The American Medical Association mandates that doctors cannot “refuse to care for patients based on any ‘invidious’ discriminatory criteria like race or ethnicity.” But what happens when a patient is racist? [The New York Times Well Blog]
Happy Tuesday! Enjoy a bonus binge this week: a playlist about design. “Design giants” contains 13 talks by iconic modern designers. Hear from Philippe Starck, who asks, “Why design?” … Stefan Sagmeister on how design helped him find happiness … Eames Demetrios on his grandparents’ legendary work … and today’s talk, Paola Antonelli, on how she shocked a few people in the art world by adding 14 video games to the design collection of MoMA.
TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built to illuminate ideas in context. A new playlist is added every week. We hope you enjoy this installment.
Fun stuff, stuff to make you cry, serious stuff, weird stuff. Here, a recap of all the coolest stuff on the interwebs this week.
More than 60 percent of 1400 Boy Scout leaders voted to lift its longtime ban on openly gay scouts. [The New York Times] .
A fantastic piece by Carl Zimmer on how studying rare diseases can help mainstream medicine. [The Atlantic] .
Listen to the only known recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. [Paris Review] .
Some cool visualizations of the world’s tallest building, which will be 838 meters tall and in an empty field in China. [Quartz] .
Dexter Johnson begins a column in which he explores the origins of “seven or never,” a principle in nanotech that says any new technology appears on the market in seven years or not at all. [IEEE Spectrum] .
From last week, a heart-wrenching story about a man who, hit by a truck when he was 6 and living with brain damage since, finally found peace in running. Tissues required. [Runner’s World] .
TED speaker Hyeonseo Lee (right) meets Dick Stolp (left), the kind stranger who gave her a wad of cash to help get her family out of jail four years ago. Photo: SBS
A total stranger helped Hyeonseo Lee pay her mother and brother’s way out of jail as they fled from North Korea. Now, four years later, Lee has been reunited with that stranger, getting the chance to thank him in person.
Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North KoreaIn Lee’s TED2013 talk, “My escape from North Korea,” she describes defecting from North Korea in the late ’90s and how, after nearly ten years of living in hiding, she returned to help her family make their own escape. When her mother and brother were captured in Vientiane, Laos, and jailed for illegal border crossing, Lee describes how, out of money and desperate for a solution, she was approached by a foreigner. After hearing Lee’s story, this stranger withdrew a large sum of cash — £645 to be exact — from an ATM. With the money to use as a bribe, Lee’s family was able to escape.
When Lee asked the stranger why he was helping her, he replied, “I’m not helping you. I’m helping the North Korean people.” As Lee says in an emotional moment in her talk, “The kind stranger symbolized new hope for me and the North Korean people when we needed it most.”
Earlier this month Lee was invited to be a guest on the Australian broadcast show Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), where she had an unexpected visitor: Dick Stolp, the Australian backpacker who had helped her in Laos. Lee didn’t have any of his contact information – but Stolp had seen her TED Talk and SBS, catching wind of the story, orchestrated the surprise reunion.
“I was really happy … I can’t explain with words, but it was really amazing,” Hyeonseo told Sky News after the reunion. “He says, ‘I’m not a hero,’ but I say he is a modern hero.”
Stolp, for his part, was excited to see the girl he had helped years ago. “You help a small hand and it reaches to other hands and you think, ‘That’s great, that’s good stuff,’” he said. “I’m meeting someone who is now doing good things, and inside I can’t help but feel ‘Hey! I helped this lady to go out and change her life.’”
Ready for a Sunday binge that will make your head spin? Twelve speakers take on our biggest issues: shifting global powers, the value of democracy, climate change, time, the human race. It’s not all bad news, but it’s likely you’ll end up with more questions than answers.
If you can only digest six awesome pieces of Internet content this week (plus one congrats), look no further. Here’s a round-up of the best stories on the webs this week.
