…New York the most linguistically diverse city in the world. […]

While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages — far more than the 176 spoken by students in the city’s public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New York’s most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 census forms. […]

New York is such a rich laboratory for languages on the decline that the City University Graduate Center is organizing an endangered-languages program. […]

In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan); Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands); Irish Gaelic; Kashubian (from Poland); indigenous Mexican languages; Pennsylvania Dutch; Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland); Romany (from the Balkans); and Yiddish.

Researchers plan to canvass a tiny Afghan neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, for Ormuri, which is believed to be spoken by a small number of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan. […]

In northern New Jersey, Neo-Aramaic, rooted in the language of Jesus and the Talmud, is still spoken by Syrian immigrants and is taught at Syriac Orthodox churches in Paramus and Teaneck. […] And on Long Island, researchers have found several people fluent in Mandaic, a Persian variation of Aramaic spoken by a few hundred people around the world.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { “Back to the 50′s” car show at the Minnesota State Fair Grounds }

Are human beings intrinsically good but corruptible by the forces of evil, or the reverse, innately sinful yet redeemable by the forces of good? […]

Until about three million years ago the ancestors of Homo sapiens were mostly vegetarians, and they most likely wandered in groups from site to site where fruit, tubers, and other vegetable food could be harvested. Their brains were only slightly larger than those of modern chimpanzees. By no later than half a million years ago, however, groups of the ancestral species Homo erectus were maintaining campsites with controlled fire — the equivalent of nests — from which they foraged and returned with food, including a substantial portion of meat. Their brain size had increased to midsize, between that of chimpanzees and modern Homo sapiens. The trend appears to have begun one to two million years previously, when the earlier prehuman ancestor Homo habilis turned increasingly to meat in its diet. With groups crowded together at a single site, and an advantage added by cooperative nest building and hunting, social intelligence grew, along with the centers of memory and reasoning in the prefrontal cortex.

Probably at this point, during the habiline period, a conflict ensued between individual-level selection, with individuals competing with other individuals in the same group, versus group-level selection, with competition among groups. The latter force promoted altruism and cooperation among all the group members. It led to group-wide morality and a sense of conscience and honor. The competitor between the two forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.

{ Opinionator/NY Times | Continue reading }

What if we someday learn how to model small brain units, and so can “upload” ourselves into new computer brains? What if this happens before we learn how to make human-level artificial intelligences?

{ Robin Hanson/Extropy, 1994 | Continue reading }

via:

One of the few pieces of evidence I find compelling comes from Mihály Csíkszentmihályi research into the experience he calls “flow.” His work suggests that humans are most productive, and also most satisfied, when they are totally absorbed in a clear but challenging task which they are capable of completing.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

photo { Thomas Prior }

Charles Darwin and Alan Turing, in their different ways, both homed in on the same idea:

the existence of competence without comprehension.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

Recent world tragedies have led to an increased emphasis on the importance of deception training - especially at security checkpoints in airports, bus terminals, and train stations – that is designed to avert potential terrorist attacks. Past research on deception has identified the physiological and behavioral cues that can expose the individual liar, but most major terrorist acts involve two or more coconspirators. […]

 “Deception has been studied as an almost exclusively individual-level phenomenon,” said Tripp Driskell. “You have a hard-nosed detective on one side of a desk and a suspect on the other. But there are many situations today, especially in security settings, in which the opportunity exists to question two or more suspects. The bottom line is that there are many occasions in which people conspire to lie or to deceive. In fact, many terrorist acts are carried out jointly by multiple participants or conspirators, and initial encounters with these suspects are likely to be in a group setting.” 

“We believe that the key to distinguishing truthful dyads from deceptive dyads is the concept of transactive memory,” he continued. “Two people describe an event differently if they had actually performed that event together versus if they did not but are fabricating a story about an event that did not take place. When we are questioned about the event, we recall it also in a joint manner - you recall some information and I recall some information. This is not as evident when two people recall a story that is fabricated or that did not take place.”

{ Human Factors and Ergonomics Society | Continue reading }

Could mirror universes or parallel worlds account for dark matter — the ‘missing’ matter in the Universe? In what seems to be mixing of science and science fiction, a new paper by a team of theoretical physicists hypothesizes the existence of mirror particles as a possible candidate for dark matter. An anomaly observed in the behavior of ordinary particles that appear to oscillate in and out of existence could be from a “hypothetical parallel world consisting of mirror particles,” says a press release from Springer. “Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other.”

{ Universe Today | Continue reading }

photo { Aaron Fowler }

What retail consultants call a Henry: High Earner Not Rich Yet.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever Becomes Even Tougher

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language in which the words for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are ‘da’ and ‘ja’, in some order. You do not know which word means which. […]

His modification is to remove any knowledge about the Gods’ language other than that they all speak the same language and use the same words for yes and no, rather than synonyms.

