Time to link to another post in Language Log: “The “happiness gap” and the rhetoric of statistics”. It’s more to do with general scientific method than with linguistics, but it expresses really well something that always annoys me no end. Mark Liberman writes: “Most people think in essentialist and non-statistical terms, as if all the members of a category were uniform copies of an invariant prototype.” Yes! That is exactly it. Of course it can be questioned whether actually most people do it - it is certainly the case that it seems that most people do, and that enough people do it for it to be what the doctors call Very Annoying Indeed.

Which is not to say that I would like everybody to walk around thinking in statistical terms. I don’t. I don’t want to think in statistical terms myself, it hurts my brain when I have to. But the point remains: “More women than men like to do X, so she’ll like to do X cos she’s a woman” (or teenager, or any other more-or-less random grouping of people.) It doesn’t actually take any knowledge of statistics or scientific methods to see the basic flaw in that type of reasoning - and yet we see examples of it every day.

So read that post, even though it’s longish and contains statistical diagrams. It’s worth it.

Brilliant, just what I need. A rather habit-forming, Flash based online card game in the tradition of Magic the Gathering and other “role playing card games” (which I have never actually played but I know how they work in theory).

Oh, and also you might want to read the writings of Cedric Walker. He wrote for Slant and Operation Fantast and all those famous fanzines, back when.

I know I’ve been plenty quiet, and I have to run now and can’t post, so here is a quick cheese cam just so you have something to do. (Watching a Cheddar cheese mature beats watching paint dry, hands down!)

I just discovered Bill and Bull, a double planet orbiting Delta Eridani. Oh, ok, so I didn’t literally discover it — astronomers from Uppsala University did. Isn’t that marvellous? Discovering a double planet and naming the constituents Bill and Bull.

And for those readers who were not raised on a diet of Swedish childrens’ literature: Bill and Bull were twin cats who were the minions of the nasty cat Måns, nemesis of Pelle Svanslös (Peter No-tail in the English translations of the books). Bill and Bull were always seen together, and always said the same things, generally echoing what Måns said (and often getting it oh so slightly wrong). Especially Bull had no imagination of his own, he’d repeat everything Bill said, and so in Swedish, “X, said Bull” has become a means of emphasising that X is rather obvious.

Bill and Bull as a double planet. Excellent. I’ll sleep well tonight.

Here is a nice blog I found not very long ago: Sociolinguistics and CMC. (CMC in this context being computer mediated communication, which is what my PhD is all about). It’s written mostly by graduate students, and there are more posts that raise interesting questions than posts that answer them; but the field is too young to have a lot of decisive answers anyway. I think it’s quite interesting reading.

Language Log is one of the best linguistic weblogs around. Read this post by Geoffrey K Pullum, for instance. (It concerns less and fewer and why less than three is a perfectly grammatical construction). I could give you lots of other example posts to read as well, but on the whole, it is almost always worth reading. (No, not only if you are a linguist.) Relevant topics, often entertainingly discussed. A really good blog about language. How could it possibly be better?

Here it is: Language Log.

My Christmas holiday is winding down. I went to the department today, saw my tutor briefly and discussed my time plan. Once back home, I started tidying up my reference lists and making todo lists. Tomorrow I’ll start writing again.

I feel fairly good about the thesis right now. I think I can finish it on time - more or less. I feel less sanguine about the quality of my research, though. Sometimes I don’t think what I’m doing is relevant at all. But at the moment I’m not too panicked about that.

Ho hum. Here is a good link regardless of your nationality: The Local, English-language news from Sweden. Only from Sweden, and by a team of native English-speaking editors who live here (mainly expatriate Brits, I think). I enjoy reading The Local for many reasons - their articles are well-written and usually well-researched; even if the news are the same I get in DN the language factor makes it seem as if the perspective is somehow different; and knowing that Sweden is very small and very insignificant it nevertheless feels good to be able to point to news articles (not to mention in-depth articles about Swedish society, culture, traditions, science, politics…) for the benefit of foreign friends. Read The Local, it’s a good newspaper. Especially if you’re a forriner.

Incidentally…

In the year 2007 I resolve to: Not forget Poland. Get your resolution here.

I haven’t broken my resolution yet!

Woo, posting now works with Firefox again! I am pleased.

I have posted links to the GROW! games before; two new games have appeared there since last time I checked. These are less complicated than the ones on the site earlier — in fact they are called GROW! 1 and 2, respectively, whereas the previous one was GROW! 3 — but quite enjoyable all the same. Here is GROW! 2 and GROW! 1. The latter is extra fun because once you have found the correct sequence you can go back and see what happens if you make other choices, which is often quite fun and very different. I like that kind of light-hearted creativity, very much.