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caelengrubb

How Isaac Newton Changed the World | Live Science - 0 views

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  • To the probable dismay of some befuddled calculus and physics students the world over, Isaac Newton didn't just live, he grew up and lived long enough to become the single-most influential scientist of the 17th-century.
  • Newton's wide range of discoveries, from his theories of optics to his groundbreaking work on the laws of motion and gravity, formed the basis for modern physics.
  • The true genius of his work, experts think, is how he ultimately took those theories and applied them to the universe at large, explaining the motions of the Sun and planets in a way that had never been done before.
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  • Upon getting bumped on the head by a falling apple, Newton airily dreams up the laws of gravity and the rest, as they say, is history
  • When the black plague closed Cambridge University, where he was a student, for two years starting in 1665, he spent the long months locked up at home studying complex mathematics, physics and optics.
  • It was during this fruitful time that Newton, with the help of a crystal prism, became the first to discover that white light is made up a spectrum of colors
  • He also developed the concept of infinite-series calculus, the kind of scary math studied today by engineering and statistics scholars.
  • By 1666, Newton had even laid the blueprints for his three laws of motion, still recited by physics students everywhere:An object will remain in a state of inertia unless acted upon by force.The relationship between acceleration and applied force is F=ma.For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
  • Across the pages of the Principia, Newton breaks down the workings of the solar system into "'simple"' equations, explaining away the nature of planetary orbits and the pull between heavenly bodies.
caelengrubb

Universe Is Created, According to Kepler - HISTORY - 0 views

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  • On April 27, 4977 B.C., the universe is created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science
  • Kepler is best known for his theories explaining the motion of planets.
  • Kepler’s main project was to investigate the orbit of Mars.
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  • When Brahe died the following year, Kepler took over his job and inherited Brahe’s extensive collection of astronomy data, which had been painstakingly observed by the naked eye
  • Over the next decade, Kepler learned about the work of Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who had invented a telescope with which he discovered lunar mountains and craters, the largest four satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, among other things
  • In 1609, Kepler published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion, which held that planets move around the sun in ellipses, not circles (as had been widely believed up to that time), and that planets speed up as they approach the sun and slow down as they move away.
  • Kepler’s research was slow to gain widespread traction during his lifetime, but it later served as a key influence on the English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and his law of gravitational force
  • Additionally, Kepler did important work in the fields of optics, including demonstrating how the human eye works, and math.
  • As for Kepler’s calculation about the universe’s birthday, scientists in the 20th century developed the Big Bang theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7 billion years.
caelengrubb

How Galileo Galilei's discoveries helped create modern science - 0 views

www.zmescience.com/...ilei-life-achievements-feature

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  • Few people in history can claim as large a contribution to how we conduct and think about science as Galileo. His work revolutionized our entire outlook on what it means to study nature (and got him in some very hot water with the Roman Inquisition)
  • He is perhaps best known for his championing of Copernicus’ heliocentric model (the one that says the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun), but that is by no means the full extent of his legacy. Far, far from it.
  • Galileo earned himself a place among the stars as Europe’s global navigation satellite system bears his name
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  • Galileo is certainly among the titans of science — in many ways, he’s one of its ‘founders’. His legacy includes contributions to the fields of physics, astronomy, math, engineering, and the application of the scientific method
  • He was an accomplished mathematician and inventor, designing (among others) several military compasses and the thermoscope. He was also the one to pick up the torch of modern astronomy from Copernicus, cementing the foundations of this field of study by proving his theories right.
  • Showing others what science can do, and how one should go about it, is Galileo’s most important achievement. Its effects still ripple through the lives of every researcher to this day
  • Since the days of Aristotle, scholars in Europe believed that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. Galileo showed that this wasn’t the case, using balls of the same materials but different weights and sizes. In one of his infamous experiments, he dropped two such balls from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa to show that objects of different weights accelerate just as fast towards the ground (air resistance notwithstanding).
  • The truth is Galileo’s experiments in this area used a more reliable but less flashy bunch of inclined planes that he rolled balls down on.
  • His interest regarding motion and the falling of objects were tightly linked to Galileo’s interest in planets, stars, and the solar system.
  • Apart from his theoretical pursuits, Galileo was also an accomplished engineer — meaning he could also turn his knowledge to the solving of practical problems. Most of these, historical accounts tell us, were attempts by Galileo to earn a little bit of extra cash in order to support his extended family after his father passed away.
  • Among his creations are a set of military compasses (sectors) that were simple enough for artillery crews and surveyors to use.
  • He was also an early builder and user of telescopes and microscopes. Galileo, among a few select others, was the first to ever use a refracting telescope as an instrument to observe heavenly bodies, in 1609
  • His fascination with celestial bodies and defense of the heliocentric model is what eventually led to the Inquisition cracking down on him and his works.
caelengrubb

