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Real English grammar

A couple of good items on my two English usage hobby-horses: first on singular 'they' from Language Log: Everyone knows each other.

"“Everyone knows each other”, ... The -s suffix on the present-tense verb knows tells us that the subject ... counts as singular for purposes of subject-verb agreement. But each other, famously, requires a semantically plural subject. That is why They know each other is grammatical and *He knows each other is not. From this and nothing else it follows that semantic plurality and morphosyntactic singularity are compatible in English."

The rest of the article points out that singular they has a long history.

The second article, Irrational terror over adjunct placement at Harvard, also at Language Log, bears on so-called split infinitives, also making the point of their long history of good English usage. In this case, it's by way of noting bad usage arising from trying to avoid a split infinitive. Picking up a section from a Harvard publication, the issue becomes clear:

David Rockefeller,... has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates through international experiences

What's the issue? Well, read it again and if that doesn't work here's the thing: ""What are “dramatically learning opportunities”, you might ask? We’d normally expect an adjectival rather than adverbial modifier on “learning opportunities”; is it a typo for “dramatic learning opportunities”?
Now here's the analysis:

Standard English in both its American and British varieties permits a manner adjunct (like the adverb dramatically) to occur in various places in a clause, one of them being between to and the plain form verb in an infinitival clause, but it does not normally permit any adjunct to occur between a transitive verb and its direct object. Thus [1] and [3] are grammatical, but [2] is not:
[1] This gift has dramatically improved things. (before verb)
[2] *This gift has improved dramatically things. (before object)
[3] This gift has improved things dramatically. (after object)

A further piece of evidence to show the legitimacy of the split infinitive. Students: use 'em and be happy.

Celts weren't ethnically cleansed

For those interested in the Celts and the Saxons there's a new piece of information to take into account but the way to interpret the genetic research is the moot point:

The argument is, that from AD 430 to 730, the Germanic conquerors of Britain formed an elite, with a servant underclass of native Britons. Inter-marriage was restricted, and the invaders and their genes flourished. "But it is just not necessary to assume an apartheid-like system," argues John Pattison of the University of South Australia in Adelaide. "The evidence is compatible with the idea of a much more integrated society."
...
He concludes that people with Germanic origins came to Britain well before and after the early Anglo-Saxon period, and this long period of immigration can explain a relatively strong Germanic genetic signal today. He adds that about 60% of the current British population still has some native Briton DNA, arguing against the idea, put forward by Mark Thomas at University College London and colleagues that Saxon invaders ethnically purged the country.

Expect to see both interpretations of this research appearing in comments and reflections on Celtic Christianity.

Tagged -who's next?

ninetysix and ten: "I’ve been tagged by Cath at ninetysix and ten .
First the preamble:
1. The rules of the game get posted on the beginning.
2. Each player answers the rules about himself [or indeed herself].
3. At the end of the post, the player tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they’ve been tagged and asking them to read his [or her] blog.

And the questions:
What I was doing ten years ago: Five things on my To-Do list today: Things I would do if I were a billionaire: Three of my bad habits: Five places I’ve lived: Five jobs I’ve had: Five books I’ve recently read: Five people or communities I’m going to tag.

And the answers...
What I was doing ten years ago: I was leading an inner-city church as its vicar and getting involved in a city-wide process for Christians strategising with regard to Islam in our city. I was also just finishing a PG cert in cultural studies.

Five things on my To-Do list today: Book a lecturer to contribute to an Autumn module; prepare for Thursday night communion at which I'm presiding; further planning for Mission History and Theology module; participate in current delivery of same; arrange further meetings for Mixed mode set ups.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire: sort out good eco housing for me and my family, set up or invest in business in something green, perhaps a portfolio of risk but the aim being to get something interesting going, eg, an airship company for international flight

Three of my bad habits: letting people get away with things I should challenge, having the wrong pudding, talking too much.

