I love Scrabble. I’m just not sure that Q deserves to be worth 10 points anymore. It used to be a serious liability that required some skill to play off. Now? Pfeh. Just play QI, which is a word meaning new age energy horseshit. It didn’t use to be this way back in the old days of the OSPD 3rd edition.
Well, this episode is half about suggested changes to Scrabble scoring, and then the other half is really interesting! That’s where I talk about Peter Norvig finding letter and word frequencies in English by using billions and billions of words. Cool!
One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here
Show tunes:
‘A Letter from the Past’ by I’m Not a Gun
from the album We Think As Instruments
Doing the podcast is my dream job. Not only do I get to talk about language every week, but I also get to talk about language with some of my linguistic idols. Dr Daniel Everett is definitely on the list. I’ve talked about his work with the Pirahã people of the Amazon many times in my classes, but here I got to ask him about what it all means.
Now everyone on my interview list can move up one. What linguistic types should I go after next?
First episode: Here
Second episode: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here
Show tunes:
‘Sunchemical’ by O Yuki Conjugate
from the album Equator
‘Crawling by Numbers’ by Lali Puna
from the album Faking the Books
Probably the biggest use of ‘Daniel’ to date appears at the entrance to CentroSicilia, a new shopping centre in Sicily, near Catania. Those Sicilians know style.
Notice that they’ve added a tab on the ‘n’, which is fine by me — a few people have added one of those.
If you’re up for a game, try Semblance. It’s an interesting 2d mover with text that can form part of the game. I don’t usually sound as depressed as the text would indicate.
If you’d like to get your hands on ‘Daniel’ (the font, not me) or ‘Yataghan’, or any of my other fonts, then head over to the Page of Fontery, where they’re all available for download.
Thanks to all the creative people who have made great stuff with my fonts. If you’ve made something cool, tell me about it, and you might see yourself here.
The LDS Church has filed a brief with the US Supreme Court, claiming that their involvement with Prop 8 wasn’t motivated by hatred.
“On the contrary, our members supported Proposition 8 based on sincere beliefs in the value of traditional marriage for children, families, society, and our republican form of government.
We don’t hate them! We’re just trying to protect ourselves from them!
And then they whip out a little bit of “shame on you for demeaning our bigoted beliefs”.
Only a demeaning view of religion and religious believers could dismiss our advocacy of Proposition 8 as ignorance, prejudice, or animus.”
I’d say that only a demeaning view of gay people could view their marriages and relationships as antithetical to children, families, society, and government.
People operating under a sense of religious privilege, lifted up by the unquestionable righteousness of their cause, have literally no idea how offensive their actions are. They also have no clue about how ridiculous their umbrage looks to normal people.
How is that supposed to work? Presumably fans on both sides are praying for their team to win. Does god ignore half the prayers? It recalls John Steinbeck: “Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.”
It’s also odd to think that some people are sufficiently self-absorbed to think that their god would intervene in the entertainment of affluent North Americans, while ignoring real suffering around the globe.
“Do you think it’s true that any good man and any good woman can make a relationship work?” a friend asked me today.
“No,” was my immediate response. I’m a good man, and my relationship with a good woman didn’t work. I guess it depends on what you call ‘good’. But if you go there, the whole proposition gets untestably vague. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh,” she said, “I was in a relationship with a Jehovah’s Witness guy once, and that’s what he said.”
“Really?” I said. “That’s odd. They used to say the very same thing in the Mormon Church. Exact same wording and everything.”
Unless he was actually a Mormon guy, and she got mixed up. But she should know, wouldn’t you think?
Like I say, I don’t believe it. Maybe two good people can tough it out, but will they be happy? I think the extra effort is going to cost them in other ways.
But let’s not go too far the other way, and say there’s a “one” out there for you. I’m with Dan Savage: there is no “one”. But there are lots of .8s and .7s. Then you round up to 1.
And I think it helps if you can start as close to 1 as you can. My wife and I are about a .995 for each other. And that makes it so much easier and nicer.
But it got me thinking: Why would it benefit a religion to have this “any good man and any good woman” belief? I have one possible answer.
