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Did you know that Eskimos have 20 words for lame linguistic analogies? Do you suppose this shapes their view of visiting linguists? I understand they can distinguish among many subtle variations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the Isumannaallisaavigissavaat meeqqap angajoqqaaaminiit taakkua piumasarinngisaannik avissaartitaannginnissaa hypothesis, as it is known in Tuktut Nogait.

Amateur linguists (hey that’s me!) are easily seduced by linguistic relativity, also known by its cocktail-party name, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It’s very appealing, this idea that the language you speak shapes the thoughts you can think. George Orwell played on this with his imagined Newspeak language in 1984, the notion being that politically incorrect thoughts become impossible so long as you think only in Newspeak.

Among language professionals, linguistic relativity has lost much of its charm. The so-called “strong form” that Orwell described has been discredited. Just because Germans have the word schadenfreude and we don’t doesn’t mean I can’t take pleasure in your misfortune. And, watch this, if I like the word schadenfreude, I can just appropriate it by removing the italics. Boom! It’s mine now. Eskimos (Inuits) really do have lots of words for snow, but it’s only because Inuktitut is an agglutinative language. So when they say qanik, it means falling snow. Qanittaq is recently fallen snow. Qannialaaq is light falling snow. And so on. They just mash all them little word blobbies together. It’s not like I can’t describe the same snow with my mealy non-agglutinative English. Oh look! I just did. So is that a profound linguistic insight or merely a somewhat interesting distinction between two languages?

But even among the pros, a weaker form of linguistic relativity is on the rise. Here’s a Scientific American article by Lera Boroditsky called How Language Shapes Thought. I recently listened to a Long Now lecture by Boroditsky on the same research. She’s pretty pumped up about relativity, but I came away with the sense that Sapir-Whorf is the Coriolis force of language. The Coriolis force is the thing that supposedly makes the toilet swirl counter-clockwise (in the northern hemisphere). Here’s the thing: the Coriolis force is real. You can measure it. But at the scale of your toilet, it’s tiny. It’s completely swamped by a dozen other larger forces. As a result it’s almost never the actual reason your toilet swirls this way or that. Similarly, you can do fascinating experiments that show there really is something to linguistic relativity. Russians really are measurably better at distinguishing between shades of blue than you are. It’s true! But do these effects happen at a scale that really matters, once they smash into all the other forces that influence human behavior? I doubt it.

Good stuff for a cocktail party though. By the way, did you know that pigs’ tails curl the other way in New Zealand?

My brother-in-law Craig is an artist who spends a lot of time thinking about shelter as part of his work. As a sculptor, he’s created a variety of artworks that play on the notion of dwelling. But he’s also done the work of an architect in creating well-designed livable spaces, including one that he lived in: the Octagonal Living Unit, or OLU.

Motivated by a desire to create cheap and affordable housing for those in need, Craig has adapted the OLU design and re-imagined it with novel high-tech materials. The result is an OLU for the 21st century, a small house that is inexpensive, easy to build, well-insulated, and much more lovely than a lumpish haul-in you might find in trailer park lot. It hath, as Vitruvius might say, commodity, firmness, and delight.

Here’s what Craig has to say about it.

Are you sold? Are you ready to put some money behind it? Here’s the Kickstarter page where you can sign on as a supporter. Tell ’em Ned sent you!

The appointed hour came, but the heavens didn’t cooperate. End-times prophet Harold Camping may be disappointed, but he’s got his game face on. Now he’s saying that the world will actually end in October. Working in the software industry, I can appreciate this kind of thing. It happens all the time. It’s just a slip in the schedule. Somebody in Rapture Quality Control found a serious problem with the Fire and Brimstone Sequencer, and they just need another six months, okay? So just chill out people. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.

As a prophet with bad timing, the Reverend Camping can take comfort in one thing: he’s got plenty of company. During the mid-nineteenth century, America was riddled with End Timers and millennialists. The most prominent of these were the so-called Millerites, and when October 22nd, 1844 passed mildly into October 23rd, the result was known as the Great Disappointment. A curious name, considering the world didn’t end, but there you go.

It all put me in mind of a book I recently read called The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. In it, Ridley takes everything you’re worried about, global warming, peak oil, killer bees, toenail fungus, and lays out the case that the situation isn’t nearly as dire as you’ve been led to believe. In fact, it’s pretty good. I appreciate the fact that Ridley just goes for it. He doesn’t shuffle his feet or qualify his words. No, in a loud voice he says that irresponsible people are making you feel terrible because humans in general and journalists in particular have an insanely powerful negative bias. Bad news is good business. But if you look at the facts he’s assembled, a few things jump out: almost everything you can name is getting better and cheaper, we’re really terrible at predicting the future, and we are secretly thrilled by the thought that the world may end on our watch. If history is any guide, we do not live at a pivotal moment in history, even though it’s fun to think so.

