From TFA: [...] and 42 percent believe that "English will displace other languages" by 2020.
How?!? There'll still be a geographical spread and there'll sure as hell still be 3rd world countries that won't get an invitation for the great globalization party. Even if - by magic - English replaced all other languages in a split second and everybody became fluent English speakers instantly, people would soon start to develop regional dialects (e.g. cockney vs. some Texan redneck's dialect) and the more isolated groups' dialects (e.g. the less globalized regions of the world) wouldn't take too long to become unintelligeble to other "English" speakers.
A more plausible scenario could be, that even more people will become bilingual with English as their 2nd language, but still keep their mother tongue. English wouldn't displace or replace much, just supplement it.
Besides, with approx. 7000 languages in the world it will probably take a little more than 14 years before English can be said to have "displaced other languages".
Of course I don't use Internet Explorer on the Linux computer since it isn't even avilable for Linux [...]
Not entirely true. IEs 4 Linux. I installed it, just because I could... Besides, it can run Flash 8-9 and stuff (so I can watch the Weebl & Bob episodes that require Flash 8), but it's highly unstable --- think (stability of Wine) * (stability of IE)...
I wonder if this WMF-exploit will work in IE on Linux... And - if so - what will it do?
Yeah, this is definitely not an open content problem, it's more of a "double-check your sources" type of problem. If I had to trust my english teacher from some years back, then I'd be calling everyone I found cute for "pussy"...
If I recall correct, Billy says somewhere in the commentaries, that the voice of Fry is just Billy West at 20-something. When hearing Billy speak on the commentaries, I think that's probably a suitable description, even though I don't know how Billy sounded at 20-something.
Thanks to Billy for taking the time to do this, I think a lot of us Futurama-fans really appreciate it. So who's next? David X. (or S.) Cohen?;-)
From the take-down notice on http://piratebay.org/"The police took down all servers in the rack, including the non-commercial site Piratbyrån, the mission of which is to defend the rights of TPB via public debate."
Wtf?!? Did Piratbyrån have anything illegal on their servers or were they just supporting TPB by means of debate? Did the police just think "hey, there's the server hosting that annoying organization morally supporting piracy, let's take that down now that we're here anyways."?
I have to admit that I'm a bit afraid that they might succeed in closing down TPB. The allegations apparently are "breach of copy-right law, alternatively assisting breach of copy-right law." - the alternative is probably how they're going to get them.
I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that something will go wrong in the trial and we'll gte PirateBay back.
[...] I prefer emacs for that [simple editing]. I am not an emacs power user. All I can do is do primive searches, cut and paste. But that's really all I need for quick command line edits. (Emphasis mine.)
Something's wrong here...:-p Why VIM you ask? Apparently you haven't tried starting Emacs on a 633 MHz Pentium Celeron with only 128 MB of RAM.:-p
Seriously though... For dead-simple editing, like you mention, I think Pico or Nano is fine. If you want a little more control I'd suggest VIM, since it appears to me as somewhat lighter on the system resources than Emacs. Both have a steep learning curve, so in that respect I wouldn't recommend one over the other - it's just different ways of doing things. I went from Pico to Emacs and ended up at VIM, since it was most appealing to me.
I'm not here to start a flame-war or anything, so if I'm dead wrong about the speed, I'm sorry. I'm only speaking from my own experience - I haven't made benchmarks or anything. Maybe Emacs can be configured to start up just as fast (or faster) than VIM.
Haha! Yeah, I don't think I've ever been modded troll before... It was actually just a joke, but I can see why someone could easilly mistake it for a troll.
The only people who would probably use it, are people with extremely sensitive data, and in that case, they probably wouldn't be dual booting anyway.
No, hopefully they'll be sticking with Linux, *BSD or Mac. Keeping extremely sensitive data on anything created by Microsoft would be like trying to hide a rhino behind the curtain - it just doesn't cut it.;-)
That said, I'm not sure how I feel about the name, I like Revolution better, but Wii might turn out good/fun too. (And I'm looking forward to getting my hands on that Wii.)
I've not personally tried Debian, but, I have heard the community there isn't exactly 'newbie friendly'.
I'm running Debian on my server and on my laptop and let me just say that you've heard absolutely right. I've been running Linux for 6 years (Debian for 4) but I still encounter things that gives me problems every once in a while --- last time it was an upgrade of Xorg that messed up my keyboard layout so AltGr wasn't working. Asking on #debian would most likely get me "RTFM!"; asking on #Xorg (or whatever their channel is called) would probably have been the best solution --- asking on the appropriate channel usually is. Fortunately I figured it out myself after a couple of hours. Well, my point is that the distro-channels easilly become rude and snobbish (except for #ubuntu and possibly a few other, it was still nice and friendly last I was there).
