Camil Stoenescu's blog

Există vreo legătură între limba (maternă/nativă) și modul în care gândim și percepem realitatea?

SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.[…]

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world. […]

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

Articolul integral, aici.

Explicația științifică – aici.

Nu reprezintă pentru nimeni o noutate faptul că – în România – cercetarea este codașă în lista de priorități a guvernanților, indiferent de coloratura lor politică. Cifrele brute vorbesc de la sine și nu lasă loc de nuanțe și interpretări. În acest context (vitreg), descoperirea cercetătorilor de la Institutul ”Victor Babeș” apare cu atât mai remarcabilă. Astfel, aceștia au descoperit un nou tip de celule, denumite telocite, celule care joacă un rol important în capacitatea de regenerare și reparare a țesuturilor și organelor din corpul omenesc, împreună cu celulele-stem.

Romanian researchers from “Victor Babes” National Institute for Research and Development in the Field of Pathology and Biomedical Sciences have discovered a cell type, which, together with stem cells could promote regeneration of heart muscle affected by stroke. Victor Babes Institute’s specialists have discovered by chance, while doing research on cells in the intestine, the presence of very small cells that help regenerate organs.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered a particular cell type in the gut, which he named “interstitial neurons” more that 100 years ago. In the early 1970s, electron microscope (EM) studies showed that indeed a special interstitial cell type corresponding to the cells discovered by Cajal is localized in the gut muscle coat, but it became obvious that they were not neurons. Consequently, they were renamed “Interstitial Cells of Cajal”(ICC) and considered to be pace-makers for gut motility. For the past 10 years many groups were interested in whether or not ICC are present outside the gastrointestinal tract, and indeed, peculiar interstitial cells were found in: upper and lower urinary tracts, blood vessels, pancreas, male and female reproductive tracts, mammary gland, placenta, and, recently, in the heart as well as in the gut. Such cells, now mostly known as Interstitial Cajal-Like Cells (ICLC), were given different and confusing names. Moreover, ICLC are only apparently similar to canonical ICC. In fact, EM and cell cultures revealed very particular features of ICLC, which unequivocally distinguishes them from ICC and all other interstitial cells: the presence of 2–5 cell body prolongations that are very thin (less than 0.2 mm, under resolving power of light microscopy), extremely long (tens to hundreds of mm), with a moniliform aspect (many dilations along), as well as caveolae. Given the unique dimensions of these prolongations (very long and very thin) and to avoid further confusion with other interstitial cell types (e.g. fibroblast, fibrocyte, fibroblast-like cells, mesenchymal cells), was coined the term TELOCYTES for them, and TELOPODES for their prolongations, by using the Greek affix “telos”.

According to Laurenţiu Popescu, President of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the telocyte cells were highlighted by Romanian scholars and their existence was confirmed by independent teams from Italy, Germany, Britain and China. In tandem with stem cells, telocytes can help restore some vital organs like heart and brain.

“If we succeed to isolate, multiply them with stem cells, we can use effectively to treat heart attack,” said Professor Laurenţiu Popescu, M.D., Ph.D.

De aici. Cine vrea să cunoască mai multe despre istoria și detaliile descoperirii poate arunca o privire aici.

Lesne de înțeles, o finațare corespunzătoare a institutelor de cercetare care chiar produc rezultate științifice ar reprezenta o promovare mult mai bună pentru România, în loc de aruncat bani aiurea pe concerte și scene inutile marca Ridzi sau pe campanii de plagiat frunze marca Udrea & co. De pildă, comparați milionul de euro necesar Institutului ”Victor Babeș” cu sumele care se fură, cu acte în regulă, în România actuală…

PS Aflu că știrea nu este tocmai nouă, domnul Popescu acordând un interviu încă din luna aprilie revistei Viața Medicală, interviu în care acesta vorbește despre descoperirea telocitelor. Pesemne mass-media autohtonă nu a considerat subiectul destul de important pentru a fi strecurat în vreun jurnal de știri sau colț de tabloid, în cele patru luni scurse de atunci…

Cercetătorii de la AVG au alcătuit un clasament al țărilor în care utilizatorii de Internet sunt cei mai predispuși a fi ținta unui atac informatic sau ai unui virus. Topul riscului e condus de Turcia, Rusia și Armenia, cele mai „sigure” țări fiind Sierra Leone, Niger și Japonia – primele două adevărate „pete albe” pe harta rețelei globale.

