“Holding theorems in their hands” is a blog post about the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project. It’s a wonderful story about collaboration on many levels and across many interest groups – and with beautiful images to boot. I saw it via Stephen Downes.
Columnist Jan Freeman defends the habit, common in some regions, of using the past participle in place of the gerund or infinitive phrase – ie saying “t’lawn needs cut” rather than “the lawn needs to be cut”.
The main issue here is that the past participle is an adjective and the problem with using an adjective as a noun is that we seem to have a built in syntax checker that works independent of semantics. So if in “I work fed” the adjective applies to the subject, then it should also do so in “I need fed”, which therefore means that after being fed I apparently still need something else!
… of course the fact that in English the gerund (noun) has the same form as the present participle (adjective) also needs fixing – and if Jack was hungry when he got to the top of the beanstalk he would be as leery of saying “I need eating” as of “I need eaten”. I do like eating though….
But it should be clear by now that I don’t need confused since I already am!
In Do the math – The Boston Globe columnist Jan Freeman dismisses objections to the common usage of “three times less than” to mean equal to one third of.
But the Merriam-Webster editors (per JF) are completely off base if they claim that “times less” has never been misunderstood. …more »
My friend Gerry Pareja forwarded a link to this story from ‘Improbable Research’ about the first prize winner in the Neural Correlate Society’s 2007 Illusion of the Year contest.
The image certainly is pretty cool. But to test the explanation I tried covering each image in turn and the effect was still there! I wondered if there was a perceptual delay effect in that our memory of one picture affects our interpretation of the other but then I also noticed that the effect changes depending on where the picture is in our field of view. If I position myself facing the right hand edge of the monitor, then the right hand tower seems more vertical and the left one almost seems to lean left or backwards. So the illusion may be more (or at least partly) due to the fact that in the absense of other visual cues in the picture we tend to interpret as if viewed from the direction at which we are looking at the picture – ie we interpret the picture edge as a window frame.
David Basskin, Director of the CanadianPrivate Copying Collective, has written a letter to the Star in response to Michael Geist’s earlier comments about the media levy and its prospects of its being extended to mp3 players and perhaps even computer hard drives.
Basskin says “The private copying levy is an important source of revenue for music-rights holders and is an issue of fairness”, and goes on to claim that “The levy is often misunderstood. It is not a tax or subsidy, but payment to individual rights holders for use of music by Canadians in the privacy of their homes. Compensation for use – that’s fair”.
But of course the levy is NOT fair because it extracts funds from people who purchase data storage media for purposes having nothing to do with the products of Basskins’ clients and so in fact it IS a tax and subsidy.
What is particularly frustrating about this is the fact that there is a perfect opportunity for the sellers of music recordings to obtain compensation for whatever pattern of reproduction they expect from their customers, and that is at the point of sale. Extracting that compensation later from others who may have no interest in the product just amounts to artificially lowering the price. This may be good for sales and it may even be in the public interest to subsidize artistic products in some way, but this particular approach to gaining that subsidy is fundamentally dishonest and the legislators who were persuaded to go along with it have been conned and bamboozled.
One other aspect of this situation that is worth mentioning is that many who object to the levy might still be willing to entertain a more honestly defined subsidy – paid from honestly defined taxes. But taxes should be collected by the government not by private organizations.
The peace and wellbeing of society is harmed by laws whose perceived unfairness or unenforceability reduces public respect for the law.
In a large body of legislation it is hard to avoid parts which will appear unfair to some, but it is foolish to unnecessarily enact provisions whose manifest unfairness will be frequently imposed on large segments of the population.
A case in point is the media levy in Canadian copyright law. …more »
In TheStar.com – entertainment – Tax on MP3 players may return, David Basskin, director of the Canadian Private Copying Collective, is quoted as saying:
“When you have bought a CD, you don’t own the music – you own the copy of the music that you’ve purchased,” he says. “You’re not buying the rights to make copies.”
“People are going to do private copying, and the levy legitimizes it and provides compensation to the people who created the music. It’s pretty hard to say why that’s not fair,”
No its bloody well not hard to see at all!!!
{Warning:obscenities coming} …more »
ok, This may be a picayune comment in the context of a serious issue, but in David Remnick’s Letter from Jerusalem: The Apostate: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker he refers to Avram Burg’s “flouting of the fact that he holds a French passport”. Of course the common ignorami more often go the other way and have angry demonstrators “flaunting authority” so at least favouring the more hi-toned word is consistent with the New Yorker’s self-perceived station in the world. But perhaps this flaunting of editorial incompetence may encourage others to flaut the magazine’s presumed authority.
Michael Geist – Canadians Speak out on Media Diversity
I support a policy limiting concentrated and cross-ownership of the media in Canada, and also clearly separating those who control distribution channels from those who produce, aggregate and/or distribute content.
I want a choice in what I see on TV, hear on the radio and read in the newspaper and on the internet, and I do not want any private body to have the power to deny or limit that choice.
The freedom of expression and communication that is essential for democracy is lost when the private holder of a broadcast license can deny the right to purchase advertising on the basis that the proposed message conflicts with those of others to which it is beholden (as happened with the denial of AdBusters anti-car ads a few years ago)- or when the controller of an internet communication channel blocks access to web sites whose message it objects to (as was done more recently by Telus in the context of a labour dispute).
Any public policy seeking to protect diversity in the media must recognize the simple fact that ownership matters, and carries a responsibility to the public interest.
Because this review comes after a wave of media mergers, I call for a policy that forces divestiture by media companies with concentrated holdings in a given market.
I also call for the severance of media producers and aggregators from the control of media distribution channels.
But most importantly, I call for a policy which requires those who control media distribution channels to refrain from any kind of censorship of what is distributed over those channels and to provide access to such channels at the same price for all content producers even (in fact especially) when such content may be detrimental to their own interests.
I want to be assured that my voice will be both heard and counted at all CRTC hearings on these matters.
My email address is: alan@qpr.ca
Commenting on the arrest of Haleh Esfandiari in The Chronicle: 7/13/2007: Banishing the Ghosts of Iran, Fatemeh Keshvarz says “We all wish Esfandiari to be freed, but the danger is that we will color all of Iran…” and goes on to harangue Azar Nafisi for not mentioning enough contemporary Iranian women writers in her story of the travails of an occidophilic women’s reading group in post-revolutionary Tehran. As if the readers of ‘Reading Lolita ..’ will not see the protagonist as well as her oppressors as the ends of a spectrum which includes many other categories in between. Perhaps ‘Reading Lolita..’ is a bit two dimensional (but it certainly allows for more than one!) but is concern about this issue is the most appropriate response to the arrest? Don’t get me wrong. I am interested in trying to see and understand a broader range of Iranian experience, but the context of this complaint is really rather dissonant.
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