TED speaker Paul Bloom makes a compelling case against empathy, arguing that empathy alone is not sufficient to uphold morality — and may even work against it. [The New Yorker]
42 truly stunning photos from the 2013 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest. [The Atlantic]
Would you be friends with Humbert Humbert? Authors weigh in on whether fictional characters ought to be likable. [New Yorker blog]
Scientists show an electronic jolt to the brain can improve mental arithmetic skills in the long-term, and without negative side-effects. [New Scientist]
Meg Jay gave a talk at TED2013 suggesting that the 20s are a person’s defining decade — and it started a heated debate at the office. Here, a 20-something responds. Photo: James Duncan Davidson
I’m 24 and a woman, and that makes me a target for a lot of speculation and life advice. Sheryl Sandberg wants me to lean in to become a woman leader; Anne-Marie Slaughter says my lady parts may doom me to a half-fulfilled life; Susan Patton thinks I should have spent my time at Princeton looking for a husband (ideally one of her sons); and in TIME Magazine’s most recent cover story, Joel Stein suggests that I’m narcissistic and dying to be famous. Everyone’s talking about me.
And people wonder why millennials are so self-involved.
Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20Now I can add clinical psychologist Meg Jay, today’s talk, to the list of well-intentioned non-millennial millennial critics. Jay spoke at TED2013 — and emphatically stated that “30 is not the new 20.” She urges twentysomethings to rid themselves of the idea that their 20s are a prolonged adolescence, throwaway years. According to Jay, 80 percent of life’s defining moments happen by the time a person is 35. Powerful — and intimidating — words.
To be honest: When I first heard the talk, I was appalled. It wasn’t a message I wanted my peers to hear: it put pressure on an already overstimulated generation to find the right career and start thinking about marriage now. And it seemed to simultaneously berate thirtysomethings, telling them their most important years were over and it was too late to get what they wanted.
In her book, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter – and How to Make the Most of Them Now, Jay addresses a lot of the eyebrow-raisers she couldn’t in her 14-minute talk. As anybody who has given a TED or TEDx Talk knows: Boiling years of work down to 18 minutes is a terrifying honor. While the format makes for a good introduction to a new idea, the nuance and detail can be lost in the condensation. The heteronormative lifestyle Jay seems to take for granted in her talk is subdued in her book, which actually dedicates its first 30 percent to work. And the book very quickly establishes a critical condition that’s taken for an assumption in her talk: That her advice is geared toward people who choose to list marriage and/or children in their life goals.
In her book, Jay includes personal experiences and reflections that help to soften what could otherwise seem like a condescending stance. She writes, “Like many twentysomethings, I wanted to establish my career before I had kids, and I did. I waddled across the stage to collect my Ph.D. diploma while eight months pregnant with baby number one.” By the time she had her second child Jay had a university job. But she writes, “Having two babies after thirty-five did not go quite as smoothly as I expected, and now I see how lucky I was. Many women are not as fortunate.” Jay wants twentysomething readers to avoid some of the same mistakes she feels she might have made.
If you are in your 20s and marriage and/or children are things you desire, Jay has a lot to say on the matter. She opposes the media’s portrayal of American twentysomethings as a “culture dominated by singles who are almost obsessed with avoiding commitment.” She writes, “I have yet to meet a twentysomething who doesn’t want to get married or at least find a committed relationship.” The anecdote doesn’t convince me, but Jay’s argument that postponing marriage just for the sake of it is a reasonable one. Just because people get married later doesn’t mean that, a priori, later is better. And that also doesn’t mean twentysomethings should be content to date and cohabitate for years with people they know they won’t end up with. At least thinking about the qualities you want in a long-term partner while you’re in your twenties, says Jay, can help prevent what she sees often in her practice: people who rush into marriage when they turn thirty because it’s suddenly the time to care. Basically: Start worrying in your twenties, and you might not feel as screwed in your thirties.
