Babies know what's fair

This post is a kind of 'note to self' in this case I'm relating the quote and its article to thinking about atonement where the idea of fairness, rewards etc underlies notions of offence and forgiveness.
Babies know what's fair: "

We think children are born with a skeleton of general expectations about fairness," explains Sloane, "and these principles and concepts get shaped in different ways depending on the culture and the environment they're brought up in." Some cultures value sharing more than others, but the ideas that resources should be equally distributed and rewards allocated according to effort are innate and universal.

Basically, I think that if we can say that the idea of fairness in built-in to human nature, then that has important implications for notions of incarnation and also the way that we understand offence, punishment, excuse ind forgiveness.

Beneath the shadow of the steeple

Teaching science through language

For me it was interesting to read this post at the end of a week when I'd twice said to different people that I do have a science bachground since Linguistics is a science. It's interesting to see this perspective beefed up big-time:

Language provides a wealth of data available from the students themselves — data with questions that beg to be asked, making everyday phenomena surprisingly unfamiliar and requiring explanation. Linguistics is at the core of cognitive science, offering incomparable ways to understand the nature of the human mind. The biological capacity for language appears to be shaped in part by genetic information and in part by information gained through childhood experience. Scientists have sought to tease that information apart, and this work has yielded good explanations in some domains and a body of understanding that can be made accessible to middle school and high school students

Interestingly I also use language to help teach cultural analysis for similar reasons: its proximity to all of us and the way that it scales to culture more widely.
Language Log � Teaching science through language

Texting research: dilemma for grammar marms

Fascinating and ironic: This research into the way that frequent users of textisms compare with others in accepting nealogisms. The article reporting the research is here:
Texting affects ability to interpret words
The findings, I think, may present a dilemma for those who enjoy a good moan about how English language is going to the dogs -see if you can see why:

... reading traditional print media exposes people to variety and creativity in language that is not found in the colloquial peer-to-peer text messaging used among youth or 'generation text'. She says reading encourages flexibility in language use and tolerance of different words. It helps readers to develop skills that allow them to generate interpretable readings of new or unusual words. "In contrast, texting is associated with rigid linguistic constraints which caused students to reject many of the words in the study,"

Yes, I' sure you see it: At first it seems to offer comfort that texting really might have an adverse affect on your English usage. But, oh dear, it's in the ability to appreciate and respond to new words and usages -the very kind of thing that the grammar marms are allso keen to discourage and tut at. Who'd have thought it grammar marms and texters sharing the same linguistic vice! Hope they enjoy the company ;)

Naming Shape-shifting dinosaurs

A refrain in this video is "Scientists like to name things..." It's a nice little study, at one level, in how perceptions and comparative observations interact with assumptions and reslut in naming...

Jack Horner: Shape-shifting dinosaurs | Video on TED.com

Rules for Anchorites - In Which I Completely Fumble A Child’s Education

The problem with a lot of Christians when we get an opening to explain what our faith is, we can get all caught up with what's in our heads and what we ought to say (who says?) that we fluff real communication because we forget the gholden rule of 'incarnational' communication. So it's really interesting to see a bunch of the dynamics played out in this little reali-life tale of trying to explain King Arthur to a five-year old when you're an Arthurian expert. See here:
Rules for Anchorites - In Which I Completely Fumble A Child’s Education:

Here's an excerpt:

Serenity: Who’s King Arthur?
And three things happen. I make the shock-grin-gasp thing that I do whenever someone hasn’t heard of a thing I love. Almost simultaneously I remember that she’s five, and it’s not really surprising she doesn’t know who King Arthur is. And then my brain goes OMG I GOT THIS and gets all excited that I am literally the BEST PERSON EVER to explain King Arthur to a little girl for the first time. I wrote a book about it! I AM ON THIS.

But then…it happens. My entire knowledge of Arthuriana lurches forward into the talky part of my brain, every little thing I know about it from childhood obsession to grad school fights to come out first, and I start talking before the kid can get bored again but King Arthur is a huge story and SURPRISINGLY HARD to soundbite for a kindergartner.

