Jackie: “Do you ever make cakes for people?”
Monica: “No… I don’t like people.”
(Overheard at the Big Blog Company ‘open day seminar’ held this evening Samizdata.net HQ)
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August 11th, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Having recently completed Edward O. Wilson’s flawed tome on updating the Enlightenment: “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge“, I was struck by the passages that he wrote on colour perception. To summarise Wilson’s description, there appear to be four basic units of colour if a wide range of languages are compared: red, yellow, green and blue. However, these units are either incorporated or discarded within the range of human languages. Human cultures are so diverse that the range of colours or shades within languages stretches from two to eleven. The science of colour perception has now settled upon a consensus that endeavours to construct “a model of the evolution of color terminology systems that attempts to derive the typology and evolutionary trajectories of basic color term systems from facts of color appearance“, as declared by Paul Kay, a distinguished scholar in this field. This school is opposed by the empiricists who follow Piaget’s argument that colour perceptions are learned as part of the environmental stimuli and by the culturalists, who argue that all colour representations are culturally constructed. Both the empiricists and the culturalists reject any role for biology in the formation of colour representations. One of the most famous and controversial examples of a culture where colour perceptions were limited to two terms was the Dani tribe of New Guinea. They had two terms for what they saw: mola (white) and mili (black), although further study demonstrated that they were able to perceive the full range of colours despite the lack of colour terms in their language. Current experiments conclude that perceptions of colour are not as naturally determined as biological determinists have argued and that perceptions can be altered through linguistic categories, though not to an extent that would justify the conclusions of the empiricists or the culturalists. At the opposite end of the range is the English language. Wilson concludes that English has eleven terms to describe colour, although others have only identified eight: red, blue, green, pink, purple, orange, yellow and brown. In addition, the Russians have an additional blue hue. Yet, as an Englishman, the question arises how additional colour perceptions in language may influence the culture. As a foundation, one could argue that a language which supports more complex partitions of colour perception may predispose the speakers towards a greater use of simile, description and metaphor: that it aids language, and possibly music, as well as the visual arts. This is a mere speculation. Yet this aspect of the English language, with its panoply of colour perceptions, must have enriched rather than disabled our culture and its impact appears to be unknown. August 11th, 2004 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The British Conservative Party has today announced that it would (if elected to office) cut 4,000 of the 5,000 civil servants in Department of Trade and Industry and would not expand other government departments to take up these posts – i.e. this would be a real cut (although the cut would take several years to bring into effect). Of course there is no point in having a Department of Trade and Industry at all (the nickname for the DTI… ‘Death To Industry’… about sums up the department), but this annoucement should still be welcomed. The Conservatives might rat on the promise if elected – but at least the promise has been made. August 11th, 2004 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Terry L. Heaton has a sound article on the realities of TV and internet as the news medium. The dynamics of local news reporting and news breaking have changed and the broadcast industry is in a situation where the first-mover can have the real advantage.
And here comes the new, in the local newsrooms resisted medium:
Yes, news is a conversation. With those who are in the middle of it and those who are affected by it and those who have opinions on it. There have also been changes on the receiving end – the user (formerly known as consumer) is in charge.
The major media outlets have already adopted internet strategies that do not wait for the news hour. That is how it was possible for a group blog such as the Command Post to scour the breaking news from most of them and provide a useful one-stop information source about the Iraq conflict. It also starkly highlighted the different biases in the major media reporting that were embedded deeper than their reporters with the troops in Iraq. The local news are closer to home and such inherent biases may be more obvious. So let them scoop the big media and each other beyond the box of the 6 o’clock news… via Doc Searls August 11th, 2004 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
– from the The Daily Courant of March 11, 1702. The Courant was probably the world’s first daily newspaper. Bloggers might not like the next bit:
August 11th, 2004 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Racial profiling may be too controversial too touch but just wait until somebody suggests species profiling:
An agitated domestic cat is a truly frightening thing. It could have been armed with a machine-gun or a bomb. Who knows what it could have done? Maybe it intended to overpower the crew, take over the plane and crash it into a building? Nobody would be able to stop it!! Terror in the skies!!!
