Afternoon nap ...
Okay, so I kept reading about language and thought and came across a fascinating article I had read a few years ago. Chew on this:
A recent set of studies suggests that the grammatical genders assigned to objects by a language do indeed influence people’s mental representations of objects (Boroditsky et al., in press). […] Spanish and German speakers also ascribe more feminine or more masculine proper– ties to objects depending on their grammatical gender. For example, […] to describe a ‘bridge’ […] (a word feminine in German and masculine in Spanish), German speakers said ‘beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender’, while Spanish speakers said ‘big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering’. These findings once again indicate that people’s thinking about objects is influenced by the grammatical genders their native language assigns to the objects’ names. It appears that even a small fluke of grammar (the seemingly arbitrary assignment of a noun to be masculine or feminine) can have an effect on how people think about things in the world.
Light ...
I love our living room in the afternoon.
A Language of Smiles — Olivia Judson Blog — NYTimes.com
A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.
I’ve long been intrigued by the effect of language on thought processes or worldview. For example, the tendency for verbs to end up at the end of German sentences loads a whole lot of meaning in the last words of a sentence, and I wonder how that affects both conversational interruptions and listening habits. I’ve recently been introduced (thanks, Zach) to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity which is, more or less, a scientific inquiry exploring my selfsame thoughts.
I hadn’t thought about language’s effect on emotions; that is equally interesting, but doesn’t seem to have been tested in the same way.
The experiment quoted above, though, fails; it doesn’t explain why I love German and why saying things like “Öl” and “müde” make me happy. 
If Google sells this in the App Store for zero dollars, those millions of bucks Apple makes off of GPS app sales will likely disappear. It’s not for us to worry about until there’s no more GPS competition except Google, and we’re dependent on their pace of progress, but no competition is a bad thing. And it’s a little strange that Google’s search money is going to pay for a free map app that is competitive with stuff that costs $100 a year from full-time GPS makers like TomTom. Unfair is the word that comes to mind. But I can’t say I don’t want this app.
Agreed, on all counts. I wonder if Apple will try to play any differently with this than with other navigation apps since this is Google; does that make it any more “confusingly similar” to the iPhone’s Maps app (driven by Google Maps)? I think not, but I also wouldn’t be confused by a mobile Firefox (Fennec) or Google Voice.
It’s easy to see Google’s (and their users’) advantage in entering a competitive market this way, but yeah, I wouldn’t want to be their competitors either.
It does scare me how much data Google now owns, more in how they ditched their licensors so they could do something like this. But I want this app too.
Not today, which is crummy, but Sunday, which was beautiful!
A few months ago I posted a graph of my music listening and was asked how I produced that.
Andrew Godwin runs a really nice service called LastGraph that creates these graphs based on one’s Last.fm profile data.
Of course, what would this be without a new one? (I had to check it out again, of course.)
Always an interesting view.
WNYC — Radiolab: New Normal? (October 02, 2009)
John Horgan examines how Americans seem to have a completely different attitude toward war than we did thirty years ago. He takes us on a stroll through Hoboken, asking strangers one of the great unanswerable questions: “Will humans ever stop fighting wars?” Strangely, everyone seems to know the answer. Robert Sapolsky brings us farther afield — to eastern Africa, where a population of baboons defies his expectations of violent behavior. Robert is surprised to feel hopeful for a gentler future, but then primatologist Richard Wrangham asserts that their aggressive nature is innate, unchanging, and hanging over them like a guillotine.
Listen:
Fascinating, as this show always is.
I’m curious about the mostly unexplored reasons why we humans feel so differently about the inevitability of war than we did 30 years ago.
And Wrangham makes a good point about genetic inherence — I wouldn’t expect these baboons to be genetically more peaceful, but the environment seems to be prevailing in Sapolsky’s population. “Nature versus nurture?” As ever, the answer would seem to be “Both.”
Happy Halloween! ...
Happy Halloween everyone!