More like the Age of the End User
on
The Rise of Geekdom
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It's all words, I guess, but I'd say there's more to being a true geek than using Facebook.
In fact, one of the real oddities of our age is that it depends hugely on high-tech and yet actual knowledge of even elementary scientific principles is still not regarded as mainstream, or part of what every person with a claim to be educated should know.
Look at the quality of science journalism or of science-related politics - people still, on the whole think that there's no shame in being ignorant of even basic science.
It's evidently based on Latin spelling; I presume that English pronunciation of the "h" in Latin words is based on the prior use of the original Latin "h" letter to represent the English sound in English words (similarly in other Germanic languages).
It must have been a non-trivial step for the original developers of writing systems for English, German etc to think of using the "h" symbol, which would have represented no actual sound in contemporary Latin-derived speech, to represent our "h" sound.
There was a lively tradition of Latin grammatical writing to help, though, which included descriptions of the original sound going back to the days when not pronouncing it was a social error.
We actually pronounce "h" in some words based purely on the spelling, which imitates Latin rather than the historical development of the word.
American "herb" with silent "h" represents the historically "correct" English form borrowed from (Old) French "herbe", in which the "h" has never, so long as French has been French, been pronounced. (It's there because scribes, knowing Latin, easily recognised the word as being from Latin "herba", in which the "h" was originally pronounced.)
In British English we pronounce the "h", based entirely on the spelling. Originally this was simply an error, like pronoucing the "b" in "debt".
Each European nation had its own tradition of pronouncing Latin, based on Latin spelling and internal developments with the native vernacular.
Some (English and French particularly) were far removed from the original Roman pronunciation. In the last century there has been a strong tendency in teaching Latin to replace these traditions with something more like the reconstructed original, but this does not affect words of Latin origin long since borrowed into our modern languages.
Latin "h", originally pronounced like English "h", eventually ceased to be pronounced at all; in the modern languages descended from Latin it is has been lost and is found, if at all, only in words borrowed from other languages.
So Latin "homo" "person" but Italian "uomo", Rumanian "om" and so on.
(The "h" in French "homme" has never been pronounced and is only there in the spelling by analogy with the Latin word).
In the time of the later Roman Republic and early Empire (when most of the famous Latin literature comes from) whether "h" was pronounced was a class thing; dropping "h"s was supposed to be a mark of ignorance or low status.
People insecure about their status would put in "h"s where they didn't belong (the poet Catullus has a whole poem mocking somebody who does this).
Even those who prided themselves on their education were already getting it wrong by then, though, and some of their mistakes got perpetuated:
"humerus" "upper arm" should be "umerus"
"anser" "goose" should be "hanser"
We can deduce a remarkable amount about how Classical Latin was pronounced; there's a good book about it:
"Vox Latina" by W Sidney Allen
I am an eye surgeon [IAAES?], and I find it hard follow why Dmitri Azar in the linked article thinks it would be so useful in our field.
Bleeding isn't normally a big feature of eye surgery such as cataract surgery.
Maybe he has applications in retinal surgery in mind. Blood in the vitreous humour inside the eye clears away very slowly, and sometimes needs to be removed surgically, which is a very major eye operation. It would be good to have some substance you could inject into the eye which would clear the blood faster: in fact various things of this kind have been tried.
It doesn't seem that this stuff would be particularly useful in that way, as it arrests bleeding rather than clears blood.
Neurosurgery I can see, though.
It reminds me of when I did neurosurgery as a trainee, years ago; brain bleeds easily, and the more you touch it, the more it tends to bleed. We used to splosh peroxide on the bleeding spots to arrest bleeding (I don't know if this still goes on).
I remember a cynical anaesthesiologist saying he was convinced that peroxide had no actual effect in itself to stop the bleeding - what happens is that the peroxide fizzes for several minutes and during that time the surgeon has to keep his fingers away from the brain, and it's THAT that arrests the bleeding.
The UK database contains the DNA of people who've been arrested even when then they're later released uncharged or acquitted.
It is almost impossible to get your record deleted when you are acquitted in England and Wales (but not in Scotland).
So unless you believe that the police only ever arrest the guilty, perhaps you will begin to understand what's making people jumpy.
Khoisan is the name of a modern human population, so to call our common ancestors Khoisan is like saying that the French language is descended from Italian.
Linguistically, BTW, "Khoisan" is a suspect concept: there are several different groups of "Khoisan" languages which cannot be shown to be related to one another by orthodox comparative linguistics - the time depths involved are too great for the question to be answerable one way or the other.
