吴大地晚照闲闲

2012年12月19日星期三

AN AMATEUR LINGUIST LOSES CONTROL OF THE LANGUAGE HE INVENTED

Joshua Foer in The New Yorker:

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.

More here.

THE NEW SCIENTISM

In contrast to reason, a defining characteristic of superstition is the stubborn insistence that something — a fetish, an amulet, a pack of Tarot cards — has powers which no evidence supports. From this perspective, scientism appears to have as much in common with superstition as it does with properly conducted scientific research. Scientism claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer. Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition.

more from Austin L. Hughes at The New Atlantis here.

2012年12月18日星期二

科学: 科学家发现可能有两种不同的希格斯玻色子

大强子对撞机Atlas实验的物理学家公布了最新的实验结果，他们发现了不同寻常的东西。数据显示似乎有两个希格斯玻色子，其中之一的质量是 123.5 GeV，另一个质量是126.6 GeV，两个粒子的质量相差约3 GeV。Atlas物理学家可能花了一个月时间去研究是否哪里出错了，但收效甚微。难道真的有两种希格斯玻色子？虽然粒子物理标准模型的某些扩展预言有多种希格斯玻色子的存在，但实验结果与预言相去甚远——质量为123.5 GeV的希格斯玻色子衰减成两个Z粒子，而另一个希格斯玻色子则衰减成两个光子——都与预言不吻合。粒子物理学家 Adam Falkowski认为结果很可能是系统性问题的一个迹象。也许结果需要明年3月公布的下一批数据才能揭晓。
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科学: NASA反驳世界末日预言

2012年12月21日是世界末日？中国警方已为此抓了一百多人以遏制谣言传播，NASA则早就设立了专门网站反驳世界末日预言。在最新的视频中，NASA解释说，2012年并不特别，我们的地球已经安然度过了40多亿年，NASA确信2012年12月21日世界不会结束。这则视频简单但扼要的说明了玛雅历的起源，以及为什么2012年12月21日会被错误解释了末日。玛雅文明创造了最复杂的日历系统，日历第一天被记为13.0.0.0.0，而2012年12月21日回到了13.0.0.0.0，这类似一个四位十进制计数系统，当到达9999之后，接下来会还原到0000。NASA科学家指出，2012年没有小行星彗星或流浪行星会与地球相撞，而燃烧了数十亿年的太阳也不会威胁到地球。