Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

Page 56 of 126

What will happen to signed languages?

6 August 2009 / / 1 Comment

Great news: Deaf children are getting cochlear implants that can help them hear. But this has an unintended consequence: signed languages, already endangered, are getting pushed closer to extinction.

Until the past five years or so, cochlear implants were considered risky for young children. Some teachers of the deaf recommended that parents wait and let the child decide whether to get implants or use sign language. But such advice comes with a cost: A child who waits too long to hear might never become proficient in oral language. As scientific evidence accrues that children learn spoken language better if implanted before age 3, the recommendation to wait has faded.

Still, some experts advocate learning sign language even if children receive implants. Learning sign language is a safeguard that allows a young child to develop communication skills prior to receiving the implant. And sign language is there if, for any reason, the implants do not help a child sufficiently.

The pragmatist in me thinks that maybe this isn’t that serious. Signed languages, while languages in their own right, are still sort of a solution to a problem. If everyone could suddenly hear, that would be such a great thing that it might be worth the loss of ASL, Auslan, BSL, and other signed languages.

But Linguist Me laments the possible demise of yet another natural language, with all the variety and human ingenuity encoded in it. Keep in mind that Auslan, the main signed language used in Australia, has only about 7,000 speakers, far fewer than has been thought. That means it may already be endangered. And if fewer and fewer people are learning and using it, this has some serious implications for the Deaf community.

I don’t know much about the technology of cochlear implants, but I can’t imagine that they have a 100 percent success rate. If they don’t work for someone, and signed languages die out, will that person just be SOL?

Mom and Dad pray while sick daughter dies

3 August 2009 / / 3 Comments

Here’s another guy who really believes in his religion. In this case, that means someone ended up dead.

A US jury has found a man guilty of killing his sick 11-year-old daughter by praying for her recovery rather than seeking medical care.

The man, Dale Neumann, told a court in the state of Wisconsin he believed God could heal his daughter.

She died of a treatable disease – undiagnosed diabetes – at home in rural Wisconsin in March last year, as people surrounded her and prayed.

Neumann’s wife, Leilani Neumann, was convicted earlier this year.

The couple, who were both convicted of second-degree reckless homicide, face up to 25 years in prison when they are sentenced in October.

Reckless homicide is a good way of putting it. Having a child means you have to take care of them. They can’t do it themselves; they count on you. When you instead subject that child to a horrible and unnecessary death, there ought to be legal consequences.

And that goes for people who use alternative medicine instead of giving their child real medicine. If that child is harmed through a parent’s inaction, there should be consequences.

Post 700

1 August 2009 / / 3 Comments

On the eve of my 700th post on Good Reason, I find myself in Singapore. (I’m presenting at a conference.)

The conference hasn’t started yet, though, so I’m taking a day to look around Singapore. My strategy is to fling myself into the hurtling stream of people and see where I wash up. It’s going well. By dinner time, I was in Vegetarian Central with a steaming plate of rice and fake meat. And root beer. For some reason, A&W Root Beer is unaccountably popular in Singapore. You can’t get the stuff in Australia because they think it tastes like medicine. Figure that: the people who happily gulp down lemon lime and bitters won’t touch root beer because they think it tastes ‘weird’.

This is an open thread. Where does today find you?

Phineas gage photo found

30 July 2009 / / 2 Comments

It seems that a daguerreotype of Phineas Gage has been found. You’ll remember Gage from your first-year psych class, as the railroad worker who had an unfortunate encounter with an iron bar.

Gage was working on blasting that day in 1848. When you blast holes in rock, you first drill a hole in the rock, insert some gunpowder plus some sand, then insert your tamping rod and tamp it all down. But on this particular day, Gage forgot the sand. When he tamped directly on the dynamite, the resulting explosion blasted the iron bar right through his cranium. The bar landed with a clang about 30 meters behind him.

Incredibly, Gage survived, but some reports note that Gage’s personality changed from amiable to quarrelsome. This fact caused researchers to focus on the brain as the source of behaviour, and not some metaphysical spirit entity. If the brain gets damaged, the personality gets damaged.

I like the photo of Gage. He looks confident, and every bit the gentleman. The closed left eye shows he’s taken some knocks, but still he holds the token of his fame and near-destruction in his hands.

Rudd won’t budge on gay marriage

29 July 2009 / / 19 Comments

Australia has a reputation for being irreverant, secular, and liberal. At times like these I’m not sure it’s deserved.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will move against a push at this week’s Labor Party conference to allow same-sex marriages.

The Labor Party’s Tasmanian state conference has called for the Federal Government to amend the Marriage Act to allow same-sex couples to marry.

It will be an issue at this week’s National Labor Conference.

Mr Rudd says he will not change the policy he took to the last election.

“We went to the last election being very clear-cut about our position on marriage under the Marriage Act being between a man and a woman,” he said.

Now I’ve voted for two people who are against gay marriage, but I have to say, it’s getting tiresome. I think Mr Obama and Mr Rudd are smart leaders who are good at most things, but I find their view on this issue really disappointing.

I suspect that this is due in part to the openly religious leanings of these men. Being religious has a way of making cool people occasionally act in jerky ways (e.g. Rich Raddon). Otherwise, I just can’t see why Rudd would have to take this stand in a country where polls show the issue at 60 percent acceptance.

I’d like to see this change, and soon.

Mormons the most Republican religious group

27 July 2009 / / 1 Comment

In a piece of news that surprised precisely no one, the Pew Report has revealed that Mormons are the most conservative religious group in America.

More Mormons (60 percent) identify themselves as conservatives than any other religious group; they also lead every other group in GOP party identification (at 65 percent)–much higher than the general population in both categories.

