“It may be worth noting here that there does not at the present time exist a word in the English language which may serve as a term for all primates. It is unlikely that the classificatory term ‘primate’ will ever come into common usage, in any case, the latter term is already reserved by the Church to describe the chief ecclesiastic, and we must be careful here, accerima proximorum odia!” (M.F. Ashley Montagu, “Knowledge of the Ape in Antiquity.” Isis 32.1 [1940]: 88 n3).
No.
Most of the world watched in horror as the Spurs finally managed to bludgeon a depleted Suns team to death in the Western Conference finals (the entire Eastern Conference playoffs were unwatchable–with the notable exception of a few games in the Bulls-Wizards series). Rarely in sports have you seen such a triumph of pure evil over pure good, but there it was.
Most observers are geared for something as painful as the Spurs-Nets series , and they are fully justified. Not that is particularly novel or exciting analysis, but basketball isn’t that complicated: the Pistons' starters match up as well with the Spurs’ as anyone in the league, but their bench isn’t deep enough for them to win in a seven-game series. The difficult choice is between five and six games, and I’m guessing that big games from Rasheed Wallace will let them get two (as he’ll show up for 1/3 of the average playoff game).
Its 5.2 billion yearly spending on health care is having a tremendous impact on its profitability, whereas only 18,000 people in the U.S. per year die because they’re uninsured.
GM employs 324,000 people (not all Americans, but let’s not get bogged down in details). If it dropped all of its insurance, approximately 20 of its employees would then die in the next year (since they’ve previously had health care, this wouldn’t quite be as likely, but the stress of losing it would compensate).
Talk a lot about media restructuring consciousness and the like. I’m sympathetic to some of these arguments to an extent, but a lot of the trick is defining what “consciousness,” particularly “social consciousness,” means at any given argumentative moment. Since I pointed the site’s immense readership to two Washington Post articles last night, I’m continuing the trend.
I’ve never watched an episode of CSI: Anywhere, I should say. What then should we think of this?
The Washington Post has a story about the House’s decision to ban the EPA from conducting tests that measure pesticide-levels in humans. Apparently, there was a program that would pay $1000 to 60 Florida families over two years to measure their children’s exposure to these chemicals. A Bruce Sterling novel tosses off that health-conscious humans of the near future no longer eat fruits and vegetables because the chemical defenses were linked to cancer. I’m not sure why I mention that, really, but it seemed like it was time.
Any reader of Lem’s Fiasco will know both why you would want to weaponize space and the disastrous consequences (and be a better speller).
Missile defense, particularly in space, should of course be called “missile offense.” It is designed to eliminate an enemy’s deterrent, not prevent attack.
Poet and translator Michael Hofmann of the University of Florida was recently elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences. I’m quite confident that he’s the only member with whom I’ve drunk beer.
I will not be predicting the second round, nor am I going to predict how long the series will last.
Eastern Conference
Nets v. Heat: On TNT one night, Charles Barkley said, with a completely straight face, that you could look at Vince Carter and tell that he didn’t lift weights. WINNER: Heat, but just barely.
Sixers v. Pistons: Ever since April of 1993, I’ve been a big fan of Chris Webber. The Sixers win over the Lakers in the first game of the 2001 championship series was a world-historical moment, so far as I recall. WINNER: Pistons by overwhelming margin.
My review-essay, “Cognitive Storyworlds,” on David Herman’s Story Logic appears in the 38.1 edition of Style.
Here’s a paragraph which touches upon one of my current research interests:
One immediate example of this is what might be termed the ontological properties of narrative for Herman. What is the relation between narrative and language? The answer is that language is an “interface between narrative and cognition” (5). Whereas the theories of language and narrative are both modular components of cognitive science, language itself is not an autonomous cognitive function but is anterior to narrative. Herman cites Turner’s argument in The Literary Mind that language use originated through principles of narrative imaging or parable, rather than genetic specialization (Turner 140-68, qtd. in Herman 379 n. 18). The strongest argument for Chomsky’s notion of Universal Grammar is the “poverty of stimulus”: that children are able to distinguish grammatical from nongrammatical sentences on the basis of a limited and conflicting exposure and that this ability must thus be an aspect of cognitive development triggered by exposure to language (Chomsky 43). Herman rejects the idea that narratives have syntactical properties in this matter, stating that all “coding strategies” are permissible at the local level of narration (50). He substitutes the idea of “preference rankings” that determine the permissible sequences of states, events, and actions that compose narratives. While it is entirely acceptable that the narrative property would have different characteristics than language, it is an open question whether, if narrative is a modular property anterior to language, it must develop on the basis of the same limited evidence and thus be constrained by the same measure of lower-level syntacticality.