Sensible · Marks · of · Ideas

The simplest explanation is just that it takes a while for information to spread; by the time most people have noticed the fall in crime, crime will probably have started rising again. However, I shall lay Occam's razor to one side for a moment in order to contemplate another hypothesis, which I call the MOMS syndrome, MOMS here standing for "malaise of modern society". The idea that crime is increasing is attractive not just because for a while it did increase, but because increasing crime is part of the MOMS: modern society has a high crime rate because modern society is fundamentally flawed. You can choose one or more of many aspects of the malaise to explain crime: decline in religious belief, rampant consumerism, single mothers … take your pick. Any of these can be pulled in to say why, for about thirty years, crime rose to almost nineteenth-century levels. Ah yes, that's the problem. Take a look at these figures [Source], which give the murder rate in Britain (per 100,000 per year averaged by decade):

While grey goo is still a far-off threat, I can see an analogous scenario unfolding on the Web. An increasing amount of cyberspace is taken up by Web 2.0 applications: Live Journal, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, Quechup, Flickr ... the list is endless. Not only is much of the "content" in these services devoid of real content, it is also self-replicating, just like grey goo. For example, I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter and of course LJ. I have arranged things so that anything I write on Twitter or LJ appears on my Facebook page (and thus on the home pages of any of my Facebook friends). I was about to also have my tweets appear on LJ, as many of my friends do, but then realised that they would then appear twice on Facebook: once as a Twitter feed and then again as a LJ feed. Now imagine an app that posts your Facebook updates to Twitter (after cutting them up into 148-character chunks). If no one has written it yet, someone soon will. So then you create an infinite loop, drowning all of your webspaces in a sea of tweets.

Now consider that someone is friends with you on Facebook, following you on Twitter, your minion on Bebo or whatever. They get all this garbage, of course. Normally what will happen then is that they'll block you, defriend you and generally curse your name, and it stops there. But consider what happens if they are such a fan of yours that they have an application which automatically retweets your tweets, shares your Facebook posts and so forth. I don't know if such an application exists, but like I said, if no one has written it, someone soon will. No web application is so useless that no one will design it—that's what the spirit of Web 2.0 is all about. While your lethal tweet is racing around your own social sites, it is periodically cloning itself onto your friends' sites and thence throughout the web. Within a short period of time, the whole of the web could be full of a hideous mashup of meaningless tweets.

Ever since I started grading essays (and that was a looong time ago, boys and girls), I had assumed, along with most of my colleagues, that if you were going to break down the way you gave grades, rather than just holding the paper up to the light and saying "Hmmm, looks like a B+," it would be along the following lines:

1. Argument;
2. Organisation;
3. Language;
4. Other stuff.

What I was ignoring was that argument and organisation are pretty much inseparable. You can separate them in theory, as I demonstrated above, but in practice they usually go together, or at least they do in ENG 101. I occasionally give a paper "D" for argument and "A" for organisation, but that's nearly always because the paper is off-topic or factually inaccurate; I hardly ever do the reverse, because a paper which is disorganised is not well-argued. Another problem with dealing with organisation on its own is that you end up doling out a lot of average-to-high grades because it is easy for students, once they've learnt the basics, to do cookie-cutter organisation. They know what teachers want, and it's easy to provide it. Thesis statement? Check. Some crap to lead into the thesis statement? Check. Paragraphs with one main idea? Check. Topic sentences? Check. This method might not get you an "A" for organisation, but it will guarantee you a "B". So when there is a discrepancy between the grades for argument and organisation, it is often because the student is simply writing to a formula.

It seems, then, that it is best to treat argument and organisation as one entity for the purposes of grading. This leaves us with language, which is worth a band to itself, and "other stuff", some of which could go in with language (e.g. punctuation) and most of which is to do with using sources, so we could have the following:

1. Argument / Organisation;
2. Use of Sources / Citation;
3. Language.

The second and more pressing reason is that ties can violate health and safety regulations. I kid you not: they can get caught in machinery, and "concerns have been raised over children pulling them too tight for a joke." Ah yes, I remember how we used to pull our chums ties until their faces went blue and their eyes popped out—hilarious it was. It seems that, like other jolly old traditions such as sodomy with a Curly Wurly, this is unacceptable to namby-pamby progressive educators. Now you might think the solution was simple: instruct pupils to remove their ties while operating lathes (not something they need to do very often, unless the curriculum has got considerably less academic since I left school) and devise a suitable punishment for those who strangle their classmates. Putting their heads in a plastic bag for a while should do the trick. But no, we need to live in a Britain Where Bad Things Do Not Happen, so clip-ons are the obvious solution: safe, easy to use … and totally wanky. I mean it was bad enough having to wear a school tie, but a clip-on school tie? A clip-on school tie that sends a clear message to every bully within eye-shot: "Rip me off, throw me in the air, then trample me underfoot"? Have a heart.

