Ehm

I forgot what I wanted to write now.

Do you remember what you wanted to read? If so, please write it down on a piece of paper and read it out with a loud and clear voice.

No computers, please

There is a New York Times blog about a coffee shop where they do not allow computers. Or e-Book readers.

The logic of the coffee shop may have something to it. They want a rapid turnover of clients so they get rapid turnover of money. If people have too nice a time, playing computer games or reading long novels, they can stay for ever and take up place for paying customers.

However, why stop at electronic devices? They should prevent anyone from having too fun. No paper books. No newspapers. And something that is even more time consuming than reading is of course: friends. There should be no talking allowed. No chatting. No laughing. Preferably no drinking or eating either.

That would really make people leave quickly.

The World is not Boolean

Being agnostic does not always mean that you do not know. It often means that you know that you do not know. That means that you have more information than someone who considers himself informed.

I just read this in a booklet about evolution:

Mutations can be:

• harmful
• beneficial or
• neutral

That is a good example of an informed statement that is blatantly false. The general idea is of course right, and it is something to keep in mind if you want to learn about evolution.

However, there are not exactly three possible labels for each mutation. We cannot take a particular mutation and classify it as "harmful" and nothing else or definitely "beneficial". And we rarely can claim it to be absolutely "neutral".

Unless you define what those terms mean, the statement has hardly any information value at all. Beneficial for what? For the individual? For the group? In the current environment? In any environment? When the individual is young or when he grows old? For males or females?

Sickle-cell anaemia is caused by a mutation that also happens to make the person immune to malaria. Is that "beneficial" or "harmful"? Both. If you live on Greenland, it is a bad mutation, but if you move to Congo, that same mutation can help you.

One could go out on a limb here, and say that each and every mutation has some beneficial and some harmful value. Sometimes, it is almost entirely beneficial and sometimes almost entirely harmful, but most of the time somewhere in between.

There are admittedly "neutral" mutations. Those are mutations that have absolutely no effect whatsoever.

The point, however, is that we have a tendency to put absolute labels on things, and think using those labels. Was the war in Iraq "good" or "bad"? Is the lady in the at the news stand down the street "nice" or "nasty"? Are state subsidies to collapsing banks "good" or "bad"?

The answer to all those questions, if one thinks about it, is "neither". Or "both". A bit of this and a bit of that.

This does not mean that it does not matter. It matters a lot, when you are leader of a country and a major bank collapses. You have to choose: either you save the bank or not. Just do not think that the decision will be "right" or "wrong". It will be mostly right or mostly wrong. It may help some people long term, and harm other people short term. The decision will be partly good and partly wrong. The task is to figure out which decision is more good and less bad.

But if you describe the world in absolute terms, you describe a world that does not exist.

Poor white South Africans

An acquaintance of mine had seen a television program that clearly was based on Finbarr O’Reilly's photos. The program had apparently been biased in a way to tell the story of the current horrible situation of the poor whites in South Africa, ignoring the situation of poor blacks.

What the program did not mention was that there always have been some poor white people in SA, just like one of the comments says below the NYT article: "The emergence of Afrikaner nationalism, over 100 years ago, was tied, in part, to a desire to lift poor white Afrikaners out of poverty." There have of course been many other poor Europeans in Africa, notably Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique.

The implicit statement of the television program, that black majority rule makes loads of white poor for the first time in Southern Africa's history, is clearly wrong.

But as a white European, it is not easy to find any acceptable reaction to O'Reilly's pictures. One has to sympathise with the poor whites, of course, as one should sympathise with poor people of all colours in all countries. On the other hand, it feels very awkward to pick out this particular group, when there are plenty of poor blacks in South Africa and plenty of other poor people in Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola and so on all the way to the United States and Zimbabwe.


Food is handed out to residents in Coronation Park. Photo: Finbarr O’Reilly

Karlfeldt vs Dickens vs Eliot - three learned men

In the poem Sång efter skördeanden the Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt, describes how Fridolin "talar med bönder på böndernas sätt men med lärde män på latin" - "speaks with peasants in peasants' ways but with learned men in Latin".