There was a recent paper, purporting to show that the earliest human languages must have had clicks, from the fact that the speakers of "click languages" do indeed show as much variety genetically among themselves as all the rest of the human race. Criticism of this:
That isn't to say that our common ancestors may not have looked like modern Khoisan; at any rate they were certainly "black" in modern racist-speak. Pale skin seems to be a fairly recent adaptation to dim-light northern climes: the only physical benefit seems to be increased ability to synthesize Vitamin D, thus making you less likely to get rickets. In premodern times this was presumably enough to outweigh the increased skin cancer risk. In parts of the world where the sun occasionally shines (if I sound bitter, it's because I'm from Scotland), genes for dark skin are advantageous enough to spread quite quickly through a population. The racists' favourite way of dividing up the one single human race is based on a particularly superficial (!) criterion
There's obviously truth in what you say, but what I mean is that the basic principles of all real scientific endeavour, what separates real science from pseudoscience, is not considered to be part of "general knowledge" in our society. In my own line (medicine) it's pretty easy to find lots of examples of researchers whose egos have got in the way of their research, not to mention outright falsification and corruption. But in the end science progresses if and only if it is humble before the facts. What I'm saying is not that scientists are all paragons of intellectual virtue, but that people (like many journalists) who would be regarded in our liberal-arts orientated society as well educated frequently have a view of science which is just magical thinking dressed up in long words. The fundamental problem (IMHO) is not so much that they don't know the basics of science, but that they really don't think that any such knowledge is necessary or even desirable except for a little clique of morlocks. I think that's a recipe for disaster in a democratic society faced by complex and pressing scientific questions. As a specific example here in the UK we saw children put at risk by a major drop in immunisation following baseless scare stories about MMR vaccine; but you can make your own list...
TFA quotes Carl Sagan's all-too-true:
"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
and then says
"this is exactly as it should be."
Even so-called science journalists in the MSM generally have no idea what science is all about. The problem is not that they lack knowledge in some specific domain (who doesn't?) but that they don't get the basic concepts e.g. the systematic pursuit of knowledge by a continual willingness to consider that your best theory so far may be wrong.
Worse yet is that many if not most journalists, like this one, think that their ignorance is not actually a problem.
In a democracy, rational decisions from politicians on technical issues (including medical issues) can't come about in a vacuum - there needs to be a background of _informed_ public debate. This casual comment from a journalist shows why we don't get that so often.
"GOMER" comes from "The House of God" by Samuel Shem (well worth reading, by the way).
It does indeed stand for "Get out of my emergency room", but the sense is not what you think.
In the book it refers to very sick, very old, very frail and demented patients who are evidently going to die despite your best efforts, but will involve you in a huge amount of fruitless effort before the inevitable end.
The book is anything but anti-patient: the plot is basically about the intern hero regaining his faith that it's all worth it.
GOMERS go to ground. Read the book and find out.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all words, I guess, but I'd say there's more to being a true geek than using Facebook.
In fact, one of the real oddities of our age is that it depends hugely on high-tech and yet actual knowledge of even elementary scientific principles is still not regarded as mainstream, or part of what every person with a claim to be educated should know.
Look at the quality of science journalism or of science-related politics - people still, on the whole think that there's no shame in being ignorant of even basic science.
Not "Age of the Geek" by a long shot, yet.
Good question.
It's evidently based on Latin spelling; I presume that English pronunciation of the "h" in Latin words is based on the prior use of the original Latin "h" letter to represent the English sound in English words (similarly in other Germanic languages).
It must have been a non-trivial step for the original developers of writing systems for English, German etc to think of using the "h" symbol, which would have represented no actual sound in contemporary Latin-derived speech, to represent our "h" sound.
There was a lively tradition of Latin grammatical writing to help, though, which included descriptions of the original sound going back to the days when not pronouncing it was a social error.
We actually pronounce "h" in some words based purely on the spelling, which imitates Latin rather than the historical development of the word.
American "herb" with silent "h" represents the historically "correct" English form borrowed from (Old) French "herbe", in which the "h" has never, so long as French has been French, been pronounced. (It's there because scribes, knowing Latin, easily recognised the word as being from Latin "herba", in which the "h" was originally pronounced.)
In British English we pronounce the "h", based entirely on the spelling. Originally this was simply an error, like pronoucing the "b" in "debt".
Each European nation had its own tradition of pronouncing Latin, based on Latin spelling and internal developments with the native vernacular. Some (English and French particularly) were far removed from the original Roman pronunciation. In the last century there has been a strong tendency in teaching Latin to replace these traditions with something more like the reconstructed original, but this does not affect words of Latin origin long since borrowed into our modern languages.
Latin "h", originally pronounced like English "h", eventually ceased to be pronounced at all; in the modern languages descended from Latin it is has been lost and is found, if at all, only in words borrowed from other languages.
So Latin "homo" "person" but Italian "uomo", Rumanian "om" and so on.
(The "h" in French "homme" has never been pronounced and is only there in the spelling by analogy with the Latin word).
In the time of the later Roman Republic and early Empire (when most of the famous Latin literature comes from) whether "h" was pronounced was a class thing; dropping "h"s was supposed to be a mark of ignorance or low status.
People insecure about their status would put in "h"s where they didn't belong (the poet Catullus has a whole poem mocking somebody who does this).
Even those who prided themselves on their education were already getting it wrong by then, though, and some of their mistakes got perpetuated:
"humerus" "upper arm" should be "umerus"
"anser" "goose" should be "hanser"
We can deduce a remarkable amount about how Classical Latin was pronounced; there's a good book about it:
"Vox Latina" by W Sidney Allen
No, no, no, don't tug on that - you never know what it might be attached to ...
