Good Reason

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China bans foreign words

26 December 2010 / / 4 Comments

China is concerned about creeping English.

Chinese authorities have banned the use of foreign words and phrases – especially English – in Chinese newspapers, books and websites.

The ban, reported Wednesday, was issued by the General Administration of Press and Publication, the governing body for written publications. It says the increasing use of English and half-English phrases is damaging the purity of the Chinese language and disrupting the nation’s “harmonious and healthy cultural environment.”

No language is pure — all languages change over time, and every language is influenced to some extent by other languages. This is a futile attempt to stop language change, and probably to promote a standard variety of Chinese.

China’s not alone — other countries have taken action from time to time to prevent the borrowing of English words. (Which is fine — we have something of a trade surplus going at the moment.) Other countries include Iran — remember ‘elastic loaves‘?

And, of course, France, which has been trying to replace the stubborn ‘e-mail‘ with the more Frenchy ‘courriel’ for years. Doesn’t seem to be taking, though — Google gives me a lot more hits for “email” than it does for “courriel” on French pages. (Though interestingly the situation is reversed for the more formal “votre courriel” v “votre email“. Could this be a formality thing?)

Anyway, I think China is going to find that while this law may hide English from view, it will do little to stop the borrowing of English words.

The Provo Tabernacle died for your sins

21 December 2010 / / 11 Comments

The Provo Tabernacle burned down. It’s a real shame. I went to church there a couple of times in my Utah days, and I remember it as a good old building. It would have made a nice library in 100 years.

One might wonder, of course, why the Mormon god would allow a church building to be destroyed by fire as he watches, pitiless and indifferent to human affairs. One might even wonder what message he intends to send. Perhaps an Old-Testament-style message of anger and vengeance! The fire and destruction symbolic of the wrath to come. A Mormon might get a sense of divine disapproval, and that would never do.

But wait! It’s a Christmas miracle!

As the four-alarm fire raged at the Provo Tabernacle, firefighters and those watching helplessly from the sidewalk observed something truly remarkable. Some are even calling it “a Christmas miracle.”

A painting of Jesus Christ burned in the fire, save for the image of the son of God [yes, that was the wording chosen by Fox News], which was left unscathed.

Yep, the church burning down isn’t the real takeaway here. It’s the painting. That’s the ticket.

This is the Argument from Incomplete Devastation, one of many ways to creatively interpret events in order to sustain a narrative that you already believe. Religious folk are quick to use this one because in the face of disaster, there are only two possible outcomes — either your faith is boosted, or your faith is boosted more. You have to admire their optimism, at least.

Here’s the scorched painting. Coming soon to a fireside near you.

Wait a minute! Forget about Jesus — that outline around it looks strangely familiar! Could it be the hunched figure of…

Nah.

God is good, as long as you keep expectations low

19 December 2010 / / 2 Comments

If anyone wants to convince me that a god exists, prayer studies could be one possible avenue. So I noticed this headline:

Prayer May Help Victims of Domestic Abuse

And how ‘may’ prayer ‘help’? By preventing abuse? No, nothing quite so concrete.

Prayer can help victims of domestic violence deal with their situation and emotions by using coping methods such as venting, a small new study suggests.

It included dozens of people in abusive relationships who were interviewed by Shane Sharp, a sociology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The racially diverse participants came from different regions of the United States, were mostly from Christian backgrounds and had varying levels of education.

I wonder if the abuse victims were mostly Christian because of availability. Not the greatest track record on gender equality or anything.

One finding was that prayer offers “a readily available listening ear” to people who were boiling with anger.

“If they vented their anger to their abuse partner, the result was likely to be more violence. But they could be angry at God while praying without fear of reprisal,” Sharp said in a university news release.

Prayer also offers domestic abuse victims an opportunity to see themselves as God views them.

“During prayer, victims came to see themselves as they believed God saw them. Since these perceptions were mostly positive, it helped raise their senses of self-worth that counteracted their abuser’s hurtful words,” Sharp said.

Is anyone else underwhelmed by this? Say you’re the all-powerful creator of the universe, and one of your beings (or believers) is suffering horrifying abuse in a relationship. You’re capable of doing anything to help. What will you choose? Maybe — stop the abuse? Turn the abuser’s heart? (The god of the Bible can change people’s feelings, you know.) How about a mysteriously vague heart attack for the abuser?

Or will you… give the abused spouse vague positive feelings? Until the next cycle of abuse. Thanks a lot.