How Galileo Changed Your Life - Biography - 0 views

www.biography.com/...ories-modern-physics-astronomy

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  • Galileo’s contributions to the fields of astronomy, physics, mathematics, and philosophy have led many to call him the father of modern science.
  • But his controversial theories, which impacted how we see and understand the solar system and our place within it, led to serious conflict with the Catholic Church and the long-time suppression of his achievements
  • Galileo developed one of the first telescopesGalileo didn’t invent the telescope — it was invented by Dutch eyeglass makers — but he made significant improvements to it.
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  • His innovations brought him both professional and financial success. He was given a lifetime tenure position at the University of Padua, where he had been teaching for several years, at double his salary.
  • And he received a contract to produce his telescopes for a group of Venetian merchants, eager to use them as a navigational tool.
  • He helped created modern astronomyGalileo turned his new, high-powered telescope to the sky. In early 1610, he made the first in a remarkable series of discoveries.
  • While the scientific doctrine of the day held that space was perfect, unchanging environments created by God, Galileo’s telescope helped change that view
  • His studies and drawings showed the Moon had a rough, uneven surface that was pockmarked in some places, and was actually an imperfect sphere
  • He was also one of the first people to observe the phenomena known as sunspots, thanks to his telescope which allowed him to view the sun for extended periods of time without damaging the eye.
  • Galileo helped prove that the Earth revolved around the sunIn 1610, Galileo published his new findings in the book Sidereus Nuncius, or Starry Messenger, which was an instant success
  • He became close with a number of other leading scientists, including Johannes Kepler. A German astronomer and mathematician, Kepler’s work helped lay the foundations for the later discoveries of Isaac Newton and others.
  • Kepler’s experiments had led him to support the idea that the planets, Earth included, revolved around the sun. This heliocentric theory, as well as the idea of Earth’s daily rotational turning, had been developed by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus half a century earlier
  • Their belief that the Sun, and not the Earth, was the gravitational center of the universe, upended almost 2,000 years of scientific thinking, dating back to theories about the fixed, unchanging universe put forth by the Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle.
  • Galileo had been testing Aristotle’s theories for years, including an experiment in the late 16th century in which he dropped two items of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, disproving Aristotle’s belief that objects would fall at differing speeds based on their weight (Newton later improved upon this work).
  • Galileo paid a high price for his contributionsBut challenging the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic theories about the Earth’s role in the universe was dangerous stuff.
  • Geocentrism was, in part, a theoretical underpinning of the Roman Catholic Church. Galileo’s work brought him to the attention of Church authorities, and in 1615, he was called before the Roman Inquisition, accused of heresy for beliefs which contradicted Catholic scripture.
  • The following year, the Church banned all works that supported Copernicus’ theories and forbade Galileo from publicly discussing his works.
  • In 1632, after the election of a new pope who he considered more liberal, he published another book, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, which argued both sides of the scientific (and religious) debate but fell squarely on the side of Copernicus’ heliocentrism.
  • Galileo was once again summoned to Rome. In 1633, following a trial, he was found guilty of suspected heresy, forced to recant his views and sentenced to house arrest until his death in 1642.
  • It took nearly 200 years after Galileo’s death for the Catholic Church to drop its opposition to heliocentrism.
  • In 1992, after a decade-long process and 359 years after his heresy conviction, Pope John Paul II formally expressed the Church’s regret over Galileo’s treatment.
caelengrubb

I'm So Totally Over Newton's Laws of Motion | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...im-totally-newtons-laws-motion