Of course this begs the question of why, in the twenty-first century, any schools would want their pupils to wear ties. Ties first became fashionable in the 1630s (thanks to Croatian mercenaries, hence the word "Cravat"). They've had their day. If we're going to insist on ties, we may as well have britches and shoes with big buckles. The only reason why school ties didn't die out a few decades ago is Harry Potter.

Harry Potter can also be blamed for another disturbing trend in schools: the revival of the house system. This originated in private schools (which we Brits confusingly call "public schools") and was meant fairly literally: boys were incarcerated in large houses where they would sleep, study and engage in sado-masochistic homosexual behaviour. This naturally supported good-natured competition, fair play and grievous bodily harm, as boys from rival houses would while away the summer afternoons clubbing each other with cricket bats. When state education got going, the more pretentious grammar schools emulated this system, even though there were no actual houses. When I was a lad, we had houses, but they were really just an attempt to find names catchier than 3A or 5C (we had Abbey, Castle and Quarry, named after local landmarks). No one had any doubts that the system was a feeble attempt to imitate the world of Tom Brown's Schooldays, a world that had been dealt a death blow by WWI and by the 1960s was just hanging on in a coma. But then along came Harry Potter, and now, the same Telegraph article reports, the Schoolwear Association notes that an increasing number of schools are adopting the house system and "ordering ties, polo shirts and scarves in house colours to differentiate between pupils" (emphasis mine). This, my dear readers, is madness. It won't be like Gryffindor and Hufflepuff; it'll be like the Sharks and the Jets or the Crips and the Bloods.

1. While I sometimes like the way Twitter forces me to be epigrammatic, LJ entries are a generally comfortable length: not too long, not too short. Related to this, I actually think about what I'm going to post, often for quite a while before I write it, which is not something that usually applies to, say, Facebook.
2. The friends system did what the Twitterati claim is so innovative about Twitter.
3. Unlike so much blogging software (and of course Twitter), comments actually appear in proper forum-like threads.
4. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, I don't feel the need to make any excuse for using LJ.
5. Unlike Wordpress and other "serious" blogging tools, I don't feel that LJ obliges me to blog about some definite subject.
6. Custom filters.
7. My LJ friends don't post five entries in as many minutes just consisting of links to videos.
8. I have a permanent and easily accessible archive of what I've been thinking for almost a decade.
9. Maybe it's my imagination, but it looks like a lot of the illiterates who plagued LJ about five years ago have moved on to Facebook and Twitter.
10. While I don't mind being one of the twenty billion people following Stephen Fry (who now tweets in the Andromeda Galaxy too), I rather like the low celebrity count on LJ, and the fact that when you do stumble upon someone a teensy bit famous, there's a much better chance that they'll actually read your comments.

In other words, Dunbar's number tells us nothing that common sense doesn't. Meanwhile, other anthropologists have come up with some different numbers: Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth reckon the maximum could be a hefty 230 or 290 (depending on whether you take the median or the mean). But, as Wikipedia notes, "the Bernard-Killworth number has not been popularized as widely as Dunbar's," despite its being replicated in a variety of studies. To explain this, I propose Dunbar's Law: "Where there are two hypotheses to explain the same data, the one with the cooler name will be adopted." "Dunbar's number" beats "the Bernard-Killworth number" by sheer assonance.

I've just noticed how common fathers, or men taking a father role, are in female action films and TV series. Check this out:

* Lara Croft and her father (which was what prompted me to think about this, since I was watching Tomb Raider)
* Beatrix and Bill (bad father substitute)
* Buffy and Giles (good father substitute)
* Charlie's Angels and Charlie (benevolent but distant father figure)
* Henry VIII and Elizabeth I (real father but dead, just like Lara's)
* Julie and Mr. Miyagi.
* Xena and Ares - no, I'm getting silly now.

What I find interesting is that the protagonist's father is either dead or replaced by a surrogate father. What do you think?

