Fans of language might get a laugh out of today’s XKCD.
Yes, there are languages where anything over 2 is just considered ‘many’. You could probably save some time going through the names of colours in these languages, too. “Ready, kids? Light! Dark! That was fun!”
‘Primitive cultures’, though? I’m no anthropologist, but that seems a bit old school to my ears. And a hint: if they’re watching Sesame Street on TV, their culture is probably not that primitive.
Last week saw the passing of Martin Gardner, a mathematician, skeptic, and puzzle master.
I first became aware of his work when I was just a wee lad, probably about nine. I ran across an article he wrote about ‘Hexapawn’, a game he invented. Hexapawn uses only six pawns, on a 3 x 3 board, like so.
You can move like a pawn in chess: straight ahead, or diagonal to capture. You win either by getting to the last rank, by capturing all the other player’s pieces, or blocking the other player so they can’t move.
The article showed diagrams of all the possible moves in the game, in the form of pictures like this one.
You were meant to print these out, paste the pictures onto matchboxes, and put coloured beads in the matchboxes. When you’d done this, what you had was a kind of computer. You’d make your move, look at the board, choose the matchbox that matched the current state of the board, shake up the matchbox, and the colour bead you pulled out was the move the computer would make. If that move made the computer lose, you would remove that bead so the computer couldn’t make that move anymore.
Eventually, once all the losing moves were pruned out of the system, you’d have an unbeatable Hexapawn machine. This was my introduction to machine learning and AI. What an eye-opener! I realised that unthinking boxes (or computer chips, or what have you) could learn things without people explicitly teaching them.
(Here’s an implementation of Hexapawn as a PDF.)
Later, I found a book called “Mathematical Puzzles of Sam Loyd“, which Gardner edited. I spent hours poring over Loyd’s puzzles, and Gardner’s explanations. Later I picked up Gardner’s “My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles“.
Gardner was a skeptic, but he believed in a god. Here’s a bit from an interview with Michael Shermer in 1997.
Skeptic: Inevitably skepticism leads to asking the God question. You call yourself a fideist.
Gardner: I call myself a philosophical theist, or sometimes a fideist, who believes something on the basis of emotional reasons rather than intellectual reasons.
Skeptic: This will surely strike readers as something of a paradox for a man who is so skeptical about so many things.
Gardner: People think that if you don’t believe Uri Geller can bend spoons then you must be an atheist. But I think these are two different things. I call myself a philosophical theist in the tradition of Kant, Charles Peirce, William James, and especially Miguel Unamuno, one of my favorite philosophers. As a fideist I don’t think there are any arguments that prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. Even more than that, I agree with Unamuno that the atheists have the better arguments. So it is a case of quixotic emotional belief that is really against the evidence and against the odds. The classic essay in defense of fideism is William James’ The Will to Believe. James’ argument, in essence, is that if you have strong emotional reasons for a metaphysical belief, and it is not strongly contradicted by science or logical reasons, then you have a right to make a leap of faith if it provides sufficient satisfaction.
It makes the atheists furious when you take this position because they can no more argue with you than they can argue over whether you like the taste of beer or not. To me it is entirely an emotional thing.
This is strange to me, but it’s not the first time I’ve seen a good reasoner suspend critical thinking in favour of supernaturalism. And emotional reasoning is a terrible rationale — it’s like saying ‘I’m going to believe it if it makes me feel satisfied.’ Oh, well, good for you. This is epistemological hedonism.
And it gets the reasoning backward. Gardner argued that you could believe what you liked if it wasn’t strongly contradicted by evidence, but we’ve already seen that when someone’s in the grip of a belief, no evidence is ever strong enough. Science works the opposite way: you believe something when there’s evidence to support it.
On the other hand, Gardner sounds like someone who’s done the reading (unlike me) and knows his way around the philosophy. He’s aware that his position is reaching out into the unknown, and even though he chooses to believe, he knows that he doesn’t know.
Martin Gardner must have been a fascinating guy, exerting an influence on mathematics, skepticism, and philosophy. I’m glad I’ve had the chance to benefit from his work.
For this week’s UWA Atheist and Agnostic Society meeting, it was Atheist YouTube Party! With me as programmer. I really enjoyed the chance to share some of my faves. Here they are, as a YouTube playlist. Prepare to be offended and/or enlightened; the choice is, as always, entirely up to you.
NOTE: I think there might be a bug in the YouTube embedded playlist feature. The embedded playlist below skips the first video, which in this case was Tim Minchin’s “The Pope Song”. If you want to see it first, you can either click here to go to my blog post of a few days ago, or click here to find a working playlist on a different page.
Since I didn’t have a rock-solid net connection in the lecture room, I decided to take the precaution of downloading the videos as mp4’s using KeepVid, and then making a playlist in VLC. It made things go much more smoothly.
Via Hungry Beast.
Are some religions more loopy than others? Not intrinsically. I happen to think that all religions fall within a narrow band on the loopiness scale. If Scientology seems intrinsically wacky to you, then you’re probably just more familiar with stories about talking snakes, people made out of clay, dead people coming back to life, ritual cannibalism, and people floating up to heaven.
But are some religions more evil than others? Again, I’d say not intrinsically. Whether a religion is one of the ‘nice religions’ is more a function of who’s running it at the present moment. Giving someone the license to claim they’re acting in the name of a supreme being is just inviting abuse — which may or may not be exercised. The nice pastor of the Mild-Mannered Christian Church won’t be around forever. All the ‘bad scriptures’ will be in that bible, waiting for a charismatic extremist to come around. (Tick tick tick.)
Here’s where I disagree with the Beast: At the present moment, yes, some religions are much much worse than others, including fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Christianity, and probably fundamentalist anything else. And of course Scientology, for reasons mentioned in the clip. These religions are affecting lives and minds by controlling the information that reaches their people, and by not allowing them to leave.
