Alfred Russel Wallace was born on this day in 1823 (he died in 1913). You know of him as the other guy who invented a theory of Natural Selection which was very like Darwin’s; they published the theory together. He also spent considerable time traveling around on boats in the tropics, like Darwin did, and collected one or two items that made it back to to various museums.
One of the most awful tragedies of 19th century science happened to Wallace, when on July 12th, 1852, the ship he and his very important and interesting insect specimens, and notes, that he was taking back to the UK from the Rio Negro area caught fire and sank. He and others survived in a life boat and were eventually picked up.
Until a few minutes ago, I didn’t even know what the heck Vocal Fry is. Apparently some people have gotten really annoyed about it, as it is a speech mannerism that has emerged among young folks, who are always annoying, and especially females, who are always annoying. Apparently. (I also did not know that until a few minutes ago! I’m learning a lot of new stuff today!)
It’s been written up in a scientific journal (see below), in popular media, and it was brought to my attention by a facebook post of Debby Goddard’s. But of all the sources I’ve seen, the following video best describes the phenomenon for those who don’t already know what it is:
Speech mannerisms come and go, and they seem to be part of the cultural process of ever-shifting styles. Some have suggested (Trigger warning: Possible Pop Psychology!) that this is an ingroup-outgroup mechanism. If you don’t know the current mannerisms, you can’t sit at the Middle School lunch table with the other cool kids.
Here’s an interesting thing about speech mannerisms: When we Westerners see them in other cultures, we (well, not you and me, but those other Westerners) often glom onto them as markers for primitivism or as indicators of less than fully developed culture or even language. A great example for those who know it is the banter of the men in the film The Feast, a Chagnon film depicting a Yanomamo Feast (more about the feast here). The men are bartering, arguing, making alliances, and showing off, and it is done with a cadence almost as though they were rapping. This is on top of the already highly nasalized language, and with face and hand gestures that vaguely resemble Western children complaining about things. This makes them look like children. Of course, they are talking about important matters of local economy, about death and warfare, about relationships, marriage, and so on. They are not acting like children in their own culture but they are heavily invested in a highly stylized set of vocal mannerisms that are not easy for a Westerner (well, those other Westerners) to interpret.
It has been said that Vocal Fry is the new Valley Speech, and if so we can see the lilting rise at the end of every single sentence replaced with a dropping of tone and glottalization at the end of every sentence, on certain TV ads and in certain sitcoms.
The Journal of Voice reports a study, Habitual Use of Vocal Fry in Young Adult Female Speakers.
The purpose of this study was to examine the use of vocal fry in young adult Standard American-English (SAE) speakers. This was a preliminary attempt to determine the prevalence of the use of this register in young adult college-aged American speakers and to describe the acoustic characteristics of vocal fry in these speakers. Subjects were 34 female college students. They were native SAE speakers aged 18–25 years. Data collection procedures included high quality recordings of two speaking conditions, (1) sustained isolated vowel /a/ and (2) sentence reading task. Data analyses included both perceptual and acoustic evaluations. Results showed that approximately two-thirds of this population used vocal fry and that it was most likely to occur at the end of sentences. In addition, statistically significant differences between vocal fry and normal register were found for mean F0 minimum, F0 maximum, F0 range, and jitter local. Preliminary findings were taken to suggest that use of the vocal fry register may be common in some adult SAE speakers.
I think the most interesting finding may be one they are not too sure of based on the available data. Fry has been around a while, and has in the past been reported as a marker for larger scale chunks of speech, like paragraph-size utterances, but the new use is simply to fry-out the ends of sentences. If this turns out to be the case it constitutes an arbitrary re-use of an extant vocalization tool as a purely stylistic form rather than as a marker of meaning, since we probably already could tell where sentences ended. Also, it needs to be noted (as they do in the study) that this particular research does not identify focal fry as a thing done by females of a certain age. This study simply looked at females of a certain age, and did not attempt to identify the demographic parameters of the mannerism’s use.
Wolk, L., Abdelli-Beruh, N., & Slavin, D. (2012). Habitual Use of Vocal Fry in Young Adult Female Speakers Journal of Voice, 26 (3) DOI: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2011.04.007
I just want to say that my son is pretty bad at swimming.
I quickly add, for a 3 year old human, he’s pretty darn good at it. Amanda’s family is very aquatic, as tends to happen when everyone spends several weeks per year (or longer) on the edge of a lake. They can all ski really well, they can all swim really well, etc. etc. So, very soon after my son was born, his grandfather started to bring him to age-appropriate swimming lessons. He is now 37 months old and has been to a swimming lesson almost every week. In addition to to that, Amanda brings him to the pool pretty close to once a week, often more. In addition to that, during the summer, he has spent several days at the lake and gone in once or twice almost every day the conditions allowed. In short, he should be about as good a swimmer as any 3 year old.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE ON HUMAN EVOLUTIONAnd he is. In fact, better. He is far beyond his age to the extent that he’s skipped grades, and the people at the swimming school have to keep making adjustments in order to ensure he is always getting the next level of training rather than being held back by the other kids who are not as good as he is.