Dincolo de reclama implicită, rezultatele complete și metodologia pot fi găsite aici.

Acum ceva vreme fragmentul de mai jos făcea parte din manualul de filosofie pentru clasa a XII-a, capitolul „Dreptatea”:

[…]

— Întrebarea este ce a vrut să spună R. Daneel prin folosirea termenului „justiţie”.

— Din contextul conversaţiei noastre, el s-a referit la ceea ce am înţelege eu, dumneavoastră şi orice alt om, dar ce n-ar putea înţelege nici un robot.

— Domnule Baley, de ce nu-i cereţi să definească termenul?

Baley simţi că siguranţa începea să i se destrame. Se întoarse spre R. Daneel:

— Ei bine?

— Da, Elijah?

— Cum defineşti tu justiţia?

— Justiţia, Elijah, este ceea ce există când toate legile sunt aplicate.

— O definiţie bună pentru un robot, încuviinţă Fastolfe din cap. Dorinţa de a urmări aplicarea tuturor legilor a fost recent încorporată în Daneel. Pentru el, justiţia este un termen foarte concret, deoarece se bazează pe aplicarea legii, care la rândul ei se bazează pe existenţa unor legi specifice şi definite. Nu este vorba de nimic abstract. Un om poate recunoaşte faptul că, pe baza unui cod moral abstract, unele legi pot fi proaste, iar aplicarea lor injustă. Ce părere ai, R. Daneel?

— O lege injustă, răspunse egal R. Daneel, este o contradicţie în termeni.

— Aşa stau lucrurile pentru un robot, domnule Baley. Din acest motiv, nu trebuie să confundaţi justiţia dumneavoastră cu cea a lui R. Daneel.

                                                                                                                                        Isaac Asimov – Caverne de Oțel

Ce este – sau ce ar trebui să fie – un doctorat, explicat în 12 imagini:

de aici.

Descoperiți între 1980 și 2010:

via Popular Science.

În prezent – cât și cum se produce energia electrică și care sunt principalii consumatori:

Și evoluția producției și consumului de energie, între 1949 și 2009:

La o primă vedere: consumul de energie – total și pe cap de locuitor – a cunoscut o creștere continuă în ultimii 60 de ani, iar în prezent înregistrează o ușoară scădere, după maximul atins la începutul anilor 2000. Strâns corelate cu indicatorul anterior, cheltuielile cu energia au crescut într-un ritm și mai spectaculos, în special după 1990. Totodată, lesne de observat, schimbările în producție nu sunt substanțiale – cărbunele și petrolul au continuat să fie principalele surse de energie, urmate de cea nucleară. Cu toată publicitatea făcută, sursele alternative/nepoluante de producere a energiei aduc un aport simbolic în tabloul de ansamblu. Dar, cel mai probabil, în viitor situația nu poate decât să se schimbe.

De aici.

PS  1 Quad = 1.055 × 10¹⁸ jouli.

Pentru cunoscători:

Matter and energy had ended and with it, space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.

All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.

All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.

But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.

A timeless interval was spent in doing that.

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer — by demonstration — would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

And there was light—-

Isaac Asimov – The Last Question

De la creatorii Nmap:

We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below.

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its "www." counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons–those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach–are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440. Since your web browser would choke on that, we have created the interactive viewer below (click and drag to pan, double-click to zoom, or type in a site name to go right to it).

Concluzie interesantă – aparent, Facebook este al doilea site din lume ca trafic, după Google, depășind Youtube, Yahoo! sau Wikipedia.

De aici.