Why simplify when you can beautify language?

New research has shown that all languages evolve to be as efficient as possible. That is both trivial and wrong. And right, as well, of course. When we're in a hurry to convey an important message, we try to apply as many shortcuts we can without losing meaning, thereby making language efficient.

However, sometimes languages do not communicate efficiently but beautifully.

For example, the Roman poet Horace (65 BC - 8 BC) ends a poem thus:

... Me tabula sacer
votiva paries indicat uvida
suspendisse potenti
vestimenta maris deo.

A word for word translation would be something like this:
"My tablet sacred votive wall shows wet (I) hang dominating clothes sea god."

However, applying some knowledge of Latin word forms, it is clear that the actual meaning could be conveyed with a word order that is easier to grasp in English:
"The votive tablet on the sacred wall shows that I hang up my wet clothes to the god who dominates the sea."

Added colours may hint which parts of the poem belong together:

... Me tabula sacer
votiva paries indicat uvida
suspendisse potenti
vestimenta maris deo.

No efficiency in the poem, but beauty nevertheless.

Another writer with a sense for unexpected word order is the Icelander Sigvatr Þórðarson (995 - 1045), who has the following verse in his Austrfararvísur:

Oss hafa augu þessi
íslenzk, kona, vísat
brattan stíg at baugi
björtum langt en svörtu.

The original word order:

"Us have eyes these Icelandic, woman, shown uphill road to the ring bright long and black."

Again, one first has to study Old Icelandic grammar for a few months to figure it out: 

"These black, Icelandic eyes, have shown us, woman, the long uphill road to the bright ring."

I love the way he throws in "svörtu", black, at the end, as if he had forgotten about it until then. These Icelandic eyes have.... oh, they were black, by the way. Another nifty thing is the assonance between "svörtu" and "björtum", bright. And the contrast between black and bright. And the alliteration between "brattan", "baugi" and "björtum".

All in all both Horace and Sigvatr knew what they were doing in their inefficient writing.

How Successful People Brush Their Teeth

Are you successful? Did you ever become CEO of a Fortune 100 company that sold a billion smartphones on the North Korean market? Did you ever play bagpipe on the moon? Did you invent cheese?

I thought not. Did you ever ask yourself why? What is it that makes truly successful people different from you?

I am convinced it is that it is in the way they brush their teeth. It is a daily (or at least weekly) task where one can go wrong in so many ways.

The first challenge is the tooth paste. Where should it go? A survey of an unfathomable number of successful business executives showed that a majority of them applied the toothpaste on the bristles. You may have thought that the toothpaste should go in the little hole at the end, but no. That hole is there just to hang the toothbrush on a hook (purchased separately). 

The second question is how to hold the toothbrush. Successful people have a tendency to hold it in the handle end. Hardly any clasped the bristles. 

The third and most crucial bit is where to apply the toothbrush. It turns out that of the people who put it up their nostril, not a single one figured on a list of America's most well paid entrepreneurs. No, you should put it in your mouth. That's what successful people do. 

Then it is just a matter of brushing away, and wait for the first million dollars to arrive at your executive corporate bank account. 

Music in Public - Legal Status

It is clearly just an oversight from the law makers that there is no law to explicitly allow you to take action against people playing  loud music in public on radios or phones or other music devices. To make it easier for law makers, here is my proposed list of actions that should be allowed and actions that should be forbidden, when someone plays loud music in public. 

Should be allowed:

* Remove the device from its owner and switch it off. 

* Unplug the device, if connected to the electric net. 

* Confiscate the batteries of the device. 

* Confiscate the device. 

* Throw the device in a bin. 

* Throw the device in a river, lake or the sea, if available. 

* Throw the device against the ground. 

* Repeatedly smash the device against rocks, walls or other music devices. 

* Jump on the device with spiked shoes. 

* Jump on the device with clogs. 

* Hit the device repeatedly with any hard object, like a hammer, a stone or the Koh-i-Noor diamond. 

* Procure a military tank and repeatedly run over the device, until it is paper thin.

* Bury the device in a deep mine and cover it with nuclear waste. 

* Launch the device into space to orbit one of the outer planets.

* Grind the device to a thin powder and spread it over a haunted cemetery. 

Should be forbidden:

* Nothing.