Twentysomething women trying to figure out how to have it all will have to look elsewhere. In her chapters on work and love, Jay doesn’t address the critical relationship between the two — and more important, how one might hinder the other. She doesn’t recognize that for an ambitious twentysomething, there simply might not be enough hours in the day to further a career and work on finding the perfect mate.
Ultimately, Jay’s goal is to create a sense of urgency for twentysomethings so they don’t end up in their 30s feeling like they wasted the past ten years — and to provide tools to deal with this proverbial fire under the butt. As she told me, “I’m being sincere when I say there’s nothing worse than sitting across from a 35-year-old who’s realizing they’re never going to get the life they want, and that’s sad. Creating urgency for twentysomethings is okay.” But how this helps anyone over thirty is less clear.
Indeed, Jay’s book could be a pretty depressing read for thirtysomethings who haven’t been powerwalking through their 20s. It might also add more pressure to twentysomethings who are being told from every angle what their generation could be doing better. It’s nice to imagine a bunch of Gen X’ers sitting around nodding their heads saying “Yes, yes, yes I wish I had heard this when I was 20. Onward, millennials! Succeed where we failed!” Certainly these people exist, as evidenced by the deluge of Gen X advice to young poets (Jay, Sandberg, Slaughter and Stein are all Gen X’ers); but what’s much more likely is a bunch of thirtysomething women tearing their hair out when they are told that being the first real beneficiaries of feminism and birth control has doomed them to spinsterhood.
And finally: What about youth? If your 20s is not the time to have fun, when is? As Jay says in her talk, “I’m not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that’s not supposed to count. Which by the way, is not exploration. That’s procrastination.”
I’m not going to upend modern philosophical thought when I say: Not all experiences need a focus, and not everything that counts can be counted. While I had hoped that Jay’s final chapter, “The Brain and the Body,” would focus on the sort of “capital” that doesn’t belong on a work or relationship résumé, it turned out to be further reading on my developing adult brain and my rapidly deteriorating eggs. Adults need to play, too.
When I asked Jay about “fun,” she said “there should be fun all throughout your life. Twentysomethings shouldn’t feel this pressure to live their life like an eternal spring break — because how can it, when you’re working and you don’t have money and you don’t know whether you’re going to get a text back from the person you like? It’s actually a very stressful time.” Agreed, but — as you get older — spring break gets harder and harder to schedule. While Jay finds it hard to see what is fun about scrambling for the L train at 4 am after too much Scotch, it’s hard for me to imagine what’s fun about owning a home and having two kids. And, yes, I know that’s in part because I’m in my twenties.
If my father’s house had a mantra, it would be “Life is long.” I was infused with the belief that I could do anything I wanted, at any age. No one likes thinking about life as a series of limitations, and certainly no woman likes to think of herself as a ticking time bomb. But Jay is right when she says we all have to face certain realities: Time runs out. Which is why I am also completely on board with Jay’s own mantra: Be intentional. Because while we may have different ideas on how to live the good life, Jay and I can agree that the intention of living it should be realized early and often.
A round-up of funny, interesting and strange stories on the Internet this week:
Hyperbole and a Half’s Allie Brosh is back after a two-year hiatus, with part 2 of an illustrated account of overcoming depression. Dark and delightful. [Hyperbole and a Half]
A Spanish foundation uses lenticular printing to show a different anti-abuse ad to people depending on their height, to convey a secret message to abused children when walking with their abusers. [Gizmodo]
Researchers observe that theta brainwaves are predictors for the ability to overcome ingrained Pavlovian biases, which could help in treating conditions like addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder. [Sci Tech Daily]
Neurohumanities: Breakthrough cross-disciplinary approach, or reductionist field? In other words: Does “how your brain is firing … tell you if something is ironic, metaphorical or meaningful”? The jury is still out. [The Nation]
A redditor projected a circle (ish) on a map of the world and observed some astonishing facts. [io9]
Our friends at Science Studio, dedicated to collecting the best science video and audio on the interwebs, have launched a preview edition of their site. [Science Studio]
A lovely visualization of the number of meteorites with eyewitnesses in proportion to those recorded. [Bolid.es]
The Cicadapocalypse is nigh as billions of cicadas return to New York for the first time in 17 years. [Gothamist]
The extent of human creativity/weirdness always baffles me, but I have to say the Internet really won my heart this week. Here are some staff picks of weird, beautiful, smart stories and videos from the interwebs this week.
