Sunday, December 20, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 2009
"Once I was taken to a party. There was this old man, and he was celebrating his hundredth birthday. I wanted to know how he was feeling. The poor man gave me an astonished smile, and said, I don't really know, it all happened so quickly... He talked about his hundred years as though they were some disaster that had befallen him in the last few minutes. Sometime I feel the same way. My soul hurts with too much past in it, and so much emptiness. I feel like that old man"
from The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa.
from The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa.
Monday, November 9, 2009
projects
I have been lazy for a long time... finally decided to do something, just telling myself, next week I will start working on some projects that I already had visualized in my mind but need to put on paper... let's see what's gonna comes out.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
experiment with flowers.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
2en day
despues de segundo dia de mi viaje, estoy dando cuenta que estoy escuchando muchas historias de gente desconocidas, ya entiendo por que gente decia que uno aprende mucho a traves de viaje. Creo que este viaje me va a servir mucho.
Pao, en Playa del Carmen.
Pao, en Playa del Carmen.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Mexican trip
still planning my trip to Mexico, August 4th - 27th
NY- Cancun- Mexico city- Cancun- NY,
between Cancun and Mexico city I haven't decided where to go yet,
maybe Cancun- Chichen Itza- Merida- Palenque- Sancristobal- Monte Alban- Oaxaca- Puebla- Teotihuacan Ruins- Mexico city, then fly back to Cancun- NY.
NY- Cancun- Mexico city- Cancun- NY,
between Cancun and Mexico city I haven't decided where to go yet,
maybe Cancun- Chichen Itza- Merida- Palenque- Sancristobal- Monte Alban- Oaxaca- Puebla- Teotihuacan Ruins- Mexico city, then fly back to Cancun- NY.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Michel Gondry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f34oYgz6bGs
http://www.muzu.tv/bjork/bjork-video-army-of-me-music-video/85773
Monday, May 11, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
chiling
uff, ya casi termino mi thesis, por fin estoy chilin... it's time to take a rest, now I just need to fix some tiny details, transitions, music...ect. and of course I need to work on my website, maybe some promotional elements like postcards.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
a fish
I just found an amazing animation about fish, while looking for some fish movement references...
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
thesis render codec
it took me a whole day to figure out the best render setting for my thesis..., even a lot of people saying that "animation" is the best lossless codec...but I think it's not quite working with pixel video footage, I have been trying couple of times,I feel there is no much notable difference between H.264 and animation, in fact, animation always results a gigantic file. so I think I will use H264 rather than animation for my final rendering.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
production issues
This week I had been working on my film production, and after I done with shooting I was so scared that when I saw the result in finalcut, all edges look pixaleted... I thought it was problem of my video cassette, but actually it wasn't true... it was just a manner of export... here is a helpful link that explain how to export a high quality film. thanks God that I don't have to broadcast again...
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
demotivation
maybe I need some demotivation for doing my thesis...
check this out...
http://despair.com/viewall.html
check this out...
http://despair.com/viewall.html
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
George Orwell 1984
"From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
British scientists uncover oldest words in English
LONDON (AFP) - The oldest words in the English language include "I" and "who", while words like "dirty" could die out relatively quickly, British researchers said Thursday.
ADVERTISEMENT
Scientists at Reading University in southern England have used a supercomputer called ThamesBlue to model the evolution of words in English and the wider family of Indo-European languages over the last 30,000 years.
They say that the most commonly-used words -- which also include the numbers two, three and five -- tend to be the oldest and change most slowly over time.
Meanwhile, adjectives like "dirty" and verbs like "squeeze" could disappear over the next eight centuries or so, the scientists say.
"What we've discovered is the frequency with which the words are used in our common everyday speech is a strong predictor of whether or not they will be retained and words we use a lot tend to be highly conserved," Professor Mark Pagel told BBC radio.
Because there are many different ways of saying "dirty" in Indo-European languages -- currently 46 -- it is more likely to die out, the team said, along with, for example, "push", "turn", "wipe" and "stab".
The oldest words in circulation today have been in use for at least 10,000 years, researchers added.
As well as English, other languages in the Indo-European family include Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali.
ADVERTISEMENT
Scientists at Reading University in southern England have used a supercomputer called ThamesBlue to model the evolution of words in English and the wider family of Indo-European languages over the last 30,000 years.
They say that the most commonly-used words -- which also include the numbers two, three and five -- tend to be the oldest and change most slowly over time.
Meanwhile, adjectives like "dirty" and verbs like "squeeze" could disappear over the next eight centuries or so, the scientists say.
"What we've discovered is the frequency with which the words are used in our common everyday speech is a strong predictor of whether or not they will be retained and words we use a lot tend to be highly conserved," Professor Mark Pagel told BBC radio.
Because there are many different ways of saying "dirty" in Indo-European languages -- currently 46 -- it is more likely to die out, the team said, along with, for example, "push", "turn", "wipe" and "stab".
The oldest words in circulation today have been in use for at least 10,000 years, researchers added.