Biology of Species That do Not Exist

People may consider biology a science too much down to earth to be exciting. There are admittedly plenty of exciting things in the world of the living, but the one boring thing they have in common is that they exist.

Luckily, there are some biologists who leave all reason behind them and research interesting things that most likely do not exist at all - cryptids.

Cryptozoology

Cryptozoologists study animals that are rumoured to exist, like the yeti and the Loch Ness monster and the gorilla. The gorilla is of course no longer studied by cryptozoologists as its discovery in the real world 1847 proved that it actually existed - to the cryptic community's big disappointment.

Cryptobotany

Cryptobotanists spend their time studying plants that do not exist, like Vampire Vine or Man-eating trees. They also try to find the Balkan raskovnik (Serbian: расковник), which is a magical herb that can uncover anything according to legend. What really makes the raskovnik mysterious to me is that it is supposed to be a grass that looks like a four-leaf clover, which means that it would be both monocot and dicot at the same time. It will be so annoying for Darwin, if they find one.

Future Animals

I recently learnt of a project by the palaeontologist Sébastien Steyer and the paleo-artist Marc Boulay, which is to describe animals that will evolve in the future. It is very possible that they will be right in some of the things they describe, and in less than a few million years, we may be able to tell.

"De Monocerote: figura haec talis est, qualis a pictoribus fere hodie pingitur, de qua certi nihil habeo." - "The unicorn - as it is usually painted. I have no clue myself." 

Konrad Genser: ''Historiae animalium'', 1551

Source: Wikipedia

Geometry - nothing more than a theory

I had enough of all that celebration of pi day yesterday. After all, geometry is just a theory. Mathematicians like Euclid and Lobachevsky have different ideas of the value of pi, and if the professionals do not agree, I think everyone should be allowed to make up their own mind. Geometry is definitely nothing to trust. Well, to be honest, I am not sure if it is just a theory, or if it is a hoax, like the moon landings.

The Original Villain Organ

For some reason villains in movies have a tendency to play the organ. It was only recently that I started asking myself why. Couldn't the villains' guild instrument equally well have been the saxophone or the kazoo? Do villains have to pass a test to prove that they can play the organ before they are allowed to be really evil?

And where does the idea come from? Who was the first villain with an organ? I spent the usual superficial 10 minutes on google and came up with no convincing answer.

One candidate on the screen would be Lon Chaney in the 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera, based on the novel from 1910. However, if we count captain Nemo as a villain, he played the organ already in 1870, in Jules Verne's book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin).

More research is clearly needed in this area.

Captain Nemo playing the organ. 

(Image credits: Alphonse de Neuville, Edouard Riou, Nick Hobgood and Wikipedia. And me who cut and pasted.)

Shopping Dystopia - Automatically

A few years ago, one needed a good camera to take good pictures. Nowadays, I can still take some good pictures with a powerful high end camera that I could never have taken with my smartphone. However, on average, my smartphone takes better photos than I do. Once I have framed a motive, the smartphone uses plenty of smart logic to tweak all the settings to get a decent result. I can tweak the setting on a high end camera, but for trivial photos, my logic is often not as quick as my smart phone.

It seems a computer is outwitting me.

What if this happens with shopping as well?

A big social network has recently started a service called "Nearby Friends". To use that one, the user needs to activate "Location History". For now, that will not be used for marketing or targeted ads, but that is likely to come.

At first I was outraged and considered this yet another invasion of my privacy. But what if they are right? What if they can use all the information they have about me to produce really well targeted ads. I will no longer see any ads for knitwear, and the ads I see everywhere on the internet will all be about things that interest me, like Maroille cheese and Cantonese dictionaries. That would save such a lot of time for me.

Perhaps, they can go one step further. Perhaps they can shop for me using artificial intelligence. I do not even have to read the ads. I just sit back, and some huge computer company will place orders for me. Just before I run out of toilet paper, there will be a knock on the door from someone delivering toilet paper, ordered for me by this company. At my birthday, I will get a surprise present I did not know I wanted, but which the computer company knew I would love to give myself.

The really worrying thing will be when I prepare to go out to my favourite fish restaurant, and someone turns up to deliver antihistamine before I leave.

Geographic Curiosities - Distances between the New and the Old World

Which North American country is closest to Africa? Answer: Canada.