Today was the final day to tweet #TornadoWeek to turn up the winds on interns at the Weather Channel. It seems the Weather Channel is embracing climate change with reckless abandon as it turns to an aggressively hilarious editorial strategy. [The Weather Channel] UPDATE: Unfortunately the livestream of the interns getting blasted is over, but you can watch a clip at CNBC » .
If you were a kid growing up in the U.S. in the ’80s and ’90s, or raised a kid during this time, PBS was a testament to the power of good educational television. A satirical trailer-making group called Gritty Robots published a heart-warming video this week of beloved PBS personalities Carl Sagan, Mr. Rogers, Bill Nye the Science Guy (see his TED-Ed lesson above) and Bob Ross as as the Avengers, saving us from bad TV. [Gizmodo] .
Did you know that being annoyed at the incorrect use of “literally” is about as old as the heinous act itself? Ben Yagoda has a literal breakdown. [Lingua Franca] .
New science magazine Nautilus launches its first issue, on the topic “What makes you so special.” We’re excited to see what’s next from this awesome publication. [Nautilus] .
IBM puts out an animation of epically small proportions, moving atoms with extreme precision. The film holds the Guiness World Record for smallest stop-motion film. [YouTube] .
How many countries are there in Africa? Answering the question isn’t as easy as it sounds. [Africa Check] Watch Chimamanda Adichie’s classic talk, “The danger of a single story” » .
An inside story on the future of Guantanamo Bay and its history of hunger strikes, by Shihab Rattansi. [Al Jazeera] .
The painted turtle is on the path to extinction. A sad, strange story of how it may soon become a 100 percent female species, due to the fact that its eggs are more likely to hatch as females if they are in warm nests. [New Scientist] .
A weekly round-up of interesting, weird and useful reads from around the interwebs.
In “The wrong kind of Caucasian,” Sarah Kendzior critiques the media for its tendency to demonize an entire country based on the violent acts of a few individuals. [Al Jazeera]
“The Internet: A Warning from History,” or how the Internet ruined everything. Just watch it. [The Poke]
Ah, the glory of academia, the life of reading and luxury. Or, the horrors of a life of anxiety and uncertainty? A great read about the impossible question of graduate school. [New Yorker Blog]
Scripps Research Institute scientists accidentally find a way to turn bone marrow stem cells into brain cells. … whoops? [Sci Tech Daily]
An independent company hopes to support Kickstarter’s mission by aggregating all the T-shirts listed in Kickstarter rewards, turning the site into a shirt shop. A weekend hack by web company P’unk Avenue. [Kick shirts]
UCLA professor Peter Nonacs taught his students game theory by letting them cheat on an exam. [Pop Sci]
Kim Hyun-hui was a North Korean spy who blew up a South Korean airliner with an accomplice in 1987, killing 115 people. She gives a rare interview. [BBC] For a very different escape from North Korea, watch Hyeonseo Lee’s talk from TED2013 »
Finally, let Harvard guess your age based on a series of red dots. [Huffington Post]
Charles Duhigg talks about the incredible staying power of habits at TED@250 “A Better You.” Photo: Ryan Lash
Last night in the TED office, we held a salon all about spring cleaning — for your life. Themed ”A Better You,” the event featured four speakers with ideas on how to make a better, happier, more productive self.