It was wielding a box-cutter and screaming ‘death to the Yankee imperialist dogs’. This is a tragically inevitable result of the constant human meddling in the domestic affairs of cats. August 11th, 2004 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
There have been grumblings from the commentariat in recent posts, questioning my libertarian bona fides because I think it is a good thing that journalists are treated like ordinary citizens, a bad thing that a former government grandee thinks he can break the law with impunity, a good thing that my government is at least trying to perform its most basic function – protecting me against those who trying to kill me and mine, and so forth. I regard these positions as being pretty straightforward applications of a common-sense practical libertarianism, one that has no truck with either pacifism or anarchy, but it occurred to me that I hadn’t really laid out my basic principles. Government is the wrong tool for nearly every job. At a minimum, civil society does a better job of creating and distributing wealth, and of regulating conduct that does not involve force or fraud. The regulatory state and the redistributionist state are both largely illegitimate and ineffective in achieving their stated goals. Taxation is distinguishable from theft and extortion only through an attenuated theory of ‘consent’ that posits that your vote for the guy who lost somehow means you consented to a bunch of people you never even had te chance to vote for agreeing among themselves to take your money. Low taxes good, high taxes bad. → Continue reading: Back to basics August 10th, 2004 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have always regardless the Olympics with indifference at best (I am not a great sports fan) but clearly the people organising the games in Athens are completely demented.
These people would be funny if they were not so self-important. And from a PR point of view: message to the folks sponsoring the Olympic… rule number one is do not piss off your prospective customers. Morons. And whilst on the subject of sporting madness, what I cannot understand is why the furore over well known lothario Sven-Goran Eriksson’s love life? So he has some hanky panky with a kiss-and-tell money grubber who happens to be female employee of the Football Association… so what? The guy is the coach of the England football team: he is in the sports business which means reasonable expectations of probity are surely somewhere between rock stars in hotel rooms and sailors on shore leave. If there is any scandal here it is that Sven’s standards seem to be slipping: at the risk of being ungallant, ‘beauty’ Faria Alam is not quite of the same ‘calibre’ as Italian lawyer Nancy Dell’Olio or Ulrika Jonnson. links via AdRants and the Big Blog Company August 10th, 2004 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
They have tried false beards, make-up, wigs, sunglasses, plastic surgery. None of it has worked. So time for something really radical:
Allow me to assist. How about ‘Not The Conservative Party’? August 10th, 2004 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Never break the neutrality of a port or place, but never consider as neutral any place from whence an attack is allowed to be made. August 9th, 2004 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday I visited Warwick (both the castle and the town) – it was an interesting trip, but an odd thing happened that may amuse some people. I was in the crypt of St Mary’s Church Warwick and (observing my condition and the condition of the two friends who were with me) I said:
There was an odd silence from my two friends, and turning round I saw three, rather sun burnt, bald men – three thick set men, with tattoos. I looked at them and they looked back. They smiled and I smiled and no fight resulted. I wonder what the odds of this event were. The crypt was a small place and no other people were there. August 9th, 2004 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the conceits of the press here in the US is that the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” somehow grants them special status and immunities from laws that we plebes have to comply with. Not too surprisingly, the establishment media sees itself as the “Fourth Estate,” Americanized as the fourth branch of government (after the legislative, executive, and judicial branches) entitled to its own kind of sovereign immunity. They are wrong. If the freedom to publish is restricted only to a certain limited or identifiable class, then it isn’t really a freedom at all, but is a privilege. One of the more common expressions of the misconception that they belong to a special privileged class is the belief among journalists that they are entitled to defy court orders. Specifically, they believe that the First Amendment somehow guarantees them an immunity against having to identify their sources. One of the micro-scandals plaguing the Bush administration has been the entirely hoked-up l’affaire Plame. In a nutshell, when former ambassador and Saudi shill Joseph Wilson began lying in public about his fact-finding mission to Africa regarding Saddamite nuclear ambitions, someone in the Bush administration may or may not have “leaked” the fact that his wife works for the CIA and got him the gig. This was scandalous because his wife may or may not have been an “undercover” op, so that leaking her identity may or may not have been against the law. Valerie Plame was so concerned about being outed that she and her husband arranged for a nice photo spread in Vanity Fair. The scandal was hoked up because the press knew from the get-go who leaked Valerie Plame’s name and identity, but nonetheless went on a rampage about a coverup and the need for a grand jury to investigate the White House for this dreadful breach of national security. In effect, the Washington press was demanding a grand jury to discover what they already knew. This bluff has been called – the grand jury quite logically subpoenaed the testimony of two reporters who had fingered the White House for the leak.
A timely reminder that freedom for all is not a privilege for the few. August 9th, 2004 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
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