Anyways, RTFM has become more or less of a standard answer even if the answer isn't actually in the manual... I've always seen RTFM as meaning "the information is out there somewhere and if you look hard enough you'll probably find it sooner or later, either way I don't really care about your problem" --- i.e. Google it, search some wikis and/or forums, read the man-pages etc.
People on the IRC channels --- and people doing support in general --- need to remember that there's a huge difference between asking how to set up Postfix w/ MySQL, SpamAssassin, ClamAV and more, and then asking how to make 'ls' do detailed listings. (Hint: 'ls -l' or even better 'ls --help' is a _way_ better answer than RTFM in the latter case.) The first case with Postfix et al is of course a big question, but a link to a howto or some words to feed to Google will actually get the poor guy started whereas RTFM will just leave him as ignorant as before and possibly thinking your an insensitive, snobbish clod.
I usually try not to use RTFM, since it's often not a good nor fulfilling answer. Often the manual is outdated compared to the application (or vice versa).
Ever had problems with mplayer? Well, RTFM! (Yeah, right --- try showing TFM to mplayer and see if it cares!)
Note: It's not that I dislike #debian or other distro-channels, many of them just aren't newbie-friendly. Nor do I dislike mplayer --- au contraire --- the docs just aren't up to date with the app.
[...] you're just not supposed to give it to all of your friends, what's wrong with that?
It's alright to buy an album or a movie and let a friend borrow it for half a year, but once it becomes a file it's not alright? When will they start suing me because I invite some friends over to watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? (Don't tell me that odds are that they'll buy it if the like it, if they've had my copy for half a year - in most cases they won't (based on personal experience).)
Or better yet, if I buy, say, a movie (on DVD, VHS or Betamax) and decide I don't like it and give it to a friend who does, that's alright. But if I buy an album or a single mp3 as a file (or collection of...) and decide that I don't like it, then it's piracy if I give it to a friend... (I.e. I copy the file to his computer and delete it from my own.)
Dude, what are you talking about? I was pointing out that because we have access to the sources from the Mozilla Foundation we can actually check the code for stuff like this... I don't know about you, but I've never had access to any source code from the big G.
So I, as a Debian user, am at risk, where Gentoo users are practically in the safe, or...:-p
I know what you mean and I'm sure you know how tiny the chances are that anyone would actually go through the hassle to actually do that, but sure, the possibility exists.
Well, I'm pretty sure that if the Mozilla Foundation was doing this, someone would have noticed it (e.g. when trying to fix a bug) and complained about it.
I'm not sure what point they actually proved. It wasn't like there were much point to them from the beginning. The only thing I think has been proved here is that Jyllands-Posten can't handle the responsibility that comes with freedom of speech. It wasn't like they were unaware that muslims don't like drawings of Muhammad - they just chose to ignore that. I truly fail to see why it was so important for them to publish those cartoons.
Of course, I don't think running around burning down embassies will solve the problem, that's obviously a poor choice of reaction, but I understand their frustration. The government is usually the highest instance of power in a country, therefore they naturally seek to push them for an apology. Unfortunately our government can't apologise on behalf of the paper because the paper and the government have absolutely nothing to do with each other - we have a free press (fortunately). I guess they should target their frustration directly at the paper, but how do you do that from, say, Palestine or Syria?
I don't see what the cartoons have to do with womens' rights...(?) Their society not being perfect doesn't give either of us the right to blaspheme. (Heck, our own society is pretty far from perfect.) I'm an atheist myself, but I still think one should respect others' beliefs. I'm all for womens' rights (and everyone else's for that matter), but I really fail to see the connection... If I understand you right, then you're basically saying that it's alright to mug someone who's once beaten his wife... Or an even more relavant analogy, it is ok for me to muck you and your religion because you don't agree with me on what programming language is the best.(?)
Sure, freedom of speech is great, but it comes with a lot of responsibility --- a responsibility Jyllands-Posten (the paper that originally published the drawings) apparently can't handle. I think I'm pretty much your average christian-by-culture/atheist-by-belief dane and I understand why the muslims are so pissed! These drawings show nothing but disrespect for the entire muslim community, both here and in the rest of the world.
