I was watching my child get ready for bed. He placed his stuffed animals in a deliberate order. As I watched him stalling (he often does), I wondered about the role of playing. the more I thought about it, the more I wondered the extent to which it is actually a simulation. Not particularly this, but rather all playing.Of course, the next thought was of young mammals fighting and chasing one another around in the cute ways that make Animal Planet so popular. We have countless times heard this referred to in terms of developing coordination and dexterity that will be needed to make one’s own way in the adult world. What does this mean, though? For what it’s worth, this interpretation is accurate, but in the broader context it is unnecessarily limiting. Consider this play as the conduct of simulations. Suppose a child is playing with cars. How closely to the movements of the cars reflect reality? Perhaps the cars travel in slow motion. Children will address concepts that are almost entirely foreign to them. What six year old understands gravity? Yet they know enough that the jumping car will decelerate as it rises and decelerate as it falls. As well, the arc of the vehicle through the air is a reasonably good facsimile of a parabola. Listen to the conversations between action figures. The child tends to change the dialogue even for similar imagined situations. Note in particular how much better the child’s dialogues improve over time. Certainly much of this improvement is due to the intellectual growth and experience of the child. Nevertheless, I suspect the hours of playtime simulation have almost certainly contributed significantly. I wonder if anyone has ever really addressed this idea.
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A few nights ago, my wife and I hitched up the wagons and headed in to the big city to pick up the in-laws at the airport. On the way back, she was complaining about the lack of crappy 80s hair metal on my iPod. We started naming off as many crappy 80s hair metal bands and their crappy songs as we could. After a while, I had one song painfully stuck in my head: Kix’s “Don’t Close Your Eyes.” We dropped off her parents. As we approached our own house, I said, “That stupid song is playing at home right this very moment.” As soon as I walked in the door, I turned on the TV and looked for the appropriate channel.
The screeching of “Don’t Close Your Eyes” immediately sounded through the living room. On the one hand, it was somehow like victory. On the other hand, it sort of bugged me. I can readily see how some people would look at this as something more than a funny coincidence. In this case, it was something of no consequence whatsoever. If it had been some “intuition” of great consequence, this sort of thing could make someone a believer in the paranormal. Worse, it could reinforce the already deluded. Of course, if I had the time, I could run through the stats: How many iconic songs are there in each little niche genre? How are the playlists made for those music channels on DirecTV? Would we still call it a “hit” if it had come up as the next song, rather than the first? I think the combination of these could give us a double digit percentage probability.
It all comes down to one truth, though.
Weird stuff happens.
The Spanish Inquisitor had up a recent picture of Newt. With that expression, I got it stuck in my head that he looked a lot like Uncle Arthur from the 60s TV show “Bewitched.”
For some reason, I wasn’t able to find an Uncle Arthur (actor Paul Lynde, by the way) picture with just that expression.
A World Lit Only by Fire
A World Lit Only by Fire
The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance
Portrait of an Age
by William Manchester
366 pages
Little, Brown & Company, New York, 1993
I have recently heard the argument made more and more that the so-called Dark Ages were not that. I think this book stands against that notion. William Manchester leads the reader in a fascinating look at times that truly were the darkest of times. Romantic fiction and movies of that era tend to paint a picture of a relatively quiet life in the pleasant countryside (oftentimes, the plot involves this idyll being disturbed by highwaymen or war). Instead, the author describes a time when murder was so common as to boggle the mind of the modern reader. Indeed, the statistics the author presents from particular locales such as London lead one to wonder that there was anyone left. The puritanical ideas we impose on these times are put to bed when the reader learns that getting pregnant as a means to acquiring a husband was routine. We see not the country cottages of Kinkaid paintings, but rather mud and straw huts shared with pigs and chickens. This was a time when the man clad in rags was the social superior to the man clad in sky. In central Europe. In winter.
As the author presents stories of the conversion to Christianity among the tribes on the Continent and in the British Isles, one gets the distinct impression that this is done by barbarian chieftains with the overt intent of increasing personal power. The storyline of the progress of Christianity necessarily informs the political scene, even as barbarians cling to their more ancient superstitions. As the Church in Rome begins to exercise more and more authority, it begins to serve in the stead of a fully functioning governing body. We see where the politics of all of Europe become deeply entangled with the Papacy, including the purchase of high office. The Borgias and the Medici are only the best known among the intriguers of ecclesiastic power, but their actions echoed throughout Europe. As one not particularly interested in the Church, I thought a bit too much time was spent on the issue. But I understand that it is difficult to understand much of the period absent information on this topic.
I found this a very readable and interesting work, even going as far as getting my wife to read it. For the reader with a reasonably high degree of familiarity with Renaissance Europe, there will be bits of interest even there. But as the time preceding the Renaissance, it is very richly informative.
I have been a bit of an amateur linguist since high school. Recently, I decided to look into which languages were the most spoken. I made a post on that, based on minimal intertube research. Now that I have a new table plugin (courtesy of Tobias Bäthge), I decided to take another stab at it. This time, I spent a couple of hours on Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. I included countries whose contributions were over 10,000,000 speakers. For some languages, however, this wasn’t enough. So I also included either the first two countries or the first three if the third was a significant contributor).
[table id=3 /]
.
Unfortunately, the “All Countries” number is only a rough estimate. Someday I may be induced to do an actual study. For now, however, I think this is adequate for informational purposes.
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