I don’t suppose I’ll be getting many gloating messages from believers about this study. It’s interesting about prayer, just like other studies are interesting about placebos, but in order to believe that a god was behind the effects, you’d have to believe that God is watching case after case of abuse while doing nothing real. How many cases? Surprisingly many, according to this estimate from the Australian Department of Statistics.

approximately one in five women (19 per cent) have experienced sexual violence at some stage in their lives since the age of 15 and one in three women (33 per cent) have experienced physical violence at some stage in their lives since the age of 15.

If prayer helps abuse victims, then this is a strange definition of ‘help’.

When people talk about the power of prayer, let’s remember that the only benefit we observe is the kind of stuff that people could imagine up anyway, even if no god existed. If this god does exist, he could surely do better. But for some reason, he won’t. Skip the god. Better to talk to people who are there to help this kind of thing.

Word Lens

17 December 2010 / / 1 Comment

This has to be the coolest machine translation idea I’ve seen for a while.

Imagine taking this app on vacation in a foreign country. Can language goggles be far behind?

Notice that it doesn’t always try to twiddle the word order, even where it would be appropriate. On the other hand, it must be doing all kinds of text and character recognition under the hood. Not to mention colour and size matching. I bet later on they’ll try font matching.

Now if I can just get a copy to play with on my iPhone.

And an iPhone.

Hindus want a piece of the yoga action

15 December 2010 / / 5 Comments

One day many Christmases ago, the erstwhile Mrs Daniel and I went to an Anglican Church. (We went seeking pomp, but were disappointed.) While there, we saw some parents we knew from Hippy School.

“So, are you Anglican?” I asked.

“No,” they replied. “We do Yoga!”

The quondam Mrs D was irked. “Yoga’s not a religion!” she later fumed.

Well, no, it’s actually a method of torture, but that’s coming from me, with the shortest hamstrings in the Pecos.

And yet, the Hindu American Foundation would like to take yoga back.

Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as numerous — from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible rewards that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it.

But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism.

At first, I was thinking: fine, but this won’t improve yoga. Doing asanas is fine as a form of exercise, but dragging in a bunch of religious muck won’t make it any better.

Then I realised: Silly me! They don’t want to improve yoga. They just want to piggyback on yoga’s popularity. Which is all right, I suppose. Look at Christianity. They’ve been allowed to piggyback on

  • family
  • personal milestones like birth, marriage, death, and puberty
  • the human qualities of virtue, morality, goodness

So I guess the least we can do is let the Hindus have yoga. Though later on they might try to claim all exercise.

On the other hand, I have no objection if people who practice Christian Yoga are tied up into a knot and rolled over by a thousand fitballs.

And what’s with all the sleeping?

14 December 2010 / / Comments Off on And what’s with all the sleeping?

Top-down v decentralised

13 December 2010 / / Comments Off on Top-down v decentralised

Having seen what governments get up to when their secrecy is assured, we should all be welcoming the WikiLeaks age. (And if you’re a signer of petitions, you could do worse than this one at avaaz.com — h/t nikki)

In the wake of the cable leakages, right-wing authoritarians like Newt Gingrich and Fox News haven’t been shy about using terrorism accusations, and calling for assassination. Seems like they think the only way information should move is from the top down. They hate it when anyone tries to make the information move laterally.

I mention Wikileaks and Fox because it follows something of a pattern I’ve noticed with right-wing authoritarians — a very strong tendency toward hierarchy, as opposed to a more collaborative style of exchange with no centralised control — a configuration I’ve seen associated more often with liberals.

This pattern shows up in the way the two groups get information. The right currently dominates the radio dial — Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, and so forth — where an announcer disseminates information down the channel. The liberal attempt to duplicate it was not a success. It’s just not how liberals communicate. Liberals talk to each other through a loose confederation of blogs, where comments flow between participants and multiple writers are likely to work together on the front page. Righties have their blogs too, but it’s not their main channel. The political discourse on the net skews leftward (at least on the xkcd map).

This pattern also feeds into stories of origin. For conservatives (much more likely to be religious), truth comes from on high, and the diversity of life was caused by a god creating it from the top down. For liberals (more often secular), the story is evolution, with no central controller. Science works by peer-review.