Jyllands-Posten even refused to print some drawings joking with Jesus back in december, 'cause as the editor said, it would offend the readers...(!) (The drawings were something like "rising from the dead doing a double somersault" and stuff - pretty hilarious actually.) How's that for hypocrisy?
Now, I don't think the government should start apologising on behalf of the paper, neither should they start censoring the danish papers in any way --- the danish papers should simply learn a thing or two about respect for others and their religion(s).
Jyllands-Posten has even been rumoured (e.g. on CNN) to want to print the Iranian holocaust-drawings, but the editor in chief (is that what it's called?) has disputed that. Hopefully he won't change his mind.
The Muhammad drawings were stupid and absolutely needlesly provocative --- it has nothing to do with freedom of speech and it never had.
Attention: After writing this I realize that this may well be the nerdiest post ever, but on the other hand I feel that it'd be a shame to let it go to waste...
Whorf actually said that the structure of ones native language would strongly affect or fully determine the world-view an individual gains when acquiring language. This is what is widely regarded as linguistic determinism in linguistics today.
Whorf also put forward a less extreme claim, namely that difference in the structure of two languages would generally go hand in hand with differences in non-linguistic cognitive processes in the native speakers of the two languages. This is what is generally regarded as linguistic relativity.
It's important to note the emphasis on "structure", since the Whorfian hypothesis would otherwise mean that because the Hopi have one word covering "pilot", "dragonfly" and "aeroplane" they can't distinguish between the three. (Obviously ridiculous.)
Ironically enough, Paul Kay (who co-authored the article in PNAS) was 50% of the infamous universalist duo that wrote Basic Color Terms (1969) --- the other 50% was Brent Berlin --- in which they argued for a universal categorization in the color domain, but lately he's been moving more and more towards a relativist stand-point.
Kay (along with Willett Kempton) was involved in a similar experiment (the one briefly mentioned on the U-Chicago website) in 1984, where they conducted it as a triad experiment. Three color chips were presented to the subject and s/he had to pick the "odd one out". They used Tarahumara (Uto-Aztecan) speakers and English speakers as subjects. Tarahumara does not make the same distinction between "green" and "blue" as English does, but use one word covering the whole spectrum instead. The colors presented to the subject would be close to where the distinction between "blue" and "green" is made in English, but the two colors closest to each other was not always on each side of the "border". (A is called "green", B is called "green" and C is called "blue", but A and C might be closer in terms of wave-length.)
The results came out that the English speaker used a naming strategy when picking the odd one out, whereas the Tarahumara speakers did not, they picked it in terms of wavelength (as expected). That was definitely strong evidence for linguistic relativity. I hope this new experiment is as well-conducted and thought out.
The text on the U-Chicago website states that "Language appears to sharpen visual distinctions in the right visual field, and not in the left visual field", however, I would think that "sharpen" is a bad choice of words and I hope that's not what is meant. Language cannot "sharpen" the distinctions between colors, it can only set up some sort of categorization (as Kay & Kempton described in 1984) and perhaps deceive our brain in various ways. The distinction must still be based primarilly in physiological conditions (color receptors in the eye etc...).
If you're interested in this subject, I suggest you check out the following:
Berlin, B. & Kay, P., 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.
Davidoff, J., 1997. The Neuropsychology of Color. In Hardin, C. & Maffi, L. (eds.), Color Categories in Thought and Language.
Davidoff, J., 2001. Language and perceptual categories. Trends in Cognitive Science 5:382-87.
Davidoff, J., 2004. Coloured Thinking. Psychologist 17:570-72.
Kay, P. & Kempton, W., 1984. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? American Anthropologist 86:65-79.
Kay, P. & McDaniel, C., 1978. The linguistic signicance of the meanings of basic color terms. Language 54:610-46.
MacLaury, R., 1992. From Brightness to Hue: An Explanatory Model of Color-category Evolution. Current Anthropology 33:137-86.
Newcomer, P. & Faris, J., 1971. Basic Color Terms. International Journal of American Linguistics 37:270-75.
And of course...
Whorf, B., 1971. Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf.
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From TFA: [...] and 42 percent believe that "English will displace other languages" by 2020.
How?!? There'll still be a geographical spread and there'll sure as hell still be 3rd world countries that won't get an invitation for the great globalization party. Even if - by magic - English replaced all other languages in a split second and everybody became fluent English speakers instantly, people would soon start to develop regional dialects (e.g. cockney vs. some Texan redneck's dialect) and the more isolated groups' dialects (e.g. the less globalized regions of the world) wouldn't take too long to become unintelligeble to other "English" speakers.