First to speak was The Power of Habit author Charles Duhigg, a reporter for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize last week for his series The iEconomy. Duhigg began his talk describing a habit he just couldn’t kick: Every day at around 3 pm, he would leave his desk and go to the cafeteria for a chocolate chip cookie. As a result he gained 8 pounds, and his wife was starting to make pointed comments. As he looked more closely at this habit, he realized why it was so hard to break — because habits become part of tightly wound behavior loops. Habits are extremely powerful: Bad ones can be harmful, he said, while good ones can improve all aspects of your life. He capped his talk with an unexpected example — Starbucks, which endows its employees with good conflict resolution habits in order to provide the customer service they are known for.
Tech writer Jill Duffy shares tips for taming one’s email inbox. Photo: Ryan Lash
Tech reporter Jill Duffy spoke next, giving nine useful tips on how to conquer email before it conquers you. Among them: Keep your unread emails to about a page, save canned responses or email templates so you don’t always end up typing the same thing, and don’t be afraid to delete emails — and let go of the obligations that they represent.
Jay Silver shows how a cat can take photos of itself — using a bowl of water and the Photo Booth program on a computer. Photo: Ryan Lash
You see a banana for eating; Jay Silver sees a yellow edible space bar for his keyboard. Silver, an MIT Media Lab Maker, brought in a bag of tricks to demonstrate how to hack everyday objects. He connected his laptop to two slices of pizza to use as a clicker to advance his slides, and painted a streak of ketchup — then played it like a piano. See more uses from his invention kit, MaKey MaKey »
Amy Webb concluded the program, giving a hilarious and heartbreaking talk about how she gamed the online dating system. Photo: Ryan Lash
Finally, author Amy Webb closed the night with a lesson in love, explaining how she reverse engineered online dating sites to find her perfect mate. Webb, drew from her new book, Data: A Love Story, to explain what she did when she found herself frustrated with her online dating prospects. Since she’s a digital strategist, she naturally turned to data analysis. She devised a point system by which to rate all her prospects, only to realize that she had left out one important element from the equation: the competition. In this incredibly honest talk, she explained why she created 10 fake male accounts to scrape data about successful female candidates and how they presented information about themselves. (Note: optimistic language and photos with just enough skin.) Webb’s story has a happy ending. She is now married to Brian Woolf, who she met as a result of her data gathering. Sitting next to me in the audience, last night was the first time he heard her tell the story.
“A Better You” was part of TED@250, a new series of salons held at our New York headquarters at 250 Hudson Street. Since our main conferences are only twice a year, TED@250 is an opportunity for talks that rethink headlines and respond to conversation happening in real time. It’s also a place for speakers with the kind of personal stories that simply work better on the small scale. Stay tuned. Some of these talks may be coming to TED.com.
It’s been a hard week for many Americans, as the Boston bombings continue to raise more and more questions. Here is some weekend reading as you await answers.
A poignant ode to the city of Boston, its annual marathon and the victims of the April 15 bombings. [NY Review of Books Blog]
Far, far away in another American city, income inequality varies from block to block. The New Yorker has released an insightful data visualization of city income by subway stop. [New Yorker] Find out more »
Galileo’s public condemnation is often invoked to defend new or unverified science. But as Adam Gopnik writes for the BBC, Galileo taught us a more important lesson: the value of the experimental method, the essence of what science is. [BBC.co.uk]
A plan has been approved to build the world’s largest optical telescope in Hawaii. [NY Times] But will it be any match for the awesomely named European Extremely Large Telescope?
Would you like to go to Mars? Would you like to go to Mars to be filmed for a reality TV show? Would you like to go to Mars to be filmed for a reality TV show, knowing you probably won’t come back? Your dream has come true »
A deeper look at the feats of Felix Baumgartner, everyone’s favorite record-breaking skydiver. [Vanity Fair]
TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, a new playlist is available: Listen up.
“We are losing our listening,” says sound consultant Julian Treasure. In these eight talks on the value of listening, Treasure gives 5 ways to listen better, Ernesto Sirolli talks about listening to the beneficiaries of aid organizations, and Neil Harbisson uses an “eyeborg” to “listen” to color.