As well as English, other languages in the Indo-European family include Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: September 20, 2005/ The New York Times
Incensed by what it sees as a virtual pandemic of verbal vulgarity issuing from the diverse likes of Howard Stern, Bono of U2 and Robert Novak, the United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air.
By raising the fines that would be levied against offending broadcasters some fifteenfold, to a fee of about $500,000 per crudity broadcast, and by threatening to revoke the licenses of repeat polluters, the Senate seeks to return to the public square the gentler tenor of yesteryear, when seldom were heard any scurrilous words, and famous guys were not foul mouthed all day.
Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin's famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television.
Young children will memorize the illicit inventory long before they can grasp its sense, said John McWhorter, a scholar of linguistics at the Manhattan Institute and the author of "The Power of Babel," and literary giants have always constructed their art on its spine.
"The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and "peremptorie Asses," and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like "zounds" or "sblood" - offensive contractions of "God's wounds" and "God's blood" - or some wondrous sexual pun.
The title "Much Ado About Nothing," Dr. McWhorter said, is a word play on "Much Ado About an O Thing," the O thing being a reference to female genitalia.
Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, "eat their own dung, and drink their own piss."
In fact, said Guy Deutscher, a linguist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the author of "The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention," the earliest writings, which date from 5,000 years ago, include their share of off-color descriptions of the human form and its ever-colorful functions. And the written record is merely a reflection of an oral tradition that Dr. Deutscher and many other psychologists and evolutionary linguists suspect dates from the rise of the human larynx, if not before.
Some researchers are so impressed by the depth and power of strong language that they are using it as a peephole into the architecture of the brain, as a means of probing the tangled, cryptic bonds between the newer, "higher" regions of the brain in charge of intellect, reason and planning, and the older, more "bestial" neural neighborhoods that give birth to our emotions.
Researchers point out that cursing is often an amalgam of raw, spontaneous feeling and targeted, gimlet-eyed cunning. When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the "uncontrollable" outburst accordingly.
Because cursing calls on the thinking and feeling pathways of the brain in roughly equal measure and with handily assessable fervor, scientists say that by studying the neural circuitry behind it they are gaining new insights into how the different domains of the brain communicate - and all for the sake of a well-venomed retort.
Other investigators have examined the physiology of cursing, how our senses and reflexes react to the sound or sight of an obscene word. They have determined that hearing a curse elicits a literal rise out of people. When electrodermal wires are placed on people's arms and fingertips to study their skin conductance patterns and the subjects then hear a few obscenities spoken clearly and firmly, participants show signs of instant arousal.
Their skin conductance patterns spike, the hairs on their arms rise, their pulse quickens, and their breathing becomes shallow.
Interestingly, said Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a similar reaction occurs among university students and others who pride themselves on being educated when they listen to bad grammar or slang expressions that they regard as irritating, illiterate or déclassé.
"People can feel very passionate about language," she said, "as though it were a cherished artifact that must be protected at all cost against the depravities of barbarians and lexical aliens."
Dr. Burridge and a colleague at Monash, Keith Allan, are the authors of "Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language," which will be published early next year by the Cambridge University Press.
Researchers have also found that obscenities can get under one's goosebumped skin and then refuse to budge. In one study, scientists started with the familiar Stroop test, in which subjects are flashed a series of words written in different colors and are asked to react by calling out the colors of the words rather than the words themselves.
If the subjects see the word "chair" written in yellow letters, they are supposed to say "yellow."
The researchers then inserted a number of obscenities and vulgarities in the standard lineup. Charting participants' immediate and delayed responses, the researchers found that, first of all, people needed significantly more time to trill out the colors of the curse words than they did for neutral terms like chair.
The experience of seeing titillating text obviously distracted the participants from the color-coding task at hand. Yet those risqué interpolations left their mark. In subsequent memory quizzes, not only were participants much better at recalling the naughty words than they were the neutrals, but that superior recall also applied to the tints of the tainted words, as well as to their sense.
Yes, it is tough to toil in the shadow of trash. When researchers in another study asked participants to quickly scan lists of words that included obscenities and then to recall as many of the words as possible, the subjects were, once again, best at rehashing the curses - and worst at summoning up whatever unobjectionable entries happened to precede or follow the bad bits.
Yet as much as bad language can deliver a jolt, it can help wash away stress and anger. In some settings, the free flow of foul language may signal not hostility or social pathology, but harmony and tranquillity.
"Studies show that if you're with a group of close friends, the more relaxed you are, the more you swear," Dr. Burridge said. "It's a way of saying: 'I'm so comfortable here I can let off steam. I can say whatever I like.' "
Evidence also suggests that cursing can be an effective means of venting aggression and thereby forestalling physical violence.
With the help of a small army of students and volunteers, Timothy B. Jay, a professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams and the author of "Cursing in America" and "Why We Curse," has explored the dynamics of cursing in great detail.
The investigators have found, among other things, that men generally curse more than women, unless said women are in a sorority, and that university provosts swear more than librarians or the staff members of the university day care center.
Regardless of who is cursing or what the provocation may be, Dr. Jay said, the rationale for the eruption is often the same.
