October 2006

According to a new “report”:http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf (pdf) in the Lancet on post-invasion mortality in Iraq:

bq. We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2·5% of the population in the study area. Of post-invasion deaths, 601 027 (426 369–793 663) were due to violence, the most common cause being gunfire.

With a lower bound of 426,369 for violent deaths, maybe we won’t hear from Fred “This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board” Kaplan this time.

The Australian reports on the “infiltration” (or maybe “infiltrazione”) of Italian by English words, quoting Michele Cortelazzo, lecturer in linguistics at the University of Padua, who is quoted as saying

Prime recent examples were flop instead of the Italian fiasco, and trend instead of tendenza.

Does anyone notice un problema here?

Given that concern over Franglais, Spanglish and so on has been around for many decades now, I’d be interested to know whether the influence of English on other European languages goes beyond the importation of a relatively modest number of loan words. My very limited observation suggests not, but lots of readers here are in a much better position than me to comment.

A piece up at the Guardian blog which probably belonged over here at CT but I didn’t have my CT login to hand. Basically, Harry Collins, a sociology professor, has been doing the Dian Fossey bit with a subcommunity of physicists. He has been accepted among them to the extent that he can have perfectly sensible conversations with physicists, and even teach them a few new things about physics on occasion (since he puts a lot more effort into networking than they do, he’s usually got some new bits of information from the bleeding edge of research).

The question that interests me is, in what sense can one say that Harry Collins doesn’t “really” understand gravity waves? What is that thing which he is missing, if anything? A lot of people on the Guardian blog seem to want to argue that the particular mathematical manipulations carried out by gravity waves researchers are in some way constitutive of what it is to “understand the physics”, but this seems to me to be obviously wrong. “The current state of research about gravity waves” clearly names a different entity from “gravity waves”, and what I’m interested in is the existence of any sense in which the physicists understand gravity waves and Collins doesn’t. (It’s a common belief among physicists, probably derived from Quine, that there is a particular correspondence between mathematics and physics which might serve to hold a special relation together. Not so, as we’ve known ever since Hartry Field‘s work, managing to derive Newtonian mechanics using only logic).

We don’t want to make “understanding the subject” mean “being able to do calculations about the subject”, unless we have some reason to believe that this is a necessary condition rather than a sufficient one (and to be frank, I don’t believe it’s a sufficient condition; I’ve spent enough time with economists to know that ability to do the maths does not mean that someone understands the economics). Is there anything? Or is Collins’ concept of “interactive expertise” really all there is, in terms of understanding?

Unless something changes, I’ll be on the Al Franken show on Air America tomorrow, sometime around 1.30 ET, talking about blogs and politics.

Over at “Language Log”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/, Arnold Zwicky has been having some fun tracking the various ways in which newspapers avoid printing taboo words. The strangest instance of differing taboo standards I’ve seen was in an article in the SMH this morning. At the end of the article, we see this paragraph.

bq. [Sienna Miller] who is in town shooting the screen adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, called the city a name that sounds like Pittsburgh, but contains an expletive.

That’s not too surprising. In fact this is one of the instances of taboo avoidance that Zwicky mentions. At risk of engaging in my own little piece of taboo avoidance, I will just “link to”:http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/10/10/1160246104961.html the article and note the quote from Miller in its fourth paragraph, rather than reprint it. I’ve worked on publications with several different standards with respect to taboo language. But I’ve never seen standards quite exactly like what the SMH seems to be using.

Just “listen to at least the first few minutes of this radio show”:http://www.wnyc.org/stream/ram?file=/radiolab/radiolab042106a.mp3 (“or via links here”:http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21), which begins with the work of “Diana Deutsch”:http://psy.ucsd.edu/~ddeutsch/, a psychologist who studies the psychology of music. The opening segment demonstrates a remarkable phenomenon, whereby a looped segment of ordinary speech appears — after a few repetitions — to become musical. Moreover, once you’ve perceived it as music, listening to the segment in context makes it sound like the speaker is in a Busby Berkeley musical and has just begun to segue into a solo number. The general musicality of speech is obvious, I suppose, especially when you listen to certain accents, or hear “uptalk”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002967.html. But this is a very nice sort of case.