{ The arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

You know the young Marx – I don’t idealise Marx, he was a nasty guy, personally – but he has a wonderful logic. He says: ‘You don’t simply dissolve marriage; divorce means that you retroactively establish that the love was not the true love.’ When love goes away, you retroactively establish that it wasn’t even true love. […]

For me, the idea of hell is the American type of parties. Or, when they ask me to give a talk, and they say something like, ‘After the talk there will just be a small reception’—I know this is hell. This means all the frustrated idiots, who are not able to ask you a question at the end of the talk, come to you and, usually, they start: ‘Professor Žižek, I know you must be tired, but …’ Well, fuck you. If you know that I am tired, why are you asking me? I’m really more and more becoming Stalinist. Liberals always say about totalitarians that they like humanity, as such, but they have no empathy for concrete people, no? OK, that fits me perfectly. Humanity? Yes, it’s OK—some great talks, some great arts. Concrete people? No, ninety-nine percent are boring idiots. […]

I especially hate when they come to me with personal problems. My standard line is: ‘Look at me, look at my tics, don’t you see that I’m mad? How can you even think about asking a mad man like me to help you in personal problems, no? […]

They claim sex is healthy; it’s good for the heart, for blood circulation, it relaxes you. They even go into how kissing is also good because it develops the muscles here – this is horrible, my God! […]

I like this idea of sex as part of love, you know: ‘I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever.’ There is something nice, transcendent, about it. I remain incurably romantic.

{ Slavoj Žižek | Continue reading }

related/recommended { The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema }

photo { Fernando Gregory }

Unhealthy eating habits don’t develop as a result of instinct; they have to be learned — and a processed-food industry stands ready to teach them.

{ Christine Baumgarthuber | Continue reading }

photos { 1 | 2. Brian Finke }

Body image is a subjective experience of appearance. It’s an accumulation of a lifetime’s associations, neuroses and desires, projected on to our upper arms, our thighs. At five, children begin to understand other people’s judgement of them. At seven they’re beginning to show body dissatisfaction. As adults 90% of British women feel body-image anxiety. And it doesn’t wane – many women in their 80s are still anxious about the way their bodies look which, Professor Rumsey explains, can even affect their treatment in hospital, when their health choices are influenced by aesthetics. […]

We’re no longer comparing ourselves to “local images” – our friends – instead we’re comparing ourselves to social-networked strangers, celebrities, and to Photoshopped images, of which we see around 5,000 a week. […] The problem is not the Photoshopping itself – the problem is that Photoshopped images threaten to replace all others.

{ Eva Wiseman | Continue reading }

polaroid { Robert Whitman }

How might one prove the existence of other universes given that we can experience only this one? […]

What is the world made of? One might answer in terms of the electrons, protons, and neutrons that make up atoms. But what are electrons, protons and neutrons? Quantum physics shows how they are observed to behave like waves as they move about. But on reaching their destination and giving up their energy and momentum they behave like tiny particles. But how can something be both a spread out wave with humps and troughs, and at the same time be a tiny localized particle? This is the famous wave/particle paradox. It afflicts everything, including light.

{ Russell Stannard | Continue reading }

painting { Peter Halley, Delayed Reaction, 1989 }

What’s, in a way, missing in today’s world is more biology of the Internet. More people like Nils Barricelli to go out and look at what’s going on, not from a business or what’s legal point of view, but just to observe what’s going on.

Many of these things we read about in the front page of the newspaper every day, about what’s proper or improper, or ethical or unethical, really concern this issue of autonomous self-replicating codes. What happens if you subscribe to a service and then as part of that service, unbeknownst to you, a piece of self-replicating code inhabits your machine, and it goes out and does something else? Who is responsible for that? And we’re in an increasingly gray zone as to where that’s going.

The most virulent codes, of course, are parasitic, just as viruses are. They’re codes that go out and do things, particularly codes that go out and gather money. Which is essentially what these things like cookies do. They are small strings of code that go out and gather valuable bits of information, and they come back and sell it to somebody. It’s a very interesting situation. You would have thought this was inconceivable 20 or 30 years ago. Yet, you probably wouldn’t have to go … well, we’re in New York, not San Francisco, but in San Francisco, you wouldn’t have to go five blocks to find five or 10 companies whose income is based on exactly that premise. And doing very well at it. […]

In 1945 we actually did create a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. Can they record this interview? Can they play our music? Can they order our books on Amazon? If you cross the mirror in the other direction, there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that’s not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It’s a physical reality. […]

The best example of this is what we call the flash crash of May 6th, two years ago, when suddenly, the whole system started behaving unpredictably. Large amounts of money were lost in milliseconds, and then the money came back, and we quietly (although the SEC held an investigation) swept it under the rug and just said, “well, it recovered. Things are okay.” But nobody knows what happened, or most of us don’t know. […]

What’s the driver today? You want one word? It’s advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it’s the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they’re trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising.

