this just gave me a glimpse into an alternate reality where human society functions the way carpenter ant society does
オレはきょう家主 じむしょいかなくていいと思うですけど、皆さんどう思うです？
I think my landlady shouldn't go to her office, how about you?
On the bright-ish side, the Get His Ass campaign seems to be enjoying quite the flood of donations tonight.
Honestly it's not that bad as it sounds. It takes the eagles about 2 hours to get to my liver and another 2 to eat it. The whole ordeal is over by one and I've got the afternoon to myself.
i love watching recipe videos on youtube but i HATE how popular “oil free” shit seems to be lately. you cant “sauté” your vegetables in water you are STEAMING them
“we’re using peanut butter/tahini/avocado/whatever as a substitute for oil 😌” madame WHAT do you think is in your Oil Substitute
To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.
“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”
This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?
Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.
While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.
But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:
Navigation and Pormpuraawans
In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
Blame and English Speakers
In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)
tell me my prof didn’t upload the reading by photocopying his kindle reader page by page
i don’t know why anyone has to feel insecure about their bodies, when objectively, humans are all freakish horrors. Every last one of us. Hairless, fleshy, gangly beasts walking upright straight as a tree with bony tentacles on the ends of our limbs.
you have a hole in your face full of sharp bones and you’re worried that your belly is a little squishy
broke: all bodies are beautiful!
woke: all bodies are made of warm meat wrapped around wet bones with blood-plump organs stuffed inside. rad
Actually, your face isn’t filled with sharp bones! Bones are derived from the mesoderm, one of three tissue layers in very early embryonic development that diversify into all of the organs in the body. Teeth on the other hand, come from the ectoderm. So congrats! Your face isn’t filled with sharp bones- it’s filled with sharp skin! Have fun!
me carefully reading the wiki page on some character from a game i’ve literally never played and not going to:
OH i just realized what that persons argument against letting felons vote reminds me of. wheres that tweet saying if prisoners are allowed to vote theyll vote themselves out of prison