St. Johns - Casablanca: 4051 km

Which American state is closest to Africa? Answer: Maine.

Lubec, Maine - Bu Jaydur: 5095 km

Which American state is closest to Bosaso in Somalia? Answer: Alaska.

Wainwright, Alaska -Bosaso: 10650 km

For almost all of Africa, the closest American state is Maine, but Bosaso is one of the few exceptions. 

Lubec, Maine - Bosaso: 11103 km

Maps and data from WolframAlpha.

Aleksandr Zinoviev on Convictions and Intellectual Maturity

The Russian author Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zinoviev (Александр Александрович Зиновьев) was famous in the seventies and eighties for his irreverent analysis of the Soviet system and the Soviet citizens. What he did not seem to fully realise himself, not even after he was exiled to the West in 1978, was that much of his descriptions of shortcomings of the Soviet system equally well could be applied to describe a capitalist system or in fact any human system.

We humans work according to very similar mechanisms whether we are part of a Soviet state, a Soviet communist party, a Western conservative party, a military organisation, a big corporation, a religious organisation or, sometimes, a family at a Saturday picnic in the city park.

One of my favourite passages in Zinoviev's writing is the short chapter about convictions in his Homo Sovieticus. Here it is in Charles Janson's translation:

Philosophical Convictions and Behavioural Stereotypes

And here’s yet another mystery for you: what I’m saying here doesn’t express my convictions. And, what is more, it’s only an apparent mystery: I haven’t got any convictions. I’ve only got a more or less stable reaction to everything I bump up against: a behavioural stereotype. Convictions are something Western man has, not Soviet man. Instead of having convictions the latter has a “stereotype of behaviour”. This doesn’t presuppose any convictions, and so it’s compatible with every sort of conviction. When you confuse convictions with behavioural stereotypes without convictions, you get many misunderstandings, and strange ideas arise among Westerners about Soviet behaviour. If somebody else were to say what I am saying, I would start arguing with him. If you want to get at the truth, the first thing to do is to get into an argument with yourself. But I say this not from conviction, but in order to be witty, because I am not concerned with the truth either.

If a man has convictions it is a sign that he is not intellectually mature. Convictions are only a compensation for not being able to understand a given phenomenon quickly and accurately in its concrete manifestation. They are a priory guides to how one should behave in a concrete situation without understanding its concreteness. A man with convictions is rigid, dogmatic, tedious and, as a rule, stupid. But more often convictions have no effect on people's behaviour. They merely beautify vanity, relieve unclear consciences and cover up stupidity.

And for those of you who want to attempt making friends at parties by quoting the central argument in Russian, here it is: Человек с убеждениями негибок, догматичен, зануден и, как правило, глуп. Make sure you stress the last word, глуп, pronounced "glupp". It means "stupid".

Information missing from Wikipedia

Recently I wanted to know more about Jean d'Ormesson. You know. The member of the Académie Française since 1973 and author of dozens of books, one of the more important French authors the last sixty years. Logically, I went to Wikipedia. English Wikipedia has an article of 5,775 bytes about him. To get a little more information I went to French Wikipedia, which has a much bigger article with 31,755 bytes. I read it, and re-read it, and then my mind drifted off. Suddenly there was something I wanted to know about The Simpsons. You know. That American cartoon. The Simpsons article is 122,973 bytes, four times as big as the article about d'Ormesson on French Wikipedia and more than twenty times bigger than d'Ormesson's article on English Wikipedia.

This is a cartoon, we are talking about. A television cartoon, and there is apparently twenty times more interesting things to write about it than there is about the life of an 88 year living French classic author. At least in English.

Admittedly d'Ormesson is not English and not all his books have been translated to English. So what about an English author, like Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the David Cohen prize and many others? His Wikipedia article is 18,366 bytes long - a seventh of The Simpson's article.

But that is not all. There are 45 articles about different Simpson characters and more than 500 for different Simpson episodes. Not even a dozen of Julian Barnes' books got their own Wikipedia on English Wikipedia.

I do not know what this says about Wikipedia editors, about our society and its priorities or the mechanisms behind sharing information.

But it is clear that anyone who thinks that Wikipedia already contains all needed and relevant information is much mistaken.