A more plausible scenario could be, that even more people will become bilingual with English as their 2nd language, but still keep their mother tongue. English wouldn't displace or replace much, just supplement it.
Besides, with approx. 7000 languages in the world it will probably take a little more than 14 years before English can be said to have "displaced other languages".
Not entirely true. IEs 4 Linux. I installed it, just because I could... Besides, it can run Flash 8-9 and stuff (so I can watch the Weebl & Bob episodes that require Flash 8), but it's highly unstable --- think (stability of Wine) * (stability of IE)...
I wonder if this WMF-exploit will work in IE on Linux... And - if so - what will it do?
Yeah, this is definitely not an open content problem, it's more of a "double-check your sources" type of problem. If I had to trust my english teacher from some years back, then I'd be calling everyone I found cute for "pussy"...
If I recall correct, Billy says somewhere in the commentaries, that the voice of Fry is just Billy West at 20-something. When hearing Billy speak on the commentaries, I think that's probably a suitable description, even though I don't know how Billy sounded at 20-something.
Thanks to Billy for taking the time to do this, I think a lot of us Futurama-fans really appreciate it. So who's next? David X. (or S.) Cohen? ;-)
From the take-down notice on http://piratebay.org/ "The police took down all servers in the rack, including the non-commercial site Piratbyrån, the mission of which is to defend the rights of TPB via public debate."
Wtf?!? Did Piratbyrån have anything illegal on their servers or were they just supporting TPB by means of debate? Did the police just think "hey, there's the server hosting that annoying organization morally supporting piracy, let's take that down now that we're here anyways."?
I have to admit that I'm a bit afraid that they might succeed in closing down TPB. The allegations apparently are "breach of copy-right law, alternatively assisting breach of copy-right law." - the alternative is probably how they're going to get them.
I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that something will go wrong in the trial and we'll gte PirateBay back.
[...] I prefer emacs for that [simple editing]. I am not an emacs power user. All I can do is do primive searches, cut and paste. But that's really all I need for quick command line edits. (Emphasis mine.)
Something's wrong here... :-p Why VIM you ask? Apparently you haven't tried starting Emacs on a 633 MHz Pentium Celeron with only 128 MB of RAM. :-p
Seriously though... For dead-simple editing, like you mention, I think Pico or Nano is fine. If you want a little more control I'd suggest VIM, since it appears to me as somewhat lighter on the system resources than Emacs. Both have a steep learning curve, so in that respect I wouldn't recommend one over the other - it's just different ways of doing things. I went from Pico to Emacs and ended up at VIM, since it was most appealing to me.
I'm not here to start a flame-war or anything, so if I'm dead wrong about the speed, I'm sorry. I'm only speaking from my own experience - I haven't made benchmarks or anything. Maybe Emacs can be configured to start up just as fast (or faster) than VIM.
Haha! Yeah, I don't think I've ever been modded troll before... It was actually just a joke, but I can see why someone could easilly mistake it for a troll.
The only people who would probably use it, are people with extremely sensitive data, and in that case, they probably wouldn't be dual booting anyway.
No, hopefully they'll be sticking with Linux, *BSD or Mac. Keeping extremely sensitive data on anything created by Microsoft would be like trying to hide a rhino behind the curtain - it just doesn't cut it. ;-)
BTW, Is a cluster of these called a Wii-Wii?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Wii-wiis!
That said, I'm not sure how I feel about the name, I like Revolution better, but Wii might turn out good/fun too. (And I'm looking forward to getting my hands on that Wii.)
Oh, a million puns and only so little time.
In Soviet Russia Windows nag ... Windows. :-p
I've not personally tried Debian, but, I have heard the community there isn't exactly 'newbie friendly'.
I'm running Debian on my server and on my laptop and let me just say that you've heard absolutely right. I've been running Linux for 6 years (Debian for 4) but I still encounter things that gives me problems every once in a while --- last time it was an upgrade of Xorg that messed up my keyboard layout so AltGr wasn't working. Asking on #debian would most likely get me "RTFM!"; asking on #Xorg (or whatever their channel is called) would probably have been the best solution --- asking on the appropriate channel usually is. Fortunately I figured it out myself after a couple of hours. Well, my point is that the distro-channels easilly become rude and snobbish (except for #ubuntu and possibly a few other, it was still nice and friendly last I was there).