Actually, I was a bit surprised. Only 65 percent Republican? Back in my Utah days, it felt like 95 percent. I’ll bet the Republican numbers are low because there’s a further 25 percent comprised of John-Birch-birther-Ron-Paul Independents who think the Republican party isn’t Constitutional enough.

Out of the remaining 10 percent, subtract the usual 8 percent Unaffiliated/Don’t Know, and you’ll have 2 percent left. That’s the elusive Liberal Mormon.

You’ll find more than a few liberal Mormons behind this effort to reconcile LDS Church leadership with gay people. As of today, it has — wow — all of 1,360 signatories. (For comparison, this is an order of magnitude less than this petition to consider Michael Jackson for a Nobel Peace Prize.)

We the undersigned, in the spirit of love and peace, earnestly seek to create a climate for reconciliation between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and gays and lesbians who have been affected by the policies, practices and politics of the Church. We recognize that issues surrounding sexuality and gender orientation are complex; that understanding of these matters has evolved, especially over the past several decades, and are continuing to evolve as scientists, therapists, theologians and others continue to explore and ponder their meaning and significance; We believe that people of good will may have differing views about homosexuality, while maintaining amicable relationships.

Lovely sentiments, a noble goal, and a complete waste of time. Why would church leadership want to reconcile with gay people? Their fiercely conservative membership is convinced they speak for god, and when god’s on your side, negotiation is impossible. Enter a dialogue with gay people, seriously? Those people want to destroy society. Oh, sure, the church will have to walk back all that homophobia someday, but that’ll be a long time from now, and Mormons will claim it was never official church policy anyway.

You have to love Mormon liberals, but you have to feel sad for them. True, they haven’t completely off-loaded their conscience onto church leadership. But that only means that their post-Dark-Ages political leanings puts them at odds with other Mormons, including church leaders, who wonder why they’re not ‘following the prophet’. So they have an uneasy relationship with a church that distrusts them for their intellectual independence.

I want to see a better relationship between the LDS Church and gay people too, but it’s not going to happen by church members politely petitioning for it. It will happen when Mormons with a conscience refuse to support the church financially or numerically with their membership.

It’s all about the shoes

25 July 2009 / / 2 Comments

While walking the streets of Seattle last month, I was pleased to find that Shoefly has used the Daniel font for their logo and design. Notice how they’ve cleverly used the ‘oe’ digraph for their name.

Now I’m realising that I’d never seen my handwriting in neon before. Very nice.

Why sue a genie? He’ll just conjure up a really good lawyer.

15 July 2009 / / 5 Comments

Back in my Mormon days, I believed in angels. By that I mean, I believed the stories about angels visiting Joseph Smith, and I agreed that angels could probably exist in theory somewhere. If someone claimed they’d actually seen an angel, I’d have been extremely skeptical. But they were characters in scripture, which I believed, so how skeptical could I have been.

But I never believed in genies — that was just storybook stuff. (At the time I saw no contradiction.)

Imagine my surprise to find genies treated as real beings in the Qu’ran. And now it would appear that someone is trying to sue one.

A family in Saudi Arabia has taken a genie to court, alleging theft and harassment, according to local media.

The lawsuit filed in Shariah court accuses the genie of leaving them threatening voicemails, stealing their cell phones and hurling rocks at them when they leave their house at night, said Al-Watan newspaper.

Cell phones. Voice mail. I’m tempted to say that these people don’t deserve the technology that they have. And the same goes for some Christians — today I saw someone smear a woman with cooking oil in an attempt to convince a supernatural being to heal her. That these people can even use a phone is amazing to me.

Pre-deconversion, I’d have thought that suing an angel was crazy, so I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some Muslims think that suing a genie is equally crazy. Then again, if you think that angels and genies are real beings, it makes perfect sense to sue them like anyone else. This family’s unquestioning faith in their scriptures looks like insanity. Doesn’t it?

So here’s an interesting continuum. On the one side are people who are rational, don’t believe in supernatural beings, and live in the real world. On the other side, you have people who believe in angels and genies, and may try to sue them. They’re the ones who really believe their religion, but they’re (quite frankly) nuts. Someone in the middle of the continuum, like me back then, claims to believe in those things, but doesn’t really. These people can exist in the real world, but that means they believe in their religion somewhat less. This suggests that one is insane to the extent that they believe in the unreal beings presupposed by their religion.

Civil disobedience of the nicest sort

12 July 2009 / / 3 Comments

A lovely bit of protest over in Salt Lake City. Two guys get charged with trespassing for a peck on the cheek in Temple Square. Next thing you know…

About 100 people gathered near the Mormon church’s downtown temple to stage a “kiss-in” protesting the treatment of 2 gay men who were detained by security guards on a plaza owned by the church and later cited by police for trespassing.
…
The Salt Lake Tribune reported on its Web site that heterosexual and gay couples exchanged small kisses and pecks at the plaza’s south entrance, which faces downtown. Church security was present, but the Deseret News of Salt Lake City reported on its Web site that no altercations occurred.

This takes non-violent protest to a new level — it’s anti-violent.

It’s entirely fitting that this protest is happening in Salt Lake City. The search term “men kissing” is most googled in Utah, with SLC also showing a lot of curiosity. Now they get to see some for real.

Linguistics with T-pbtbhpt!-Rex

7 July 2009 / / 2 Comments

T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics shares with us some linguistic universals.


Of course, he’s talking about absolute universals (like the fact that all human languages use nouns and verbs), but don’t forget that there are lots of implicational universals. If a language has a word for ‘blue’, it will also have a word for ‘red’, but not the reverse. Or if a language has a word for ‘toes’, it’ll have a word for ‘legs’, but not the reverse.

T-Rex would probably like to know that some languages have no word for ‘fingers’, since he’s a bit short in that department.

« Older posts Newer posts »

Meta

© 2024 Good Reason

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