"Time and again, people have told me that cursing is a coping mechanism for them, a way of reducing stress," he said in a telephone interview. "It's a form of anger management that is often underappreciated."
Indeed, chimpanzees engage in what appears to be a kind of cursing match as a means of venting aggression and avoiding a potentially dangerous physical clash.
Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, said that when chimpanzees were angry "they will grunt or spit or make an abrupt, upsweeping gesture that, if a human were to do it, you'd recognize it as aggressive."
Such behaviors are threat gestures, Professor de Waal said, and they are all a good sign.
"A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures, but just goes ahead and attacks," he added.
By the same token, he said, nothing is more deadly than a person who is too enraged for expletives - who cleanly and quietly picks up a gun and starts shooting.
Researchers have also examined how words attain the status of forbidden speech and how the evolution of coarse language affects the smoother sheets of civil discourse stacked above it. They have found that what counts as taboo language in a given culture is often a mirror into that culture's fears and fixations.
"In some cultures, swear words are drawn mainly from sex and bodily functions, whereas in others, they're drawn mainly from the domain of religion," Dr. Deutscher said.
In societies where the purity and honor of women is of paramount importance, he said, "it's not surprising that many swear words are variations on the 'son of a whore' theme or refer graphically to the genitalia of the person's mother or sisters."
The very concept of a swear word or an oath originates from the profound importance that ancient cultures placed on swearing by the name of a god or gods. In ancient Babylon, swearing by the name of a god was meant to give absolute certainty against lying, Dr. Deutscher said, "and people believed that swearing falsely by a god would bring the terrible wrath of that god upon them." A warning against any abuse of the sacred oath is reflected in the biblical commandment that one must not "take the Lord's name in vain," and even today courtroom witnesses swear on the Bible that they are telling the whole truth and nothing but.
Among Christians, the stricture against taking the Lord's name in vain extended to casual allusions to God's son or the son's corporeal sufferings - no mention of the blood or the wounds or the body, and that goes for clever contractions, too. Nowadays, the phrase, "Oh, golly!" may be considered almost comically wholesome, but it was not always so. "Golly" is a compaction of "God's body" and, thus, was once a profanity.
Yet neither biblical commandment nor the most zealous Victorian censor can elide from the human mind its hand-wringing over the unruly human body, its chronic, embarrassing demands and its sad decay. Discomfort over body functions never sleeps, Dr. Burridge said, and the need for an ever-fresh selection of euphemisms about dirty subjects has long served as an impressive engine of linguistic invention.
Once a word becomes too closely associated with a specific body function, she said, once it becomes too evocative of what should not be evoked, it starts to enter the realm of the taboo and must be replaced by a new, gauzier euphemism.
For example, the word "toilet" stems from the French word for "little towel" and was originally a pleasantly indirect way of referring to the place where the chamber pot or its equivalent resides. But toilet has since come to mean the porcelain fixture itself, and so sounds too blunt to use in polite company. Instead, you ask your tuxedoed waiter for directions to the ladies' room or the restroom or, if you must, the bathroom.
Similarly, the word "coffin" originally meant an ordinary box, but once it became associated with death, that was it for a "shoe coffin" or "thinking outside the coffin." The taboo sense of a word, Dr. Burridge said, "always drives out any other senses it might have had."
Scientists have lately sought to map the neural topography of forbidden speech by studying Tourette's patients who suffer from coprolalia, the pathological and uncontrollable urge to curse. Tourette's syndrome is a neurological disorder of unknown origin characterized predominantly by chronic motor and vocal tics, a constant grimacing or pushing of one's glasses up the bridge of one's nose or emitting a stream of small yips or grunts.
Just a small percentage of Tourette's patients have coprolalia - estimates range from 8 to 30 percent - and patient advocates are dismayed by popular portrayals of Tourette's as a humorous and invariably scatological condition. But for those who do have coprolalia, said Dr. Carlos Singer, director of the division of movement disorders at the University of Miami School of Medicine, the symptom is often the most devastating and humiliating aspect of their condition.
Not only can it be shocking to people to hear a loud volley of expletives erupt for no apparent reason, sometimes from the mouth of a child or young teenager, but the curses can also be provocative and personal, florid slurs against the race, sexual identity or body size of a passer-by, for example, or deliberate and repeated lewd references to an old lover's name while in the arms of a current partner or spouse.
Reporting in The Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. David A. Silbersweig, a director of neuropsychiatry and neuroimaging at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and his colleagues described their use of PET scans to measure cerebral blood flow and identify which regions of the brain are galvanized in Tourette's patients during episodes of tics and coprolalia.
They found strong activation of the basal ganglia, a quartet of neuron clusters deep in the forebrain at roughly the level of the mid-forehead, that are known to help coordinate body movement along with activation of crucial regions of the left rear forebrain that participate in comprehending and generating speech, most notably Broca's area.
The researchers also saw arousal of neural circuits that interact with the limbic system, the wishbone-shape throne of human emotions, and, significantly, of the "executive" realms of the brain, where decisions to act or desist from acting may be carried out: the neural source, scientists said, of whatever conscience, civility or free will humans can claim.