Some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week:
Super-duper useful mandatory homework: Get a secure password now. As xkcd explains, most people’s approach to secure passwords (a word bastardized with “random” capital letters and punctuation that’s difficult to remember) is wrong. Now go get yourself a good password. If you need to ask why this is important, watch an informative playlist on hackers.
Scientists reveal a new technique called CLARITY that can render a brain nearly invisible — that is, rid the brain of light-scattering lipids that make it hard to look at in detail. [io9]
A must-watch Frontline documentary on the conflict in Syria, but not like you’ve seen before. A powerful human-interest piece. [PBS]
Read an eye-opening piece by Gina Kolata on the world of sham academic journals. It’s disturbing that even reputable academics get scammed. [NYTimes] It’s becoming increasingly difficult to parse what’s legitimate on the interwebs, as we learn from Markham Nolan’s talk on false Internet stories. Here’s a useful guide to some predatory open-access journals.
We’re a little late on this one, but The Invisible War is a harrowing, Academy Award-nominated documentary about rape in the U.S. military. (Did you know, for example, that 25 percent of U.S. servicewomen don’t report their rape because the person to report to is their rapist?) Watch the documentary »
Become a better thinker by applying Bayesian reasoning. [io9]
A riveting data visualization animation of all the drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004. [Pitch Interactive]
A slightly odd story about Rami Abdul Rahman, basically the one-man team behind the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which produces the main casualty reports coming out of the Syrian conflict. [NYTimes]
Ron Finley, the self-described renegade gardener, gave a hit talk at TED2013 on his gardening efforts all over South Central LA. Finley is an object of my fascination for more than one reason: In the 35 days since Finley’s talk went live, he’s left 178 comments on the site, making him the 3rd most prolific speaker commenter. (Trivia: the 1st and 2nd are Curator Chris Anderson and TED2011 speaker Janet Echelman). To put it in context, as someone who receives speaker comments in a daily digest sent to me by email: Of the 1250 speakers on the site, only 211 have left comments, and the average number of comments they’ve left is 19.
Here are my 10 favorite comments left by Ron Finley on TED.com — with just a touch of context, since that’s how I receive them in my inbox. Click on the link to see the full discussion going on in the thread:
“THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! I’M SITTING HERE CRYING READ YOUR PASSIONATE COMMENTS. MAN THIS IS A BIG TASK!!! WHAT THE HELL DID I GET INTO!?!?LOL CAN’TSTOPWON’TSTOP!!”
“Im so Proud Of my ‘LiL Brother Richard!!! Seeing him here brings me to tears. So happy for him. He deserves it all. Someone offered to sponsor him at MIT this summer, as soon has he walked off stage!! That is what TED is About!! . . .Thats me barking in the back ground!!!”
TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, a new playlist is available: Everything you thought … was wrong.
You think you know how to tie your shoes, but you’re wrong. You think you understand how non-profits should work, but you’re wrong. You think more choices are better, but you’re wrong. This week’s new playlist looks at 8 problems and offers unconventional, counter-intuitive solutions that’ll flip your thinking.
We all have unique fingerprints and genomes — and breathprints? [New Scientist]
What does linguist Ben Zimmer read? A question you never thought you’d ask, yet you’re glad you found the answer. [The Atlantic]
Weird but fascinating article on how breeding pigeons in New York City is becoming a representation of the American melting pot/tossed salad. [NY Times]
Neat. Fourteen words that are their own opposites. [Mental Floss]
Whole Foods announces a new partnership with Gotham Greens, co-founded by TED Fellow Viraj Puri, to build a greenhouse on the roof of its forthcoming location in Gowanus, Brooklyn. [Grocery Headquarters]
Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week:
Happy Birthday, Upworthy! Here are 11 lessons our friends at Upworthy learned in their first year on the Internet. [Unworthy]
Jay Horwitz, media relations director for the Mets, is the Barry Bonds of butt dialing. He frequently booty calls everyone in the MBA but everyone’s cool with it. [WSJ.com]
New details about the origin and contents of the universe, revealed by the most detailed map ever made of the oldest light in the universe. [Sci Tech Daily]
There are seven different words in Dothraki for striking another person with a sword. Among them: “hlizifikh,” a wild but powerful strike; “hrakkarikh,”a quick and accurate strike; and “gezrikh,” a fake-out or decoy strike. But you won’t find these words in George R. R. Martin’s epic series A Song of Ice and Fire, which is where Dothraki originated as the language of the eponymous horse-riding warriors; rather these and more than 3,000 other words were developed by David Peterson, the world’s authority on Dothraki.