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  • We don't need to be stuck with the traditions of the past if we want students to understand physics.
  • Newton's First Law: An object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by a force. An object at rest, stays at rest unless acted on by a force.Newton's Second Law: The magnitude of an object's acceleration is proportional to the net force and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.Newton's Third Law: For every force there is an equal and opposite force. (I've already complained about the way most books talk about this one)
  • Newton's First Law Is Really About Aristotle
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  • Remember that before Galileo and Newton, people looked to Aristotle for ideas about physics
  • Yes, it's true that Aristotle wasn't a scientist since he didn't really do any experiments. However, that didn't stop him from become a huge influence on the way people think about physics
  • Do I think that we should ban Newton's Laws? No. There is still a place to talk about the historical development of the interaction between forces and matter and Newton played a large role here (but so did Aristotle and Galileo
  • Let's write down Newton's Second Law in its common form as an equation:Although this is a very useful model, it doesn't always work. If you take a proton moving at half the speed of light and push on it with a force, you cannot use this to find the new velocity of the proton---but it's still a great model. So, maybe we shouldn't call it a Law.
  • Science is all about models. If there is one thing I've tried to be consistent about---it's that we build models in science. These models could be conceptual, physical, or mathematical
  • Since Newton's ideas are Laws, does that mean that they are true? No---there is no truth in science, there are just models. Some models work better than others, and some models are wrong but still useful
  • Just because most physics textbooks (but not all) have been very explicit about Newton's Laws of Motion, this doesn't mean that is the best way for students to learn.
caelengrubb

The scientific method can't save us from the coronavirus - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ethod-cant-save-us-coronavirus

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  • The scientific method can’t save us — because it doesn’t exist.
  • there is no such thing as “the scientific method,” no single set of steps or one-size-fits-all solution to the problems we face.
  • Ask any scientist: what they do, individually and collectively, is too diverse, too dynamic, too difficult to follow one recipe.
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  • But its nonexistence has never dampened the scientific method’s appeal. And now, in the face of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the question of who is (or is not) adhering to the scientific method feels more urgent than ever.
  • Fictional or not, “the scientific method” seems to offer safety in unsafe times.
  • The novel coronavirus causing the current crisis presents a multidimensional challenge — to personal, public, economic and mental health. There is no single tool with which to confront such a threat; what we need is a vast tool kit.
  • Luckily, scientists know this. Science is about staying flexible, trying out a variety of tools as the questions we try to answer change before our eyes. It is a process, not a product
  • In 1910, the philosopher and psychologist John Dewey published a brief introduction to thinking in general, based on research at the Laboratory School he had founded at the University of Chicago.
  • If you paid attention, Dewey argued, you saw that children were already scientific thinkers — they were creative, they solved problems, they worked together. Science came naturally to them.
  • Dewey emphasized that science was all around us and that was its strength
  • Finally, Dewey contended that science evolves. Constant change is how organisms keep up with their environments; the same is true for science. Facts matter, but not as much as flexibility
  • But Dewey’s list wasn’t meant to be the scientific method. He advocated flexibility, not stasis, and saw science as a continuation of everyday problem-solving
  • Pointing to the scientific method, which so many are doing with the best of intentions, misses the thing that gives science its power: scale. Science is too big for one set of steps — and too big to fail
  • The phrase “the scientific method” implies something special, static and solitary. But the history of the scientific method as it emerged last century reveals something familiar, adaptive and social. Science is human, in other words, just like the scientists who do it every day
caelengrubb

Opinion | There Is No Scientific Method - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-is-no-scientific-method.html

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  • Maybe the method on which science relies exists wherever we find systematic investigation. In saying there is no scientific method, what I mean, more precisely, is that there is no distinctly scientific method.
  • Our knowledge separates into layers: Experience provides a base for a higher layer of more conceptual understanding. This is as true for poetry as for science.
  • Suppose you and I try to define courage. We would begin with the meaning that is familiar to both of us. This shared meaning will be used to check proposed definitions and provide typical examples of it. Commonly, we may not be able to explain what something is, but we know it when we see it
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  • Yet we wouldn’t accept such a definition even if it itemized every possible exception. Why? Because, from a different point of view, this definition is inadequate: not because it fails to bring the meaning of the definition closer to the actual meaning of courage, but because all it does is try to save the original definition by tacking on ad hoc exceptions.
  • When a scientist tests a hypothesis and finds that its predictions do not quite match available observations, there is always the option of forcing the hypothesis to fit the data.
  • One can resort to curve-fitting, in which a hypothesis is patched together from different independent pieces, each piece more or less fitting a different part of the data
  • The lesson is that it is not just the observed facts that drive a scientist’s theorizing
  • Science education, however, has persistently relied more on empirical fit as its trump card, perhaps partly to separate science from those dangerous seat-of-the-pants theorizings (including philosophy) that pretend to find their way apart from such evidence.
  • Yet in science, just as in defining a concept like courage, ad hoc exceptions are sometimes exactly what are needed
caelengrubb

Problems with 'the scientific method' | Science News for Students - 0 views

www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/...problems-scientific-method