That the brain's executive overseer is ablaze in an outburst of coprolalia, Dr. Silbersweig said, demonstrates how complex an act the urge to speak the unspeakable may be, and not only in the case of Tourette's. The person is gripped by a desire to curse, to voice something wildly inappropriate. Higher-order linguistic circuits are tapped, to contrive the content of the curse. The brain's impulse control center struggles to short-circuit the collusion between limbic system urge and neocortical craft, and it may succeed for a time.
Yet the urge mounts, until at last the speech pathways fire, the verboten is spoken, and archaic and refined brains alike must shoulder the blame.
Published: September 20, 2005/ The New York Times
Incensed by what it sees as a virtual pandemic of verbal vulgarity issuing from the diverse likes of Howard Stern, Bono of U2 and Robert Novak, the United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air.
By raising the fines that would be levied against offending broadcasters some fifteenfold, to a fee of about $500,000 per crudity broadcast, and by threatening to revoke the licenses of repeat polluters, the Senate seeks to return to the public square the gentler tenor of yesteryear, when seldom were heard any scurrilous words, and famous guys were not foul mouthed all day.
Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin's famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television.
Young children will memorize the illicit inventory long before they can grasp its sense, said John McWhorter, a scholar of linguistics at the Manhattan Institute and the author of "The Power of Babel," and literary giants have always constructed their art on its spine.
"The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and "peremptorie Asses," and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like "zounds" or "sblood" - offensive contractions of "God's wounds" and "God's blood" - or some wondrous sexual pun.
The title "Much Ado About Nothing," Dr. McWhorter said, is a word play on "Much Ado About an O Thing," the O thing being a reference to female genitalia.
Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, "eat their own dung, and drink their own piss."
In fact, said Guy Deutscher, a linguist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the author of "The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention," the earliest writings, which date from 5,000 years ago, include their share of off-color descriptions of the human form and its ever-colorful functions. And the written record is merely a reflection of an oral tradition that Dr. Deutscher and many other psychologists and evolutionary linguists suspect dates from the rise of the human larynx, if not before.
Some researchers are so impressed by the depth and power of strong language that they are using it as a peephole into the architecture of the brain, as a means of probing the tangled, cryptic bonds between the newer, "higher" regions of the brain in charge of intellect, reason and planning, and the older, more "bestial" neural neighborhoods that give birth to our emotions.
Researchers point out that cursing is often an amalgam of raw, spontaneous feeling and targeted, gimlet-eyed cunning. When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the "uncontrollable" outburst accordingly.
Because cursing calls on the thinking and feeling pathways of the brain in roughly equal measure and with handily assessable fervor, scientists say that by studying the neural circuitry behind it they are gaining new insights into how the different domains of the brain communicate - and all for the sake of a well-venomed retort.
Other investigators have examined the physiology of cursing, how our senses and reflexes react to the sound or sight of an obscene word. They have determined that hearing a curse elicits a literal rise out of people. When electrodermal wires are placed on people's arms and fingertips to study their skin conductance patterns and the subjects then hear a few obscenities spoken clearly and firmly, participants show signs of instant arousal.
Their skin conductance patterns spike, the hairs on their arms rise, their pulse quickens, and their breathing becomes shallow.
Interestingly, said Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a similar reaction occurs among university students and others who pride themselves on being educated when they listen to bad grammar or slang expressions that they regard as irritating, illiterate or déclassé.
"People can feel very passionate about language," she said, "as though it were a cherished artifact that must be protected at all cost against the depravities of barbarians and lexical aliens."
Dr. Burridge and a colleague at Monash, Keith Allan, are the authors of "Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language," which will be published early next year by the Cambridge University Press.
Researchers have also found that obscenities can get under one's goosebumped skin and then refuse to budge. In one study, scientists started with the familiar Stroop test, in which subjects are flashed a series of words written in different colors and are asked to react by calling out the colors of the words rather than the words themselves.
If the subjects see the word "chair" written in yellow letters, they are supposed to say "yellow."
The researchers then inserted a number of obscenities and vulgarities in the standard lineup. Charting participants' immediate and delayed responses, the researchers found that, first of all, people needed significantly more time to trill out the colors of the curse words than they did for neutral terms like chair.
The experience of seeing titillating text obviously distracted the participants from the color-coding task at hand. Yet those risqué interpolations left their mark. In subsequent memory quizzes, not only were participants much better at recalling the naughty words than they were the neutrals, but that superior recall also applied to the tints of the tainted words, as well as to their sense.
Yes, it is tough to toil in the shadow of trash. When researchers in another study asked participants to quickly scan lists of words that included obscenities and then to recall as many of the words as possible, the subjects were, once again, best at rehashing the curses - and worst at summoning up whatever unobjectionable entries happened to precede or follow the bad bits.
Yet as much as bad language can deliver a jolt, it can help wash away stress and anger. In some settings, the free flow of foul language may signal not hostility or social pathology, but harmony and tranquillity.
