They’ve finish 4 weeks (or 20 episodes), and the objects and their stories have been consistently engaging and informative. Some standouts have been the carving of the swimming reindeer, the Egyptian clay model of cattle, and the Rhind mathematical papyrus, but it’s awfully hard to choose favorites when the quality has been this good. If I had to pick just one out of what they’ve broadcast so far, it would probably be the Jomon pot episode. This type of pottery changed the way we understood the development of this crucial technology, and the way these objects were revered in Japan thousands of years later is quite wonderful. This particular pot, made some 7,000 years ago, was valued so highly a few hundred years ago that it was lined with gold and incorporated into the tea ceremony.

I’ve been to the British Museum several times over the years, and taken way too many photos there. (A few on my “main” Flickr account, and way too many on my events account.) One thing that’s been cool about the series is that in the first 20 episodes there was only one object that I remember seeing and actually photographed: The statue of Ramesses II up above. He’s huge and pretty hard to miss there next to the Rosetta Stone. Many of the objects in the series have been small and subtle, however, which nicely illustrates the value of a cool program like this. Some objects are pretty remarkable in and of themselves, but others benefit enormously from a guide who suggests we slow down and really look at this stone or that statue. Here MacGregor and his guests help us understand the significance, context, and impact of these objects, and totally make me want to go back to the Museum and seek these treasures out.

There are some other objects in the series that I’ve seen and photographed (such as the Assyrian Reliefs below), but most of them will be new to me. I’m eagerly looking forward to the remaining 80 episodes!

It’s interesting to see in what ways various organizations do and don’t “get” these changes. Sadly, the U in general and the Morris campus in specific, for example, aren’t generally real on top of things when it comes to modern web technology. What’s particularly frustrating is the U’s unwillingness to work with and empower their users to help generate and manage content and value. Big Web 2.0 successes like Google and Amazon, Twitter and Flickr are all about leveraging user generated content. The U has its little fits in that direction (the U of M wiki, the UThink blogs), but they’re always peripheral to the life of the University, always in the back alleys instead of on the front page.

The ThoughtWorks discussion runs about an hour, and they divided it up into three chunks for podcasting. Unfortunately they haven’t released a new podcast since last July, so it appears that I’m late to the party and the party may be over. I look forward to listening to their other podcasts, and I certainly hope that they start making new episodes sometime soon.

If you’re interested you can find all their podcasts on the ThoughtWorks What We Say page through either RSS or iTunes.

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

• Democracies are very unlikely to attack other democracies. So more democracies for the win?
• Countries that educate girls and women tend to greatly reduce the risk of conflict.

On a vaguely related point, a SciAm 60 Second Science podcast from way back in late May looks (briefly) at some of the significant problems that researchers are having getting women, especially older women, involved in medical trials.

Women were also more likely than men to say that they’re too old or not healthy enough [to participate in a trial] … But women over 65 are one of the fasted growing segments of the population. … our ability to improve care, develop new treatments and find cures depends on research and educating aging women about their role in medical breakthroughs.

Damn – women are apparently important! Treating half the population like dirt is not only ethically dodgy – it has negative practical consequences as well!

Who’d’a’thunk?

Without the science base, you cannot build an industrial base.

Second, science requires long term vision and public and private support in in basic research. It typically takes decades for culture changing technologies to move from the basic idea to ubiquity; Rosen gives as examples railroads, airplanes, transistors, computers, the internet, and lasers. The question then is

How do you convince the politics and the public that that lag in fact is real and that if you don’t make the investments … today … we’ll be lagging things that other folks that are making the investments

Rosen is (quite reasonably) focussed specifically on the question of support for science, but points out that this is part of a larger trend of irrationality in the U.S.:

But we all know that in the United States there are long traditions of anti-intellectualism, of what the Times today also refer to as anti-rationalism, the idea that there really are no facts, it’s all opinion, the idea that scientists [are] just playing their sand box and don’t connect with anybody.

What it really comes down to is a distressingly common failure for Americans to see any form of education (science or humanities, K12 or university) as a necessary investment in the strength and future of our society and country. For me this has become a useful litmus test to separate sensible conservatives (who understand the economic necessity of investment in key areas) from the wingnuts that have come to dominate the Republican party (who spout anti-intellectual nonsense while shredding schools and lining the pockets of themselves and their friends).

Eisenhower understood the practical necessity of an interstate road system, and encouraged and supported that investment. All Shrub can seem to invest in is Halliburton and their ilk.

Things to think (and ask) about in this happy election season.

In “Is language extinction a good thing?” Thomas Hawks reviews some recent writing on language extinction, focusing on differing attitudes to the question of how “bad” it really is when a language goes extinct.

Languages are clearly fluid, dynamic things, and statistically we’re going to lose some along the way. In this age of massive globalization and urbanization, however, we’re losing lots, and quickly. (This and the work of Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages was a feature topic in cool podcast from last fall.)

Hawks quotes several folks who argue that language loss is a key part of the “assimilation” process that converted my starving Swiss ancestors into successful dairy farmers in Wisconsin, and thence to high-level investment analysts, and therefore we shouldn’t moan about it so much. While I’ll certainly acknowledge that there is an inevitability to certain amounts of language loss, I’m definitely not as comfortable with it as some of the people Hawks quotes for two key reasons: (a) So much of it was (and is) done against people’s will, and (b) as with biological extinction, there is potentially valuable information and history that is lost.