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  • It’s a sequence of steps that take you from asking a question to arriving at a conclusion. But scientists rarely follow the steps of the scientific method as textbooks describe it.
  • “The scientific method is a myth,” asserts Gary Garber, a physics teacher at Boston University Academy.
  • It was invented by historians and philosophers of science during the last century to make sense of how science works. Unfortunately, he says, the term is usually interpreted to mean there is only one, step-by-step approach to science.
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  • “There isn’t one method of ‘doing science.’”
  • In fact, he notes, there are many paths to finding out the answer to something. Which route a researcher chooses may depend on the field of science being studied. It might also depend on whether experimentation is possible, affordable — even ethical.
  • In the future, she says, students and teachers will be encouraged to think not about the scientific method, but instead about “practices of science” — or the many ways in which scientists look for answers.
  • But that one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t reflect how scientists in different fields actually “do” science,
  • For example, experimental physicists are scientists who study how particles such as electrons, ions and protons behave. These scientists might perform controlled experiments, starting with clearly defined initial conditions. Then they will change one variable, or factor, at a time.
  • In contrast, geologists, scientists who study the history of Earth as recorded in rocks, won’t necessarily do experiments
  • Geologists are still collecting evidence, “but it’s a different kind of evidence.”
  • A hypothesis is a testable idea or explanation for something. Starting with a hypothesis is a good way to do science, she acknowledges, “but it’s not the only way.”
  • “Often, we just start by saying, ‘I wonder’“ Singer says. “Maybe it gives rise to a hypothesis.” Other times, she says, you may need to first gather some data and look to see if a pattern emerges.
  • Mistakes and unexpected results can be blessings in disguise.
  • An experiment that doesn’t give the results that a scientist expected does not necessarily mean a researcher did something wrong. In fact, mistakes often point to unexpected results — and sometimes more important data — than the findings that scientists initially anticipated.
caelengrubb

How the Language We Speak Affects the Way We Think | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...speak-affects-the-way-we-think

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  • The story begins with the first American linguists who described (scientifically) some of the languages spoken by Native Americans. They discovered many awkward differences compared to the languages they had learned in school (ancient Greek, Latin, English, German, and the like).
  • They found sounds never heard in European languages (like ejective consonants), strange meanings encoded in the grammar (like parts of the verb referring to shapes of the objects), or new grammatical categories (like evidentiality, that is, the source of knowledge about the facts in a sentence).
  • Not surprisingly, some of these linguists concluded that such strange linguistic systems should have an effect on the mind of their speakers
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  • Edward Sapir, one of the most influential American linguists, wrote: “The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same worlds with different labels attached” (Sapir, 1949: 162).
  • Now it was suggested that the world might be perceived differently by people speaking different languages.
  • This effect of framing or filtering is the main effect we can expect—regarding language—from perception and thought. Languages do not limit our ability to perceive the world or to think about the world, but they focus our perception, attention, and thought on specific aspects of the world.
  • Chinese-speaking children learn to count earlier than English-speaking children because Chinese numbers are more regular and transparent than English numbers (in Chinese, "eleven" is "ten one").
  • So, different languages focus the attention of their speakers on different aspects of the environment—either physical or cultural.
  • We linguists say that these salient aspects are either lexicalized or grammaticalised. Lexicalizing means that you have words for concepts, which work as shorthands for those concepts. This is useful because you don't need to explain (or paraphrase) the meaning you want to convey.
  • The lexicon is like a big, open bag: Some words are coined or borrowed because you need them for referring to new objects, and they are put into the bag. Conversely, some objects are not used anymore, and then the words for them are removed from the bag.
  • Dyirbal, a language spoken in Northern Australia, for example, has four noun classes (like English genders).
  • This grammatical classification of nouns involves a coherent view of the world, including an original mythology.
  • In summary, language functions as a filter of perception, memory, and attention. Whenever we construct or interpret a linguistic statement, we need to focus on specific aspects of the situation that the statement describes
caelengrubb