"Studies show that if you're with a group of close friends, the more relaxed you are, the more you swear," Dr. Burridge said. "It's a way of saying: 'I'm so comfortable here I can let off steam. I can say whatever I like.' "
Evidence also suggests that cursing can be an effective means of venting aggression and thereby forestalling physical violence.
With the help of a small army of students and volunteers, Timothy B. Jay, a professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams and the author of "Cursing in America" and "Why We Curse," has explored the dynamics of cursing in great detail.
The investigators have found, among other things, that men generally curse more than women, unless said women are in a sorority, and that university provosts swear more than librarians or the staff members of the university day care center.
Regardless of who is cursing or what the provocation may be, Dr. Jay said, the rationale for the eruption is often the same.
"Time and again, people have told me that cursing is a coping mechanism for them, a way of reducing stress," he said in a telephone interview. "It's a form of anger management that is often underappreciated."
Indeed, chimpanzees engage in what appears to be a kind of cursing match as a means of venting aggression and avoiding a potentially dangerous physical clash.
Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, said that when chimpanzees were angry "they will grunt or spit or make an abrupt, upsweeping gesture that, if a human were to do it, you'd recognize it as aggressive."
Such behaviors are threat gestures, Professor de Waal said, and they are all a good sign.
"A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures, but just goes ahead and attacks," he added.
By the same token, he said, nothing is more deadly than a person who is too enraged for expletives - who cleanly and quietly picks up a gun and starts shooting.
Researchers have also examined how words attain the status of forbidden speech and how the evolution of coarse language affects the smoother sheets of civil discourse stacked above it. They have found that what counts as taboo language in a given culture is often a mirror into that culture's fears and fixations.
"In some cultures, swear words are drawn mainly from sex and bodily functions, whereas in others, they're drawn mainly from the domain of religion," Dr. Deutscher said.
In societies where the purity and honor of women is of paramount importance, he said, "it's not surprising that many swear words are variations on the 'son of a whore' theme or refer graphically to the genitalia of the person's mother or sisters."
The very concept of a swear word or an oath originates from the profound importance that ancient cultures placed on swearing by the name of a god or gods. In ancient Babylon, swearing by the name of a god was meant to give absolute certainty against lying, Dr. Deutscher said, "and people believed that swearing falsely by a god would bring the terrible wrath of that god upon them." A warning against any abuse of the sacred oath is reflected in the biblical commandment that one must not "take the Lord's name in vain," and even today courtroom witnesses swear on the Bible that they are telling the whole truth and nothing but.
Among Christians, the stricture against taking the Lord's name in vain extended to casual allusions to God's son or the son's corporeal sufferings - no mention of the blood or the wounds or the body, and that goes for clever contractions, too. Nowadays, the phrase, "Oh, golly!" may be considered almost comically wholesome, but it was not always so. "Golly" is a compaction of "God's body" and, thus, was once a profanity.
Yet neither biblical commandment nor the most zealous Victorian censor can elide from the human mind its hand-wringing over the unruly human body, its chronic, embarrassing demands and its sad decay. Discomfort over body functions never sleeps, Dr. Burridge said, and the need for an ever-fresh selection of euphemisms about dirty subjects has long served as an impressive engine of linguistic invention.
Once a word becomes too closely associated with a specific body function, she said, once it becomes too evocative of what should not be evoked, it starts to enter the realm of the taboo and must be replaced by a new, gauzier euphemism.
For example, the word "toilet" stems from the French word for "little towel" and was originally a pleasantly indirect way of referring to the place where the chamber pot or its equivalent resides. But toilet has since come to mean the porcelain fixture itself, and so sounds too blunt to use in polite company. Instead, you ask your tuxedoed waiter for directions to the ladies' room or the restroom or, if you must, the bathroom.
Similarly, the word "coffin" originally meant an ordinary box, but once it became associated with death, that was it for a "shoe coffin" or "thinking outside the coffin." The taboo sense of a word, Dr. Burridge said, "always drives out any other senses it might have had."
Scientists have lately sought to map the neural topography of forbidden speech by studying Tourette's patients who suffer from coprolalia, the pathological and uncontrollable urge to curse. Tourette's syndrome is a neurological disorder of unknown origin characterized predominantly by chronic motor and vocal tics, a constant grimacing or pushing of one's glasses up the bridge of one's nose or emitting a stream of small yips or grunts.
Just a small percentage of Tourette's patients have coprolalia - estimates range from 8 to 30 percent - and patient advocates are dismayed by popular portrayals of Tourette's as a humorous and invariably scatological condition. But for those who do have coprolalia, said Dr. Carlos Singer, director of the division of movement disorders at the University of Miami School of Medicine, the symptom is often the most devastating and humiliating aspect of their condition.
Not only can it be shocking to people to hear a loud volley of expletives erupt for no apparent reason, sometimes from the mouth of a child or young teenager, but the curses can also be provocative and personal, florid slurs against the race, sexual identity or body size of a passer-by, for example, or deliberate and repeated lewd references to an old lover's name while in the arms of a current partner or spouse.