1. What is the correct way to cite a tweet?
2. If a large part of my paper is from Wikipedia, is there a special way to format this, or should I just use a blockquote?
3. If I am quoting my Facebook home page, do I need separate citations for all of my friends' entries that appear there?
4. If the same quotation occurs in the author's Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, do I need to cite all of them or is one enough?
5. If I re-use material from one of my papers that I submitted to alllfreeessays.com, should I cite that site?

1. Use the spell-checker. If it puts a wiggly red line under a word, it doesn't automatically mean that the word is wrong (e.g. it will probably indicate "Mulan" as a spelling mistake) but it is worth looking carefully at it.
2. Check basic grammar. This includes things like the Simple Present tense ;-)
3. Have a title page. Look at the templates on this site. If you make your own title, put it at the top of the second page, and make sure it actually means something.
4. Don't use Wikipedia. I've said this before many times and I really don't want to have to say it again. Quoting Wikipedia says to the reader "I am so lazy, I couldn't be bothered to look further than Wikipedia."
5. Don't use sites that are just collections of student essays, like allfreeessays.com. This also makes you look lazy.
6. Use the sources in the course book. I didn't just put them there so that we'd have something to talk about in class - the essays are about the sources.
7. Cite sources properly. It is Week 12 and I am still getting just a URL as a citation for some sources. Remember that citation is a major part of your grade.

[in a later post]

Here are some other things I keep saying. Or if I didn't say them several times before, I should have done.

1. Titles of complete works (books, journals, newspapers, films, TV series) go in italics. Titles of a part of a work (chapter in a book, article in a journal, episode in a TV series) go in quotation marks. Thus in class we watched "The Deliverer", which was an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess.
2. If you quote from a film, put the film in your Works Cited page.
3. I said it is sometimes acceptable to use the first person in academic writing, especially in the introduction. That doesn't mean you can use it in every third sentence.
4. In the Simple Present tense, the third person singular takes an "-s" suffix. This means, for example, that "Beatrix fight" is not good English. Really. Look at the first chapter of any basic English textbook if you don't believe me.

The purpose of this legislation is supposedly to "protect" elders and people with disabilities from predators like Gustav Klimt. Since "elders" includes anyone over sixty (which, as various commentators have pointed out, includes such hotties as Meryl Streep and Richard Gere) and a "disability" can include almost anything, we are talking about a pretty large section of the population (in fact, if it had been Florida rather than Massachusetts, it might have been the majority). Obviously, this is nothing to do with protecting people. Sylvester Stallone does not need protecting. Clint Eastwood does not need protecting (though I don't think he's been in any sex scenes since he turned 70). Anthony "Human Stain" Hopkins doesn't need protecting, and Jack Nicholson certainly does not need protecting, though it is possible that the days when society needed protecting from him are finally over. Oh, and since blindness and deafness are disabilities, are we to believe that the law is also designed to protect people like Stevie Wonder or Marlee Matlin? (Stevie will turn sixty next year, so he'll need double protection.)

Of course, treating elders as minors and the physically disabled as mentally deficient is nothing about protecting anyone. It's about some people gong "Eeewww, that's icky!" and getting upset when others do not share their reaction.

Now I have done my share of bashing prescriptivists. My book on how to write a term paper has a page complaining about "pseudo-rules" (or what Language Log's Mark Liberman more entertainingly calls "Zombie rules"). When it comes to split infinitives, sentence-final prepositions or singular "they", I'm up there with the best of the descriptivists. On the other hand, I often criticise people's usage, usually on the grounds that I just happen not to like it, which shows that when push comes to shove, I can be as prescriptive as Strunk. Then there's the fact that I teach English in a university, which means I'm paid to be prescriptive: a large and tedious part of my job is highlighting grammatical and stylistic infelicities in student essays.

Is this another case of my characteristic fence-sitting, or is it possible to be both a descriptive and a prescriptive linguist without committing a savage hypocrisy? I would say, "Yes, you can too." In fact, I would argue that descriptive linguistics implies prescriptive linguistics. Take, for example, those most descriptive of linguists, sociolinguists. Describing the language of a certain speech-community in minute detail is what they are happiest doing (which is why generativists always tended to look down on them). A sociolinguist might spend the better part of their life conducting a longitudinal survey of vowel-change in Asian communities in Yorkshire. You can't get more descriptive than that, but ironically, what emerges at the end is a set of prescriptive rules for that speech community; they say, in effect, "If you want to talk like a Bradford-born Indian, this is how you do it."

