Thursday, January 31, 2013

Song and Dance

Given the connection between community and communication (as can be easily seen in the English words, from Latin), I somehow was clued into the importance of music and dance as community reinforcing activities. Communities are, in some ways, where a group of people coordinate their actions with each other -- the same is true of dance (and the music that goes along with it). So I had an "of course!" moment when I read this:

The Sesotho verb for singing (ho bina), as in may of the world's languages, also means to dance...
From Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music, p. 7. I'm not a linguistics expert, and I know English (sing, dance) and Spanish (cantar, bailar), and as you can see neither of those clued me in.


Thursday, January 10, 2013

Online Dating Math

If 1 in 5 (20%) relationships start online, that suggests that 4 in 5 (80%) start offline. Get away from your screen and go out into the world! Or something. And "See Pics of Single Women", really? What is this, a porn ad? I don't see that the Match.com people could have thought about the math much, or they think their audience is not very good at math. And yes they are probably trying to highlight the word "Free" but it shouldn't be capitalized, and they should know this is the internet where there are people who can do both math and grammar and insist on them being done correctly.