But still, this means he can drag himself underwater for several bananas (the unit of time used by swimming instructors, apparently), and he can thrash around moving his body across the surface several inches in a predetermined direction. He can get himself to the bottom of a pool as deep as he is tall and easily pick up a ring or some other object, and he can float around in various positions comfortably.
So he swims better than a new born through 1 month old hippo (they can’t swim at all, really) but he’s nowhere near as good as dolphin. But the thing is, this is after three years. Had Amanda and I been aquatic apes, my son would not have survived to this ripe old age. The diving reflex, proffered as evidence for an aquatic stage, during which we spent considerable time in (not near, in) water, happens in mammals generally and alone is not enough to count as a retained adaptation suggesting an earlier evolutionary stage. If human ancestors subsequent to the split with chimpanzees went through a significant aquatic phase (not just living near water, which is one of the backpedaled versions of the AAT) then our children would probably … not necessarily but probably … be much better at swimming than they are.
This does not disprove the Aquatic Ape Theory. Nor does a single nail secure a coffin. But it certainly does not inspire confidence in the idea.
My son tells me that he plans, someday, to teach me to swim.
The evidence from palaeoanthropology suggests that in the past humans were about the stature they are now, with more sexual dimporphism than now, with similar or larger brains than they have now, and used technology at the same level of sophistication as many later humans. Scientists argue over the degree to which modern day language abilities, symbolic thinking, and artistic capacity was found in these earlier humans.
Where we see physical evidence suggesting morbidity or even mortality among those humans, which included “archaic Homo sapiens” and Neanderthals and their kin, we often see violence. Some have suggested that this violence is from close quarter combat between individuals, while others have suggested it is from a hands-on approach to hunting where animals were wrangled to the ground and dispatched. Among the technologies used by these early humans we see evidence for some hand held weapons but no good evidence for projectiles.
It is possible that projectiles became widespread at some point and that this changed everything. Many scientists have suggested something like this, and each of those ideas is different and relates to a different set of evidence. We know for sure that projectiles didn’t exist then later they did, and we know for sure that high degrees of physical robusticity existed, later replaced by physical gracility. Regardless of the details, there was a time when humans needed to get up close and personal to intimidate, wound, or kill each other placing themselves at risk at the same time, and later, it became possible for a smaller, less robust person to kill pretty much anyone (with skill and luck) without taking that immediate personal risk.
I’m oversimplifying here, but this would mean that the social dynamic involved in interpersonal conflict would be very different under these two different conditions. A thrown spear, or more effectively, a bow and arrow would bring more of this dynamic into the broader social context. One might not be as likely to get killed or seriously injured if one decides to plug an enemy with a well placed arrow, but the slain enemy’s family and friends have the same separation from immediate injury when they come for you later to even things up. One could think of the social dynamic of interpersonal violence as becoming more meta, and the most likely result of this is that day to day interpersonal violence would be significantly reduced. (Larger scale conflict including warfare is a different matter we’ll skip for the present discussion, but intergroup raiding is still pertinent.) Continue reading The Irony of the Projectile→
I made a “page” on this blog, HERE, pointing to posts that teachers might find interesting or useful. So far most of the items linked to relate to Creationism and that sort of thing, but I’ll soon be adding subject area content posts as well.
If you are a teacher, have fun. If you know a teacher, please pass it on.
A colleague sent this to me, I’m passing it on to you. Looks important and interesting:
Wildfire, increasing with climate change, deposits increasing amounts of light-absorbing black carbon [soot] on the cryosphere [snow and ice], multiplying the existing heat-driven ice-reflectivity feedback [a.k.a. albedo feedback].
The relative importance of increasing wildfire [and changing industrial soot pollution] to cryospheric heating remains poorly known. Snow/ice cores down to the 2012 summer soot layer on Greenland input to new field and lab spectral and microscope technology in concert with satellite remote sensing, automatic weather station data, and numerical modeling, could be used to gauge fire’s role in amplified Arctic climate change and Greenland ice sheet mass loss.
On the heels of an [open access] publication predicting 100% surface melting on Greenland months before actuality, we’re now attempting to launch the first of its kind crowd-funding of an Arctic expedition to Greenland to measure the radiative impact of wildfire and industrial soot from the 2012 (and possibly 2013) fire seasons.
Because we can’t precisely measure fire’s increasing role in cryospheric change unless we reach our funding goal, please consider supporting http://darksnowproject.org/ with a US tax deductible donation via Earth Insight charitable foundation, and distributing this message in a call for support to those you expect would support Dark Snow Project.
…
The Dark Snow Project is by design an open-science enterprise, soliciting constructive participation from all relevant scientists and communicators. Will you join us? Each step of our work will be communicated using primarily video and social media, but also public speaking, education engagement, and conventional scientific publications aimed at the highest impact journals.