It is a very useful expression in Swedish. The problem is to find an equivalent English saying that describes the ability to change language and style according to whom you speak with.

The best thing I found so far is originally from Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend:

‘For I aint, you must know,’ said Betty, ‘much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’

The last sentence, He do the Police in different voices, was taken up by T. S. Eliot, who used it as the working title of The Waste Land.

Unfortunately, that phrase is a far cry from Karlfeldt's lines, at least for my purpose to describe someone who is able to adapt his language to the situation. If anyone has any better proposal, feel free to post it.

We are completely cut off, but it does not really matter

Strange that the current eruption of the volcano of Eyjafjallajökull is not more noticeable than it is. All air traffic in Northern Europe is cancelled. And yet, we do not really care. We communicate with family and friends and foes that are thousands of kilometres away as easily as we always do using the internet, even if hardly any physical transport can take place.

Diagnosed psychopaths

In my (fictitious) sister's company, all management went to a psycho-therapy training. Part of the training was a so called ppt test, which unfortunately showed that all managers without exception had psychopathic tendencies. They were therefore all dismissed and sent for urgent treatment.

The company could of course not work without management, so the shareholder's board were in a hurry to employ new managers. To speed up the process, they borrowed the ppt test to quickly identify candidates with the kind of psychological profile they considered desirable.

The Final Language

All the different languages we have in the world today are the evolutionary result of people trying to communicate as efficiently as possible with different starting points. As time goes on, people will select more and more efficient features in their languages. Of course one feature that is efficient in one language may not be efficient in another. For example, Chinese has much fewer possible syllables than English, so it is efficient to add tones to make clearer distinctions between syllables. As English has more syllables, it does not need tones.

Languages will drift around, picking up and dropping features that are efficient for different purposes: clarity, speed, variety. But sooner or later, all languages will reach the ultimate stage, where they have turned into the most efficient language possible. I call this ultimate language Magnusianian Languagistically Perfectissimotasticanianish.

You do not believe such a language will ever appear?

I challenge you. Just wait 20 000 years and see, what the world will come up with.

The Joy of Getting Well

Few things can give you such pleasure as a really annoying illness. It does not matter if it is life threatening or just a cold. The only point is that it shall be annoying. It shall cause you such grief that you can think of nothing else for one or a few days. Pain, fatigue or a runny nose. It is impossible to ignore.

Then you get well. And suddenly the world looks bright again.

If you never had been ill in the first place, it might never have looked bright. The end of your illness is what the world waited for to start looking bright.

From Hanzi to kana to konfusion

Today's language lesson comes from Asia, a continent I like as much as I like all the other continents.

The three characters you see in the column to the left above are Chinese characters - hànzì in Chinese. In Japanese they are called "kanji". The first character, 己, is today pronounced "jǐ". However, a thousand years ago or so, it was probably pronounced more like "ki" or "ke".

The second character, 止, is today pronounced "zhǐ", but back then, it was probably more of "te". The bottom character, 毛, is today pronounced "máo" - yes, like chairman 毛 of the Chinese communist party. A thousand years ago, however, he would probably be called chairman "Maw" or something like that.

That was the first column.

The Japanese, who did not have any writing system themselves 1500 years ago, decided to use the Chinese characters. They took 己 and decided to pronounce it "ko" - almost like the Chinese. However, they decided to simplify 己, and instead wrote コ. Or こ. Likewise they made two different versions of 止: ト and と to write "to". And chairman 毛 was used to write "mo" in the simplified shapes of モ and も. The variants you find in the second column are called "katakana" and the variants you find in the third column are called "hiragana".

Now, you probably guessed what the fourth column is. Yes, it is exactly the same three characters again! It is the hiragana variant written in a font inspired by the 12th century poet and calligrapher Fujiwara no Teika (藤原定家).

The font's name is Kazuraki (かづらき). If you also want to be able to write Japanese in a way so people will not be able to read it, you can buy it from Adobe.

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The above and many other ancient Chinese pronunciations can be found at Rinet. A lot of what we know about ancient Chinese pronunciation comes from the works of Karlgren.