The Natural Linguist

I've always thought it was right and proper for individuals to base their decisions primarily on self-interest. After all, who better than oneself to know one's own needs and wants? We invented and have been tinkering for millennia with this idea of government to try and find a way so that my self interest can exist harmoniously with yours. Or even better, that our self interests can complement each other's. In the US, as is the tendency of democracies, some are more equal than others and can, in the pursuit of their own self interest, gradually appropriate for themselves a disproportionate share of control over the levers of government and wealth. This is a failure of our checks and balances hiding mainly behind the Shield of Personal Freedom. I think this is why we have in some measure lost sight of our shared responsibility to try to cultivate a society where quality health care and education are attainable by all ordinary people and where no exceptional mind need ever g...

In this election season, we hear phrases like this one all too often: "I just want the government out of my business" (or out of my life, school, wallet, etc.) This is an understandable attitude that reflects a natural desire for independence and autonomy. The thought is: just leave me and my money alone and I'll take care of my own business. I don't want you imposing your rules, regulations or morals on me. I will live my life, raise my children and conduct my business as I see fit. I understand the social contract that says my rights end at the edge of my property, but within my property, they are sovereign and I won't allow them to be infringed upon. What I would like to suggest is that our ability to take this attitude is something we should be profoundly grateful for. And we should think twice before we say that we wish to exorcise the government from all our affairs. Be careful what you wish for! What is it that we take for granted? We have all grown up ...

Many times when I'm reading about government, free enterprise, capitalism, corporations, and other ways in which we organize ourselves and our affairs, the discussion turns to the question of good and evil. Evil government. Evil corporations. How often do we hear these phrases? Corporations are ruining the world. The middle class is disappearing. Keep the government out of my life, my house, my school, and above all, my wallet! Wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the few. Government is running amok. Tax and spend! 80% of the wealth is held by 5% of the richest people. We usually associate these phrases, politically, with either the left or the right and they are generally charged with emotion, anger, sometimes writhing fury. The result is that our political discourse has turned into a big tug of war. Our country is effectively divided into two practically equal halves who spend much of their time and energy contending with each other over the best way to conduc...

Recently I met a person who was born a female and now wants to be referred to as 'he'. This person is a college friend of my daughter's and, as we drove home, Emily and I had a lively discussion about the concept of changing one's gender. Having never given this very much thought, I nevertheless weighed in with several opinions, some uninformed, as is my wont. So here I am, faced with this interesting situation: a trans-gender person has come into the sphere of my awareness and acquaintance and now it has become necessary for me to understand what I think about that. My first thought was this: I can acknowledge that this person was born into a body of a certain gender and does not feel at home in that body. We are fellow human beings and I wish this person well. However, just because someone wishes to be referred to with non-standard pronouns because of gender identity issues, that does not necessarily obligate me to modify my use of language. My second thought was:...

This is a topic I have been thinking about for a long time. It first came to my awareness in a significant way when I read Mark Kurlansky's wonderful book Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World , which I highly recommend. Don't let the idea of a whole book about a fish deter you from reading it. It is both entertaining and instructive. The idea of nature's bounties being inexhaustible is an old one and buried deep in our collective psyche. As a culture, we can observe that many people have ceased to be grateful for nature's bounties. Many have ceased even to be complacent about them. We have, in large part, ceased to be aware of it. We have simply built our way of life around the assumption that no matter what we do, we will always have clean air and clean water; that we will always have in abundance food, electricity, minerals, petroleum, wood, the raw materials to feed our economy, the space to store our garbage, and a million other things. Only recen...

Yesterday, I was on my lunch time walk and had an interesting experience. It lasted perhaps less than 2 seconds and yet I've been thinking about it on and off ever since. I was trundling along at my usual brisk pace, on the right-hand side of the path. A few yards off, I spied a man walking toward me on my side of the sidewalk, two trains heading toward each other on the same track. As we grew closer, I instinctively hugged the right-hand margin a little closer and he did the same. When it became clear that we were on a collision course, the image of the old Dr. Seuss story about the North-going Zax and the South-going Zax popped into my head. In the story, the two Zaxes meet and stand there for years, each too stubborn to give way to the other, while a city grows up around them. For about a quarter of a second, I contemplated such a pissing contest and realized that such a course of action did not advance my goal of getting back to work in time for my 2:00 meeting. So I swerve...

Brian Greene's elegant book about the Universe offers one of the clearest explanations I've ever read of Einstein's theories. During my latest reading of the book, I was frustrated by the image of the rubber membrane and the bowling ball as an analogy for how mass curves space-time. Everyone's seen it. I understand that it's difficult to convey the idea of a four-dimensional phenomenon in a two-dimensional representation, but I find this particular analogy to be a more a hindrance than a help when I'm thinking about the idea of mass causing space time to war. It's hard to shake the two-dimensional image in my mind's eye. I always think of one of those large bowls where a coin spirals down toward the hole in the bottom. Instead, I try to cultivate in my mind the understanding that gravity pulls one toward the center of a massive object and it exerts the pull in every direction. I still can't grasp the bit about the warping of time. Enough ranting. T...