On the first point, I think that the “why” of the thing is crucial, and doesn’t come up anywhere in Hawks’ piece. (In fairness, Hawks is really just quoting a bunch of people here, so he’s arguably the messenger.) If the kids just aren’t interested in learning grandma’s weird old language, then at some level that’s their choice and we can’t force them to change their minds. My Swiss-German-speaking grandfather married a woman of primarily British descent, (American) English was their shared language, and neither my mother or aunt heard or learned any significant Swiss-German at home. My grandparents had the luxury of choice, and those are the choices they made.

All too often, however, minority groups have been forced to set aside their cultural traditions, language included. Native Americans, for example, were frequently punished severely (including beatings) if they used their native languages while in the boarding schools (which they were often forced to attend). Similarly Cajuns were often whipped for speaking their French in schools in Louisiana. Sadly, I’m sure we could pull together an embarrassingly long list of such cases worldwide, and it seems to be that we should mourn and decry every such loss in the strongest possible terms. To the degree that any given language extinction was aided by such behavior, we dare not be flippant about it’s disappearance, for it speaks ill of us all.

As to the second point, I am continually amazed and frustrated by certain people’s willfully obstinant refusal to recognize the very real value of diversity. This isn’t just some liberal whining about “Can’t we all just get along?”; I’m not arguing that the world is somehow “just a better place” when we have diversity. Diversity is vital in generating innovation and adapting to change (issues of at least a little importance in the world we have made for ourselves). Diversity manifestly enriches our lives (consider, for example, the wonderful diversities in world cuisine and world music, and how much more cooler our days are because of them).

And every language that goes extinct is a great chunk of experience, calved off the glacier of human history to melt away forever. Languages embed both knowledge and world view, and the loss of a language is the potential loss of much of that knowledge. The fact that a group in South America has over 70 words for “wasp” shouldn’t be seen as an oddity, it should be seen as a demonstration of the enormous importance of that insect to those people, and a collective encoding of a great deal of information about wasps. If that language goes extinct, that knowledge of those wasps goes with it.

This doesn’t mean that we should “freeze” languages, or force people to preserve their languages whether they want to or not. But we should be sad when one vanishes, and we should support people who wish to maintain their language in the face of all the pressures to the contrary.

A couple of weeks ago the wonderful Desert Donkey posted a comment tipping us to a nice article at Atlantic.com on the future of radio.

The iPod shows you mainly what’s already going on in your head—it’s cool, but only as cool as solipsism can ever be. I’ve got a way cooler device: a squat little box that sits on your kitchen counter or your bedside table and connects you to pretty much the entire Earth. And in so doing makes you think anew about the global and the local and what community amounts to—makes you think about connection, which is, after all, the main topic of our age. It’s a kind of home epistemology center that also happens to rock.

There’s some nice analysis, and lots of pointers to cool on-line radio stations (including plenty of Beeb product). One thing I think it misses out is the interaction between live radio and podcasting, or at least the possibility of timeshifting radio as a matter of course. The piece also assumes that listeners want to hear new things and have their horizons expanded, and I think the jury’s still out on that one.

Thanks to DD for the tip; sorry for being a bit slow about promoting it!

I was listening to a recent podcast from Steve Lamacq’s “In new music we trust” program where he was interviewing the Video Nasties. At one point Lamacq asks them how they got turned on to all these classic punk recordings as kids. It was from going through their dad’s record collection!

When I went through my Dad’s record collection, I was discovering excellent jazz from the 40’s and 50’s, as well as brilliant stuff from Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer. Other kids my age might have reasonably found early recordings of Elvis and classic 50’s R&B, blues, or country.

For Sub-Evil Boy’s generation, this is how they might find the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie And The Banshees.

Now I definitely need to go lie down.

At the kind invitation of Michael O’Neill, I am going to the University of Dublin to give a talk in early December, which will be lots of fun. I’ve been to Ireland once before, to give a talk at the University of Limerick, and really enjoyed it. I’ve never been to Dublin, though, so I’m quite excited. Dublin Tourism has a very cool set of free podcast walking tours (smart people, them) which I’ve been listening to as a way of figuring out where I want to visit in my limited tourism time.

Giovanni (my office mate) pointed out the helpfully obvious today, namely that I could probably get a tour guide to Dublin from our city library. Duh. I’d looked at some in shops, but spending £10 for a book seemed a bit daft when I’ll only have one solid day of touring to do. Checking one out from the library, however…

I’m hoping for some nice weather so I can spend a lot of time just walking around and taking photographs. The aforementioned walking tours are really nice and have me quite pumped. We are talking December in Ireland, however, so I’m not holding my breath. Happily, there are lots of cool indoor things that I also want to visit. Chief among these is Trinity College Library, as they have many wondrous things including the magnificent Book of Kells.

I’ll also be flying Ryanair for the first time. The flight is incredibly cheap, to the point that it seems fundamentally wrong. The true cost (including pollution and other environmental impacts) just has to be more than the £40 or so I’m paying round trip.

Thanks to Del Amitri for the cool photo, which I discovered using Flickr’s nifty “Places” feature. Being able to quickly sift through some very cool photos of Dublin has both given me some ideas of things I’d like to see and photograph, while also pointing out some clichéd shots I may want to try to avoid. (I’ll probably fail, since I’m a total sucker for a pretty cliché shot, but I can try.)

A complete hoot, really :-). I’m definitely in favor!