An op-ed piece in the NYT puts forth the [at least to me] novel notion that human language evolved from mother-infant vocalizations. Those, in the left, who confuse coincidence with congruence will distance themselves from such "sentimentalities", but I find it most interesting!

Our Mother Tongue – NYT
[...] 

Had it not been for the natural selection of enlarged brains, our species would have evolved in a completely different direction. There would be no theory of relativity, no knowledge of "entangled" particles or the human genome; we'd have no great art, music or novels. The excruciating pain and trauma of childbirth are the cost our species has paid for its fancy cognition. And mothers continue to pay the debt.

But that's hardly all prehistoric mothers gave us. They also may well have touched off the evolution of language from the sounds they made to reassure their helpless infants. Baby chimpanzees, after all, can cling to their mothers' hairy chests and contentedly ride along, nursing on demand. But human infants, born immature, lack that dexterity. Before the advent of devices like baby slings, the burden of carrying helpless infants presented a quandary for early mothers as they foraged for food and water.

To accomplish their tasks, ancestral moms would at times have needed to put their babies down, and these interruptions in physical contact would have been as distressing for infants then as they are now. It's very likely that mothers began to use special vocalizations to reassure and quiet their infants. These vocalizations were the origin of the more complicated lullabies and baby talk, sometimes called "motherese," that exist today in nearly all human cultures, but which are totally absent among chimpanzees.

Motherese helps infants learn the rhythms and rules of their native speech through simple vocabulary, extensive repetition, exaggerated vowels, high tones and slow tempo. The road from mothers' reassuring vocalizations to the first speech would have been a long one, but these interactions between prehistoric mothers and infants may very well have paved the way for the emergence of spoken words.

Many linguists think that the first human language was very simple and probably consisted mostly of nouns. But to what would the first words have referred? Kin, foods, predators, tools and weather have all been suggested.

I suspect that one of the first words invented was the equivalent of "Mama." Surely, maturing infants, then as now, would have sought a name for the being who provided their first experiences of warmth, love and reassuring melody.

Buried in an article in the NYT about Indian-American lobbying in the USA, is a bit of data that I have long suspected:

Indian-Americans Test Their Clout on Atom Pact – NYT

[...]

Although Indian-Americans have contributed heavily to both Democrats and Republicans, they have tended to favor Republicans, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to President Bush's campaign in 2004.

[...]

What a pathetic bunch of wannabes! Apologies for the rant, but I am sickened to the core, right now.

This is just too funny:

BBC NEWS | Manilow to drive out 'hooligans'

Officials in Rockdale say that local youths have been hanging around in car parks, revving their engines and generally annoying residents.

So the council has decided to strike back.

From July, Barry Manilow's greatest hits will be piped into one car park in a bid to drive the youths away.

Deputy mayor Bill Saravinovski said the decision was taken because the youths were intimidating local people.

"They are just hanging out and causing a nuisance to the general public," he told the AFP news agency.

[...]

"Daggy music is one way to make the hoons leave an area, because they can't stand the music," he told Australian newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

Daggy is Australian slang for unfashionable or uncool.

[...]

In 1999, the Warrawong Westfield shopping mall in Wollongong played Bing Crosby hits over and over again to drive away loitering teenagers.

Robert Kennedy has an article in Rolling Stones on the controversy over the 2004 election and concludes that the election was indeed stolen. A lot of the data and analysis presented by him does indeed sound convincing, and raises the usual question on why the Democrats have not responded with more vehemence. [via TP] Farhad Manjoo tackles Kennedy's argument in Salon:

Was the 2004 election stolen? No.

[...]

If you do read Kennedy's article, be prepared to machete your way through numerous errors of interpretation and his deliberate omission of key bits of data. The first salient omission comes in paragraph 5, when Kennedy writes, "In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots." To back up that assertion, Kennedy cites "Democracy at Risk," the report the Democrats released last June. That report does indeed point out that many people — 26 percent — who first registered in 2004 did not find their names on the voter rolls at polling places. What Kennedy doesn't say, though, is that the same study found no significant difference in the share of Kerry voters and Bush voters who came to the polls and didn't find their names listed. The Democrats' report says that 4.2 percent of Kerry voters were forced to cast a "provisional" ballot and that 4.1 percent of Bush voters were made to do the same — a stat that lowers the heat on Kennedy's claim of "astounding" partisanship.

Such techniques are evident throughout Kennedy's article. He presents a barrage of seemingly important, apparently damning data to show that Kerry won the race. It's only when you dig into his claims that you see what thin ice he's on.

that 357,000 voters, "most of them Democratic," were either prevented from voting or had their votes go uncounted, making Kerry (who lost by 118,000) the likely true winner. Kennedy finds these "missing votes" in the damnedest places. He counts 30,000 voter registrations that were deleted from voter rolls, in keeping with state law, as mostly Kerry voters, though it's impossible to know if those were even real people. He says that 174,000 mostly Kerry voters didn't vote because they were put off by long lines. But the source states it was actually 129,543 voters, and that those votes would have split evenly between Kerry and Bush. And that same source — the Democratic Party's report once again — notes conclusively: "Despite the problems on Election Day, there is no evidence from our survey that John Kerry won the state of Ohio." But Kennedy doesn't tell you that.

