Naming fail. Only in Switzerland

I propose an award for the Swiss marketing genius who choose,  as the Migros own-label toothpaste brand, the name of a fungus that causes irritating genital infections.

General Powell, next time go easy on the i-word, please

General Colin Powell issued yesterday his endorsement of candidate Obama in the upcoming US presidential election. Which is interesting, but not the zenith of credibility or even good judgment: you may remember seeing Powell wheeled out by Bush, Cheney and Rice to testify before Congress that Saddam Hussein’s regime posed some sort of danger to the United States – he looked like a man whose arm was being painfully twisted behind his back so that he would toe the party line on the necessity and desirability of another invasion.

And this time, while he certainly looked more like he’s speaking his mind, his choice of words was odd. Very odd. Consider the following reports:

• Powell praised Obama’s “steadiness,” his “depth of intellectual curiosity” and his “intellectual vigor.”
• He praised Obama’s “calm, patient, intellectual, steady approach to problem solving.“

Oh man. That’s three too many utterings of “intellectual”. The Republicans are going to have a field day.

Of course, factually Powell is right. One doesn’t get through Harvard Law School without a decently evolved cerebral cortex, and as an intellectual Obama probably towers among his generation of politicians, even if that’s not saying much (it doesn’t take much to look and sound like Karl Popper, in comparison with Sarah Palin). But voters rarely vote with their cerebral cortex: they vote with their reptile brain.

Berlusconi was voted into power, repeatedly (quod erat demonstrandum). Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was voted into power.

Gordon Brown, who has refrained from calling an election, was terribly unpopular (in contrast with the congenial Tony Blair) and only regained ground in the polls in the last few weeks, when it became evident that some intellect would actually be of use in rolling out a rescue plan for the financial system.

So, future endorsers of Candidate Obama: please endorse him all you want, but don’t highlight any of his intellectual vigor or intellectual problem-solving approach. Congress has passed the rescue package, and most Americans want to get on with their lives. Please carefully consider your choice of words when endorsing your candidate: you don’t want to put the final nails in the coffin of a potentially transformative U.S. presidency.

Bulshytt

Bulshytt: Speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said.

- Neal Stephenson, Anathem, Glossary

The Twitter language dilemma

When I started blogging, it was pretty clear to me that I’d have to have two blogs: one in Italian and one in English. Now that I’m taking Twitter for a test ride, that’s where I draw the line: I refuse to have two Twitter accounts, and I post my updates rather indiscrimately in whatever language I happen to have thought that particular though in. Still, I feel a bit guilty towards those of my readers who miss out on what I’m trying to say if it’s not in the language they speak.

If you use two or more languages, how have you solved the Twitter language dilemma?

Of algorithms, apps and autism

I know that everybody who gives a damn has been reading the March issue of Wired magazine (much discussed for Chris Anderson’s preview of his forthcoming Free) about a month and a half ago, and I know that for someone who used to read it in the pre-Condé Nast days it is considered uncool to be still reading it, but what the heck, I still find it interesting and I still like to wait (forever) until my paper copy comes in the mail. Three articles on topics I found interesting, if you’d just like to skim through the highlights:

• “This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix prize“, on how devilishly difficult it is to create a noticeably better recommendation algorithm – even for something that comes with a lot of descriptive variables and data points, like movies; but kudos to Netflix for opening up the data and trying the crowdsourcing route;
• “The Brash Boys at 37signals”, on the latest personality cult in the software industry and on David Heinemeier Hansson’s and Jason Fried’s endearing disdain for growth, venture capital, and other people;
• The somewhat overpromisingly titled “The Truth About Autism” (for one thing, we still don’t know where it comes from), a look at the achievements of autism activists Amanda Baggs (more about her here), Michelle Dawson and others, which highlight the uncommon cognitive strengths of at least some autistic people and may be close to sparking a new civil rights movement  (a stretch? remember, until 1974 homosexuality was a mental illness for the psychiatric establishment).

Enjoy.

Each time a language dies

A  whole world dies with it.