While we are not the first to consider or evaluate the role of black carbon in cryosphere-climate interactions*, we are poised to push the science envelope and amplify its urgent message in powerful new ways relying mainly on video and social media, not conventional science publications nor governmental agency funding.
With happy Holiday wishes, on behalf of the Dark Snow Project collective,
Jason E. Box, PhD
Byrd Polar Research Center / Geologic Survey of Denmark and Greenland
… Twice. The story is here. Basically, the sign was first spay painted, the burned. Run of the mill anti-atheist vandalism. But, if you are not already tapped out from the Happy Holiday Season of Buying Stuff, you might want to go to this web page and make a small donation to WASH, who originally paid for the sign. It would be funny if they made a couple thousand bucks as a result of a hate crime.
“Dr. who?” you might ask. And that would be funny.
I am not an expert on the old Dr Who’s by any means, but it has come to my attention that a lot of people are unaware of the recent addition of Dr. Who shows on Netflix, even though I did post something about this on my facebook page. Try to keep up, people.
As you know, as part of a fund raiser for the Secular Student Alliance, I wrote a novella called Sungodogo, which I’ve since made available on Amazon for the Kindle (and in other formats … I’ll have a print version in January some time). The book is about a handful of people who travel across the Congo in search of an elusive primate. What they find instead is quite unexpected. Yes, there are elusive primates but not at all what was expected. The story then becomes the origin story for the modern Skeptics and Secular Movements, and explains the rise of anti-feminist haters like those of the famous “Slymepit.”
One of the members of that movement, Michale Cortese, who uses the the line pseudonym “Mykeru,” has started to write negative reviews of the book in order to damage me and my reputation and to damage the book’s value as well. Here is the twitter tweet in which he brags about this:
In this tweet, he is asking his friends to write one star reviews of my book.
There is a great irony here. The book is about the origin of the very fight that Mykeru is engaged in here. It explains the origin of modern sketpics organizations, the problem of sexual harassment at conferences (and the purpose of that sexual harassment) and ultimately explains why there was so much pushback against Rebecca Watson when she said, correctly, “guys, just don’t do that” in reference to some rather thoughtless behavior on the part of some guy she ran into at a conference.
The book is, of course, tongue in cheek. It is project meant to be fun, to draw attention to the wonderful students of the Secular Student Alliance, and at the same time, tell an adventurous and rather realistic (up to the part where it gets all weird and impossible) and entertaining story.
And now, the book, and the secular movement, and feminism, and me, and everything else, are being attacked by Michael Cortese and the slyme pit.
And seriously, if you want a copy of the book send me a note and the format you prefer to have it in. I’m making a revised version now, it will be done in about three weeks, I’ll send you that one.
Thank you in advance.
UPDATE: I just noticed, because of a link to my blog, that Myeru’s latest hate video (hating me, Ophelia Benson, others, I’m told, though I havn’t seen it) is feature in this blog post on the site A Voice for Men (isn’t that one of those sites listed as a hate site by the SPLC?) which seems to link the MRA movement, for which I’m sure Mykeru is some sort of saint, with JP Rushton’s racist doctrine. I did not know that Rushton’s pseudoscientific racism was held in such high esteem by the Men’s Rights Activism movement, but the link between Mykeru and the Slymepitters and the MRA movement has long been clear. Recent (mild) attacks on me for my activism against climate science denialists by members of the MRA/slymepitter group sort of tie it all together. They are just a bunch of bad people.
I’ve been lucky. Becoming a secularist and atheist and, to some extent, activist in those areas (though I quickly add my activisms is mostly in other areas) was not to hard. Hey, this very morning Minnesota Atheists had a show on what you do for Christmas and other holidays as a non-believer, and asked for contributions. Even though I was asked directly a few times by the producers, I ended up providing nothing because I’ve got nothing; What do we do for Christmas? Try to eat the cookies very slowly, unwrap the presents very quickly. It is just not that interesting.
Sure, I get harassed now and then, and back in the Roe v. Wade street wars I got knocked on the ground, hit in the head, or had my clothing ripped a few times by 80 year old Italian Catholic ladies who were in a rage (we were trained to stand still and take it). And, most of the harassment I get these days other than the occasional creationist’s is actually from fellow Atheists, who hate me because I respect and refuse to rape women, and I recognize that much of the violence done to women is by testosterone poisoned men. Those guys (the Testosterone Poisoned Men of the Blogosphere, or TPMoB) compose hateful tweets, emails, and other missives about or to me and other secular feminists on an ongoing, continuous basis.
But really, I’ve never had something happen to me like what happened to Sarah. Sarah’s story is fascinating, instructive, important, and above all, inspiring. All those things are as true of her as a person as they are of this one story, I dare say. This is the story of a young woman, recently deconverted (is that the word?) from a some kinda Christian sect to atheism, and her attempts to form a Secular Student group. She just posted it, I just read it, and holy crap… so to speak … just go read it. CLICKHERENAO!!!!!!!!!
Sarah: I am very fortunate to have you as a friend and ally. Thanks for doing what you do.
He wrote some stuff, including Darwinism
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