Religions operate well in a ‘bubble’ — an environment where only positive information gets in, and disconfirmatory information bounces off. People inside the Bubble continually reaffirm to each other that life inside the Bubble is good, and life outside the Bubble is dangerous and scary. It’s very nice.
For the concept of a ‘bubble’, this video is worth watching again.
There can be lots of bubbles. Utah is a bubble for Mormons, as are parts of Idaho. But when your religion doesn’t have a geographical majority, the most effective bubble is a family. Marrying outside your faith is a killer for religious bubbles. It helps you see someone else’s point of view too well. That’s why religions explicitly forbid it.
Now imagine that you’re a member of a minority religion, and you’re only supposed to marry within your faith. The dating pool is going to suck. (Mormon YSAs: amirite?) So the “any good man and any good woman” idea is a way to convince people to settle for someone of the same religion who’s not right for them. It’s amazingly effective at building bubbles — as well as miserable but occasionally functional relationships.
A large female Javan rhino, estimated to be between 15 and 25 years old, was shot and killed in late April 2010, and had its horn removed by a poacher. Turns out it was the country’s last, as reported by Rachel Nuwer at Take Part, a digital media and advocacy company.
What did the poacher want it for?
Throughout Southeast Asia, animals are vanishing from forests largely due to a renewed demand for their parts in traditional medicine, Nuwer reports. In the rhino’s case, its horn likely ended up in a tonic to cure cancer, treat hangovers or tame fevers, according to Nuwer, who has studied wildlife poaching in Vietnam. But studies have shown that the rhino horn has no medicinal value, and consists mostly of keratin, a major component in human fingernails and hair.
Traditional medicine has its adherents in Western countries, too, but the practitioners don’t seem very concerned about the global effects of the junk they’re selling. I searched in vain for anything on the Australian Traditional Medicine Society website (link to Google) about not using rhino horn, tiger penis, or anything else that would hasten the extinction treadmill.
This is just another reason why people shouldn’t use traditional/Chinese medicine. It doesn’t work, and it’s responsible for wiping out entire species. Let’s get the word out, humans.
Well, I thought I’d heard all the excuses for why an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god allows horrible things to happen to children. But here’s another: The victims must have done something to deserve it.
It happened in this clip from ‘The Atheist Experience’. The hosts, Matt and Tracie, are discussing god’s continuing non-intervention in child sexual abuse, with caller ‘Shane’.
Tracie starts off with a bracing observation, which has already been made into a meme:
Shane begins his response by saying, “First of all, you portray that little girl as someone who’s innocent, she’s just as evil as you.” Dillahunty then cuts off the call and spits, “Good-bye, you piece of s**t.”
Here’s the clip.
That’s right; according to this caller, if a child gets raped, we shouldn’t automatically assume that she didn’t deserve it.
But really, isn’t this just the standard answer for Old Testament genocide? The Israelites (allegedly) wiped out entire tribes, and when I’ve pointed this out, Christians have told me something like, well, we don’t know that the Canaanites didn’t deserve it. Richard Dawkins has refused to debate William Lane Craig for this very reason.
It’s a new rhetorical low for the religious: blaming innocent victims for the awful things that people do to them, instead of blaming an (allegedly) all-good and all-powerful god for his tendency to watch and do nothing. Once someone decides that’s acceptable, there’s nowhere else you can go. They’re morally gone.
Millions of children in Indonesian elementary schools may no longer have separate science classes starting in June, the beginning of their next school year, if the government approves a curriculum overhaul that would merge science and social studies with other classes so more time can be devoted to religious education.
Why? What benefit could this provide?
Officials who back the changes say that more religious instruction is needed because a lack of moral development has led to an increase in violence and vandalism among youths, and that could fuel social unrest and corruption in the future.
“Right now many students don’t have character, tolerance for others, empathy for others,” Musliar Kasim, the deputy minister of education, said in an interview in November. He proposed the changes in September.
If the youth lack morality or tolerance, they won’t learn it from any holy books, be they Bibles or Korans. To build character, the kids should be learning from the very classes they’re cutting. Science encourages openness to real-world evidence, critical thinking, and honesty. Social studies gets kids to think about what it takes to live in a society with others. Religion just encourages dependence on imaginary beings.
If Indonesia wants to raise a generation of dummies, they’ve found the way to do it. Religion poisons everything.
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