https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0008559

  Quote

Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure

Abstract

Background

Languages differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological systems and in the social environments in which they exist. We challenge the view that language grammars are unrelated to social environments in which they are learned and used.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We conducted a statistical analysis of >2,000 languages using a combination of demographic sources and the World Atlas of Language Structures— a database of structural language properties. We found strong relationships between linguistic factors related to morphological complexity, and demographic/socio-historical factors such as the number of language users, geographic spread, and degree of language contact. The analyses suggest that languages spoken by large groups have simpler inflectional morphology than languages spoken by smaller groups as measured on a variety of factors such as case systems and complexity of conjugations. Additionally, languages spoken by large groups are much more likely to use lexical strategies in place of inflectional morphology to encode evidentiality, negation, aspect, and possession. Our findings indicate that just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. As adults learn a language, features that are difficult for them to acquire, are less likely to be passed on to subsequent learners. Languages used for communication in large groups that include adult learners appear to have been subjected to such selection. Conversely, the morphological complexity common to languages used in small groups increases redundancy which may facilitate language learning by infants.

Conclusions/Significance

We hypothesize that language structures are subjected to different evolutionary pressures in different social environments. Just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. The proposed Linguistic Niche Hypothesis has implications for answering the broad question of why languages differ in the way they do and makes empirical predictions regarding language acquisition capacities of children versus adults.

 

Expand  

The wealthy are bonkers and they fuck up their kids' lives, part 33,789.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/squash-lacrosse-niche-sports-ivy-league-admissions/616474

Facebook used to be a festering shithole. It still is, but it used to be, too.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/why-facebook-cant-fix-itself

Been reading a lot of articles while working (or instead of lol)

This is a good one one Palantir (thought provoking).

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/21/magazine/palantir-alex-karp.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

A good one in general on social media, the internet, and the intersection of those two with public life.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/11/05/how-the-awful-stuff-won/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

And a good personal interest story on a woman formerly married to a Texan who had converted to Islam.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-convert

More on big data and what happens when you rely on bad metrics with little regard for qualitative assessment:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-dictatorship-of-data

This is truly wild, and William Gibson's "Idoru" is completely relevant:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-29/lil-miquela-lol-s-seraphine-virtual-influencers-make-more-real-money-than-ever

Monster robot wolf scarecrow deployed in Japan to deter bears:

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/11/japanese-town-deploys-monster-wolf-robots-to-deter-bears

  Quote

Your Guidebook to Creating a Proper Heavy Metal Album Cover

https://flashbak.com/your-guidebook-to-creating-a-proper-heavy-metal-album-cover-5621

Why did I read that entire article.

  Quote

On the bonkers color palette of Garfield comics

http://wondermark.com/garfield-color/

Underlying any viable aesthetic movement , by sarah nardi

  Quote

Designing 2D graphics in the Japanese industry

https://vgdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/179656817318/designing-2d-graphics-in-japan-from-the-late-70s

IRON AND THE SOUL
by Henry Rollins

  Quote

When I was young I had no sense of myself. All I was, was a product of all the fear and humiliation I suffered. Fear of my parents. The humiliation of teachers calling me “garbage can” and telling me I’d be mowing lawns for a living. And the very real terror of my fellow students. I was threatened and beaten up for the color of my skin and my size. I was skinny and clumsy, and when others would tease me I didn’t run home crying, wondering why.

I knew all too well. I was there to be antagonized. In sports I was laughed at. A spaz. I was pretty good at boxing but only because the rage that filled my every waking moment made me wild and unpredictable. I fought with some strange fury. The other boys thought I was crazy.

I hated myself all the time.

As stupid at it seems now, I wanted to talk like them, dress like them, carry myself with the ease of knowing that I wasn’t going to get pounded in the hallway between classes. Years passed and I learned to keep it all inside. I only talked to a few boys in my grade. Other losers. Some of them are to this day the greatest people I have ever known. Hang out with a guy who has had his head flushed down a toilet a few times, treat him with respect, and you’ll find a faithful friend forever. But even with friends, school sucked. Teachers gave me hard time.

I didn’t think much of them either.

Then came Mr. Pepperman, my advisor. He was a powerfully built Vietnam veteran, and he was scary. No one ever talked out of turn in his class. Once one kid did and Mr. P. lifted him off the ground and pinned him to the black board. Mr. P. could see that I was in bad shape, and one Friday in October he asked me if I had ever worked out with weights. I told him no.

He told me that I was going to take some of the money that I had saved and buy a hundred pound set of weights at Sears. As I left his office, I started to think of things I would say to him on Monday when he asked about the weights that I was not going to buy. Still, it made me feel special. My father never really got that close to caring. On Saturday I bought the weights, but I couldn’t even drag them to my mom’s car. An attendant laughed at me as he put them on a dolly.

Monday came and I was called into Mr. P.’s office after school. He said that he was going to show me how to work out. He was going to put me on a program and start hitting me in the solar plexus in the hallway when I wasn’t looking. When I could take the punch we would know that we were getting somewhere. At no time
was I to look at myself in the mirror or tell anyone at school what I was doing. In the gym he showed me ten basic exercises. I paid more attention than I ever did in any of my classes. I didn’t want to blow it. I went home that night and started right in....

Expand  

https://www.oldtimestrongman.com/articles/the-iron-by-henry-rollins/

http://www.cs.utep.edu/vladik/1995/tr95-51a.pdf

Fuzzy Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Made More Convincing: Every Statement With Real Numbers Can Be Reformulated In Logical Terms

  Quote

How Not to Deal With Murder in Space

A bizarre 1970 Arctic killing over a jug of raisin wine shows that we need to think about crime outside our atmosphere now.