At TED2013, Peterson gave this fascinating TED University talk on the process of creating Dothraki for the TV series Game of Thrones. Based on Martin’s books, the HBO series premieres its third season on Sunday.
Peterson, who has a masters in linguistics from UC San Diego, was teaching English composition at Fullerton College when he heard that HBO was hiring someone to develop Dothraki for Game of Thrones. For the next four years Peterson developed the Dothraki grammar and wrote a dictionary of around 3,400 words.
Peterson is also the alien language and culture consultant at SyFy’s Defiance and the president of the Language Creation Society (LCS), which is made up of conlangers – creators of conlangs, or constructed languages.
Language enthusiasts have been creating languages from scratch since at least the twelfth century: for fun, for secret communication with loved ones, in pursuit of the perfect language. Conlangs have surged in popularity in recent years thanks to films and TV series like Avatar (whose characters speak Na’Vi), Lord of the Rings (Elvish) and Game of Thrones; the grandaddy of pop-culture conlangs is Star Trek‘s Klingon, a widely studied language almost as popular as Esperanto. (Both Klingon and Esperanto are available as subtitles on TED.com).
In the conlang community, Peterson is a hero. The same goes for John Quijada, the creator of Ithkuil, who was recently profiled by Joshua Foer in the New Yorker. Ithkuil seeks to encode as much information as possible in as small a space as possible, with as little ambiguity as possible. Is Ithkuil the perfect conlang? Perhaps. But Peterson says that he has never put much stock in the idea of perfection.
“Language,” he says, “is a system. We humans aren’t. We’re quite imperfect. When it comes to using even a perfect system, we will break it in some way.”
As Peterson says in his talk, a big part of the process of naturalizing conlangs is attempting to imitate the quirks and idiosyncrasies of a natural language as it evolves over time. In developing Dothraki, Peterson started by imagining how the Dothraki people would have spoken 1,000 years in the past. Creating a protolanguage allowed Peterson to evolve Dothraki “organically,” changing its sounds, grammar and semantics. But how do you create linguistic regression?
The first challenge in imagining a lost culture is to unlearn what you know about modern technology in order to grasp a linguistic view of the world before, say, books and medicine. Says Peterson, “You become part historian, part archaeologist, part detective. You say, ‘Here were my resources, how did I know all this stuff?’”
In the case of the Dothraki, there’s the added fact that the speakers exist in a fictional world, so their history is technically unknown, yet still must be realistic to the legions of fans scrutinizing the books and show.
(Why not just call up George R.R. Martin and ask? Not an option. According to Peterson, Martin is pleased with the existence of Dothraki but not especially invested in it, given how busy he is. In fact, he’s the one who occasionally calls up Peterson for a translation. Peterson happily gives it to him.)
But some aspects of Dothraki history are available to Peterson. Martin very clearly based the Dothraki on the Mongolians of the Silk Road era, with aspects of some Native American cultures mixed in. So Peterson draws on these sources for naming flora and fauna. Recently Peterson found out that in Mongolian there are two different words for animal poop, depending on whether it’s fresh or dry. (Dry animal poop is used for fires in winter, since it burns longer.) Now, he says, the Dothraki language makes this distinction, too.
