Research:
w/ Ben? - 'who' vs 'that' as markers for empathy/agentivity; vary animal, plants, verb, vegetarianism, professions, etc - round 1 = who vs that vary by whether they target is a food organism? (psycholinguistics study)
www.prayermatch.net  - double-blind vs non-blind intercessory prayer study; possibly branch off into ad-funded matching service
poly psycholinguistics survey (another psyling)
motor(cycl)ist behavior vs outcomes longitudinal study (need a catchy name & website) (not actually been done before - wtf?)

Other:
Conlang Books project - write an intro linguistics via conlanging textbook
NLF2DWS monograph
Language Creation Conference


Hmm. I probably get extra geek points for doing serious research in my spare time. I was thinking this is pretty normal but now that I think of it.... who the hell does this unless it's their job (or it's getting them job-type perks, e.g. tenure or a degree)? O.o

Sometimes I feel weirder than usual.

http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2004-jan-dimow.htm

Very interesting.

http://tikiwanderer.livejournal.com/158387.html

Go read it on tikiwanderer's journal, I don't feel like quoting-and-pasting. (FYI, when she refers to 'our' country, she means Australia.)

Thought of by http://ted.com/tedprize (BTW, the TEDTalks are I have seen so far are all excellent and I recommend watching them)

You get one wish, $100k (or several million, if you hook the right people), and the ear of some very influential people. What do you wish for?

My idea:

Include, in every primary school in every country throughout the world (as much as possible), good teaching in logic*, creativity**, and meditation***. Do it in America by 2020. Do it in all "developed" nations by 2040. Do it worldwide by 2060.

* Every person, by 15, should be able to spot logical fallacies in their own and others' logic, call people on it no matter what their status (e.g. being trained to spot errors in teachers' and politicians' logic on their own), engage in polite and productive debate with anyone, and be aware of all of the most common cognitive errors. They need not have all the knoweldge, but they must know how to think well.

** This is, to put it mildly, an extremely difficult subproblem, and nothing I have seen has ever solved it well on a large scale with people who were not already well-primed to begin with.

*** dogma, supersitition, woo, and religion free - i.e. no bullshit, no theory about chakras etc., no statements whatsoever about religious elements. Just the techniques.


I have others - e.g. completely open, open-source, online government; many global justice issues; many technologies that will change the world once developed*; my own projects; etc... but I think this is the one that would have the most dramatically revolutionary effect on the world, and within two generations max. Each of the three components would have revolutionary effect on culture, politics, religion, etc.

That's the intent.

So the meme: what would you wish for?



* Techs
1. Cheap, low battery, worldwide, completely suffusive Internet access (like citi-wide wifi, for the globe)
2. Full, implantable, sensory & motor cortex level HCI
3. Human brain level computational power for <$1000 and < laptop size
4. Fully dynamic 3d interface with touch sensitivity, texture, etc - pocket sized
5. Generic nanotech
6. Direct brain-to-brain neural linking

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6016000736265814804

Several talks about science-meets-religion. Interesting.

Edit: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2881332561756807761

Talk on quantum effects (possiblu with reverse time @ 500ms scale [!]) in consciousness. Very interesting. :-)

http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

Good essay.


Also, http://www.fstdt.com/

It's like bash.org but for fundie quotes. Amusing yet disturbing! E.g. http://www.fstdt.com/comments.asp?id=12289