The same should be true of the rules we normally associate with prescriptive grammar—the kind of grammar we were taught in school, in other words. Someone should study the speech community the students are trying to enter (or that we are trying to force them to enter); in the case of university English courses, this would be the academic community. Then, having discovered what is acceptable or typical usage in that community as it actually exists in the twenty-first century, we could prescribe some rules for neophytes. Fortunately, this has already been done; because of their accessibility, academics are some of the most studied language-users around. After all, why risk getting mugged on the street while taping the conversations of crack-dealers when you can do corpus analysis of academic journals in the comfort of your own home?

With all this study of academic discourse, why is it that there is still a mismatch between what high school and university instructors teach and real English? A possibility is that academics themselves, as a speech community, are as removed from Standard English as are drug-dealers. In some cases, this is true; some academic disciplines have their own peculiar ways of writing and talking but this generally isn't the kind of thing they teach in composition classes; in fact, anyone who taught a bunch of kids fresh out of high school to write like Theorists (with a capital "T") should be shot. (See, I can be very prescriptive on occasion.) A more common problem among English instructors is that when trying to establish what is acceptable grammar and good style, they often only consult other English instructors. People teaching Composition 101 often get their ideas about writing from composition textbooks, and these are often written by people who have done the same, following a chain going back to the grammarians who invented those silly rules about not splitting infinitives. Of course, the ideal English essay has not remained preserved in nineteenth-century amber; rather, it has evolved, but in the odd kind of way that wildlife evolves in inaccessible places like Madagascar, so that the kind of essays you see on sites like allfreeessays.com bear as close a resemblance to any other kind of academic writing as a lemur does to a chimp.

Much as I am fond of atheists and generally think the world needs more of them, I take issue with evangelical atheists who would deny agnostics the chance to sit on the theological fence. From their point of view, an agnostic is either an atheist who won't 'fess up, or an Anglican who can't be bothered to go to church. The argument runs something like this: we do not believe in leprechauns because there is no strong evidence for their existence; there is no strong evidence for the existence of God; therefore, we should not believe in God. To be an agnostic is like saying "Well, I don't actually disbelieve in leprechauns."

The logic of the leprechaun is compelling. The set of objects which can be imagined is substantially larger than the set of objects that actually exist, so all things being equal, we assume that imagined objects are imaginary. Unless you've actually seen a leprechaun with a pot of gold and all, you don't just fail to believe in leprechauns, you believe in the non-existence of leprechauns.

Theists, and even many agnostics, try to tackle the leprechaun analogy by saying that there are reasons for at least suspecting the existence of a god or gods which do not apply in the case of leprechauns. Unfortunately, the reasons proposed are not usually very good: there are arguments from personal experience, which are compelling for the person concerned but not for anyone else, arguments of the "God of the gaps" variety ("Science still hasn't explained why bread always falls with the buttered side down") and of course the argumentum ad populum that billions of people believe in God, so there has to be something in it.

Nevertheless, the leprechaun analogy has never struck me as being particularly convincing, and today while dozing in my office, I realised why. To believe in leprechauns is to make a statement to the effect that there exists some x such that x is a leprechaun. To believe in God, on the other hand, is making a statement about the universe. OK, the statement implies that there exists some x such that x is a god, but that isn't the primary claim. The primary claim varies according to your particular theology, but to keep matters simple, let's stick with the standard Abrahamic view of God. In this case, the primary claim is that the universe is the creation of some entity which pre-exists it.

Now this is a very different kind of a claim from the claim that leprechauns exist. There is an infinite number of things that could possibly exist, which makes a lot of competition for leprechauns. On the other hand, there is (probably) only one universe, and only two possibilities for its existence: it was either created or it wasn't. (At a pinch I could allow three possibilities: it was created, it always existed or it just happened.) In the absence of evidence pointing in either direction, it makes no more sense to say that the universe wasn't created than to say that it was. We should not let the stupidity of some of the arguments for its created status put us off; the only reason there aren't stupid arguments for the uncreated nature of the universe is that few people see the need to argue for this notion.

We can apply similar arguments to alternative theologies such as pantheism, panentheism and so forth. Whatever their merits or demerits, none of them are in the same class as the leprechaun argument. (An exception might be the type of paganism that asserts the existence of gods as physical or quasi-physical entities.) All of this implies that agnosticism is neither wishy-washy atheism nor closet theism and is in fact more a statement about the nature of the question we are asking than it is an answer to it.

Walk, don't drive

Walk, don't fly

Spend more time on the Internet

Sell stuff on e-bay

Sell your house

Start a new business

Relocate