Ugggghhh and Early Education

Saying 'um's' and 'ah's' seems to be something that we all do - even those who don't indulge in changing their neurons through smokables. If, we all, or most of us do it, there must be some evolutionary reason that brings out and justifies the existence of such behavior.

Um, it helps kids learn
“Do you pepper your speech with ‘um’ and ‘uh’?” Parenting asks. “While the habit won’t do you any good in a job interview, it’s a real advantage for teaching your toddler new words. University of Rochester researchers found that when children hear their parents’ stumbles and hesitations (scientific name: disfluencies), it sends a signal that they should pay attention because they’re about to learn something new. ‘A toddler hears a lot of new words when listening to adults, and if his or her brain doesn’t start processing until after the new word is spoken, learning becomes a much more difficult task,’ says Richard Aslin … one of the study’s authors.”

One issue to explore now is why such behavior is now seen as a sign of non-professionalism or social awkwardness? What historical forces put saying 'um' on the trajectory of impolite behavior?

Another related issue concerns other unprofessional behavior and its social or evolutionary utility. Does or Did faking sick or being tardy have some yet-to-be-seen utility? We can only wait breathlessly for science to deliver the answer.

A Disdain for Silence that Necessitates the Verbalization of Every Moment of One's Thinking + A slow thinking brain that requires time to move to the next word = Unprofessional or Non-Polite Conduct

That Same Disdain + That same Slow-Thinking Brain + Children = Intelligent and Cued in Offspring

Who Cares What Mona Lisa is Smiling About?

I always thought that the Mona Lisa was overrated.
Hot? - No.
Bright, Eye Appealing Colors? - No.
So reading this made me feel a little more smug and self-satisfied.

From a Wall Street Journal review of Everything Is Obvious, by Duncan Watts: “Mr. Watts asks why the Mona Lisa is the most admired painting in the world today – why most people believe it to possess unique, timeless features that set it apart. Before the 20th century, the Mona Lisa wasn’t even the most popular painting in the Louvre. But in 1911 it was stolen, smuggled to Italy and exhibited widely before being returned to France, whereupon Marcel Duchamp defaced a reproduction of it and labelled his work with an obscene pun. The painting rocketed to fame, its pigments and brushstrokes unchanged. The Mona Lisa is the artistic equivalent of the investor who did nothing special until he got lucky a few years (or quarters) in a row and was feted as a genius.

Lazy Belgians

Mexicans work longest, Belgians the Shortest

“Mexicans work the longest days and Belgians the shortest, according to a study of 29 industrialized countries released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development,” Reuters reports. “The stereotype of a laid-back manana culture was turned on its head by the OECD’s Society at a Glance study, which showed Mexicans toil for 10 hours a day on average in paid and unpaid work, such as household chores. Belgians work just seven, an hour less than the average in most other OECD countries.”

Houses - Modern and Pre-Modern

Interesting Stuff About Houses from The Globe And Mail

Homes, room by room

“Centuries ago, there was no such thing as a kitchen, a living room or a bedroom for anyone but the rich,” BBC News Magazine says. “There was a central hearth for warmth and to cook food, with straw-filled pallets laid on the floor for sleeping.” Lucy Worsley, curator of Historic Royal Palaces, explains how rooms emerged. – Living room: Aristocrats had living rooms in the Tudor period. Middling people started to get them in the 17th century, and in the 18th century everybody aspired to having such a room. The concept of taste had arrived.

– Bedroom: Once communal, today the bedroom is a private retreat. “In medieval times, your main concerns were to be warm and safe, so it was delightful to be in with other people. Since then we’ve seen a trend toward privacy, which started with the rise of reading,” she says.

– Kitchen: Once purely functional, the kitchen has been changed into a social space. In medieval times it was the central hearth, the heart of the home.

– Bathroom: The youngest room in the house. It has only become a separate room in the past 100 years. “People didn’t used to think that going to the loo was a private matter. Samuel Pepys, in 17th-century London, had a ‘closed stool’ – a velvet-covered seat that stood over your chamber pot – that he was very proud of. He kept his in his drawing room,” Ms. Worsley says.

