You’ve got to love the editors at The Economist. Merry Christmas!
No one can know for certain what future investment returns will be. If the writers at The Economist were sure of the answer, they would be lounging about on their luxury yachts instead of sweating over split infinitives.
For several years I have followed the Long Now Foundation‘s effort to built an artifact that would be in operation for the next 10,000 years, regardless of human intervention. I had a chance to hear an update last Friday, live from one of its founders, Stewart Brand, speaking at a rather intimate event organized in Milan by Matteo Penzo and Leandro Agrò and called a a Frontiers “Concert”.
Stewart spoke briefly and thoughtfully. I enjoyed hearing him talk about discussions with his friends Danny (Hillis), Brian (Eno), and others participating in the Foundation’s plan. My (only slightly edited) notes from his talk:
We do, indeed, live in a very short now. Every day, yesterday’s political debate is flooded out by today’s scandal. And politicians’ mental horizon – as climate change economist Valentina Bosetti pointed out yesterday in her talk at TEDx Lake Como – is at most the next few years, until they stand for reelection. Who can take the long view and think about the next decades and centuries? It’s up to us: as members of this civilization, as parents and grandparents, as consumers, as citizens. So we ought to listen to folks like Stewart Brand and his disciples. Thanks to Frontiers of Interaction for bringing him to Milan.
Maleta: Valija.
Salidas: Partidas.
Llegadas: Arribos.
Coches: Autos.
And, most important of all:
Retrasado: Demorado.
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 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:
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: 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
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?
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:
Enjoy.
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”.
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.
