Phoenix of Love

Language learning fascinates me. A while back, I heard about a website called Livemocha that takes a community-oriented approach to language learning. It’s a bit of a cross between Facebook, Wikipedia, and the much-acclaimed Rosetta Stone language tutoring software, which teaches with images rather than by association with your native tongue.
On Livemocha, you can take [...]

So many processes, so many adjustments, boil down to the resolution of dissonances. I remember once reading an article on Bruckner’s symphonies which described their progressions from start to finish, very broadly, as the gradual resolution of musical tensions declared in the introduction, so that each finale concludes in a sort of harmonic nirvana.
Since reading [...]

One of the comparisons that pop psychology books love to draw between men and women is that, while women show support for friends’ problems by listening and sympathizing, guys like to jump in and suggest solutions after hearing the first few words. Most probably the man is doing this while slouching in an armchair watching [...]

It’s amazing how the best way to get what you want is often to focus your efforts on what other people want. In this world of specialization, most of the time what we want is at least partly under the control of others, and it’s nearly impossible to satisfy all of our needs without involving [...]

I’ve been thinking about what makes separate cultural groups unite into a nation.
It seems as though nations unify most often in response to some kind of assault from the outside: this is what happened with the United States, for example; and India. With these hostile outside pressures, it suddenly becomes more important to have a [...]

There’s an almost universal disregard for speed limits on American freeways. I was thinking about this recently while driving a thirty-mile commute to work. Every road seems to have a certain “natural” speed, and nearly everyone driving along that road gravitates towards that speed regardless of the speed limits that are posted. If a police [...]

I was thinking about photosynthesis recently, and what a bizarre and amazing concept it is. A plant takes the sunlight that is already shining on it and uses it to create energy for itself. Then animals eat the plant, and other animals eat the animals, and the energy from the sun is passed on and [...]

Don’t worry; there are no bananas hurtling through the air. This is one of the classic examples of “garden path sentences”—sentences that make you do a double-take because your interpretation of the grammar changes halfway through. They make a sudden, unexpected turn, apparently rather like paths in a garden. In this case, you think we’re [...]