{ George Dyson/Edge | Continue reading }

Suppose in a large city somewhere in the western world, a man discovers on awaking from a two-hour nap that several hundred car accidents had occurred in the city while he slept. He wonders why. […] Something must be wrong with the traffic lights. He concludes that the lights are not working, leaving the drivers to figure out how to negotiate the intersections on their own. […] His wife […] suggests:  “If you came to a traffic light and saw it was not working at all, wouldn’t you slow down and proceed cautiously? In fact, after Hurricane Katrina didn’t people in New Orleans just treat broken traffic lights like four-way stops, without explicit direction to do so?” […] It’s not that the traffic lights were not functioning at all, but rather they were all green. […] Not only do green lights mean go, they also mean that the cross-traffic has stopped. […]

Not only was it not a dream, it was the reality of the post-2001 boom that generated the financial crisis and Great Recession. The Austrian economist Israel Kirzner has long used traffic lights as an analogy for prices. In the case of the boom and bust, the key price was the interest rate.  […] When the central bank intervenes, however, it turns all the lights green.

{ The Freeman | Continue reading }

photo { Lee Friedlander }

Queuing theory is the study of lines. All kinds of lines. The lines at supermarket checkouts, the lines at toll booths, the lines of people on hold waiting for someone, anyone, to pick up at the cable company’s 1-800 number. […]

Since the mid-20th century, queuing theory has been more about feelings than formulas. For example: Midcentury New York featured a rush-hour crisis—not out on the roads, but inside office tower lobbies. There weren’t enough elevators to handle the peak crowds. Complaints were mounting. “One solution would have been to dynamite the buildings and build more elevator shafts,” says Larson. “But someone figured out the real problem isn’t just the duration of a delay. It’s how you experience that duration.” Some buildings installed floor-to-ceiling mirrors near the elevators and, entertained by their own reflections and by the flirting that sometimes ensued, people stopped complaining quite as much about the wait time.

There are three givens of human nature that queuing psychologists must address: 1) We get bored when we wait in line. 2) We really hate it when we expect a short wait and then get a long one. 3) We really, really hate it when someone shows up after us but gets served before us.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

Americans spend a ton of time commuting. According to happiness researchers, commuting is the low point of the typical day. If you look at the jobs that people actually do, though, it’s hard to understand why so many workers continue to commute. Given a computer and high-speed Internet, most desk jobs could now be done from home – or so it seems. Telecommuting wouldn’t just save workers time, frustration, and fuel; it would also let firms drastically reduce their overhead – and pass the savings along to their customers.[…]

[Alas,] workers physically commute for signaling reasons. Employers can monitor your productivity better when you actually come to the office. Workers who telecommute put themselves on the slow track to success – if they can even get hired in the first place.

{ EconLib | OvercomingBias | Continue reading }

photo { Michal Pudelka }

I’ve always been not only a “late adopter” but a “panicky retreater” when it comes to new media, and the something that should be said about when I first went online—which was early enough that I remember watching Web sites load as if being painted on the other side of a glass—was that I also immediately went offline. As I still often do.

{ Jonathan Lethem/The New Yorker | Continue reading }

photo { Vivian Maier }

Imagine someone of the type we call neurotic in common parlance. He is wiry, looks contorted, and speaks with an uneven voice. His neck moves around when he tries to express himself. When he has a small pimple his first reaction is to assume that it is cancerous, that the cancer is of the lethal type, and that it has already spread. […] In the office, he is tuned to every single possible detail, systematically transforming every molehill into a mountain. The last thing you want in life is to be in the same car with him when stuck in traffic on your way to an important appointment. The expression overreact was designed with him in mind: he does not have reactions, just overreactions.

Compare him to someone with the opposite temperament, imperturbable, with the calm under fire that is considered necessary to become a leader, military commander or a mafia godfather. Usually unruffled and immune to small information —they can impress you with their self-control in difficult circumstances. For a sample of a composed, calm and pondered voice, listen to interviews of “Sammy the Bull” Salvatore Gravano who was involved in the murder of nineteen people (all competing mobsters). He speaks with minimal effort. In the rare situations when he is angry, unlike with the neurotic fellow, everyone knows it and takes it seriously.

The supply of information to which we are exposed under modernity is transforming humans from the equable second fellow to the neurotic first. For the purpose of our discussion, the second fellow only reacts to real information, the first largely to noise. The difference between the two fellows will show us the difference between noise and signal. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore; signal what you need to heed. […]

A not well discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities —even in moderate quantities.

{ Nassim Taleb | Continue reading }

{ The publishing and design communities now know that a printed magazine can not only be used to kill at will, but as particularly efficient tool for political assassinations. | Adam Rothstein/The New Inquiry | full story }

David Dunning and Justin Kruger (both at Cornell University’s Department of Psychology at the time) conducted a series of four studies showing that, in certain cases, people who are very bad at something think they are actually pretty good. They showed that to assess your own expertise at something, you need to have a certain amount of expertise already. […]

It is important to realize that the Dunning-Kruger paper was not such a shocking finding. It was, for instance, already known that seemingly everyone evaluates themselves as above average in everything.

{ Ars Technica | Continue reading }

artwork { Dan Witz, ABC No Rio, 2011 }