So, for people keeping score at home:
Scientology: Bullshit.
Other religions: Also bullshit.
Criticising Scientology’s doctrines: Not bullshit.
Criticising Scientology’s doctrines more than other religions: Bullfuckingshit.
Criticising crimes done to promote Scientology: Not bullshit at all.
Being wary of the tendency for all religions to become oppressive: Quite a good idea, really.
Update: Blogger layouts narrower than the minimum YouTube video size: Total bullshit.
Today’s Pictures for Sad Children asks: what do you do when you no longer believe in your family’s religious tradition?
Oh, go on. You know what they say: It doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you believe in something.
Has a month gone by already? I’ve got a backlog on Talk the Talk, so here’s a load of links for your enjoyment and edification.
For the first three links, I’m on about 5/6ths of the way through the stream. Watch out; it starts playing as soon as the page loads.
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23 March 2010: American English
For this episode, I report live from the USA, and fittingly I’m talking about that special dialect known as American English.
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30 March 2010: Guys
Would you call someone a ‘guy’, even if they’re a ‘gal’? What about in mixed-gender groups? A recent article in the Boston Globe is raising issues about what to call people. Is there any better way of handling this in English? And what about other languages?
This time on ‘Talk the Talk’, we return to language and gender, with a look at this most peevish of language peeves.
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6 April 2010: The Munduruku
This week on Talk the Talk, we talk about numbers. In English, we have lots of names for numbers, but the Munduruku people of the Amazon have no words for anything higher than five. Experiments show that they’re good at estimating large numbers like English speakers are, but not so good at working equations using numbers they have no words for. Is it a case of language constraining thought? Or are both being constrained by culture?
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13 April 2010: Homer-nyms
We have the Simpsons to thank for such words as “D’oh” and “embiggen”. But what else do the Simpsons have to tell us about language? On this week’s ‘Talk the Talk’, we look at neologisms and derivational morphology. But don’t worry, I do explain what all that is. I’m also pleased to say that I managed to restrain my urge to overdo the Homer impersonation.
This link seems to be different. They’ve made Talk the Talk downloadable, so now you can take it on your listening device of choice.
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That’s a lot of Talk the Talk to listen to, so don’t overdo it.
For next week’s show, we’re taking your questions, so be sure to email your language questions to talks@rtrfm.com.au, and I might pick it for next time.
Normal people don’t like playing Scrabble with me.
I have all the two-letter words memorised, I’m not bad with my three-letter hooks, and I always have a copy of the OSPD handy during a game. I also have a habit of laying tiles next to other tiles in a tight little bolus, which has the unfortunate effect of locking down the board so tightly that it can’t breathe. But I admit it’s a really unpleasant habit.
The other unpleasant habit I have is making up new words and placing them with confidence. I sometimes have to add, “It’s a word. I am a linguist, you know.”
Sometimes an opponent will complain about the words I use.
“Za? What’s za?” is how it typically begins.
“It’s short for ‘pizza’,” I explain.
“That’s stupid. ‘Za’ isn’t a word, and neither is ‘aa’, which you said was a kind of lava. I’m not going to play if you’re going to use dumb words.”
At this point I calmly remind my friend that we agreed on the OSPD.
“That’s dumb. Who said that those words should be in the OSPD?” says he or she, but usually she.
At this point I give the Every Lexicographer Has to Make Some Tough Choices speech, in my patient linguist voice. It usually doesn’t help, and there is much grumbling.
I tend to resist changes to Scrabble. I was against adding ‘qi’ to the Fourth Edition. I thought it made it too easy to unload the Q. Eventually I got used to it.
But now Mattel has gone too far.
The rules of word game Scrabble are being changed for the first time in its history to allow the use of proper nouns, games company Mattel has said.
Place names, people’s names and company names or brands will now count.
Mattel, which brings out a new version of the game containing amended rules in July, hopes the change will encourage younger people to play.
What, any proper noun? Xerox? Zovirax? Qwyjibo?
This doesn’t seem well-thought out. How can you check if a proper noun is unacceptable?
Mattel said there would be no hard and fast rule over whether a proper noun was correct or not.
I think I’m going to be kicking it Old School on this one. No proper nouns at my place. Or foreign words, abbreviations, or usu. cap.
Sue-Ann Post is well-known to Australian audiences. One look at her will tell you she’s not just your average 6-foot-tall ex-Mormon lesbian comedian. She got the crowd going last night with her tales of the strangeness of Mormon belief, and the shows she’s done since her deconversion. “If you want to know why I’m a lesbian, just look at Mormon men!” she roared, to the delight of the audience and the discomfort of at least one erstwhile Latter-day Saint.
But all was forgiven today at the book signing. She gave me a congratulatory (regular) handshake when I told her of my deconversion, and she was very funny and gracious. She didn’t even mind when I mentioned that, while she mentioned the Mormon belief that God lives on planet Kolob, in fact Kolob is the star around which God’s planet orbits. She thought that was great, and it reminded me that Joseph Smith really came up with some whoppers.
I think the iPad looks cool, but I wouldn’t exactly say it’s proof of God.
On the other hand, who am I to argue with an expert?
Sure, we were as surprised as you are! But trust us, everyone who tested the sleek gadget saw the same version of God. I guess you’d call it an epiphany or something. There is a God. Don’t worry. When you get one, you’ll understand.
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For this reason alone, we give the iPad four out of five stars. Yes, this next generation device has a highly responsive user interface and a gorgeous display screen. But, no one is really sure how to live, or if there’s even a reason for living any more. We look forward to seeing if Apple addresses this bug in later versions.
I’m not sure about her conclusions, but I was rather surprised to learn that Hinduism is Bluetooth ready.
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