Elon’s meme magic
There is a 1949 science fiction novel (Project Mars: A Technical Tale) about how to build a Mars colony, and it includes this part: Amazing, it was written by none…
Is language dumbing down?
In the media, we can read that political speeches are getting simpler (2013): This kind of article is typically used to bash the current right-wing president if such exists. E.g.,…
Write simple questions in surveys
There is a movement on Wikipedia, and elsewhere, to use a simplified version of English. This is mainly achieved through the limitation of which words can appear. The chief goal…
Book review: At Our Wits’ End (Ed Dutton, Michael Woodley, 2018)
I try to read many different kinds of books each year. Outside of my own fields, I try to consume high quality popular science, but mainly read academic books within…
Wordcel before it was cool: verbal tilt
Recently, the fashionable word to refer to a certain class of talking or writing heads is wordcel. A play on wordy and incel, if we take it from Urban Dictionary…
Polygenic euphemisms
As every reader knows, whenever powers that be come up with a new euphemism for something, this works, and the previous meanings and associations are quickly forgotten. That's why we...…
East Asian ability tilt and ideographic written language
https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1392623731835506691 I have not, but Lynn has noted that East Asians have a relative advantage in visual-spatial ability, and that's their written language, possibly some gene-culture co-evolution. One study shows…
Digital Phenotyping and Mobile Sensing by Harald Baumeister, Christian Montag (2019, book review)
Baumeister, H., & Montag, C. (Eds.). (2019). Digital Phenotyping and Mobile Sensing: New Developments in Psychoinformatics. Springer Nature. This book offers a snapshot of cutting-edge applications of mobile sensing for…
Linguistics paper (for class): Typology and statistics
This may have some interest. Basically, typologists cannot into statistics and it shows. On the other hand, it means there is a large number of low hanging fruit for someone…
Approximate string matching in R
In trying to merge some data, I was confronted with a problem of matching up strings where the author had mutilated them. He had done so in two ways: cutting…