a date.”

Anyway, it’s a great piece, and will probably lead to me going and attempting some of Boroditsky’s published works, which she has conveniently made available online in PDF form.

1. I wonder if there’s anything to be noted from the fact that I’ve ended up working in the security areas that focus on questions of “identity”. Probably not.
2. If I were just that bit more pretentious than I am, I’d probably talk about this in terms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Good thing I’m not that pretentious.
3. There are, of course, lots of other, less poetic, examples like “I did forgetfulness” instead of “I forgot”.

I remember being impressed and amused by the book, and by what I knew about how it connected to political life in Italy at the time.

Other than the occasional quotation, I haven’t revisited The Prince since then.

But now I may have to.

I’ve just spent some time reading a piece from 1958 by Garrett Mattingly wherein he makes the case that The Prince, rather than being taken at face value as a “scientific manual for tyrants” was actually intended as a political satire in the Swiftian mode. How has this been part of the critical discussion for more than 50 years, and this is the first I’ve heard of it? Again my information-gathering network must not be as good as I think it is. ¹

If you’re even vaguely interested in Machiavelli, or this historical context of The Prince, I’d recommend reading Mattingly’s piece. Here’s a tiny bit of it:

Moreover, The Prince is easily Machiavelli’s best prose. Its sentences are crisp and pointed, free from the parenthetical explanations and qualifying clauses that punctuate and clog his other political writings. Its prose combines verve and bite with a glittering, deadly polish, like the swordplay of a champion fencer. It uses apt, suggestive images, symbols packed with overtones. For instance: A prince should behave sometimes like a beast, and among beasts he should combine the traits of the lion and the fox. It is studded with epigrams like “A man will forget the death of his father sooner than the loss of his patrimony,” epigrams which all seem to come out of some sort of philosophical Grand Guignol and, like the savage ironies of Swift’s Modest Proposal, are rendered the more spine chilling by the matter-of-fact tone in which they are uttered. And this is where the paradox comes in. Although the method and most of the assumptions of The Prince are so much of a piece with Machiavelli’s thought that the book could not have been written by anyone else, yet in certain important respects, including some of the most shocking of the epigrams, The Prince contradicts everything else Machiavelli ever wrote and everything we know about his life….

Me… I’m going to have to go reread The Prince now with this in mind. It’s a short read, so it’s hardly onerous, and of course even as far from my library as I am today, reading the book won’t be a problem.

1. I was amused to note, when linking to the Wikipedia entry for The Prince that this notion was mentioned in the Overview, with a citation pointing to Mattingly’s work.

Today’s example: the article on medical slang. It nicely captures some of that black humour that you just know has to arise in any situation where people are constantly working in very high pressure, very life and death situations.

Some of these I am totally going to take and start using in a computer software context. Some examples:

ATS – Acute Thespian Syndrome (the patient is faking illness)

This one I’m going to transplant to my world to refer to those people who inflate the nature of their contributions to particular successes, or who make there work seem much harder, or much more significant than it actually is.

CNS-QNS – Central Nervous System – Quantity Not Sufficient.

This one I suspect I will save for discussing people who made some particular decisions that I think were… um… not the right decision.

DBI – “Dirt Bag Index”, multiply the number of tattoos by the number of missing teeth to give an estimate of the number of days since the patient last bathed.

I have no use for this in the software context, but it amuses the hell out of me.

DFKDFC – “Don’t fucking know, don’t fucking care”, a diagnosis often applied to a surgery’s most regular visitors. Most often treated with a low-dosage course of Amoxycillin.

I’d like to use this as both IM shorthand for some of the questions I get every day, and I’d also like to make this a t-shirt.

Polybabydadic – The state of having illegitimate children by several fathers, known or unknown.

Also one that doesn’t really apply to the computer world–at least not as I’ve encountered it–but one that amuses me. In this case it’s primarily the fact that written form of the word appears medical and obscure, but as soon as you actually say it it becomes obvious. Of course you could alter the pronunciation and syllable stress to create something less obvious sounding…

I’m left wondering if there’s an equivalent entry for cop slang… off to Wikipedia again.

So, we went here for a day:

Sarah’s favourite part of that day was this:

Then we went down to San Diego and spent a day at the zoo. This included some petting of bunnies:

And some eating of lunch near elephants:

Sarah also took a staring role in an educational program at the zoo:

We then spent three days driving up the coast on the PCH. This included a night in Santa Barbara, where we ran into a festival at the mission:

It also included a trip through some hilly bits:

There was a lot of beautiful coast, of course. It looked like this: Big Sur Coast

We spent a night at a lovely inn in Big Sur, where we could relax sitting in a river out back:

Then it was up the coast to Monterey, where Trish shopped and Sarah and I did the Aquarium:

The California part of the vacation ended with a couple of days in San Francisco, including, of course, a trip to Alcatraz:

We also did some hiking in the Muir woods, taking in the coastal redwoods and sequoias:

While there I dragged the girls to a couple of bookstores (would have been more, but our days were very full). One was very close to San Francisco’s garlic restaurant, which I forced the girls into.

By the end of the meal, they were converted, and happily sharing a sundae:

After California we were off to visit family and friends in Ontario. This included a big family picnic at the park at Queenston Heights, and then Sarah and I having some adventures with my pal Ralph.

For instance, we drove up to Toronto to go in this thing:

While we were in there we checked out the glass floor, where you can stand and look down over 1500 feet. Here you see me almost stepping on:

Sarah and Ralph had no problem walking around on it:

I was actually much more comfortable looking out over the lake. Sarah also seemed to like that:

The next day we spent in Niagara, first visiting the Falls:

…and then going under them:

After the falls we spent some time at cheesy tourist attractions on Clifton Hill, including the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum:

Then a haunted house, and finally the Butterfly Conservatory:

Of course there was a lot more, but that should give you a taste.