Seems to me that the key thing there is that 'entire knowledge... lurches forward into the talky part of my brain' and the felt need simply therefore to splurge. And to do so in terms that have worked for us. In such moments we probably need to do two things. One is to continuew to ask questions in order to get a sense of where the other person is with all of this, and to give answers that provoke or at least leave open the possibility of the other person asking more questions.
"I'm so wowed you asked me that because I love this. But could you help me? You see, my head is so full of things I'd love to share with you that I'm likely to start in the wrong way to help you best to understand. So, tell me: wheret do you think I'd best start? I could tell you about what got me into it or the best things about it or about why I think it's important ..."

New generation of nuclear reactors could consume radioactive waste as fuel | Environment | The Guardian

I've been very skeptical about nuclear power and have said as much several times in this blog. However, George Monbiot's advocacy of the fast reactor technology has begun to change my mind in respect of that technology as it would appear to address the issus I have with nuclear power:

The engineering firm GE Hitachi has submitted an alternative proposal based on its Prism fast reactor, which could consume the plutonium as fuel while generating electricity.

So it seems that it addresses the iddue of waste very helpfully by using it and in doing so rendering it relatively easy to deal with by comparison with current waste problems. It is also safer by using the laws of physics and so less vulnerable to terrorist co-option. In addition it seems cheaper to build and quicker, thus dealing wiht the econmic and strategic objecgtions.
New generation of nuclear reactors could consume radioactive waste as fuel | Environment | The Guardian

Sensory metaphors activate brain parts for relevant sensory experience

This looks like the neurological confirmation Lakoff and Johnson hoped for in Philosophy in th Flesh.

"We see that metaphors are engaging the areas of the cerebral cortex involved in sensory responses even though the metaphors are quite familiar," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "This result illustrates how we draw upon sensory experiences to achieve understanding of metaphorical language

Bodily experience is deeply at the heart of our ability to think. Wholistic -dare I say incarnational- approaches are affirmed. What it suggest furhter to me is that the value in enacted/embodied prayer and ritual actions are likely to be quite deeply felt if they are well targetted.

Hearing metaphors activates brain regions involved in sensory experience:

Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change

Well, despite feeling that Postman is a bit curmdgeonly and dyspeptic in Amusing Oursleves to Death, I'd have to say I love the article of which the summary follows.
Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change:

... five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

The reasons for my assessment of Postman can be seen in the above: he is disposed to see the downsides more readily and to assume that change is bad. While change can be bad, we should recall the first point about winners and losers. Sometimes the there is a more democratic spread of winners and the point about ecologic change (4th point) means that we need to be aware also that Fiske's (et al's) point that popular culture is adept at repurposing cultural artefacts and subverting hegemonic as part of the ecology. To be sure this doesn't erase hegmonic moves by the rich and powerful, but it does mean that they can't simply stand still or assume that things will uncomplicatedly work 'for' them.

newly minimal proof of everyday grammatical know-how

A few years back I started noticing some educated southern British English speakers were fronting the vowel in 'good'. I think that perhaps this may be part of the same trend that has now given rise to what in my speech are homophones becoming divergently pronounced according to the perception of the speaker as to grammatical analysis: see here...

in southeastern England /uː/ has developed two very distinct allophones: a truly back [uː] before tautosyllabic (or stem-final) /l/, but a fronted quality approaching [yː] in other positions. The kingly ruler, ˈruːlə, is taken as transparently bimorphemic, rule#(e)r, so retains the back uː of rule; but the measuring ruler, ˈryːlə, has lost touch with its origins and is taken as an unanalysable unit, with a corresponding clear l and fronted vowel yː.

And, incidently, this is a riposte to those who reckon that 'certain people' have no grammar. Admittedly this is not knowingly done according to a morphological distinction, yet it shows very neatly that native speakers have, somewhere in their heads, a very sophisticated sense of grammar which can inform the operation of new forms of language.

John Wells’s phonetic blog: newly minimal:

No Forgiveness Without Justice?

I think I tend to agree with Marina here:
Marina Cantacuzino: No Forgiveness Without Justice?:

I'd like to take justice away from its narrow adversarial focus and concentrate instead on how it much more broadly refers to the obligation to be fair to all people. That's because I believe in Restorative Justice which doesn't ask how can we punish the person who did the harm but rather facilitates a dialogue by asking how can we restore the relationships that were broken.

It also seems to me that a lot of the contemporary problems with atonement in sopme Christain circles revolve precisely around the failure to recall that it's more ultimately a personal thing not a forensic thing. Restorative justice with God! That's a pardigm we should be exploring. In fact it's one I'm trying to work on a bit myself.