Language Shapes the Way People Think and Behave - 0 views

www.daytranslations.com/...language-shapes-thinking

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  • Language is part of culture and culture has an effect on the way a person thinks, which initiates behaviors
  • The researcher found out that the linguistic discrepancy shows economic differences as well.
  • Several languages have grammatical gender systems, which the English language does not have. For example, inanimate objects have genders in German, Russian, Spanish or French.
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  • Colors are distinguished differently in other languages. In some languages, there are no separate names for orange and yellow even if the people know that there are differences between these two colors
  • The difference in the way languages define colors directly affect the way speakers give meaning pertaining to colors
  • The way speakers interpret the things they feel, hear and see can be complicated because it is influences by personal experiences, norms, cultural rules, traditions and languages. Thoughts come from words and these thoughts initiate behaviors.
  • International communication and global business are also affected by languages, thus the pressing needs for localization. To effectively do business in other countries, a company must be able to deliver messages to their employees and target audiences in a language that can be correctly and clearly understood
  • If you look at the similarities and differences between languages, you’ll be able to discover clues on what constitute proper and improper behaviors.
  • People use language daily in order to celebrate, communicate, negotiate, learn, legislate, document and argue. You use language each time you need to express something
  • The study of linguistics opens a way to better understand languages – how they are spoken and the people who speak them, which lead to an understanding of how society operates. Linguistics also helps to improve society.
  • Linguists combine different methods from several scientific fields of study such as computational, biological and psychological techniques, aside from the theoretical or documentary field.
caelengrubb

The alphabets at risk of extinction - BBC Future - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...lphabets-at-risk-of-extinction

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  • There are between 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world. Yet 96% are spoken by just 3% of the global population. And 85% are endangered,
  • Along with the spoken words, something else is also at risk: each language’s individual script. When we talk about “endangered languages”, most of us think of the spoken versions first. But our alphabets can tell us huge amounts about the cultures they came from.
  • Language is innate to all humans, but scripts have to be invented and actively learned. This has happened rarely.
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  • Even by the middle of the 19th Century, only 10% of adults knew how to write, and there are only about 140 scripts in use today. 
  • “Endangered alphabets and scripts just haven’t been brought to people’s attention in the same way as languages,”
  • By their very artificiality, alphabets arguably say more about a culture than mere language. That starts with the characters themselves
  • Writing can tell us about a culture in other ways, too. Because they live in the thick forests of the Philippines, users of Hanunuo have traditionally inscribed messages into bows of bamboo. Different fonts depend on the way that scribes wield the knife.
  • Not that scripts are simply a means of communication. Some burrow right into the values of the people who use them, and not just because they often record sacred prayers or ancient remedies.
  • Some alphabet devotees are taking these lessons so seriously that they invent whole new scripts.
  • One of the most spectacular examples comes from a pair of Guinean brothers, Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry. Tired of squashing their native Fulani tongue into the French (Latin) or Arabic alphabets, neither of which could accurately represent the range of Fulani sounds, they developed something better.
  • The result was Adlam, named after the first four letters of the alphabet. 
caelengrubb

Our Language Affects What We See - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...r-language-affects-what-we-see

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  • Does the language you speak influence how you think? This is the question behind the famous linguistic relativity hypothesis, that the grammar or vocabulary of a language imposes on its speakers a particular way of thinking about the world. 
  • The strongest form of the hypothesis is that language determines thought
  • A weak form is now thought to be obviously true, which is that if one language has a specific vocabulary item for a concept but another language does not, then speaking about the concept may happen more frequently or more easily.
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  • Scholars are now interested in whether having a vocabulary item for a concept influences thought in domains far from language, such as visual perception.
  • In the journal Psychological Science,  Martin Maier and Rasha Abdel Rahman investigated whether the color distinction in the Russian blues would help the brain become consciously aware of a stimulus which might otherwise go unnoticed.
  • The task selected to investigate this is the "attentional blink." This is an experimental paradigm frequently used to test whether a stimuli is consciously noticed.
  • The current study is an important advance in documenting how linguistic categories influence perception. Consider how this updates the original Russian blues study, in which observers pressed a button to indicate whether two shades of blue were the same or different
  • In that study, it seems likely that observers silently labeled colors in order to make fast decisions. It is less likely that labeling was used during the attentional blink task, because paying attention to color is not required and indeed was irrelevant to the task.
  •  The current finding indicates that linguistic knowledge can influence perception, contradicting the traditional view that perception is processed independently from other aspects of cognition, including language.
caelengrubb

The World's Most Efficient Languages - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...489389