Expand  

https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/arctic-t3-murder-space.html

  Quote

Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.

Expand  

https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/dark-patterns/

  Quote

Spotted and oddly striped zebras may be a warning for species’ future

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2021/01/spotted-oddly-striped-zebras-may-be-warning-for-future/

The Massacre at My Lai A mass killing and its coverup.  By Seymour M. Hersh

  Quote

There was no conspiracy to destroy the village of My Lai 4, or to kill the villagers; what took place there had happened before in Quang Ngai Province and would happen again—although with less drastic results. The desire of Colonel Barker to mount another successful operation in the area, with a high enemy body count; the belief shared by all the principals that everyone living in Son My was living there by choice, because of Communist sympathies; the assurance that no officials of the South Vietnamese government would protest any act of war in Son My; and the basic incompetence of many intelligence personnel in the Army—all these factors combined to enable a group of normally ambitious men to mount an unnecessary mission against a nonexistent enemy force and somehow find evidence to justify it.

Expand  

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1972/01/22/coverup

Finally found the time to read this interview in The Nation with Pankaj Mishra, one of the foremost writers on non-western perspectives on capitalism and imperialism:

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/qa-pankaj-mishra-bland-fanatics/

The guy’s a bit of a thesaurus but the points he makes are solid and the combination of his erudition and broad, non-western worldview make it an interesting read (also one @cyanobacteria, if he’s not actually an alt-right false flag sock puppet, would maybe enjoy).

His book “From the Ruins of Empire”, on the lives 20th century non-western anti-imperialist thinkers is stupidly interesting, btw. Highly recommended.

  On 2/21/2021 at 12:42 PM, rhmilo said:

also one @cyanobacteria, if he’s not actually an alt-right false flag sock puppet

ill have you know every word i write is utmost quality and legitimate

  On 2/21/2021 at 12:54 PM, cyanobacteria said:

ill have you know every word i write is utmost quality and legitimate

Which is exactly what a false flag sock puppet would say. Anyway, even a false flag sock puppet would probably enjoy Mishra’s writing.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/david-lynchs-industrious-pandemic

It's David Lynch.

apropos articles

  Quote

MIT Press has granted full access to all its journals

..no it's not

https://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showPublications

f.i.

https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/comj

  On 2/21/2021 at 12:42 PM, rhmilo said:

Finally found the time to read this interview in The Nation with Pankaj Mishra, one of the foremost writers on non-western perspectives on capitalism and imperialism:

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/qa-pankaj-mishra-bland-fanatics/

The guy’s a bit of a thesaurus but the points he makes are solid and the combination of his erudition and broad, non-western worldview make it an interesting read (also one @cyanobacteria, if he’s not actually an alt-right false flag sock puppet, would maybe enjoy).

His book “From the Ruins of Empire”, on the lives 20th century non-western anti-imperialist thinkers is stupidly interesting, btw. Highly recommended.

Expand  

An interesting read, but he somehow refuses to acknowledge that Fukuyama has gone back on his “end of history” writings, and also somehow confuses Christopher Hitchens for an intellectual. He also somehow thinks China and India are not “triumphalist”, which is wild. And he comes across a bit as having the idea that no ally is good enough, but that may just be the editing of the article.

 It’s a bit of a meandering interview, but as I said, interesting. 

  On 3/4/2021 at 10:04 PM, chenGOD said:

An interesting read, but he somehow refuses to acknowledge that Fukuyama has gone back on his “end of history” writings, and also somehow confuses Christopher Hitchens for an intellectual. He also somehow thinks China and India are not “triumphalist”, which is wild. And he comes across a bit as having the idea that no ally is good enough, but that may just be the editing of the article.

 It’s a bit of a meandering interview, but as I said, interesting. 

 

Expand  

It's definitely meandering.

I think his point on Fukuyama, however, isn't that Fukuyama thinks so *now* but that at one point he did and that lots of people in the West thought he was right.

And as far as the triumphalism is concerned, I read that as talking about Indian and Chinese societies, not their current leadership.

But, you know ... 

  On 3/4/2021 at 10:23 PM, rhmilo said:

It's definitely meandering.

I think his point on Fukuyama, however, isn't that Fukuyama thinks so *now* but that at one point he did and that lots of people in the West thought he was right.

And as far as the triumphalism is concerned, I read that as talking about Indian and Chinese societies, not their current leadership.

But, you know ... 

 

Expand  

Not to belabour the Fukuyama point, as I think Fukuyama is generally a tit, but Fukuyama basically revised his theory in his next book (after the end of history). The end of history theory also received plenty of criticism from American scholars, including Fukuyama’s former mentor, Samuel Huntington. I do agree though that for some reason Fukuyama’s thesis got way too much air time. 
 

Chinese society has been pretty triumphalist for quite some time - I mean the whole reason the Brits went to war with them is because the Chinese had no desire to trade because they felt they had everything they needed, they were too good for the rest of the world. Chinese people are pretty happy to spew their Han chauvinism about 5000 years of history with great gusto. 
 

I’ll have a go at the book you recommended, maybe something more focused would provide better insight. 

  Quote

Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny

Expand  

  Quote

And speaking of Christopher Nolan’s inexplicably sexless oeuvre—did anyone else think it odd how Inception enters the deepest level of a rich man’s subconscious and finds not a psychosexual Oedipal nightmare of staggering depravity, but… a ski patrol?

Expand  

https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/