randform

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Together with collegues from London and Tokyo neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes did an experiment (however up to now only with 21 test persons as it seems), where a person had to choose wether he/she wanted either to add or to substract two numbers. And even before the test persons saw the numbers and before they started to compute it was possible – by using a MRI brain scan – to tell with a 70% chance, what kind of desicion the person was going to make, or in other words: using the MRI the scientists could “read the mind” of the test persons (with a 70% chance). Freely chosen decisions are usually happening in the prefrontal cortex.

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a little comment on materials, matter and their perception. artwork by Uta Naumburg:
->chronos chromos concrete

There are various theories about the origin of languages. Personally I do not believe in things like Monogenesis, but rather think that languages start automatically with communicating basic evolutionary needs and then evolve eventually in abstraction and finetuning.

A good basis to study the origin of languages are animals and their various ways to communicate with their children, mates, friends, rivals etc. and in fact scientists spend years of their life to listen to lets say birds, like pink flamingos.

Another interesting study is to look at human languages and their finetuning. In particular the various forms of mathematics in different populations and their result on mathematical understanding is ethnomathematics. For example the Maya had two kinds of zero’s, namely – loosely speaking – a zero for the begin of a count (in particular they counted days) and a zero for denoting that a timespan doesn’t count – an article on this can be found in this issue of Spektrum der Wissenschaft.

Somewhat interesting is the reverse thing i.e. to speak of language in mathematical terms. E.g. there exist a mathematical structure called “category” (which is defined in the Wikipedia link). Let us assume we have

-a collection of objects, namely sets of words (call them for simplicity languages).
-in addition for any pair language1 and language2 one has a bunch of translators (in mathematical terms a set of morphisms) who translate e.g. language1 into language2
Let us depict this translation with an arrow in the following way:

language1 —translator—> language2

the language and the translators come together with a “repeater” (mathematically an identity morphism), i.e. someone who just translates the same language into the same language and a “composite” that is a translator who replaces two translators, i.e. if fj is a translator from french to japanese and je is a translator from japanese to english (we assume that the two translators can only translate in one direction) then fe would be a composite for fj and je, i.e. someone who does the same job as fj and fe one after the other, namely to translate from french to japanese.

So again one could depict this as:

japanese —je—> english

Now this example is a category if and only if the following is true:

1.)(mathematics: “left and right unit law”): first translate and then repeat is the same as first repeat and then translate is the same as just translate

2.)(mathematics: “associative law”) associativity holds.

If the red and the green arrows are the same then “associativity holds” or in other words a translation from english to french would give the same result if we first translate english into german and then translate german into french or if we first translate english into japanese and then to french. If this is true we have an example of a category. If not (as it is usually the case for languages) then not.

signpost at FEZ
The FEZ Berlin a children, youth and family centre (actually the largest in Europe) is one of the jewels of Berlin. FEZ-Berlin is run as a non-profit organisation of the Land Berlin and is divided into three main components: the educational work with children, youth and families, the Berlin State Music Academy and the indoor and open air pools.
It was originally founded in 1950 as the Pionierrepublik „Ernst Thälmann“.

For the educational work it hosts among others an ecology garden, a kids museum, a real kids train, which dates back to 1956 and the Orbitall -a space exploration centre for kids dating back to 1979. With various activities like e.g. the space camp mission kids get prepared for the future.

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Avalokitesvara from Wikipedia

There is currently (german nun =now) a big exibition in Berlin about the art of Tibet. The objects in this exhibition are mostly from tibetan monasteries. Unfortunately the exhibition ends in around the 1940’s so that one cannot see much of the further development of this fascinating culture like in particular the multicultural influences from China and India.

-> A youtube video (for which the Berlin Anti-Kitsch police will kill me) of the 1000 armed Kwan-yin (note: I don’t know wether the performance is related to the tibetan Chenrezig/Avalokitesvara it just looks similar)

…well, I’ve tried. But others do better and even a lot better: Like this working LEGO Harpsichord. We already noted that one can do serious things with lego bricks, but using the capes of the lego minifigures to cushion the dampers adds a new quality.
This dulcimer works as well but looks less fashionable.

The horse latitudes are a region were sailors traditionally threw any horses available overboard (or slaughtered them) to save weight – or something like that. As we recently pointed out, we are heading for horse-lattitudesque temperatures and we might be forced to throw our modern “horse power” equivalents over the metaphorical railing to keep on going.