The internet age has spawned huge numbers of incidents where people have sent emails that have inadvertently offended the recipient because the sender was not sensitive enough to the absence in written messages of the important cues that accompany the spoken word, where facial expressions and tone of voice and inflexions can provide helpful clues to the speaker’s benign intent. [Read more…]
John McWhorter is a linguist who wrote an excellent book The Power of Babel on the evolution of language that I discussed about five years ago. He writes good essays on rhetorical styles and has analyzed the differences between the Clinton and Obama speeches at the Democratic convention. [Read more…]
Many of us have argued that people Like George W. Bush and Tony Blair should be tried for war crimes. There was even a British TV film called The Trial of Tony Blair that had this as the plot. I saw that film and it was good but it was clearly fantasy. Since war crimes prosecutions are only for those whom the US government views as undesirable, it was unthinkable that this would ever occur. [Read more…]
You may recall TV evangelist Kenneth Copeland when he was featured in the Australian satire show The Chasers War on Everything. [Read more…]
The Mitt Romney campaign must surely be concerned about the lack of support for it in the black community, with some surveys putting it at an astounding zero percent. In response, they have set up a Black Leadership Council, no doubt to bring more African-Americans into the fold. [Read more…]
Thanks to physicsphdstu in a comment to the earlier post on mixing and unmixing in fluids, this video explains in further detail, using a variety of experiments, what is going on. The experiments are conducted by G. I. Taylor, a pioneer in this area of research. [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald reports on what happened to a CNN investigative report that it had commissioned on the Arab spring in Bahrain in 2011. On arrival there, the CNN news team was shocked at the harsh treatment being meted out to everyone including them and they turned in a story that was highly critical of the Bahraini government. [Read more…]
I used to think that John McCain’s election campaign was incompetent but Mitt Romney’s is surely giving him a run for his money. McCain always faced an uphill battle in 2008 with the albatross of the George W. Bush presidency hanging around his neck but his unforced errors, especially the disastrous selection of Sarah Palin, did not help him. By comparison, Romney should have had it easy. The economy is sputtering, unemployment is high, people are feeling uneasy and fearful about their future, and he could have run as the agent of change. And yet he still has not managed to take the lead in the polls. [Read more…]
It used to be the case that when people observed someone behaving bizarrely, or even dangerously, in a public place, they would be in somewhat of a quandary. Should they intervene and try to calm the person down? Should they call the authorities? Should they ignore and go on their way? [Read more…]