I am an eye surgeon [IAAES?], and I find it hard follow why Dmitri Azar in the linked article thinks it would be so useful in our field.
Bleeding isn't normally a big feature of eye surgery such as cataract surgery.
Maybe he has applications in retinal surgery in mind. Blood in the vitreous humour inside the eye clears away very slowly, and sometimes needs to be removed surgically, which is a very major eye operation. It would be good to have some substance you could inject into the eye which would clear the blood faster: in fact various things of this kind have been tried.
It doesn't seem that this stuff would be particularly useful in that way, as it arrests bleeding rather than clears blood.
Neurosurgery I can see, though.
It reminds me of when I did neurosurgery as a trainee, years ago; brain bleeds easily, and the more you touch it, the more it tends to bleed. We used to splosh peroxide on the bleeding spots to arrest bleeding (I don't know if this still goes on).
I remember a cynical anaesthesiologist saying he was convinced that peroxide had no actual effect in itself to stop the bleeding - what happens is that the peroxide fizzes for several minutes and during that time the surgeon has to keep his fingers away from the brain, and it's THAT that arrests the bleeding.
A lifelike VR simulation is likely to be more creepy than reality because of the "Uncanny valley" effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley
That's a large part of the issue.
The UK database contains the DNA of people who've been arrested even when then they're later released uncharged or acquitted.
It is almost impossible to get your record deleted when you are acquitted in England and Wales (but not in Scotland).
So unless you believe that the police only ever arrest the guilty, perhaps you will begin to understand what's making people jumpy.
Not "Khoisan", strictly speaking.
Khoisan is the name of a modern human population, so to call our common ancestors Khoisan is like saying that the French language is descended from Italian.
Linguistically, BTW, "Khoisan" is a suspect concept: there are several different groups of "Khoisan" languages which cannot be shown to be related to one another by orthodox comparative linguistics - the time depths involved are too great for the question to be answerable one way or the other.
There was a recent paper, purporting to show that the earliest human languages must have had clicks, from the fact that the speakers of "click languages" do indeed show as much variety genetically among themselves as all the rest of the human race. Criticism of this:
http://www.ling.umu.se/fonetik2003/pdf/001.pdf
That isn't to say that our common ancestors may not have looked like modern Khoisan; at any rate they were certainly "black" in modern racist-speak. Pale skin seems to be a fairly recent adaptation to dim-light northern climes: the only physical benefit seems to be increased ability to synthesize Vitamin D, thus making you less likely to get rickets. In premodern times this was presumably enough to outweigh the increased skin cancer risk. In parts of the world where the sun occasionally shines (if I sound bitter, it's because I'm from Scotland), genes for dark skin are advantageous enough to spread quite quickly through a population. The racists' favourite way of dividing up the one single human race is based on a particularly superficial (!) criterion
There's obviously truth in what you say, but what I mean is that the basic principles of all real scientific endeavour, what separates real science from pseudoscience, is not considered to be part of "general knowledge" in our society. In my own line (medicine) it's pretty easy to find lots of examples of researchers whose egos have got in the way of their research, not to mention outright falsification and corruption. But in the end science progresses if and only if it is humble before the facts. What I'm saying is not that scientists are all paragons of intellectual virtue, but that people (like many journalists) who would be regarded in our liberal-arts orientated society as well educated frequently have a view of science which is just magical thinking dressed up in long words. The fundamental problem (IMHO) is not so much that they don't know the basics of science, but that they really don't think that any such knowledge is necessary or even desirable except for a little clique of morlocks. I think that's a recipe for disaster in a democratic society faced by complex and pressing scientific questions. As a specific example here in the UK we saw children put at risk by a major drop in immunisation following baseless scare stories about MMR vaccine; but you can make your own list ...
TFA quotes Carl Sagan's all-too-true: "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." and then says "this is exactly as it should be." Even so-called science journalists in the MSM generally have no idea what science is all about. The problem is not that they lack knowledge in some specific domain (who doesn't?) but that they don't get the basic concepts e.g. the systematic pursuit of knowledge by a continual willingness to consider that your best theory so far may be wrong. Worse yet is that many if not most journalists, like this one, think that their ignorance is not actually a problem. In a democracy, rational decisions from politicians on technical issues (including medical issues) can't come about in a vacuum - there needs to be a background of _informed_ public debate. This casual comment from a journalist shows why we don't get that so often.
"GOMER" comes from "The House of God" by Samuel Shem (well worth reading, by the way). It does indeed stand for "Get out of my emergency room", but the sense is not what you think. In the book it refers to very sick, very old, very frail and demented patients who are evidently going to die despite your best efforts, but will involve you in a huge amount of fruitless effort before the inevitable end. The book is anything but anti-patient: the plot is basically about the intern hero regaining his faith that it's all worth it. GOMERS go to ground. Read the book and find out.
Stepford Coffee!