The book is good, and I also enjoyed this conversation with Stewart Brand over at the Long Now Foundation. Ridley is not a crank, and he is often persuasive. I find it hard to believe that we shouldn’t be so worried about global warming, but Ridley can point to a long list of disasters that never happened. And in any event, his thesis is not that we shouldn’t try to solve the problems we face; rather we shouldn’t be so damned gloomy about our prospects.

Perhaps his influence will cause us to stop trumpeting about Peak Indium, Peak Platinum, and Peak Peanut Butter. Perhaps we are already Post Peak Peak.

Information overload is an old story, but there’s plenty of good information out there and you still need a way to get at it and share it. The real question, the operational question, is what do you do every single day? What do you do after the novelty of this or that site has worn off? What do you persist in doing despite the sensation of information overload? After all, that feeling is never going to go away. Whether you’re swimming or drowning, you still need the water.

Do you check Facebook every day? I never got in the habit.
Do you use Twitter? I read Twitter regularly, but I don’t tweet very often. Twitter is one of best channels I have for discovering unexpected new stuff. At work I use a Twitter-like enterprise knockoff called Yammer.
Do you use a feed reader? I use Google Reader every day, but that’s pretty old-school at this point. I think feed readers are a dying breed. I’m worried that Google is going to shut down Google Reader.
Do you check individual blogs or news sites directly? I mostly use Google Reader instead, but with all the craziness in the news this year, I’ve been visiting CNN and NYTimes.com a lot.
I try to visit my Instapaper site regularly, because I’m always pushing stuff there with the magic “Read It Later” button. Instapaper is a kind of larder or anteroom where information that has already passed the audition is waiting to be consumed. The problem is that it tends to pile up.

I still like to blog, but there are so many ways to share information now that it makes you think a little more carefully about what and why you’re writing. Blogging feels like overkill for simple link sharing. That’s where Tumblr comes in. Tumblr (which was originally created by the same guy who does Instapaper) didn’t impress me when I first came across it, but they’ve done a very good job simplifying its usage model, and now I use it for storing links after I’ve verified that they’re good and worth keeping and distributing. So if you’re interested in seeing my cast off links that don’t merit a complete blog post, here’s where you go: Rambles Backyard.

Footnote: I was just downstairs reading Flipboard on the iPad, and I came across an item saying that Marco Arment, the Instapaper developer, is going to add blogging support to Instapaper. I tagged the article “Read Later”, came upstairs, opened Instapaper, and pasted the item here: Instapaper May Add Blogging Support. The ecosystem gets more tangled every day.

My wife and I went to see Wretches and Jabberers the other day. Haven’t seen it? No? I’m not surprised. It’s a small independent film about two autistic men. It’s not on Netflix and it certainly hasn’t had very widespread distribution. But it’s a great movie, and more uplifting than you might suspect. The film drives home the point that the interior world of these men is rich and articulate. At the same time, it demonstrates how hard it is to turn off our judgments on their odd and alienating behavior.

Here’s the trailer.

I recommend reading something from Tracy’s blog, which he maintains on the movie site. If you’re like me, you’ll have a hard time believing those words came from the shambling, spastic man in the movie. But they did. It’s humbling to see how much we rely on appearance to form our opinions.

I was going to write more about the movie, but my wife Wendy wrote an extensive review, so I’m including it here.

Continue reading “Wretches and Jabberers”

This is what it looks like to enter a Space Shuttle engine compartment. The pictures are great, but I really want to know what they’re talking about in there.

“When’s the last time you changed your oil?”
“A little duct tape and some aluminum foil and we’ll have you back on the road. You have any gum?”
“These damned squirrels have built another nest in here.”
“This baby’s got a lot of miles on it. Have you considered buying Russian?”
“Oh… there’s my gum.”

What do you think he’s saying?

A few weeks ago I wrote about how happy I am with Rhapsody, the subscription-based music service. For a cost per month of less than a music CD (what’s that?) I can listen to just about anything I can think of. At that cost, I lose any motivation to steal music. Whether or not you can sustain a music industry with those fees is a different matter, but I don’t mind paying Rhapsody’s fee. Put another way, Rhapsody has undercut the hidden costs of stealing music, which is a personality-dependent amalgam of nuisance and guilt.

I tried the Netflix streaming movie option too, but I was unimpressed with their selection. I’m not much of a movie person, but I reasoned that they would have all the old movies ready for me, and there are plenty of interesting old movies that I want to see. But sadly, even the old movies are largely missing from the streaming catalog, so I let the membership slip. But my Rhapsody experience taught me that it’s just a matter of building up a comprehensive enough catalog.

Some people are plenty happy with Netflix streaming already. Here, for example, is ReadWriteWeb’s Mike Melanson: How Netflix Stole my Eyepatch & I Stopped Stealing Movies. The commentary on ReadWriteWeb pointed me to a short piece at TorrentFreak that starts like this:

Something’s not right in the United States. Increasingly people start to pay for Netflix subscriptions so they can stream movies on demand.

