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Hello???? Suggestions????

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Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science, 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

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For no reason here is a library story

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Was anyone gonna tell me we found who Cleo was??? The integration genius on math stack exchange from 10 years ago?

TLDR it was a professor from Uzbekistan named Vladimir Reshetnikov who did it because he wanted people to be more interested in the niche problems people would post on there. Cleo wasn’t even his only account, he was doing multiple people

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book from the sky (tianshu) xu bing, 1989-91

I was so excited to see a copy of this in real life bc it's something I studied in art history. this is a book that was typeset and printed by hand using wooden blocks but every one of the characters was invented for the sake of the piece and does not correspond to any word in the Chinese language

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i dont watch new things often so i have this problem where whenever i do get around to watching something i am a) usually late to the hype and b) so blown away by the experience that i cannot stop thinking about it. ive spent the past 24 hours bursting at the seams like guys i watch movie can i tell yo uabout movie. i experience.d movie. have you heard about this thing called movies ? movies good.

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also if gnomes were all sitting around a small tree stump using it as a table and someone used the word "misnomer" one of them would speak up and go "HEEHEE. MISS GNOMER IS WHAT I CALL THE MISSUS" they'd all laugh so hard they fall off the mushrooms they are sitting on and spill the berry juice everywhere

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Driving my girl to work on our tandem bicycle. Takes me 15 minutes to drop her off and 45 minutes to get back home

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september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good september will be good

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People are so much more sad, and desparate, and lonely than you think. I have had three incidents in the last four months were a technician I was working with was being either dangerously unfocused (we work with high voltage), or just flat out angry with their coworkers, and every time when I just pulled them aside to say hey, this isn't you, you're nice, and you're competent, so something must be up - what can I do to help - they have responded by bursting into tears. One guy was struggling to get his wife moved into a care home, one guy just got served divorce papers, and the other hadn't slept a wink the night before because his daughter had the pukes.

I haven't spent my whole life responding to people being rude, or stupid, or dangerous with knee jerk compassion. It's a new habit. The first time I did that as the lead for my lab, it was because the guy genuinely was so good natured that I knew something had to be off. But the other two times were just me going, alright, lets see if it always goes this well, and so far, it has. I'm almost 30, and I just figured out that the #1 reason people are shitty are because they are going through shit.

I don't think you have, like, a moral obligation to respond to people being jerks with knee jerk compassion. But it has made my life so much easier the last four months that I would recommend trying. For your own sake. Please.

(I'll step off my soapbox now. Enjoy your Sunday.)

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God the 11 year old girls you put on this earth to climb trees and play with plastic animals are buying foundation at the drug store

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Not just children, because adults have to verify themselves so they will be tracked. Every purchase u make or protest u go to or petition u sign will be linked to ur ID. Surely this can’t go wrong aha

Anyone else noticing how all of this is happening at once.

Age verification for Wikipedia and Spotify. YouTube banning accounts for under-16s, and rolling out AI to detect if someone is actually 18 based on their viewing history (100% guaranteed to falsely mark autistic adults as children at an irregularly high rate, btw). Banning porn off Steam and itch. Attempts to ban and IP range-block VPNs. Age verification for not just porn, but anywhere you could maybe possibly see porn, including basic social media features like DMs.

What the fuck is happening. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, what the fuck are they preparing for

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Here is the animation that i did 2 years ago but forgot it untill now

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We live in the dumbest, lamest cyberpunk dystopia possible.

So LA has been — and continues to — protest against ICE. These protests haven’t gotten any smaller or lost any momentum, but social media wasn’t reflecting it.

TikTok users, realizing that the platform/other social media are censoring/deleting/shadowbanning these protest videos, decided to find a workaround.

They’re calling it the LA Music Festival. Ice detention centers and other protest locations are “stages.” The hottest band is Rage Against the Machine. “Here’s what gear you should be bringing to stay safe at the LA Music Festival.”

And it fucking worked.

TikTok has become a proving ground for a lot of new music, meaning lots of labels and organizations have lucrative deals with TikTok to promote their new artists and music festivals. So they absolutely cannot censor the words “music festival” or train the algorithm to ignore it, or they risk endangering that very important revenue.

So now protest videos are flooding feeds again, but it’s the LA 24/7 Music Festival. Truly an incredible timeline we’ve landed in.

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Bob Ross and Peapod the Pocket squirrel (1984)