Five places I’ve lived: Shropshire, Reading, San Sebastian, Bradford, Durham

Five jobs I’ve had: Shop worker at Sainsbury's, shop assistant at a local Wholefood shop, curate, vicar, university chaplain.

Five books I’ve recently read: How to Understand the History of Christian Mission, The University of Google, Rome Burning: Sophia McDougall, Cloud Atlas: David Mitchell, Bridge of Souls (Quickening Trilogy): Fiona McIntosh.

Five people or communities I’m going to tag: Hmmmmmmmmm. Dr Moose, Chris Monroe (Paradoxology), Jem Clines, Stephen at Greenflame, Maggi Dawn, perhaps ...

Canadian Department of Justice: use “singular they”

Htt Language Log � Canadian Department of Justice: use “singular they”:for this alert to what may be a first 'official' recognition of singular 'they' for legal documentation. "A page at www.justice.gc.ca recommends that people drafting legislation should “consider using the third-person pronouns ‘they’, ‘their’, ‘them’, ‘themselves’ or ‘theirs’ to refer to a singular indefinite noun, to avoid the unnatural language that results from repeating the noun”."

Solar so good for our house

Worth looking at, this: Solar so good for our house | Money | The GuardianHere's the pleasant surprise; "We, a family of four, have produced 92% of our electricity usage from the roof of a century-old terraced house in south-east London - laying to rest the idea that Britain is not sunny enough for solar power. It also disproves any suggestion this sort of technology only works in state-of-the-art, modern detached houses.
Not only will we not pay for any electricity, we should get a rebate of about £50 once a payment from the so-called renewables obligation (RO) scheme, which rewards microgeneration schemes with cash, is included."
This at rates which could see the initial sum repaid within about 15 years -depending on electricity prices. Of course this was a subsidised initial outlay. So as the writer says,

I received a 50% grant for the system from the government's low-carbon buildings programme - the total cost of buying and installing the panels was £17,000. Unfortunately, the government is so pathetic at supporting low-carbon technologies that it last year cut the maximum grant to £2,500 because the scheme was so popular. As a result, demand has collapsed to the extent that the small company that fitted my system has gone out of business.
That means your return on a system purchased now will be lower - little more than 3% for one like mine this year, rising to close on 4% when the RO payments increase next year. Still, 4% that is not taxable is comparable to a building society account that you do pay tax on.

And there is a really interesting reflection on use of electricity, which at first seems counter-intuitive, but as I think about my reactions I think this might be true for many.

You might think generating your own power would make you relaxed about leaving lights on or the TV on standby. But the contrary is true. It has woken us all up to the realities of energy use. The computer, TV, lights, everything, we now turn off at the wall when they are not in use. We have some of those remote control switches to turn off wall sockets that are hard to get to. In future when we go on holiday, we will empty the fridge and freezer and switch them off. The challenge now is to raise that 92% figure to 100%.

Avaaz.org - The World in Action

I just signed a petition calling to stop the Chinese weapons shipment to Zimbabwe. At this delicate time, the international community must rally to bring democracy and stability--not weapons--to Zimbabwe.

The more people sign the petition, the more powerful the international call will be--so please forward this link to friends:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/no_arms_for_zimbabwe/98.php/?CLICK_TF_TRACK

Dockworkers in South Africa have blocked a Chinese arms boat from reaching Zimbabwe... but the crackdown continues. As the ship moves up the Southern African coast looking for a new port--and China weighs whether to recall the weapons--African unions, citizen groups, and church organisations are launching a campaign to stop arms from fuelling the Zimbabwe cris

Bash Airlines All You Want, But Flying Still Beats Driving

Okay, so this Bash Airlines All You Want, But Flying Still Beats Driving is USA-centric, but it's an intriguing possibility that there are times when flying may be better on emissions: "This one's a little complicated, but stay with me. According to Terrapass, my Jetta will spew around 850 pounds of CO2 over 1,000 miles. Airliners.net says an Airbus A320 burns 2.569 gallons per mile, so my thousand mile flight (let's call it 1,500 miles with the connection) requires 3,853 gallons of fuel. The Energy Information Administration says a gallon of jet fuel produces around 21 pounds of carbon, which means my flight is releasing 80,913 pounds of C02. That's horrible, but it's not the whole story. Divide that number by 140 -- the number of passengers packed into that Airbus -- and you arrive at 578 pounds per person.
850 pounds of CO2 driving, 577 pounds flying. Advantage: plane"
I wonder what the figures might be in the UK ...? I suspect, given the nature of the figures they could be similar, though typical car fuel consumption figures could be different, perhaps.

