Watching them was mesmerizing. They were flying the entire two hours we were at the beach.

I love discovering new ways that humans can be creative and passionate about something. Of course I knew as soon as I stopped recording that there would be tons of videos on YouTube of synchronized kites, and sure enough, there are.

Cool, huh?

From Norboru Kaetsu, the producer:

Many people gave us praise for this program, but one of the students said, “I found the program interesting, but it is still light. Our year is much heavier than that.”

The Missing Dollar

Three men go to a restaurant for dinner and spend $25. Each man gives the waiter $10. The waiter keeps $2 as a tip and gives $1 back to each man. Thus each man pays $9, and so the group pay $9 x 3 = $27. The waiter keeps $2, making a total of $29. Where did the missing dollar go?

The Missing Square

Both triangles are made up of the same pieces, but one has a missing square. Why?

If you’re stumped, click on the image to go to Wikipedia for the mathematical solution, or watch this excellent video that my friend, Ray, made, which demonstrates the solution.

I’d like to see something involving any of the following: hippo, cuttlefish, penguin, octopus, praying mantis. They don’t have to be playing poker and smoking cigars. Really they don’t. I mean, that would just be silly.

Timbrook produced this:

You’ve got to admit he pretty much nailed it.

After following his project on Facebook for a month or two, I decided I’d request a drawing. As I recall, the price at the time was $20 for a black-and-white drawing, or $40 for a color drawing. I sent the payment via PayPal and emailed him the request. It took him almost three months to get to me, but he finally drew my drawing. He will be stopping his Drawing A Day project soon because he has been unable to live up to the challenge in its title, but I’m very glad I got my request in while he was still going.

My request was:

Please draw my daughter, Nora, riding an elephant, one of a herd, on the moon.

My request was right around the time I did this artwork myself. It wasn’t easy to find a photograph of Nora to send him since I hardly have any, but I sent him a link to my my Nora Flickr photostream. It looks as though he combined the hair and dress in this photo with the sunglasses in this photo to produce his masterpiece.

I absolutely love it! Bravo, Dustin. Thank you very much!

Last night, she laid out, much more elegantly, the case I made in the first paragraph, outlining the fundamental difference between the two political parties in the United States, although her explanation is valid for any modern democracy. I think it would be worth ten of your minutes to watch this video.

Here’s an important bit of the transcript:

It’s kind of a numerical mismatch between these two sides. But it always is. It’s the upper crust versus the middle class. It’s the few people who own the company versus the number of people who work for the company. It’s the people who write the paychecks versus those who cash the paychecks. It’s the economic elite versus the average person.

And what the elite lack in terms of numbers of people, they makeup for in leverage in terms of the amount of money they can spend in order to advocate for their side. And that – that split between these two sides, aside from social issues and civil rights and issues of political style, that’s split is the reason that there are two different political parties in the United States of America.

And because the Democratic side is inherently the one that has more people in it, and this is a democracy, and it’s one person, one vote, the Republican side, in order to compete with that, has to use money to leverage as many votes as they can, because their side represents the interest of fewer people. That’s where they found social issues and abortion and gay rights and religion and all of these other things to come in handy.

There’s an economic split between the two parties, between Democrats and Republicans, but more people are on the Democratic side of that economic split, almost by definition. So, Republicans, by and large, have had to use noneconomic issues to get people to vote with the economic elite and against their own economic interest.

Agentive

She does go into detail about Spanish vs. English and culpability. She uses the academic terms agentive or non-agentive. In fact, English is fairly rare in its insistence of attributing actions to an agent. In an experiment, native English and Spanish speakers were shown a video of a man intentionally performing an action (e.g. popping a balloon) and then another one of a man unintentionally causing an action. Then, they were asked to pick the man out of a lineup. The anglophones did well identifying the man in both scenarios, but the hispanophones had much more trouble identifying the man when the action happened unintentionally, since they hadn’t needed to focus on him as the subject of the sentence when they thought about the video. Not only that, but the researchers were able to induce this effect in native English speakers by making them read lots of passive voice, non-agentive sentences before watching the videos. Fascinating!

Gender

How odd is it that so many human languages would evolve to consider various inanimate objects as inherently masculine or feminine? Not that odd, apparently, as some languages have up to 30 genders, at which point it becomes clear that genders are really just classifications of concepts. Some languages have a gender just for hunting weapons or things that are shiny. And then there’s the famously humorous Australian Aboriginal gender for “women, fire, and dangerous things”.

The gender of objects in the languages we speak directly influences how we think about an object. In Russian, a chair is masculine, so Russians – even if they are tested in English! – will describe a chair as sturdy and strong, whereas a Spaniard, who has a feminine concept of a chair, will describe it as elegant and slender and beautiful.

What surprised me most about the gender section of her talk was my emotive reaction to learning how, for many words, Russian has some opposite genders to Spanish. It really feels inherently wrong to me that, in Russian, chairs, flowers, and the moon are all masculine, and the sun is feminine. How revolting! My emotions on this subject are direct evidence of just how much learning a second language directly influences how you think about the world.

Monolingual Questioner

During the Q&A session after the talk, one of the people facilitating the questions is Stewart Brand, who is clearly a very intelligent man, but who came across to me as a glaringly ignorant monolingual. He says – and I’m paraphrasing – “Here in California, we hear a lot of Spanish, and it seems to me that Spanish is a very simple language, with each thing having one word associated with it, whereas English has a rich tapestry of words for each concept. If I ever got Alzheimer’s,” he quips, “I’d rather have it in English than in Spanish, because there would be more words to convey what he meant even if he couldn’t think of the word I wanted.”

I’ve heard this same opinion, but reversed, from monolingual Spaniards. You have to get quite deep into learning a language before you learn all the synonyms. In Spain, for example, they have a very rich bacon-flavored tapestry of words for the animal from which they derive their favorite meat: cochino, puerco, guarro, marrano, chon, etc. But you could probably get to fourth-year Spanish in college and never learn more than cerdo for the word pig, because you really don’t need the rest until you’re writing poetry or insulting someone in a Spanish bar.

Dr. Boroditsky does an excellent job of not calling Brand an idiot, even if the look on her face does.

The Video

Her talk doesn’t actually start until about the four minute mark because first they preview a wonderful short video from my beloved RadioLab, aptly titled Words. It’s a sequence of very video clips cleverly edited that requires a good knowledge of English to follow. The full length video is available on FORA.tv, where they provide a nice table of contents for navigating to just the bits you’re interested in if you so choose.

I’m really starting to love FORA.tv as a site for what are more or less unabridged TED talks.

I’d be more than happy to send the smart-object-enabled Photoshop file for this to anyone who requests it.

Hopefully obviously I was joking about burning books. Even this guy’s opinion deserves to be heard, before promptly being checked for accuracy and discarded.

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.