Via Clifford at “Cosmic Variance”:http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/10/09/music-and-language/

Just finished watching the “C4 faux documentary”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0853096/ about the assassination of GWB. Very watchable, I thought. The technique mainly consisted on interspersing genuine newsreel footage with deadpan interviews with participants, including various law-enforcement people and protestors. Politically it wasn’t too heavy handed, though there was a clear attempt to situate Cheney as an opportunist who would use anything, even the killing of Bush, to advance his pet view of the world. Ditto the Syrian oppositionist who postulates official Syrian invasion on the basis of claimed insider knowledge in a manner that reminded me very much of the neocon’s pet Iranian exile. The twist was good, but I won’t spoil things for others by posting it here. I just hope that US cinemas and networks get over their reluctance to show an interesting piece of film.

I meant to respond a few weeks ago to Matthew Yglesias’s “complaints about Pitchfork Media”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2006/09/a_long_time_ago_we_used_to_be/ and never got around to it thanks to work obligations and the nine month old. But since it’s not a time sensitive topic, here goes. [click to continue…]

I’m slightly reluctant to post this recommendation, for the simple reason that most of our readers are in the US, and this is old news (really old news) to them. But I’ll post anyway, for the benefit of those who are not, and, especially, for my fellow Brits. I was watching some show the other night in which Charlie Brooker (yes, “that”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/10/26/those-dastardly-clintonites/ Charlie Brooker) was talking about American TV, and he recommended “The Wire”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306414/ . The fact that David Simon was behind it was enough for me, because “HLOTS”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106028/ was my favourite cop-show ever, so I started renting the DVDs. The Wire has never been shown in the UK (except on some nearly impossible to get satellite channel) and I guess I can see why: plot and dialogue hard for non-Americans to follow, no concessions to the viewer. But it is absolutely compulsive. Basically, it is a tale of two competing bureaucracies: the Baltimore PD and the Barksdale drug gang. On the whole, you’d say that the drug dealers have the more functional of the two organizations but the focus on the internal politics of each and on their political pathologies will elicit instant recognition from anyone who works in, say, a university. And there are great iconic characters too, such as Omar, the gay stick-up man, who only robs from the dealers and leaves civilians alone. I’ll leave it at that (since I won’t post plot spoilers). If The Wire has never been shown in your country, beg, borrow or steal the discs.

As a good European, I aim to get through half a bottle of wine most days, though I occasionally abstain midweek, or when drinking beer instead. We in the UK are really blessed when it comes to wine, since, making little drinkable of our own, we import it from everywhere (by way of contrast, try getting a decent bottle of South African in France). Lately, though, I find my enjoyments somewhat diminished by the increasing alcoholic content of the stuff. Time was, 12 or 12.5 per cent was pretty standard for a bottle of red. Not any more. A trip to my local branch of Oddbins (about 40 yards) revealed that 14.5 per cent was very common (not far off some fortified wines) and that it was hard to find a decent bottle of red under 13 per cent. I guess that there’s some good explanation for the rising strength of the stuff – probably to do with New World techniques. But I’d like something a little less fierce to knock back in front of the Sopranos.

Suppose you do research on gender issues in the social sciences (or practical/political/moral philosophy). It is quite likely that from time to time, or perhaps even often, you meet other scholars who are both sceptical and ignorant about the whole gender issue. They agree that there are sexual differences, but believe that all differences between men and women can be reduced to these sexual differences.
Suppose those sceptics ask you to give them one journal article, or one book chapter, that will give them a primer to gender. It should, thus, be an extremely good introduction to the concept and workings of gender, accessible to people who are intelligent, but have no background at all. They might perhaps later read a whole book, but right now they don’t want to waste more time on studying gender than the time to read one article. What should those people read?

Welcome to Anton Rufus Green, born Sept 30th 2006. I hope I get to know you, and whether I do or not, I hope your life is filled with love, fun, and things of importance. And I hope that when you’re an adult, and move away from the town you went to college in, someone there misses you as much as I miss your dad. My best to your parents — don’t give them too hard a time. I’m sure they’re as lucky to have you as you are to have them.

This is an abstruse bleg. (Move along, move along, if you aren’t likely to want to talk about technical philosophy stuff.) [click to continue…]

If someone hinted two years ago that one day I would be eagerly awaiting the third season of a remake of Battlestar Galactica, my response would have been something like, “Get away from me, crazy person, because that is crazy, what you are saying to me.”

The original series ran in the late 1970s and was very, very dumb. Sure, it’s interesting to learn that bits of Mormon theology were embedded into the show. And I suppose some people will now be entertained by those vintage haircuts. But don’t be fooled by the sickly glow of nostalgia. The show was junk. Let’s put it this way: There was a robotic dog.
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