Anyways, RTFM has become more or less of a standard answer even if the answer isn't actually in the manual... I've always seen RTFM as meaning "the information is out there somewhere and if you look hard enough you'll probably find it sooner or later, either way I don't really care about your problem" --- i.e. Google it, search some wikis and/or forums, read the man-pages etc.
People on the IRC channels --- and people doing support in general --- need to remember that there's a huge difference between asking how to set up Postfix w/ MySQL, SpamAssassin, ClamAV and more, and then asking how to make 'ls' do detailed listings. (Hint: 'ls -l' or even better 'ls --help' is a _way_ better answer than RTFM in the latter case.) The first case with Postfix et al is of course a big question, but a link to a howto or some words to feed to Google will actually get the poor guy started whereas RTFM will just leave him as ignorant as before and possibly thinking your an insensitive, snobbish clod.
I usually try not to use RTFM, since it's often not a good nor fulfilling answer. Often the manual is outdated compared to the application (or vice versa).
Ever had problems with mplayer? Well, RTFM! (Yeah, right --- try showing TFM to mplayer and see if it cares!)
Note: It's not that I dislike #debian or other distro-channels, many of them just aren't newbie-friendly. Nor do I dislike mplayer --- au contraire --- the docs just aren't up to date with the app.
... and here it is. Klez, MyDoom, Sobig, SCO and SomeFool are tested.
I wasn't being sarcastic! But I guess I can't run from "little pig". ;)
Hahahaaa! Thank you, that really made an otherwise uninteresting day quite a lot better! :)
It's a times like this I wish I had mod points and that there was a +1, Original.
New eps! "I'm so excited I wish I could wet my pants!"
Btw, That Guy's name is Steve (or Steven) Castle, but it's never mentioned in the show itself - just in the commentary and the bonus material. ;-)
And once again, my sig is totally on-topic!
Mmm... Global lunch... :-p
[...] you're just not supposed to give it to all of your friends, what's wrong with that?
It's alright to buy an album or a movie and let a friend borrow it for half a year, but once it becomes a file it's not alright? When will they start suing me because I invite some friends over to watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? (Don't tell me that odds are that they'll buy it if the like it, if they've had my copy for half a year - in most cases they won't (based on personal experience).)
Or better yet, if I buy, say, a movie (on DVD, VHS or Betamax) and decide I don't like it and give it to a friend who does, that's alright. But if I buy an album or a single mp3 as a file (or collection of ...) and decide that I don't like it, then it's piracy if I give it to a friend... (I.e. I copy the file to his computer and delete it from my own.)
Yeah, I've already agreed with you on that point. :) This was an answer to the guy who said "Ditto with Google"...
Dude, what are you talking about? I was pointing out that because we have access to the sources from the Mozilla Foundation we can actually check the code for stuff like this... I don't know about you, but I've never had access to any source code from the big G.
So I, as a Debian user, am at risk, where Gentoo users are practically in the safe, or... :-p
I know what you mean and I'm sure you know how tiny the chances are that anyone would actually go through the hassle to actually do that, but sure, the possibility exists.
Well, I'm pretty sure that if the Mozilla Foundation was doing this, someone would have noticed it (e.g. when trying to fix a bug) and complained about it.
I'm not sure what point they actually proved. It wasn't like there were much point to them from the beginning. The only thing I think has been proved here is that Jyllands-Posten can't handle the responsibility that comes with freedom of speech. It wasn't like they were unaware that muslims don't like drawings of Muhammad - they just chose to ignore that. I truly fail to see why it was so important for them to publish those cartoons.
Of course, I don't think running around burning down embassies will solve the problem, that's obviously a poor choice of reaction, but I understand their frustration. The government is usually the highest instance of power in a country, therefore they naturally seek to push them for an apology. Unfortunately our government can't apologise on behalf of the paper because the paper and the government have absolutely nothing to do with each other - we have a free press (fortunately). I guess they should target their frustration directly at the paper, but how do you do that from, say, Palestine or Syria?
I don't see what the cartoons have to do with womens' rights...(?) Their society not being perfect doesn't give either of us the right to blaspheme. (Heck, our own society is pretty far from perfect.) I'm an atheist myself, but I still think one should respect others' beliefs. I'm all for womens' rights (and everyone else's for that matter), but I really fail to see the connection... If I understand you right, then you're basically saying that it's alright to mug someone who's once beaten his wife... Or an even more relavant analogy, it is ok for me to muck you and your religion because you don't agree with me on what programming language is the best.(?)
