May 11, 2012
Jennifer Government is a 2003 novel written by Max Barry, set in a dystopian alternate reality in which most nations (now controlled by the United States) are dominated by for-profit corporate entities while the government’s political power is extremely limited. Some readers consider it similar in satiric intent to Orwell’s ‘1984,’ but of a world with too little political power as opposed to too much.
Consequently, some readers see the novel as a criticism of libertarianism. Many readers also see it as a criticism of globalization, although Barry claims he is not an anti-globalizationist.
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May 10, 2012
Jumping the shark is an idiom created by American radio personality Jon Hein to describe the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery. The phrase is also used to refer to a particular scene, episode or aspect of a show in which the writers use some type of ‘gimmick’ in a desperate attempt to keep viewers’ interest.
The phrase refers to a scene in the fifth season premiere of ‘Happy Days in 1977: the gang visits Los Angeles, where a waterskiing Fonzie, wearing swim trunks and his trademark leather jacket, jumps over a confined shark, in response to a challenge. For a show that in its early seasons depicted universally relatable experiences against a backdrop of 1950s nostalgia, this marked an audacious, cartoonish turn towards attention-seeking gimmickry and continued the faddish lionization of an increasingly superhuman Fonzie.
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May 9, 2012
American Gods is a 2001 novel by Neil Gaiman. The novel is a blend of Americana, fantasy, and various strands of ancient and modern mythology, all centering on a mysterious and taciturn protagonist, Shadow. Several of the themes touched upon in the book were previously glimpsed in Gaiman’s ‘The Sandman’ graphic novels. The central premise of the novel is that gods and mythological creatures exist because people believe in them. Immigrants to the United States brought with them dwarves, elves, leprechauns, and other spirits and gods.
However, the power of these mythological beings has diminished as people’s beliefs wane. New gods have arisen, reflecting America’s obsessions with media, celebrity, technology, and drugs, among others. In addition to the numerous figures from real-world myths, a few characters from ‘The Sandman’ and its spinoffs make brief cameos in the book. Other mythological characters featured in the novel are not divine, but are legendary or folk heroes, such as Johnny Appleseed. Shadow himself is implied to be Baldr (the Norse god of sun and light, son of Odin)
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May 8, 2012
The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by American educator Salman Khan (who has three degrees from MIT (a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science), and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
With the stated mission of ‘providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere,’ the website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,100 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, microeconomics, and computer science.
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May 7, 2012
The Atrocity Exhibition is an experimental collection of ‘condensed novels’ by British writer J. G. Ballard. The book was originally published in the UK in 1970 by Jonathan Cape.
After a 1970 edition by Doubleday & Company had already been printed, Nelson Doubleday, Jr. personally cancelled the publication and had the copies destroyed, fearing legal action from some of the celebrities depicted in the book. Thus, the first U.S. edition was published in 1972 by Grove Press under the title ‘Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.’
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May 5, 2012
A non-apology apology is a statement in the form of an apology but that is not in fact an apology at all. It is common in both politics and public relations. It most commonly entails the speaker saying that he or she is sorry not for a behavior, statement or misdeed, but rather is sorry only because a person who has been aggrieved is requesting the apology, expressing a grievance, or is threatening some form of retribution or retaliation.
An example of a non-apology apology would be saying ‘I’m sorry that you felt insulted’ to someone who has been offended by a statement. This apology does not admit that there was anything wrong with the remarks made, and additionally, it may be taken as insinuating that the person taking offense was excessively thin-skinned or irrational in taking offense at the remarks in the first place.
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May 3, 2012
Interlingua [in-ter-ling-gwuh] is a planned language using words that are found in most West-European languages. It was made by IALA – a group of people (the most known was Alexander Gode) that worked on it for more than 20 years, and they finished and published the first dictionary in 1951. Interlingua was created on the base of languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.
‘Inter’ means ‘between’ or ‘to each other’; ‘lingua’ means ‘language.’ The goal of the language was to enable people of different countries to talk to each other easily. Because Interlingua was made by people to be easy, it is easier than natural languages to learn. Many thousands of people know Interlingua, and Interlingua speakers say that millions can understand it (read texts in it and listen to someone talk in it) without having to learn it first.
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May 3, 2012
Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, who’s work proposed that the kinds of basic color terms a culture has, such as black, brown or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has.
Berlin and Kay posit seven levels in which cultures fall, with Stage I languages having only the colors black (dark–cool) and white (light–warm). Languages in Stage VII have eight or more basic color terms. This includes English, which has eleven basic color terms.
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May 3, 2012
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view. Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined as having two versions: Strong (language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories) and Weak (linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behavior).
The term ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ is a misnomer as the men never co-authored anything and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The notion of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ versions of Whorf’s principal of linguistic relativity is a misunderstanding of Whorf promulgated by Stuart Chase, whom Whorf considered ‘utterly incompetent by training and background to handle such a subject.’
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May 3, 2012
Excession, first published in 1996, is Scottish writer Iain M. Banks’s fourth science fiction novel to feature the Culture (a fictional interstellar anarchist, socialist, and utopian society). It concerns the response of the Culture and other interstellar societies to an unprecedented alien artifact, the Excession of the title.
The book is largely about the response of the Culture’s Minds (AIs with enormous intellectual and physical capabilities and distinctive personalities) to the Excession itself and the way in which another society, whose systematic brutality horrifies the Culture, tries to use the Excession to increase its power.
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May 2, 2012
Unknown knowns are the things that we know, but are unaware of knowing. The coining of the term is attributed to Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Žižek and it refers to the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality and intervene in it. It is the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge which doesn’t know itself,’ as French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said.
Žižek first used the term as a response to former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s statement at a press briefing given in, 2002: ‘There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’
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May 2, 2012
Yo is an English slang interjection, commonly associated with American English. It was popularized by Italian and African Americans in Philadelphia in the 1970s. It is used to signify informality, close cultural understanding, and communal bonding. It remains very popular among Philadelphia Italian Americans, possibly arising from the Italian language word ‘io’ (meaning ‘I’). In Italian, first person statements are often preceded by io.
Although often used as a greeting, yo may come at the end of a sentence, often to direct focus onto a particular individual or group or to gain the attention of another individual or group. It may specify that a certain statement that was previously uttered is more important, or may just be an ‘attention grabber’ (e.g. ‘Listen up, yo!’). In the Japanese language, the sentence-final particle ‘yo’ is used to emphasize sentences as is often the case in English slang as above, but is etymologically unrelated. ‘YŌ’ is also used by Japanese teens as casual greetings between friends, but is pronounced with a more drawn-out tone.
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