Reporting in The Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. David A. Silbersweig, a director of neuropsychiatry and neuroimaging at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and his colleagues described their use of PET scans to measure cerebral blood flow and identify which regions of the brain are galvanized in Tourette's patients during episodes of tics and coprolalia.
They found strong activation of the basal ganglia, a quartet of neuron clusters deep in the forebrain at roughly the level of the mid-forehead, that are known to help coordinate body movement along with activation of crucial regions of the left rear forebrain that participate in comprehending and generating speech, most notably Broca's area.
The researchers also saw arousal of neural circuits that interact with the limbic system, the wishbone-shape throne of human emotions, and, significantly, of the "executive" realms of the brain, where decisions to act or desist from acting may be carried out: the neural source, scientists said, of whatever conscience, civility or free will humans can claim.
That the brain's executive overseer is ablaze in an outburst of coprolalia, Dr. Silbersweig said, demonstrates how complex an act the urge to speak the unspeakable may be, and not only in the case of Tourette's. The person is gripped by a desire to curse, to voice something wildly inappropriate. Higher-order linguistic circuits are tapped, to contrive the content of the curse. The brain's impulse control center struggles to short-circuit the collusion between limbic system urge and neocortical craft, and it may succeed for a time.
Yet the urge mounts, until at last the speech pathways fire, the verboten is spoken, and archaic and refined brains alike must shoulder the blame.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
http://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/369538
Context the key in use of f-word
WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE - JANET HOLMES
The Dominion Post
Last updated 10:32 16/04/2008
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Why the f . . . do we swear? In Auckland recently I needed to send an e-mail so I found an Internet venue on Queen St. The room was full of young men playing a violent Internet game and shouting loudly as they chased and killed characters.
What struck me most forcibly was the frequency with which they used the word "f . . .", a four-letter word which, despite its increasing use in television drama (such as The Sopranos) and film, can still cause offence or, at the least, raised eyebrows in many contexts.
Circa's recent brilliant production of Conor McPherson's Shining City also included repeated use of the f-word, this time in the form "f . . . ing". Despite such exposure, this swear word still packs a punch for me, and I suspect it had a similar effect on others in the mainly middle- class, middle-aged audience at Circa.
These experiences highlight the different impact that swear words have in different contexts for different speakers.
One important function of swear words or expletives (as linguists call them) is to express anger or frustration. This is perhaps the core function with which everyone is familiar. Few can resist a strong expletive when they trap a finger in the car door or when someone treats them with contempt or derision.
Strong language is an appropriate way of expressing strong emotions and feelings, such as pain or anger, in such circumstances. But such occasions are relatively rare, and listeners are usually tolerant of expletives in such contexts.
So it is the extensive use of swear words in more familiar contexts that raise hackles and cause prescriptivists like Lynne Truss (who lambasts swearing as exceptionally rude behaviour) to sharpen their knives.
A recent American advice column warned that while "mild words like 'shit' and 'bitch' may or may not create a negative impact within your particular group, the f-word never has a place at work. The continued use of words like these can be grounds for discipline, beginning with reprimands, letters, suspensions and ultimately termination".
But our research shows this is simply not true in all workplaces.
People don't always use swear words to cause offence, and nor can one state categorically that the use of any particular word will always cause offence. For many people a swear word is simply a familiar emphatic form like "really" in phrases such as "it was really amazing" or "very" in "she was very aggressive".
Edwin Battistella recounts in his book Bad Language how during World War I "get your f . . . ing rifles' was the routine way of delivering this order. If the sergeant said "get your rifles" the soldiers knew things were urgent anddangerous. In my schooldays we were constantly advised to avoid over-using nice in our stories. The teachers claimed that it was a bland word with not much meaning and exhorted us to choose more colourful and semantically rich adjectives instead. We could make the same argument about "f . . . ing" in contexts like Internet venues, building sites and military groups.
Over-use means its edge is likely to be dulled. But it is unlikely that anyone will take notice of such appeals, since expressing oneself with originality and creativity is not the main function of talk in an Internet cafe.
USING the odd swear word in some workplaces can provoke laughter and tension relief because it is unexpected. Saying "not f . . . ing likely" rather than "no, I am afraid not" generated a gale of laughter in one professional group.
The shock value of the swear words ameliorated the bluntness of the refusal, and maintained good rapport between the people involved.
In our Language in the Workplace project, we found that swear words could be a way of building solidarity or team spirit between members of a team.
Some workplace teams used everyday exchanges of swear words as a sign that they got along well together and trusted each other. They used abusive address terms such as "f . . . er" and in a friendly way – as others might use terms like "mate" and "bro".
It is difficult for people who are unused to such language to understand the positive social meaning swear words may convey in different work contexts. The context is what matters, not the words per se; it is the context of the talk which affects whether a swear word is interpreted as a term of abuse or a friendly address term.
"Never say never" is a good rule when discussing language.
* Janet Holmes teaches sociolinguistics at Victoria University.