Worse, Kennedy relies on a band of researchers whose research on election fraud has long been called into question by experts. Especially in his section on Ohio's exit poll, Kennedy reports his sources' theories uncritically, even though many have been debunked, or have at least been the subject of tremendous debate among experts. Reading Kennedy's article, you'd never guess that some of his star sources' claims have fared quite badly when put to people in the field.

[...]

And so on for another couple of pages. I am sure we shall see a response from Kennedy shortly, and if so, I will update with a link on this blog.

I am a member of a few "left" mailing lists, which are typically dominated by Western Orthodox Leftists (typically Marxists) and even tentative mention of open source, by me (an admitted amateur in left theory), is dismissed as irrelevant to left goals, actions, etc. I never quite understood why not. Open source development seems to provide an interesting and successful example of communal effort and production, underpinned by certain ideals (from each according to his abilities and to each according to his need! ;-)) that should warm the heart of leftists.

Not all of the free software / open source movement's principles and functioning is leftist of course. There is a strong libertarian streak running through open source development and certain larger issues (participation within a capitalist system) are poorly addressed. These differences are known within the community, however, and are the subject of ongoing debate. Richard Stallman, the father of what we call today Open Source, goes to great length to stress the political considerations of his movement, and defends his precepts successfully against the newer school (Cathedral/Bazaar types). It seemed strange to me, therefore, that all of this would be so easily dismissed by the entrenched left.

Today, I came across a couple of texts that do seem to take open source a bit more seriously.

One of them is Yochai Benkler's (Yale Law School) book The Wealth of Networks (PDF), the Introduction of which I quote from below:

[A]dvanced economies have shifted from an economy based on production of physical goods and services (e.g., automobiles and textiles, mining and construction) to an economy centered on the production of information goods and services (e.g., cinema and software, legal representation and financial planning).

Second, advanced economies have shifted from a communications
environment relies on an expensive centralized communicator that
broadcasts to a wide audience (e.g., radio, television) to an
environment that relies on a multitude of cheap processors with high computing capacity that are interconnected with one another (i.e., the Internet).

These two shifts make it possible to lessen the market’s
influence over political values. The second shift allows decentralized, non-market production. The first shift means that this new form of production will play a central, rather than peripheral role, in advanced economies.

The first part of this book explores in detail the economic
implications of these two parallel shifts. The central thesis is that a new stage of the information economy is emerging. The industrial information economy of the mid nineteenth and twentieth centuries is now being displaced by the “networked information economy.” The networked information economy is characterized by decentralized individual action carried out through willed distributed, nonmarket means that do not depend on market strategies.

I haven't read the entire book yet, but it promises to be an interesting read. Another book in a similar vein (which Benkler refers to also) is Steven Weber's The Success of Open Source which funnily enough begins:

Several years ago when I began thinking about open source software, I had to convince just about everyone I talked to, outside of a narrow technology community, that this was a real phenomenon and something worth studying in a serious way. I no longer have to make that case.

Clearly, Weber can speak more intelligently of the matter than I can ;-). In the Preface, he goes on to say:

I became interested in open source as an emerging technological community that seemed to solve what I see as very tricky but basically familiar governance problems, in a very unfamiliar and intriguing way. In the end I’ve decided, and I argue in this book, that the open source community has done something even more important. By experimenting with fundamental notions of what constitutes property, this community has reframed and recast some of the most basic problems of governance. At the same time, it is remaking the politics and economics of the software world. If you believe (as I do) that software constitutes at once some of the core tools and core rules for the future of how human beings work together to create wealth, beauty, new ideas, and solutions to problems, then understanding how open source can change those processes is very important.

Now, why couldn't I have put it that way, when arguing for the importance of examining open source! Below is a bit more from the Introduction, followed by a link:

This is a book about property and how it underpins the social organization of cooperation and production in a digital era. I mean “property” in a broad sense—not only who owns what, but what it means to own something, what rights and responsibilities property confers, and where those ideas come from and how they spread. It is a story of how social organization can change the meaning of property, and conversely, how shifting notions of property can alter the possibilities of social organization. I explain the creation of a particular kind of software—open source software—as an experiment in social organization around a distinctive notion of property. The conventional notion of property is, of course, the right to exclude you from using something that belongs to me. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude. If that sentence feels awkward on first reading, that is a testimony to just how deeply embedded in our intuitions and institutions the exclusion view of property really is. Open source is an experiment in building a political economy—that is, a system of sustainable value creation and a set of governance mechanisms. In this case it is a governance system that holds together a community of producers around this counterintuitive notion of property rights as distribution. It is also a political economy that taps into a broad range of human motivations and relies on a creative and evolving set of organizational structures to coordinate behavior.

There is an excerpt in PDF from the book available for download from Harvard University Press.

Maopost.com has some (as you may have guessed) vintage Chinese propaganda posters. Check it out. If you really like themther eis even a Dashboard Widget to display the poster of the day on your desktop.