Now I’m home for all of three days, and then it’s off to Melbourne.

The article didn’t really interest me, but it does touch on some man, the future of the past isn’t what it used to be thoughts” I’d been having at while at Disneyland–specifically, of course, while at Tomorrowland.

It’s bad enough to see how dated some of the designs are–and bear in mind that this area of the park gets redesigned all the time; these are designs from this decade capturing a nostalgic future, not designs from 1955–but it’s almost heartbreaking in some way to see the shiny, clean, sleek future slowly rotting before your eyes.

A quick example–this is the top of the current version of Autopia at Disneyland:

In case it’s not immediately clear to you what I mean about the heartbreaking touch of reality on Walt’s glorious future-of-the-past, allow me to present to you: the Rust Of The Future:

In case you haven’t noticed–and I suspect you all have–the actual future is a lot more cyberpunk than Star Trek. We’ll have our street-level tech, our virtual worlds, and our corporate distopias. The sleek types will get their elegant designs… but a year or three later, they’ll be scratched up, or covered over, or broken down. Entropy always wins, and rust never sleeps.

This was made somewhat easy by the fact that this morning I was able to sleep in until I awoke naturally¹, and then was able to stay in bed and spend an hour reading² before I had to get up and deal with the day.

And then, having the ultimate perfect weather day today also helped.

But perhaps most helpful of all was walking out onto the back deck and seeing this:

I planted that tree myself a number of years ago, and it barely blossomed the first couple of years. Before I headed out on my vacation it was not yet interesting in any way. Seeing it like that was a very pleasant shock, and might possibly have put me into a satori moment.

And, you know, the fact that my next vacation starts in four days is also helping.

Of course I have a schedule tomorrow that runs from 8:30AM until 11PM, so we’ll see how long my vacation inspired Zen calm lasts…

1. I can count the number of times this has happened since I became a parent on the fingers of one hand.
2. I believe this is the first time I’ve had this luxury at all since becoming a parent.

I’m thinking about this now after reading about ex-Senator (and ex-Governor) Bob Graham, and how his little notebooks blew some holes in the CIA’s stories about torture briefings.

You can read about it over at The Quantified Self.

This, for my money, is the golden line:

First, it’s worth noting that one man’s spiral bound notebooks were able to accumulate enough credibility to defeat the records of an organization whose very reason for existence is to collect information, communicate it to trusted members of government, and keep records of these communications.

I’m actually very happy that this particular institution seems to have a hearty dose of institutional incompetence, since I’m quite sure that from my perspective the way they chose to achieve their putative goals is something I’d rather have executed incompetently.

A good romance is defined by a passionate desire. A want of something so near, but unattainable. It’s longing of the future or of the past and the possibilities that could never be. It’s the futility and foolishness of making oneself vulnerable, no matter what disasters may occur.

A good romance rarely ends happily, and if it grips you it has the power to melt and break your heart in the same breath.

It’s committing suicide in order to remember what it was like to live.

Well, that’s a pretty good evocation of something we’ve all felt, isn’t it? Those three paragraphs stand quite strong on their own, without any context.

You might be surprised to find out that they’re actually part of a discussion of the romance between a book nerd and (literally) diabolical temptress in a web comic. But they are.

Perhaps ironically, that particular storyline isn’t terribly interesting to me, even though I’ve been reading Sinfest regularly for almost a decade¹. However I love that description–I love the way it captures that utter disinterest in self-preservation… or maybe even an element of purposeful self-sacrifice.

1. Jesus, I started reading this when I was still in Ontario, that means 2000 or very early 2001–that’s really almost a decade. Where does the damn time go?

With that in mind, here’s a list of a few things that caught my eye during my little bits of hotel-room surfing after the child goes to bed:

• The Pirate Bay trial, and aftermath, has been keeping me amused for a while. The reveal that the presiding judge was a member of several copyright-protection groups was very entertaining, but the subsequent reveal that the judge assigned to check the first judge for bias had to be removed for… wait for it… bias, has my howling with laughter on the inside.
• The Surrogates was a decent comic from Top Shelf a while back–I enjoyed it. The trailer for the movie version makes me think the movie could also be quite good. I promise to try to evaluate the movie on its own merits and without reference to the comic, but I expect to fail.
• My still-suprising-me amusement with Cracked.com continues with their 7 WTF Military Weapons You Won’t Believe They Actually Built piece. As an aside, I was somewhat disturbed to find a basis in fact for the Nazi War Wheel.
• I am officially getting Really Fucking Tired of that special mocking irony. You know who you are. Some thing are So Bad They’re Good, and some things are just rubbish.
• I’m not sure who I want to show the Wu Note Project images to. I’ve got friends who know the Wu, and friends who would know what was being referenced, but I’m not sure those Venn diagrams overlap. Still, if you get it, it’s a lovely thing.
• Back in the day when my guardo camino and I decided to grab a flick our personal slang distinguished two basic categories of movies, depending on what state we were in. We either wanted to get a “thinker”–which basically meant any movie that featured quality writing and acting–or we wanted to get “something with explosions and boobs”, which category should be self-explanatory. It appears the internet has made that second category more efficient, removing the need for the movie infrastructure, and just reducing things to the real lowest common denominator. Men are so simple.
• Yet another reason to be proud of Wisconsin: deny your kid necessary medical attention in favour of waiting for divine intervention… GO TO JAIL. ’nuff said.
• Attention all those who think the private sector, and competition automatically results in better service and lower prices: Beer costs more in all-private-all-the-time Alberta than it does in monpoly-government-vendor Ontario. Just saying.