Context the key in use of f-word
WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE - JANET HOLMES
The Dominion Post
Last updated 10:32 16/04/2008
Share Share
Print Print
Text Size Text Size
Relevant offers
Why the f . . . do we swear? In Auckland recently I needed to send an e-mail so I found an Internet venue on Queen St. The room was full of young men playing a violent Internet game and shouting loudly as they chased and killed characters.
What struck me most forcibly was the frequency with which they used the word "f . . .", a four-letter word which, despite its increasing use in television drama (such as The Sopranos) and film, can still cause offence or, at the least, raised eyebrows in many contexts.
Circa's recent brilliant production of Conor McPherson's Shining City also included repeated use of the f-word, this time in the form "f . . . ing". Despite such exposure, this swear word still packs a punch for me, and I suspect it had a similar effect on others in the mainly middle- class, middle-aged audience at Circa.
These experiences highlight the different impact that swear words have in different contexts for different speakers.
One important function of swear words or expletives (as linguists call them) is to express anger or frustration. This is perhaps the core function with which everyone is familiar. Few can resist a strong expletive when they trap a finger in the car door or when someone treats them with contempt or derision.
Strong language is an appropriate way of expressing strong emotions and feelings, such as pain or anger, in such circumstances. But such occasions are relatively rare, and listeners are usually tolerant of expletives in such contexts.
So it is the extensive use of swear words in more familiar contexts that raise hackles and cause prescriptivists like Lynne Truss (who lambasts swearing as exceptionally rude behaviour) to sharpen their knives.
A recent American advice column warned that while "mild words like 'shit' and 'bitch' may or may not create a negative impact within your particular group, the f-word never has a place at work. The continued use of words like these can be grounds for discipline, beginning with reprimands, letters, suspensions and ultimately termination".
But our research shows this is simply not true in all workplaces.
People don't always use swear words to cause offence, and nor can one state categorically that the use of any particular word will always cause offence. For many people a swear word is simply a familiar emphatic form like "really" in phrases such as "it was really amazing" or "very" in "she was very aggressive".
Edwin Battistella recounts in his book Bad Language how during World War I "get your f . . . ing rifles' was the routine way of delivering this order. If the sergeant said "get your rifles" the soldiers knew things were urgent anddangerous. In my schooldays we were constantly advised to avoid over-using nice in our stories. The teachers claimed that it was a bland word with not much meaning and exhorted us to choose more colourful and semantically rich adjectives instead. We could make the same argument about "f . . . ing" in contexts like Internet venues, building sites and military groups.
Over-use means its edge is likely to be dulled. But it is unlikely that anyone will take notice of such appeals, since expressing oneself with originality and creativity is not the main function of talk in an Internet cafe.
USING the odd swear word in some workplaces can provoke laughter and tension relief because it is unexpected. Saying "not f . . . ing likely" rather than "no, I am afraid not" generated a gale of laughter in one professional group.
The shock value of the swear words ameliorated the bluntness of the refusal, and maintained good rapport between the people involved.
In our Language in the Workplace project, we found that swear words could be a way of building solidarity or team spirit between members of a team.
Some workplace teams used everyday exchanges of swear words as a sign that they got along well together and trusted each other. They used abusive address terms such as "f . . . er" and in a friendly way – as others might use terms like "mate" and "bro".
It is difficult for people who are unused to such language to understand the positive social meaning swear words may convey in different work contexts. The context is what matters, not the words per se; it is the context of the talk which affects whether a swear word is interpreted as a term of abuse or a friendly address term.
"Never say never" is a good rule when discussing language.
* Janet Holmes teaches sociolinguistics at Victoria University.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Pictoplasma
estoy mas contento que diablo....because Parsons illustration department chose some of my charactor designs to participate a toy show in Berlin called "Pictopia"! I'm so exciting to see what's gonna come out.
here is the link pictoplasma
here is the link pictoplasma
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Freud
I'm think I found an interesting link between Freud's theory and swear words.
Oral stage (exemplified by an infant's pleasure in nursing), then in the anal stage (exemplified by a toddler's pleasure in evacuating his or her bowels), then in the phallic stage. Freud argued that children then passed through a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the Oedipus Complex) but that the child eventually overcame and repressed this desire because of its taboo nature. The repressive or dormant latency stage of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development.
Oral stage (exemplified by an infant's pleasure in nursing), then in the anal stage (exemplified by a toddler's pleasure in evacuating his or her bowels), then in the phallic stage. Freud argued that children then passed through a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the Oedipus Complex) but that the child eventually overcame and repressed this desire because of its taboo nature. The repressive or dormant latency stage of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
frickin thesis...
my thesis is about curse words...
-no entiendo por que existe los "swear words," si people prohibe este tipo de expressiones.... creo que las cosas existen por cierta razon, entonces what's the reasons?
I'm kind of curious about why all swear words are about religion or sex in every language .... why ?
I don't know...fuck...
-no entiendo por que existe los "swear words," si people prohibe este tipo de expressiones.... creo que las cosas existen por cierta razon, entonces what's the reasons?
I'm kind of curious about why all swear words are about religion or sex in every language .... why ?
I don't know...fuck...