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  • But languages are strikingly different in the level of detail they require a speaker to provide in order to put a sentence together.
  • Other languages occupy still other places on the linguistic axis of “busyness,” from prolix to laconic, and it’s surprising what a language can do without.
  • Moreover, anyone who has sampled Chinese, or Persian, or Finnish, knows that a language can get along just fine with the same word for “he” and “she.
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  • If there were a prize for the busiest language, then a language like Kabardian, also known as Circassian and spoken in the Caucasus, would win
  • The prize for most economical language could go to certain colloquial dialects of Indonesian that are rarely written but represent the daily reality of Indonesian in millions of mouths
  • Experiments have shown that this is often true to a faint, flickering degree a psychologist can detect in the artifice of experimental conditions
  • In a language where final sounds take the accent, such sounds tend to hold on longer because they are so loud and clear—you’re less likely to mumble it and people listening are more likely to hear it
  • When a language seems especially telegraphic, usually another factor has come into play: Enough adults learned it at a certain stage in its history that, given the difficulty of learning a new language after childhood, it became a kind of stripped-down “schoolroom” version of itself
  • Even if languages’ differences in busyness can’t be taken as windows on psychological alertness, the differences remain awesome
caelengrubb

The Linguistic Evolution of 'Like' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...507614

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  • In our mouths or in print, in villages or in cities, in buildings or in caves, a language doesn’t sit still. It can’t. Language change has preceded apace even in places known for preserving a language in amber
  • Because we think of like as meaning “akin to” or “similar to,” kids decorating every sentence or two with it seems like overuse. After all, how often should a coherently minded person need to note that something is similar to something rather than just being that something?
  • First, let’s take like in just its traditional, accepted forms. Even in its dictionary definition, like is the product of stark changes in meaning that no one would ever guess.
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  • To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body.”
  • The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like
  • It was just that, step by step, the syllable lic, which to an Old English speaker meant “body,” came to mean, when uttered by people centuries later, “similar to”—and life went on.
  • Like has become a piece of grammar: It is the source of the suffix -ly.
  • Like has become a part of compounds. Likewise began as like plus a word, wise, which was different from the one meaning “smart when either a child or getting old.”
  • Dictionaries tell us it’s pronounced “like-MINE-did,” but I, for one, say “LIKE- minded” and have heard many others do so
  • Therefore, like is ever so much more than some isolated thing clinically described in a dictionary with a definition like “(preposition) ‘having the same characteristics or qualities as; similar to.’”
  • What we are seeing in like’s transformations today are just the latest chapters in a story that began with an ancient word that was supposed to mean “body.”
  • It’s under this view of language—as something becoming rather than being, a film rather than a photo, in motion rather than at rest—that we should consider the way young people use (drum roll, please) like
  • The new like, then, is associated with hesitation.
  • So today’s like did not spring mysteriously from a crowd on the margins of unusual mind-set and then somehow jump the rails from them into the general population.
  • The problem with the hesitation analysis is that this was a thoroughly confident speaker.
  • It’s real-life usage of this kind—to linguists it is data, just like climate patterns are to meteorologists—that suggests that the idea of like as the linguistic equivalent to slumped shoulders is off.
  • Understandably so, of course—the meaning of like suggests that people are claiming that everything is “like” itself rather than itself.
  • The new like acknowledges unspoken objection while underlining one’s own point (the factuality). Like grandparents translates here as “There were, despite what you might think, actually grandparents.”
  • Then there is a second new like, which is closer to what people tend to think of all its new uses: it is indeed a hedge.
  • Then, the two likes I have mentioned must be distinguished from yet a third usage, the quotative like—as in “And she was like, ‘I didn’t even invite him.’
  • This is yet another way that like has become grammar. The meaning “similar to” is as natural a source here as it was for -ly: mimicking people’s utterances is talking similarly to, as in “like,” them.
  • Thus the modern American English speaker has mastered not just two, but actually three different new usages of like.
caelengrubb

The Difference Between a Language and a Dialect - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...424704

shared by caelengrubb on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
  • The very fact that “language” and “dialect” persist as separate concepts implies that linguists can make tidy distinctions for speech varieties worldwide. But in fact, there is no objective difference between the two: Any attempt you make to impose that kind of order on reality falls apart in the face of real evidence.
  • The idea of distinguishing “languages” from “dialects” is of no logical use here. As often as not, it’s more that speech is a little different from place to place, such that a person can get along speaking when in the town a few valleys over; one starts having trouble the further away he gets; and after a traveling a certain distance can no longer understand a thing anyone is saying.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of speaking, which one might think of as “dialects” of one language, are actually treated as separate languages
  • It turns out that it’s also impossible to determine precisely where one “language” leaves off and another begins
  • As such, English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on “intelligibility”: If you can understand it without training, it’s a dialect of your own language; if you can’t, it’s a different language
  • The only thing that can save an attempt to impose a formal definition on the terms “language” and “dialect” now is perhaps to be found in popular usage, which suggests that languages are written and standardized and have a literature, while dialects are oral, without codified rules, and have no literature.
  • Namely, it’s the implication that there is something lesser about a “dialect.
  • As often as not, obscure, unwritten “dialects” are much more grammatically complicated than familiar “languages.”
  • A language, then, is indeed a dialect with an army and a navy; or, more to the point, a language is a dialect that got put up in the shop window.
  • In popular usage, a language is written in addition to being spoken, while a dialect is just spoken. But in the scientific sense, the world is buzzing with a cacophony of qualitatively equal “dialects,” often shading into one another like colors (and often mixing, too), all demonstrating how magnificently complicated human speech can be.
caelengrubb