Sure, freedom of speech is great, but it comes with a lot of responsibility --- a responsibility Jyllands-Posten (the paper that originally published the drawings) apparently can't handle. I think I'm pretty much your average christian-by-culture/atheist-by-belief dane and I understand why the muslims are so pissed! These drawings show nothing but disrespect for the entire muslim community, both here and in the rest of the world.
Jyllands-Posten even refused to print some drawings joking with Jesus back in december, 'cause as the editor said, it would offend the readers...(!) (The drawings were something like "rising from the dead doing a double somersault" and stuff - pretty hilarious actually.) How's that for hypocrisy?
Now, I don't think the government should start apologising on behalf of the paper, neither should they start censoring the danish papers in any way --- the danish papers should simply learn a thing or two about respect for others and their religion(s).
Jyllands-Posten has even been rumoured (e.g. on CNN) to want to print the Iranian holocaust-drawings, but the editor in chief (is that what it's called?) has disputed that. Hopefully he won't change his mind.
The Muhammad drawings were stupid and absolutely needlesly provocative --- it has nothing to do with freedom of speech and it never had.
Freedom of speech != duty to speak.
Attention: After writing this I realize that this may well be the nerdiest post ever, but on the other hand I feel that it'd be a shame to let it go to waste...
Whorf actually said that the structure of ones native language would strongly affect or fully determine the world-view an individual gains when acquiring language. This is what is widely regarded as linguistic determinism in linguistics today.
Whorf also put forward a less extreme claim, namely that difference in the structure of two languages would generally go hand in hand with differences in non-linguistic cognitive processes in the native speakers of the two languages. This is what is generally regarded as linguistic relativity.
It's important to note the emphasis on "structure", since the Whorfian hypothesis would otherwise mean that because the Hopi have one word covering "pilot", "dragonfly" and "aeroplane" they can't distinguish between the three. (Obviously ridiculous.)
Ironically enough, Paul Kay (who co-authored the article in PNAS) was 50% of the infamous universalist duo that wrote Basic Color Terms (1969) --- the other 50% was Brent Berlin --- in which they argued for a universal categorization in the color domain, but lately he's been moving more and more towards a relativist stand-point.
Kay (along with Willett Kempton) was involved in a similar experiment (the one briefly mentioned on the U-Chicago website) in 1984, where they conducted it as a triad experiment. Three color chips were presented to the subject and s/he had to pick the "odd one out". They used Tarahumara (Uto-Aztecan) speakers and English speakers as subjects. Tarahumara does not make the same distinction between "green" and "blue" as English does, but use one word covering the whole spectrum instead. The colors presented to the subject would be close to where the distinction between "blue" and "green" is made in English, but the two colors closest to each other was not always on each side of the "border". (A is called "green", B is called "green" and C is called "blue", but A and C might be closer in terms of wave-length.)
The results came out that the English speaker used a naming strategy when picking the odd one out, whereas the Tarahumara speakers did not, they picked it in terms of wavelength (as expected). That was definitely strong evidence for linguistic relativity. I hope this new experiment is as well-conducted and thought out.
The text on the U-Chicago website states that "Language appears to sharpen visual distinctions in the right visual field, and not in the left visual field", however, I would think that "sharpen" is a bad choice of words and I hope that's not what is meant. Language cannot "sharpen" the distinctions between colors, it can only set up some sort of categorization (as Kay & Kempton described in 1984) and perhaps deceive our brain in various ways. The distinction must still be based primarilly in physiological conditions (color receptors in the eye etc...).
If you're interested in this subject, I suggest you check out the following:
Berlin, B. & Kay, P., 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.
Davidoff, J., 1997. The Neuropsychology of Color. In Hardin, C. & Maffi, L. (eds.), Color Categories in Thought and Language.
Davidoff, J., 2001. Language and perceptual categories. Trends in Cognitive Science 5:382-87.
Davidoff, J., 2004. Coloured Thinking. Psychologist 17:570-72.
Kay, P. & Kempton, W., 1984. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? American Anthropologist 86:65-79.
Kay, P. & McDaniel, C., 1978. The linguistic signicance of the meanings of basic color terms. Language 54:610-46.
MacLaury, R., 1992. From Brightness to Hue: An Explanatory Model of Color-category Evolution. Current Anthropology 33:137-86.
Newcomer, P. & Faris, J., 1971. Basic Color Terms. International Journal of American Linguistics 37:270-75.
And of course...
Whorf, B., 1971. Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Ok, go ahead, mod me -1bn, karma whore. :-p