The Easiest Way To Do Something

Sometimes the best way to do something is often just the easiest.

Early man made stone axes by sharpening stones, embedding them in the trunks of young trees, and waiting for the trees to grow around the stone, gripping it securely. Then the tree would be felled and the excess wood cut away, leaving behind a ready-made axe complete with fitted handle.

When we think of natural conditions of man our mind tends to wander to a world of fierce competition for the few precious pieces of sustenance in the local environment. Its nice to think that at least one tribe was laying back, taking it easy whilst waiting for the natural band-aiding like coverage of our coniferous friends to fasten nature's kung-fu grip.

What did ancient man get for his/her laziness? An uninbubitably kick ass weapon.

Further, it has been noted in various studies of medieval sources (first hand and intermediate)axe-head from handle detachment whilst the warrior's hand is swung back and in striking position with war cry being yelled during a high-stake, hotly-contested battle is in the top three of hand-to-hand combat's most disconcertingly emabarrasing moments.

On a biological note: The annual rate of growth for trees is 7.5 cm a year. At that rate, one could expect a hunting-fit hatchet no sooner than 2.3 years.

Go Sports!

With the World Cup engaging the world at the present moment, I hear lots of the boorish and idiotic argument that attempt discrimination between worthwhile and non-worthwhile sports. Baseball is not worthy because .... Soccer is .... I won't attempt to repeat these are they are mind-bogglingly ethnocentric and close-minded.

Here's a word from Alistair McIntyre on what constitutes a worthwhile activity or practice ...

By a 'practice' I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended (AV, 187).

Possible Equation

complex behavior + cooperative human activity multiplied by internal goods and levels of excellence + achievable levels of human excellence = worthwhile human activity

So, all sports contain this internal logic. Counting blades of grass does not. In counting grass, you usually perform the task alone (because your crazy), there's no recognized levels of excellence (you can't get much better at it) and its none the too complex. You could theoretically add these things to grass counting and it would become a sport. Throw in body checking and it would become a contact sport.

So basically, the sport you grew up with and were embedded in the practice and culture thereof and internalized the standards of excellence therein becomes ipso facto the best sport there is. Of course, you could be an American and like cricket for example, but chances are that you are a difficult and contrarian personality who has a thirst for ragging on the home grown stuff.

In following MacIntyre, this is not relatavism. People can clearly discriminate between grass cutting and baseball. Likewise, people can clearly disriminate between fine dining and microwaveable food. Fine dining is embedded in a rich culinary practice, microwaveable cooking lacks this context.

How Do We Point Out Particulars

How do we talk of particular things?

This is a very basic question, maybe one that concerns philosophy at its best. Peter Strawson claims that we can talk fish out the logical necessities of the structure required to talk about particular things by referring everything back to the present moment of space and time.

Space and time is a unifying structure that links every particular with every other. We want to refer to Aristotle, we know at this present moment of space and time it is now, refer to our internal or an external calendar to get a sense of the 5th century BC when he lived, and maybe even look at picture of him to get an idea of what he looked like. But, what is necessary, is too relate everything to this current space and time moment, and show the relative space current to that.

What happens when this system appears to break down. For example, a speaker and listener are talking and the speaker refers to 'a boy and a man standing at a train station', 'the man then proceeds to sit down'. In this case, we put quotation marks around the story. We can't relate these particular things 1) the train station, 2) the boy, 3) the man to anything in space and time as we do not know the exact location of things or the thime that they occured. So, we must, put quotation marks around these particulars. So, for the listener, the quotation marks put the particular not square in reality but in a frame held by the speaker. The speaker, unless he is making up the story, does not need these quotation marks. He can sufficiently locate these thing within reality.

So what happens when he get something like a phrase "the first dog born at sea". We can make sense of this phrase. It is logically sensible and conceivable. But, we don't know where and when the first dog was born at sea. We can not place it within the logical framework. Strawson argues, however, that it is not completely detached from out talk of particulars grounded in space and time (which in turn can be traced back to the present moment). We can make sense of talking about dogs because we know of other particular dogs, likewise the sea and 'being born'. We could not make sense of the sentence if we could not refer back to any particulars.