In the States Netflix nearly doubled the number of new subscribers in the first quarter of 2010, from 1.7 to 3.3 million. … It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that Netflix’ popularity has a negative effect on the movie piracy rates in the US.

I love the hand-wringing spin he puts on it. Piracy is being wiped out in America unless we work together to do something about it! What’s really going on is that Netflix found the money floor, the price that beats free. Stealing movies is even more of a pain than stealing music. Which is to say, not that much, but enough to justify a few bucks every month. Once your music and movies are online, you can say goodbye to that wretched experience of finding the jewel box you were looking for, opening it up, and only then discovering the #$% box is empty. Agggghhh!

Every startup has a frequently told founder’s story. Ebay’s (apocryphal) story is about the founder helping his girlfriend with her Pez Dispenser collection. PatientsLikeMe’s story is about the founders watching their brother die. Ben and Jamie Heywood’s brother Stephen had ALS, the debilitating disease forever associated with Lou Gehrig. As they worked to improve his condition, they realized that data sharing among the community of sufferers could be a powerful medical tool. They founded PatientsLikeMe as a site where people come together online not just for the moral support of sharing their stories, but for the concrete medical value of aggregating data that official medical channels don’t have the resources or inclination to gather.

It’s a great concept, managed very well. I’ve always thought of the web as a tool for finding “people like me,” people who’ve encountered and solved my problems before me. Think about your own experience. When you’re looking to resolve some technical problem, what kind of site is most likely to be the one that helps? How often is it the official support site for a big company? I’ve found it’s almost always a fellow sufferer who makes the biggest difference. It’s the same way with medical conditions. Who is the most likely person to give you straight and credible answers about living with your disease? Somebody else with the same disease. Your doctor wants to help, and that is of course where your medical advice starts, but ultimately he’s not facing the same situation you are.

If you want to learn more about the site, I highly recommend Jon Udell’s conversation with Jamie Heywood or the TEDMED talk embedded below.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Can this really make the kind of difference that a proper medical study can? Nature Biotechnology just published a paper from PatientsLikeMe that mined their community of ALS patients to refute a dubious claim that lithium was slowing the disease. It’s an important result, and will certainly be the first of many insights that can be made more quickly and more cheaply by working directly with data volunteered by the patients themselves.

Much is made these days about beautiful data visualization and how subtle but sophisticated presentation can bring important details to the fore. But I think the best visualization always comes down to having the best seats. If you’re in the right place when the poop goes down, you’ve got all the visualization you need.

For instance, here is some wind speed data from a buoy floating in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, this is NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center Station 42001. The subtitle to this picture is: See if you can guess when the hurricane went by.

What correlation do you notice between wind speed and atmospheric pressure? If I told you that Hurricane Rita came visiting during the reporting period, could you make a guess as to when? Can you suggest a scenario that might account for the following notes from this station’s website?

Station 42001 went adrift on 09/23/2005 and the last report from its moored position (listed above) was at 0230 GMT.

The best data visualization is often determined by collecting the right data at the right time. Which brings me to a little visualization I saw on Ben Hyde’s site. The question: does the meal schedule affect a judge’s decisions?

Once again, the important thing was to find the right vantage point. Once you decide to correlate food breaks with favorable parole decisions, the visualization speaks for itself. It’s one little jagged line, but it’s very eloquent. When do you want to appear in court?

Mmmm. Donuts.

Culture advances by composting the layer just below it. That which seemed rare and rich yesterday becomes the steaming rot for tomorrow’s sprouts. Kutiman is an Israeli musician who had the brilliant idea of using various “found” YouTube videos as the raw material for his own compositions. He’s sequencing and channeling dozens of people. I wrote about him once before. I still go back and listen to the Mother of All Funk Chords every now and then… it’s one of my favorite things on the web. More recently I came across this new Kutiman release, My Favorite Color.

It’s wonderful to think of these people collaborating in absentia through Kutiman’s deft touch. There’s something transparent and guileless about the resulting music. It made me think of Pomplamoose, a duo that Greg turned me on to. Their specialty is something they call a “video song,” a sort of intentional version of Kutiman’s mixes. In a video song, you see the anatomy of the song laid bare. As band member Jack Conte puts it (this is from the Wikipedia article)

1. What you see is what you hear. (No lip-syncing for instruments or voice)
2. If you hear it, at some point you see it. (No hidden sounds)

Slick MTV-style music videos are, of course, altogether different. They superimpose a highly-produced video stream on a highly-produced audio stream, although these two bear almost no relation to each other. Where music videos obfuscate with sound and fury, video songs reveal the essential whatness of the music. It’s another example of technology reclaiming the human aspect that was lost in an earlier, poorer use of technology. As Aristotle might remind us, don’t put the spectacle before the action. Pomplamoose is all about the action. When you think to yourself “By god, it sounds like he’s playing a toy piano,” you soon will see that by god he is.

Here, toy piano and all, is Pomplamoose covering Michael Jackson’s Beat It.