The Story of Stuff

Not the first time I've mentioned it but it really deserves a plug, especially as this is the whole thing but with on option for chapterisation. The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard

The Pleasures of the Flesh

Like George Monbiot, I almost feel weary of saying this, but I really do feel it's urgent to say it, because clearly a lot of us are in flesh-addiction denial. The following quote is from The Pleasures of the Flesh � Celsias and says: "there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals(9). This could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat."

Here are the comparisons, and later on the calculation is that we should eat no more than 30% of our present meat consumption in order to have a sustainable diet in flesh terms.

a vegan diet grown by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half the current total)(13). Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture.

Science Fiction and the Areopagus

Useful little article this: InsideCatholic.com - Science Fiction and the Areopagus: It provides a few pointers at the end to authors, but highlights a reason for giving SF time and attention. From a Christian point of view, it may seem surprising to some, because I suspect that the image of scifi is of varieties of atheist fantasies. However,
"...the astonishing thing is that science fiction and fantasy are absolutely awash in theological speculation. Lots of it is pagan, in the Chestertonian sense. That is, it is an attempt to reach God through the imagination, hampered by the inability to conceive of something truly outside of the created world. The result is a sort of quasi-supernaturalism that acknowledges planes of existence beyond the human, but refuses to entertain the notion of angels and demons."
And the themes that many writers are working with are really important and sometimes a kind of analogical theology. Htt Greenflame.

Big brother creep

This is a disturbing news report. Council uses criminal law to spy on school place applicants: The point I'm concerned about is summed up in this first sentence. "A council yesterday admitted using laws designed to track serious criminals to spy on a family for nearly three weeks to find out if they were lying about living in a school catchment area." Notice the reapplication and thus widening of the use of a law fram what was intended. And then recall that this government has several times, concerning its legislation, assured those of us concerned that the potential powers granted to agencies are too great and so likely to be abused that the intent is not to do that, so it is okay. Well, I can't help thinking that this is an example of precisely the worry we are articulating: that powers once granted tend to extend to their fullest expression. If you don't build in safeguards, you'll have trouble. Now let's remember this in connection with the Regulatory Reform Bill (I think that's right) and ID cards.

Romans Disarmed: Overcoming Evil with Good

I've just signed up to go to this: I was well-impressed with Walsh and Keersmaat's take on Colossians bringing newer understandings of the socio-economo-political realities of first century Palestine and Mediterranean to bear on hermeneutical task and merging that with the horizon of post modern concerns so that Paul's writing could actually be commended to the kinds of people I prefer to hang out with (radical-ish world citizens concerned for justice, peace and the integrity of creation). So since I don't have to teach that day I'm going to it. Here's the blurb:
Romans Disarmed: Overcoming Evil with Good - with Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat: "Some Christians struggle to be faithful in the shadow of empire; others struggle to be faithful at the heart of empire. At the very centre of Rome lived a small community of Christians. What happens when their story of a Saviour, Jesus, who brought forgiveness and peace, met the story of an empire that proclaimed to truly bring justice and peace by means of a new saviour, Caesar? Does that tell us anything about living this story today? Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat, authors of Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire present a day's teaching of their new material on Romans."
I commend it to you. If you're planning to go, let me know. I've signed up to bring my own lunch (vegetarian, low-fat -never can guarantee catering to cope with that) so maybe if you fancied sharing a lunch with me and the weather's okay, then Brum cathedral is in loverley grounds.

