Life by a thousand cuts

Proud and stripey...

Linguists, not in your sweetest dreams has such a golden opportunity come your way.  Owners of PhD in social sciences, rejoice. This is your time, so if you want to advance your research, stop procrastinating.

If you have not done it already, sign up to as many social media platforms as possible and watch the world go by.  Up to now, if you wanted you investigate how people truly communicate when they are angry or upset, you'd have had to carry out an experiment, recruit volunteers, set-up the environment and then pray that they act genuinely. Otherwise, it's been listening to individual stories and trying to identify a version closer to truth.

Trading insults between four walls has always been part of domestic life. Insults directed towards strangers, out in the open world, have been around for ages too, and at times there were some consequences.  Remember the Three Musketeers' famous duels?  Generally, the human mouth is not always emitting nice and pleasing sounds. On …

A blog post by Shelly Palmer, I've Talked to the Future and it Talked back, set me thinking a couple of years ago, so I wrote a blog post. I am re-publishing it because nothing seems to have changed since. His questions were not purely rhetorical.

Indeed, how are we going to distinguish between human and machine? Will a new code of conduct be invented and become part of product instructions,  same as the ‘do not immerse in water’ one?
Imagine how many future legal departments could be scratching their collective heads over a certain feature that may open the door to litigation.
The anthropological aspect is a bit trickier, I agree, but has it ever been otherwise?  Children turn out well-behaved or not as a result of at least two factors: genetics and environment.
From a certain age onward, peer pressure displaces parental influence. Add to this chance (yes, goddess Fortuna, that one) and the concoction is almost ready.
I am not worried about kids talking to devices. Kids have alw…

This is going to outrage dog lovers, but I think that humans’ tyrannical nature is revealed not just when it enslaves other humans, but also when it enslaves dogs.

We never say 'free as a dog", do we? Just 'free as a bird'.


Dogs and humans, not all what it seems.
We take a wolf at heart and spend lots of time and energy teaching it to obey and react to commands. 
(To be more historically accurate, the 'taking' happened a long time ago, and it succeeded, so very different from cats.)
We are prepared to downsize our vocabulary to a few words in order to achieve that. 
We literally put up with shit. 
All in the name of training, while the true purpose looks more like having a totally obedient living being under our control, one emitting apparent devotion. 
In humans it’s called the Stockholm syndrome. 
Even the basic freedoms of sniffing and running are restricted anywhere near human habitat. It takes a trip back to the wild to allow the dog to be itself. 
At lea…

Prologue - This is the very first ever post written on a mobile phone. It feels like walking in very tight clothes while trying to be graceful and not miss the train at the same time.
Squeezed between the rush of inspiration and the small screen, what a terrible situation.
 Better get this out before an attack of RSI or an unwelcome interruption.

The idea of trust and trustworthiness has been undermining the reality of human connections forever, or  so it seems. It is viewed as an essential element of any emotional architecture, something that could make the whole edifice of a relationship go down.

The premise is that as soon as talking to someone goes beyond the shallow end of trivialities and into ‘soul’ territory, a new feeling is being born. If we did not trust someone, why would we share so much of the unseen self? I am not talking here about heartbreak stories. The unveiling is part of a ritual that new friends-in-the-making like going through. I tell you this and you reciprocat…

Version 1.1. of this blog post, rewritten at  the suggestion of someone who keeps pushing me to write and knows a thing or two about good prose.
Spreadsheets must have been around since Egyptian scribes started organising the pharaohs' worldly possessions. I somehow feel they inspired just as much awe to Upper Nile's neophytes as they do to today's untrained users of such tables.
They certainly throw me into a very deep hole of despair. The more I look, the faster all those numbers in their tiny cages are whirling before my eyes.
I never thought there was a name for it, but hey, there is one: dyscalculia. The weird thing is that mental arithmetic is piece of cake, but working with a spreadsheet just makes me nauseous.
It's not a joke. I was so thrilled to discover that there is no such thing as ruining a spreadsheet forever and ever. There is always a way of going back one or two or three steps and start all over again moving the little number monsters around.
I though…