Your Ability to Can Even: A Defense of Internet Linguistics - The Toast - 0 views

the-toast.net/...yes-you-can-even

shared by caelengrubb on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • When the new grammatical structures and phrases express something that conventional language simply cannot
  • this new grammar-bending, punctuation-erasing, verb-into-noun-turning, key-board-smashing linguistic convention doesn’t dominate the whole Interne
  • language generated on Tumblr is is now becoming Facebook and Twitter language and influencing language everywhere from Buzzfeed to Autostraddle.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The linguistic study of the Internet is a very young field but it does, in fact, exis
  • Conventional wisdom portrays this form of linguistic flexibility and playfulness as the end of intelligent human life. The Internet has been blamed for making children illiterate, making adults stupid and generally tarnishing the state of modern discourse.
  • Not only are these allegations not true. David Crystal’s research actually points to the opposite.
  • Men and women on the Internet use many of the same tropes, enthusiasm markers and emphasizers in order to communicate. In the world of blogging and Internet writing, women are the creators of language
  • The backlash confirms the emergence of Internet Language as a fairly serious development, if not a very small and vibrant written dialect
  • Dialects are characterized as deviations from the “standard” version of a given language and are often dismissed due to their lack prestige by standard users of the language
  • The fact is, the type of language that is being created online is affecting day-to-day speech patterns and writing styles of most young adults
  • Dialects develop when people with a distinct cultural and linguistic heritage run up against a rigid and unfamiliar system, usually by immigrating to a new country. It becomes necessary to develop a way to retain old linguistic features while adopting new ones in order to able to communicate.
  • Those who use technology read more on a day-to-day basis than non-tech users and are, therefore, faster and better readers.
  • But the Internet Language phenomenon is just as much sociological as it is sociolinguistic: we are just as shaped by language as it is shaped by us.
caelengrubb

Why language might be the optimal self-regulating system | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...optimal-self-regulating-system

shared by caelengrubb on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Language changes all the time. Some changes really are chaotic, and disruptive.
  • Descriptivists – that is, virtually all academic linguists – will point out that semantic creep is how languages work. It’s just something words do: look up virtually any nontechnical word in the great historical Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which lists a word’s senses in historical order
  • here is another fact to bear in mind: no language has fallen apart from lack of care
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  • Prescriptivists cannot point to a single language that became unusable or inexpressive as a result of people’s failure to uphold traditional vocabulary and grammar. Every language existing today is fantastically expressive
  • Nonetheless, despite potential harm done by an individual word’s change in meaning, cultures tend to have all the words they need for all the things they want to talk about.
  • Every language has a characteristic inventory of contrasting sounds, called phonemes.
  • The answer is that language is a system. Sounds, words and grammar do not exist in isolation: each of these three levels of language constitutes a system in itself.
  • During the Great Vowel Shift, ee and oo started to move towards the sounds they have today. Nobody knows why
  • Words also weaken with frequent use
  • At the level of grammar, change might seem the most unsettling, threatening a deeper kind of harm than a simple mispronunciation or new use for an old word
  • what are the objects without those crucial case endings? The answer is boring: word order
  • Language is self-regulating. It’s a genius system – with no genius
caelengrubb