Sophie 1.0

I haven't tested this myself, but the tutorials look encouraging and I'm downloading it with a view to installing and using it to produce some multimedia online learning materials. It's free and seems targetting at academic usage, so it's the business from that point of view. Sophie 1.0 Available Now | Sophie: "Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins." There are a bunch of tutorials here.

NT Greek online

Just because I needed to check something out and didn't have my stuff available at the time, since it's in my study and I was hours away from there, I ended up checking out Koine resources on the interweb net thingy. Here's where I started:Search for NT Greek verbs -eo on Everyclick
And out of the returns here's what I think is worth bookmarking:
Shorter definitions of Greek verbs; this one gives brief overview of the normal sorts of meanings of the tenses.
And here we have what appears to be the start of an online course which has some useful reference value.
Oh, and this site gives a whole host of 'learning Greek' resources online.
Something a little more techical but offering links to various things is NT Resources site.

A Cunning Plot for vegetabling

I'm a terrible gardner but harbour a dream that one day I might be able to do it properly. This article was quite inspirational, so I'm drawing attention to it with a view to getting back to it. Monbiot.com � A Cunning Plot

Write like a blogger

Now here's an interesting set of ideas over at Seth's Blog. Seth's core thesis is that we "can improve your writing (your business writing, your ad writing, your thank you notes and your essays) if you start thinking like a blogger" and then goes on to list some ways to do so. I'm also intrigued by his final question: "What would happen if every single high school student had to have a blog? Or every employee in your company? Or every one of your customers?"
Mainly because I'm thinking that this may be something to encourage our ministerial candidates to do as part of their learning. For which I would add the following to Seth's list of reasons to write like a blogger: it is something some clergy do and it can help in their church leadership or pastoral practice (though we need to be aware of how it can't and mustn't too!); it can help us to reflect theologically; it can help us to note those odd little things that become important potential factors in the exploring or the reflection stage of the pastoral cycle. A bit more on blogging as reflection at Postmodern Bible.
There is a further question though; some of the things he suggests may not be quite such a good idea in an academic essay; though some definitely should be there. I'll leave you to decide which is which, though I would say that in the latter category I would place the use of headings, if only they didn't go into the word count! I'm for excluding such things from word count (along with footnotes) on the basis that they are simply aids to the reader. Of course, one way to do that would be to make the headers into graphics files and simply add them as pictures. Don't tell anyone I said that, but, well, it's a good idea if people were to be picky. I'd actually produce a text only file for the word count proper and then add the headings and even Title and contents pages later.

University aspiration gap remains: it's the learning styles!

Not surprising but still concerning: University aspiration gap stays stubbornly wide, survey shows | higher news | EducationGuardian.co.uk: "While overall the proportion of children who say they would like to go to university has increased from 53% in 2000 to 62% in 2008, the gap between the social classes has not narrowed."
It's about aspiration, yes. And it is good that more now aspire to university. But I suspect that we're still suffering from a malaise borne of an inappropriately narrow view of education and 'academic' which goes right to the start of formal education and begins to exclude able kids who happen to have background detriments or who are not able to key into dominant schooled learning styles. And half the problem is that the parents who take most interest are the ones who like it that way, and the ones who don't, don't because they too were failed by the system. For them and their offspring school is at best a child-minding service and more often a form of day-prison. How do you get a child to aspire to do more of the same voluntarily? And go into debt for it?