I think collaboration is much more likely to give good answers than a top-down hierarchy will. The success of science is evidence of this, but there’s also Wikipedia, where content always has lots of eyes poring over it and is always being updated. Wikipedia’s not necessarily liberal, but it is true that some conservatives felt it wasn’t serving them, and their attempt to create their own is a farce. Or there’s the terrible Knol, where single authors write what they want, no one has to agree, and good information is very hard to find. Give this liberal a good collaborative effort anytime.

Working with the rough kids

10 December 2010 / / 1 Comment

This week, I took part in a program called ‘Race Around Campus’. It’s an outreach program that UWA puts on to give high schoolers a taste of what they’d be doing at university. I gave the same 20-minute mini-class over and over again for about 18 different school groups.

I got to see the contrast between different groups. Some were great. One group came into the lecture room, and they actually waited at their chairs until I realised what they were waiting for, and I said, “Please take a seat.” Which they did. But these groups weren’t just well-behaved; they were really switched on, they took an interest in the linguistics problems I was presenting, and they grasped them quite readily. Maybe they needed a little ‘entertainment’ in the teaching to keep them interested, but when they got it, they responded.

Other groups were from underpriviledged schools. Some had a teacher/student ratio of about 1 to 4. These groups had real control issues. While some groups were inattentive, some were potentially dangerous. One student started trying to punch a hole in his water bottle with his pen, and ended up injuring himself right there in class. (That was in the first ten minutes.) They had a hard time staying on task. They cracked private jokes at my expense. They talked incessantly, despite the best efforts of their teachers. It was rather dispiriting to be using my best presenting skills, and not magically captivate their interest like I normally do, but eventually I shifted my focus to simply holding their attention, and failing that, maintaining order and getting through the twenty minutes.

I had to reflect about the difference between the ‘good’ groups and the ‘more difficult’ groups. The kids in the good groups were responsive, smart, and able to take an interest in problems and solve them. The kids in the tough groups couldn’t do any of that. They probably weren’t dumb — they just didn’t see the need or take the interest. And why would they? I was presenting material that was utterly remote from their experience. They were never going to do linguistics, and they might not ever see the inside of a university building again. It wasn’t part of any framework they were used to, or one that they had ever succeeded in. It felt like my job was to attract the students that were interested, and let all the rest filter through. Which was the most I could do in twenty minutes.

I felt bad for the kids from the rough schools, and I felt worse for their teachers. But the ones I felt worst about were the students who were actually quite bright, and clearly capable of doing the work, but they were being forced to go to school every day with some unpredictable and rather frightening kids. It reminded me of everything I hated about being that age.

He’s pretty responsive to their wishes

9 December 2010 / / 2 Comments

The Kongressional Krayzee Korps has decided that President Obama doesn’t talk about the Sky-Fairy enough.

President Obama doesn’t mention God frequently enough in his speeches, a group of religious House Republicans said in an open letter to the president, chastising him for skipping over mention of the “Creator,” especially in a recent overseas address.

Forty-two members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus complained in a letter sent to the White House Monday that in a speech delivered last month in Indonesia, the president substituted the U.S.’s religious-themed national motto for a more secular alternative.

The letter suggests the speech was not an isolated incident but part of a series of remarks that “establishes a pattern” of the president intentionally excluding talk of God from his public remarks.

Republican crazies have made a demand, so you know what that means. Expect the number of god-references in presidential speeches to jump sharply.

Extraordinary Claims

3 December 2010 / / 4 Comments

Love the look of this website — Extraordinary Claims — by the Centre for Inquiry Canada. Love the content too. It’s a rundown of a whole crop of bogus ideas, from Allah to Xenu.

From the blog:

Why is belief in Bigfoot dismissed as delusional while belief in Allah and Christ is respected and revered? All of these claims are equally extraordinary and demand critical examination.

At CFI Canada we challenge ideas and ask tough questions to promote reason, science, secularism and freedom of inquiry.

I think I could read this all afternoon. There goes today’s productivity.

And if you’ve read the website, why not ride the bus? Only catch is, you have to be in Toronto.

The atheist group behind last year’s controversial bus ads suggesting “there’s probably no God” is rolling out a provocative new set of posters on buses across the country that places Allah beside Big Foot and Christ beside psychics.
…
They will hit Toronto streetcars in January, pending final approval from the Toronto Transit Commission, said Justin Trottier, national executive director of the Centre for Inquiry, an atheist organization. After the Toronto debut, the organization plans to post the ads to buses in Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa, Saskatoon and Montreal.

The rest of us can but hope to have such liberal-minded bus advertisers.

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