5 key facts about language and the brain - 0 views

www.medicalnewstoday.com/...324529

shared by caelengrubb on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Language is a complex topic, interwoven with issues of identity, rhetoric, and ar
  • While other animals do have their own codes for communication — to indicate, for instance, the presence of danger, a willingness to mate, or the presence of food — such communications are typically “repetitive instrumental acts” that lack a formal structure of the kind that humans use when they utter sentences
  • As Homo sapiens, we have the necessary biological tools to utter the complex constructions that constitute language, the vocal apparatus, and a brain structure complex and well-developed enough to create a varied vocabulary and strict sets of rules on how to use it.
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  • Though it remains unclear at what point the ancestors of modern humans first started to develop spoken language, we know that our Homo sapiens predecessors emerged around 150,000–200,000 years ago. So, Prof. Pagel explains, complex speech is likely at least as old as that
  • A study led by researchers from Lund University in Sweden found that committed language students experienced growth in the hippocampus, a brain region associated with learning and spatial navigation, as well as in parts of the cerebral cortex, or the outmost layer of the brain.
  • In fact, researchers have drawn many connections between bilingualism or multilingualism and the maintenance of brain health
  • Multiple studies, for instance, have found that bilingualism can protect the brain against Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
  • Being bilingual has other benefits, too, such as training the brain to process information efficiently while expending only the necessary resources on the tasks at hand.
  • Research now shows that her assessment was absolutely correct — the language that we use does change not only the way we think and express ourselves, but also how we perceive and interact with the world.
  • Language holds such power over our minds, decision-making processes, and lives, so Broditsky concludes by encouraging us to consider how we might use it to shape the way we think about ourselves and the world.
caelengrubb

How a second language can boost the brain - 0 views

knowablemagazine.org/...econd-language-can-boost-brain

language

shared by caelengrubb on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The cognitive benefits of bilingualism can begin from experiences very early in childhood and can persist throughout life.
  • The first main advantage involves what’s loosely referred to as executive function. This describes skills that allow you to control, direct and manage your attention, as well as your ability to plan
  • The brain is made up of cells called neurons, which each have a cell body and little branching connections called dendrites.
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  • Executive functions are the most complex brain functions — the most “human” functions that separate us from apes and other animals.
  • Bilingualism promotes the integrity of white matter as you age. It gives you more neurons to play with, and it strengthens or maintains the connections between them so that communication can happen optimally.
  • These myths about bilingualism date back to studies in the US and the UK from the First and Second World Wars. They were seriously flawed studies involving children from war-torn countries: refugees, orphans and, in some cases, even children who were in concentration camps.
  • Not every bilingual person is going to have a healthier brain than every monolingual person. We’re talking about general, population-level trends.
  • A bilingual brain can compensate for brain deterioration by using alternative brain networks and connections when original pathways have been destroyed.
caelengrubb

Even Non-Amputees Can Feel a Phantom Limb | Invisible Hand | Live Science - 0 views

www.livescience.com/mputees-feel-phantom-limb.html

science

shared by caelengrubb on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Amputees often suffer from a phenomenon known as phantom limb syndrome, but researchers now say that non-amputees can also be made to feel phantom limbs, and even pain, when knives are jabbed into nonexistent hands.
  • In phantom limb syndrome, people suffer from the illusion that a limb exists even if it is missing
  • Phantom limbs occur in 95 percent of amputees who lose an arm or leg
    • caelengrubb
      caelengrubb on 04 Nov 20
       
      I didn't know that it was this common
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Doctors have known of this syndrome since the 16th century. (After Lord Horatio Nelson lost part of his right arm during a battle in 1797, he said he felt fingers pressing into his missing palm, sensations the admiral cited as direct evidence for the existence of a soul.)
  • Not only can the mind fool people into thinking a missing limb is there when it is not, but experiments prove that people can be fooled into thinking another object is part of them. The deception is known as the rubber hand illusion.
  • To play this trick, start with a table with a screen running up its middle, and sit in front of the table so the right arm is hidden from view. A fake right arm is visible on the table. If both the right hand and the rubber hand are simultaneously stroked with a brush for a few minutes, a 1998 study found eight of 10 volunteers experienced the disarming illusion that the dummy hand was their hand.
  • In another experiment, the volunteers were asked to close their eyes and quickly point with their left hand to where they perceived their right hand was. Those experiencing the invisible hand illusion would point at the invisible hand rather than their real hand.
  • The scientists had previously found objects that did not resemble body parts, such as a block of wood, cannot be experienced as one's own hand, "so we were extremely surprised to find that the brain can accept an invisible hand as part of the body,
  • "We believe that the crucial difference lies in that we are very used to feeling our hands without seeing them, and we can move our hands in empty space but not through solid objects," Guterstam said. "The empty space close to the body represents an array of potential locations for the limbs."
  • The researchers scanned the brains of 14 volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Perceiving the invisible-hand illusion led to increased activity in the same parts of the brain that are normally active when individuals see their real hand being touched or when participants experience a prosthetic hand as their own.
  • There could be important differences between the invisible hand illusion and phantom sensations, Ehrsson said. "For example, signals from damaged nerves could contribute to phantom limbs and phantom pain in a way that would be different from our illusion in limbed-individuals," Ehrsson said.
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