How unhealthy respect for religion warps scientific discourse

Yesterday I went to a talk Russell C. Eberhart was giving at the DCU School of Computing about Swarm Intelligence and specifically about the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. It was an entertaining and informative talk, even though parts of it went over my head.

But a disturbing episode during the presentation caught my attention. The speaker was giving an overview of evolutionary approaches to AI and at one point he used a weird disclaimer along the following lines:

It doesn't matter if you believe that evolution happened or not. We are talking about computer applications here, it's not about religion.

He justified himself by mentioning that when giving a similar talk in one of the southern US states, he got comments concerning the reality of evolution, and he wanted to avoid any such questions. There were a few embarrassed giggles from the audience and the talk went on.

It's a small detail, but if you stop to think of it, a remarkable and disquieting thing has happened: An engineering professor addressing an audience of science and engineering faculty and postgrads feels obliged to give lip service to a quaint superstition and ends up sounding as if the biological evolution was a purely religious question, beyond the scope of science, rather than the solid scientific fact that it actually is. A sad cop-out on his part.

I just hope that creationism doesn't take root in other parts of civilized world any time soon. But seeing so many things spreading out from the US to every corner of the globe, maybe it's hoping for too much.

You don't speak the way you think you speak

People's judgments about their own speech patterns are notoriously unreliable. I noticed it on several occasions. One of the first ones was when I was learning Spanish and people would correct me when I said things like Pasa que sigo resfriado. I was supposed to say Lo que pasa es que sigo resfriado, the former was total rubbish that nobody ever said. But actually the corrector herself would occasionally use the shorter form in casual and rapid speech.

Yesterday I experienced a particularly cute example: a Polish friend was instructing a Belgian guy how to pronounce the Polish word się, and as people often will when adjusting speech for non-native speakers, she said that as /ɕɛw̃/. I started objecting that such a pronunciation never occurred in normal conversational speech and that she herself didn't pronounce /ɛw̃/ (but rather /ɛ/) in się and other words spelled with word-final ę. To which she responded Ale ja tak mówię! (But I do speak like that!), pronouncing mówię, of course, as /'muvjɛ/ :)

For some even more outlandish claims made by someone about their own phonology, check out They have ears, but they hear not on the Language Log.

The scourge of modern civilization

If I had to choose a single culprit guilty of causing much of the unpleasantness of life in a 21^st century city, a serious contender would be CARS. They are big and dangerous, they stink, they are noisy, they contribute to pollution and climate change and last but not least they tend to be equipped with hysterical alarms that go off at random times during the day and night and go on and on for hours. You guessed, I didn't get much sleep tonight. Y no, no me gusta conducir. I'll stop now though since I decided to try and keep this blog free of rants.