In 2009 Stuart McMillen, famed Australian comic artist, published a drawn rendition of a short passage from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death. The passage compares the radically different worlds depicted by Orwell in his “1984” and by Aldous Huxley in his “Brave New World.” Both novels show an Earth whose inhabitants have been rendered…
Category: Society
Add money to your likes: Flattr’s microdonation system
Many social networks today employ the concept of “favoriting” items: images on Flickr, Instagram and 500px; songs on SoundCloud; videos on YouTube and Vimeo; tweets on Twitter; repositories on GitHub; and so on…. When you “favorite” or “like” something, you’re essentially telling the author that you’d like more of that. Yet, when it comes to creative…
Italian luddites: the downfall of a country living in the past
If you were to describe my country, Italy, as a country fearful of change, you wouldn’t be too far off from the truth. If Italians could live under a bubble preventing time from passing, most of them would jump at the opportunity. I have come to the conclusion that most of my fellow countrymen are…
God is an atheist
God here. First, I do not exist. The concept of a 13,700,000,000 year old being, capable of creating the entire Universe and its billions of galaxies, monitoring simultaneously the thoughts and actions of the 7 billion human beings on this planet is ludicrous. Grow a brain. Second, if I did, I would have left you…
In memoriam: Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
Steve is gone. I waited a few days before writing about it, yet it still feels unreal. The man who created Apple, the company that essentially created modern computing and more, is gone. It was widely known that he was sick, and those who follow Apple-related news and rumors had a feeling that it was…
Photographic trends I just don’t understand
It is no mystery that I have a passion for photography. Having published two books and posting regularly on my Flickr stream, and knowing the theory of optics in addition to just snapping around, I think I know what I’m doing. Mind you, this does not mean I consider myself an artist. It may sound…
Languages: ambiguous parsing
There is one reason computers are great at numbers and awful at languages: the latter are difficult to parse. While complex mathematical operations can be carried out in a well-known order, parsing text can be exruciating difficult even for humans. This is especially true for languages — such as English — that allow long sequences…
Languages: the strange case of Pirahã and Aymara
In my last post, I wrote about the connections between language and thought, ie. linguistic relativity / determinism. In today’s highly globalized world, languages get mixed and evolve at a much faster pace than ever before. English, for instance, is no longer only divided into British, American, Canadian and Australian English; we could say that there…
Languages: linguistic relativity, words vs. thought
One of the most intriguing concepts in linguistics is the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity principle. Simply put, it states that the language we speak can influence the way we think. Another common name for this theory is linguistic determinism. There are some subtleties in the usage of these different names (no pun intended),…
Italian hand gestures explained
This is spot on. You’ll need this if you ever come here. 😀