Where existing context is not available, a conlanger can bring his or her own experiences to the language, as in the case of the Dothraki word for “to dream.” Peterson wanted to capture the essence of dreaming, which for him means feeling, while sleeping, that there’s no other life or world. Peterson started with the word for wood and changed it to its adjective form, wooden, or “ido.” Since in Dothraki wood is used to describe fake swords, “wooden” comes to be synonymous with “fake.” A dream then becomes a wooden life, a fake life. In Dothraki, to dream, or “thirat atthiraride,” literally means “to live a wooden life.”
While many conlangs are created for fictional characters, the majority are not. But a language is nothing without its speaker — so how do conlangers deal with the fact that their speakers have no history or culture? Is it possible to create a naturalized conlang without also creating an entire world around it? Indeed, it’s a challenge that Peterson discovered late. Initially he wasn’t interested in creating cultures, but realized that if you don’t have a very specific idea of who is speaking the language, your language automatically carries a whole host of cultural assumptions — probably yours.
An example Peterson often gives is creating a native word for “book.” It seems like a simple task, but this actually assumes quite a lot about the speakers: that they have a written form of their language; that they have something to write down; that they have some value for literature or scholarship; that literature or scholarship exists; that they’ve invented paper; that they’ve invented styluses, ink and book binding. One word, a world of assumptions.
As president of the LCS, Peterson communicates with and celebrates conlangers all over the world, handing out the annual Smiley Award to the year’s best created language. So what makes a good conlanger? “It’s a combination of somebody who is very technically minded, who is very good with puzzles or coding,” says Peterson. “And somebody who has a literary bone inside them, who is a big reader and loves stories.”
This marriage of the technical and aesthetic explains why Peterson’s favorite conlang is Sylvia Sotomayor’s Kēlen, which defies a universal element of language: It has no verbs. It’s common for created languages to have alien or unnatural constraints, says Peterson, but Sotomayor beautifully naturalized hers, bringing artistry to an engineered system.
Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week. First, happy (late) World Poetry Day! Celebrate the occasion with 8 talks from spoken-word poets.
A piece by Ed Yong takes an in-depth look at new findings on the mechanics of swarming, a phenomenon that has baffled scientists. Awesome quote: “Cannibalism, not cooperation, was aligning the swarm.” [Wired]
Beautiful photos from Christo’s “Big Air Package” — which is being called the “largest indoor sculpture in history” — being installed at the Gasometer Oberhausen, due to premiere in December 2013. [This is colossal]
What is it like growing up in a futurist household? Veronique Greenwood’s mother, a technology consultant, was touting the rise of mobile social networking years before the iPhone had come out and before Facebook had a “Like” button; she had pens printed with the slogan “Remember when we could only hear each other?” a decade before Skype. [Aeon magazine]
Congratulations to TED Fellow Durreen Shahnaz, whose company, Impact Investment Exchange, has been nominated for the Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Award.
Timo Arnall’s thoughtful critique of the growing trend to encourage “invisible” interaction design. [Elastic space]
A father overhears his son talking about coming out of the closet to his mother and him, then leaves him this note. [Twitter] More details from Gawker.
A cute hello from the Axosoft TED Live event from TED2013. Watch for some tasty-looking carrots. [YouTube]
Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea
Paul Bloom: The origins of pleasure
Damon Horowitz: Philosophy in prison
Raghava KK: My 5 lives as an artist
Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20
Stephen Hawking: Questioning the universe
Neil Turok makes his TED Prize wish
Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness
John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!
Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leaders
Andres Lozano: Parkinson's, depression and the switch that might turn them off
JR's TED Prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside out
Markham Nolan: How to separate fact and fiction online
Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!
Richard Turere: My invention that made peace with lions
Stephen Ritz: A teacher growing green in the South Bronx
Dimitar Sasselov: How we found hundreds of potential Earth-like planets
Willard Wigan: Hold your breath for micro-sculpture
David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization
Keith Chen: Could your language affect your ability to save money?
Susan Cain: The power of introverts
Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly … and cooperate
Ed Boyden: A light switch for neurons
Stewart Brand: The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready?
Jehane Noujaim wishes for a global day of film