Friday, February 13, 2009
R+D
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Gracias Elias!
lo siguiente es el review from curator for my expo.
"Bocabulario"
¡Los dominicanos somos creativos! A pesar de nuestros índices de analfabetismo y lo mucho que se habla de nuestra poca cultura, ¡somos creativos! Tenemos la capacidad de usar el lenguaje figurado para expresar nuestra opinión y visión de las cosas de manera amplia y a la vez divertida. Pero en la mayoría de las ocasiones no nos percatamos de éso y mucho menos lo valoramos. Hace falta que venga un extranjero y nos lo haga ver para nosotros apreciarlo. Y esto es lo que ha hecho Paolung Lee.
En su aprendizaje del lenguaje, Paolung le tocó vivir en la "República" y enfrentarse a todo tipo de expresiones que llamaban su atención y le enseñaban a conocernos. Conocí a Paolung en la Escuela de Chavón, fui su profesor por dos años y nunca terminé de sorprenderme ante su capacidad comunicativa; cada día llegaba con una frase o una palabra extraña para la boca de un "chinito" (claro, sé que no lo es), y lo más impresionante era lo bien que aplicaba esa nueva palabra o frase a la situación a la cual se refería.
Paolung nos presenta nuestro "bocabulario" de manera literal, dejando el ego creativo del diseñador a un lado para destacar la creatividad del pueblo que le enseñó a "amarrar" y a "estar en olla".
Una propuesta gráfica sofisticada, económica en recursos visuales y una presentación impecable añaden caracter y seriedad a tanta "vagabundería". Un sentido del humor inesperado se mezcla con el respeto hacia conceptos callejeros, regalándonos imágenes impactantes que no necesitan de palabras para ser comprendidas. Irreverentes combinaciones de colores (que nos recuerdan nuestros letreros en colmadones y bancas de apuestas,) manejadas con mucha discreción y puntualidad, crean un ambiente de calidez que invita a la observación y al diálogo, haciendo al espectador partícipe de la descodificación del mensaje sin complejidades superfluas.
Las vainas de este aplatanao nos revelan como inteligentes, nos llenan de orgullo y a la vez nos hace sonreir!!
Elías Roedán
16 de Enero de 2009
"Bocabulario"
¡Los dominicanos somos creativos! A pesar de nuestros índices de analfabetismo y lo mucho que se habla de nuestra poca cultura, ¡somos creativos! Tenemos la capacidad de usar el lenguaje figurado para expresar nuestra opinión y visión de las cosas de manera amplia y a la vez divertida. Pero en la mayoría de las ocasiones no nos percatamos de éso y mucho menos lo valoramos. Hace falta que venga un extranjero y nos lo haga ver para nosotros apreciarlo. Y esto es lo que ha hecho Paolung Lee.
En su aprendizaje del lenguaje, Paolung le tocó vivir en la "República" y enfrentarse a todo tipo de expresiones que llamaban su atención y le enseñaban a conocernos. Conocí a Paolung en la Escuela de Chavón, fui su profesor por dos años y nunca terminé de sorprenderme ante su capacidad comunicativa; cada día llegaba con una frase o una palabra extraña para la boca de un "chinito" (claro, sé que no lo es), y lo más impresionante era lo bien que aplicaba esa nueva palabra o frase a la situación a la cual se refería.
Paolung nos presenta nuestro "bocabulario" de manera literal, dejando el ego creativo del diseñador a un lado para destacar la creatividad del pueblo que le enseñó a "amarrar" y a "estar en olla".
Una propuesta gráfica sofisticada, económica en recursos visuales y una presentación impecable añaden caracter y seriedad a tanta "vagabundería". Un sentido del humor inesperado se mezcla con el respeto hacia conceptos callejeros, regalándonos imágenes impactantes que no necesitan de palabras para ser comprendidas. Irreverentes combinaciones de colores (que nos recuerdan nuestros letreros en colmadones y bancas de apuestas,) manejadas con mucha discreción y puntualidad, crean un ambiente de calidez que invita a la observación y al diálogo, haciendo al espectador partícipe de la descodificación del mensaje sin complejidades superfluas.
Las vainas de este aplatanao nos revelan como inteligentes, nos llenan de orgullo y a la vez nos hace sonreir!!
Elías Roedán
16 de Enero de 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
mi primera exhibicion individual- Bocabulario
"bocabulario", una exhibición inspirada en el libro “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” por Junot Díaz, traduce las expresiones dominicanas en una serie de iconografías, creando un juego jocoso a través de conceptos semióticos. Del mismo modo, "bocabulario" es una nueva forma linguística de ver la identidad dominicana desde el ojo de un inmigrante asiático aplatanao.
Friday, January 2, 2009
sinoficio
jeje, otra vez se me ocurrio de pintar la puerta, I just realized that it's the most interesting thing ever- to paint a door... I feel like that I'm paiting on a colossal canvas. somehow eso hace que la puerta no funciona como divisor... sino it could bring people closer, es como cuando veo una puerta chula eso me hace querer knock the door...hehe, just like my vecino!
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