As the spoken language died, so did the stories of tricky Creator-Raven and the magical loon, of giant animals and tiny homunculi with fish-spears no bigger than a matchstick. People forgot why “hat” was the same word as “hammer”, or why the word for a leaf, kultahl, was also the word for a feather, as though deciduous trees and birds shared one organic life. They lost the sense that lumped apples, beads and pills together as round, foreign, possibly deceiving things. They neglected the taboo that kept fish and animals separate, and would not let fish-skin and animal hide be sewn in the same coat; and they could not remember exactly why they built little wooden huts over gravestones, as if to give more comfortable shelter to the dead.

From The Economist’s obituary of an 89-year-old Alaskan, Marie Smith, the last speaker of the Eyak language. Smith was the last name she took from her Oregonian husband. As for her first name, originally it had not been Marie, but Udachkuqax*a’a'ch, “a sound that calls people from afar”.

Weekend reading and more: Jonathan Lethem, Tim Powers, Steven Landsburg and P.D. James

I love reading but I can’t seem to go on a healthy diet with a regular intake of books. I alternate starving (these last three weeks or so) and bingeing (last weekend, when I planted myself on a lawn chair and did little else). So, here’s mini-reviews of the latest titles I’ve fed myself.

• Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet: Lethem gets out of his native Brooklyn (Fortress of Solitude, The Disappointment Artist) and goes to Los Angeles to tell us this whimsical story about a dysfunctional band, among art galleries, avant-garde parties and with a not insignificant part played by the LA Zoo. While the prevailing tone is farcical, Lethem’s ear for wordplay hides language gems on almost every page.
• Tim Powers, Three Days to Never: if you’re into time travel, alternate realities, and the Mossad’s most improbably cabalistic experiments, this book is for you. It took me a long time to read the first half, then I accelerated and finished it in one sitting. IMHO, the story would have held up well even without so much Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein.
• Steven Landsburg, More Sex Is Safer Sex: economics professor Steven Landsburg builds on the success of Dubner and Levitt’s Freakonomics and expands on some of his most successful Slate columns to produce an entertaining book (his parents, we’re told, hate the title, but I bet it’s selling better than “Incentives, Externalities and Cost-Benefit Analysis” would have. Oh, and “Applied Statistics” – see Gerd Gigerenzer’s Calculated Risks for more on the dramatic lack of numeracy in our society). A quick read written in an almost-too-accessible style, this is the perfect gift for your libertarian friends and offers several counterintuitive insights. The world is overcrowded? Take the state of Texas, carve it into 500-square-meter subdivisions, and build a home for 4 people on each lot – voilà, you’ve just housed the entire world population. I’ve always thought of other people’s children as imposing negative externalities, especially when they fly within half a dozen rows of my seat, but perhaps I should revisit my judgment. This point is also being driven home to me by…
• P.D. James, The Children of Men: this is a terrific dystopia about the end of our civilization due to a sudden and unexplained infertility of the entire human race. I’m only about halfway through it and I am in awe at P.D. James’s skills – perhaps I should start reading the Dalgliesh novels too? My paperback edition also had the added bonus of Clive Owen’s face on the cover; I haven’t seen the movie, but I am not very inclined to do so, as this book is the opposite of a Hollywood action blockbuster – introverted, meditative, almost philosophical. On a side note, I wonder why it is Canada and Britain that consistently produce the best in the apocalyptic genre, as in The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (whose quiet, elegiac tone seems to me to owe something to P.D. James’s book). Americans, it seems, are too terminally optimistic to entertain such thoughts. Yet, when material like this comes from such capable hands as Baroness James’s, the results are – as American book jackets would say – un-put-downable.

Franz Kafka on writing, quoted by Tom Robbins

Before the Prologue to his playful debut Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins quotes a few lines by Kafka, which I haven’t been able to trace back to the original source, but I’ve always found delightful and somewhat perversely un-Kafka-like:

You don’t need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen, simply wait.
Don’t even wait.
Be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you.
To be unmasked, it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Autism, language and personhood

It looks like everybody knows at least somebody who has an autistic child these days. In fact, I sometimes get the feeling that is it becoming fashionable to claim to have been at least a borderline Asperger child (and I am not immune to the fad myself). Today, this video by an autistic woman made me think again about what the majority of us calls a cognitive deficit, all the while being told by autistic people who cross over and try to explain it to us in our language that from their point of view it is our cognitive patterns that appear to be severely restricted, not theirs. Eight and a half minutes, quite worth watching. If you’re the kind who prefers reading to videos (I do!), I also recommend Send in the Idiots by Kamran Nazeer.