£1,000 for Brown's fingerprints

That would be interesting, particularly if the government did seek to prosecute, presumably for incitement or somesuch. Here's a quote about why No2ID are offering a bounty from ID card rebels offer £1,000 for Brown's fingerprints | Politics | The Observer: "the campaign was designed to highlight the increasing sensitivity of fingerprinting as a political issue. 'Having committed the largest data breach in history, the government is about to perpetrate the largest identity theft in history,' he said.
'I'm sure the government will seek legal advice to see if we can be prosecuted,' said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International. 'But it would be a foolish government that would try to charge civil rights groups.'"
A lot to applaud there. Yes the government are proposing to nationalise our identities and then rent them back to us, in effect. But what I really like about this idea is the way that it calls time on that whole 'nothing to hide nothing to fear' thing. If Brown etc do go for legal proceedings, they are in effect saying, 'something to fear whether or not nothing to hide'. It makes this legislation personal and drives home how easy it would be to fake an identity via a fingerprint. It highlights that technology is far from foolproof and it makes the point directly to the head honcho, who may be wobbly on ID cards anyway, because of the cost /white elephant nature of the project.

Environmental Enrichment Can Reduce Cocaine Use, Researchers Find

Now this is fascinating research: Environmental Enrichment Can Reduce Cocaine Use, Researchers Find: and the reason is that it seems to demonstrate a link between marginalisation and social exclusion on the one hand and drug abuse on the other. Of course it's in monkeys, but it does seem likely that the principles would transfer to humans. If so, whither social policy and the war against drugs. You can bet the neocons are not going to be signing up for programmes to improve social status of the have-nots, are they? And yet that would seem to be part of the solution.
"subordinate animals are far more inclined to engage in the human equivalent of serious drug abuse than are the dominant animals. Research has shown differences in certain neurochemicals in the brains of the animals, both as predictors and results of the social ranking, and therefore as predictors of drug abuse."
Even more interesting was the effect of 'environmental enrichment': "enrichment reduced the drug response of all the animals; however, the detrimental affect of the stress -- more drug intake, less food -- was more prominent in the subordinate monkeys. "This is very significant for at least two reasons," said Nader, professor of physiology and pharmacology and of radiology. "First, it is a result that could be directly applied to the human situation. It suggests that a better environment could alleviate at least some of the risk that individuals will turn to drugs."
Perhaps decriminalisation and putting resources instead into environmental and personal improvement would be a strategy?

Will power is temporarily zero sum

Unfortunately I can't spot the research this is based on, though the authors look like they ought to know what they're talking about. If it's right, there are interesting implications for education and coaching and similar endeavours. The article is this:Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind - New York Times and we're told two basic things; "The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals"
So we need to strategise and work out either what we will focus on that will need our willpower, or what we might relax on to compensate for hard willpower work. But all the time building capacity. It would certainly explain why some people seem to have little impulse control: they've never learnt otherwise.

Evolution and 'superorganisms'

A report in Wired News alerts us to new thinking about evolution which takes account of organisations, complexity and symbiosis. It's also relevant to the ongoing project of mine linking principalities and powers in the New Testament with emergent properties of social organisms/organisations. Biologists Take Evolution Beyond Darwin -- Way Beyond: commenting on social insects like ants and bees, "until recently, scientists thought the division of labor had a genetic basis, but after scientists sequenced the honeybee genome, they couldn't find a trigger. Hyper-specialization seems to be an emergent property of the collective. 'That's a specific example of how a new pattern can be thrown into play,' Amdam said. 'You have an ordinary life cycle in an individual, but in a social context it's exploited by the colony.'
The superorganism is still shaped by mutation and natural selection, but only recently have biologists, accustomed to thinking of evolution at the individual level, applied the superorganism concept to insects. It may very well have even broader applications."

20-Second Clarinet Solo compressed to <1k

I think that this is probably the sonic equivalent of vector graphics. "In order to get this done, they created a model of the clarinet itself -- essentially replicating each aspect of the sound rather than creating thousands of digital samples from a performance of it. The resulting file occupies less than a kilobyte despite including all of the audio materials. By comparison, the same clarinet sample would occupy 32KB as a MIDI file."
Researchers Cram 20-Second Clarinet Solo into Sub-Kilobyte File | Listening Post from Wired.com:

Worship songs aren't for the blokes

This deserves more thinking about. Definitely. And it's Matt Redman talking, so even more interesting.

YouTube - Worship songs aren't for the blokes. Matt Redman comments.