[Why Man?]

But it should be clear, simply through your own introspection, that you exert some additional mental effort to learn longer words. Maybe not a lot, but some--enough to make a real difference when you need to learn thousands and thousands of words.

Which only means that the word man will be learned a few years earlier than humanity.

And it should also be clear, through simple self-observation of how much your mouth moves, that, under normal conditions, you exert more effort to say longer words as opposed to shorter ones.

This only serves to explain why we'd use man instead of humanity now in conversation. However, if you just think about how the word man came to be used in both senses in the first place, it makes no sense by your argument. In Old English, you had distinct words for 'man,' 'woman,' and 'mankind': wer, wif, and mann. (Indeed, you also had guma 'man' and quen 'woman.') Mann is a bit longer than wer (the two n's were both pronounced) and had a distinct meaning, so why replace wer with a longer word with a distinct meaning? And it's obvious that the difference in meaning between 'male human being' and 'human being' is important--English speakers have since put together an even longer word mankind for the second meaning and borrowed a number of words from Latin and French to express it (humanity, person, people), and even cobbled together some set phrases (human beings, the human race). All of these are centuries-old and quite a bit longer than man, so presumably it's important to distinguish the two meanings of the word--and so presumably it was stupid to replace wer by mann in the first place. (And the same thing happened in other languages. Latin homo 'person' is longer than vir 'man,' especially if you look at the non-subject forms: hominem / virum in the direct object, for example. Yet homo replaced vir in all of the Romance languages.) Obviously there's something going on besides trying to exert less energy.

["Organic" Foods]

Like somehow it's okay to ever put the word "but" after "I am not an environmentalist."

Hmm. How about, "I'm not an environmentalist but I play one on TV"? (Kinda hard to come up with any other examples where it's okay though...)

[Why Man?]

To clarify, I wasn't arguing from a point of etymology. I was arguing from word economy. Etymology studies the origin and history of a word, but it doesn't explain why we actually use a particular word versus another. It doesn't explain why we stop using some words and replace them with others. You need to study linguistics for that.

Huh? Etymology is part of linguistics (historical linguistics, to be exact).

My theory is that, in general, we don't use "man" because we are sexist, but because it's more economical than using "humanity" or even "people."

Economical for whom? The speaker, certainly, but not necessarily for the listener. Fewer syllables, and more generally fewer distinct sounds in a word, means that there's a greater chance of confusion for the listener; similarly, having to figure out which of several meanings of a polysemous word is intended in a sentence is added effort for the listener. There's a fundamental tension between the ease of the speaker and the ease of the listener that works to keep words from being reduced entirely to an inchoate vocal cry. (In case you're curious, that leads to an inverse relationship between the length of a word and its frequency in speech described by Zipf's Law.)

These other words for "man" do still have some uses, however. So we keep them around for writing poetry, feminist literature, etc.

And for distinguishing one of the two distinct meanings of the word man.

But for the common man, "man" will suffice. He has little need for the instant recollection of other terms for "man." So, he forgets them, if he ever learned them, and those other words gradually fade from the realm of common usage and become obsolete.

It's more complicated than that. If man and humanity were essentially identical in meaning, then yes, there would be a tendency to use the shorter one in common speech to the exclusion of the longer one. (There's the opposite tendency to use the longer word for play, flair, emphasis, or what not, and if the word man were reduced enough in length, to (1) reduce the probability of mishearing, and (2) prevent confusion with other really short words.) However, man has two distinct meanings, and it's necessary in some circumstances to distinguish them. Humanity has been used as synonymous with mankind/man/people for several centuries (the earliest citation in the OED for this particular meaning is from 1579, which might well not be the earliest but only representative) and it's quite common usage even among common men today, so presumably it meets some need. (Mankind has been around in some form since at least 1225 or so, and people--another loanword--since the early 1300s if not earlier, and they too show no signs of impending obsolescence.)

[Why Man?]

My sources on this are not scholarly, and I'm not sure how to verify it.. But my understanding is that "man" was initially non-gender specific, and that originally the term "woman" merely described the type of man who has a womb (I read that they derived from Norse originally). That seems plausible to me, but I don't know.

I've read that before, but it's not true; it depends on looking only at the modern form and free associating. (I remember encountering it only in one place, actually, a book by a radical feminist "thinker" named Marilyn Frye, from which she claimed it indicated men think the essence of woman is to bear children and thus need to be subordinated to the fathers of the children. She also claimed that royal and reality were etymologically related, thus showing the role that political power plays in defining what is taken as real. Needless to say, all of this is utter BS.) Woman is the modern form of a compound word wifman or wyfman (which was the form in Old English around 900 AD but developed into wummon, womman, and woman in Middle English, 1200 and later), where man meant human and wif meant woman or female; it's the same word historically as German Weib 'woman, broad, dame.'

[Why Man?]

In this specific case, rather than remembering four syllables (hu-man-i-ty), or three (hu-man-kind), or two (hu-man), we have reduced the word down to one: man.

Actually, no, English man is unrelated etymologically to human, which is borrowed from Latin. It in turn is related to Latin homo meaning man in the sense of all people (as opposed to vir, meaning man as opposed to woman). Interestingly enough, homo in turn seems to come from a suffixed form of the root meaning 'earth' that you see in humus, and thus probably originally meant something like 'earthling' (as opposed to the gods, who lived elsewhere).

[Do animals have volition?]

A photon and an electron will mutually self-destruct which can be seen as the communication of signs "I'm negative" and "I'm positive".

You mean a positron, not a photon.

[The History of Language:]

The definition of a word is subjective.

So, you mean it varies from person to person? Well, actually, no you don't, as the rest of your postings make clear. A better way of making the point you're trying to make is that the meaning of a word is conventional. When you say a word, you expect (and have every reason to expect) your listeners to understand it. The connection between the sound and the sense of a word is in most cases essentially arbitrary (onomatopoeic words are exceptions), in the sense that any other combination of sounds could express that meaning equally well; however, this arbitrariness does not make social conventions subjective. These conventions are social facts--the very fact that you rely on them without a second thought to communicate shows this. Thus, in a certain important sense conventions are objective (hence the term social fact). They belong to the mental realm and thus can be described as subjective in another, different sense (in that they pertain exclusively to knowing subjects), true, but the same is true of every kind of social knowledge. The question is whether a given statement of a convention (such as, say, pronunciation rules or meanings of words or grammatical constructions or social practices or what-not) describes the portion of reality it applies to accurately; if so, it is objective knowledge of an objective fact about members of a given society or speakers of a given language.

It is subject to its common use. The same is true of grammar.

Language is a tool to communicate. In many circumstances there's no need to question common use, especially in quotidian doings. This is not true when you're discussing ideas, whether in science or philosophy, and especially when you're discussing ideas that are not common currency, when you must choose words carefully to express yourself. Generally what you are doing then is choosing words to express new distinctions in meaning, distinctions that are not part of the earlier meanings of words. This is obvious and uncontroversial in science, in which words like "radical," say, are constantly consciously redefined to express expanded knowledge of reality; the same is true (though perhaps it is less obvious) in philosophy. Does a new use of a word allow you to express a new or refined concept conveniently? If so, then it's useful. It doesn't matter if it's not part of common use. So long as you explain your new meaning clearly and show its usefulness, so what if it's not? And perhaps some day it will be--it might well be one of those practices you alluded to that will replace an older practice to fall out of use, perhaps even because it's a damned useful new meaning.

Look at my thread in the History subform, about 18th/19th century English. Rules have changed...not because some governing body of the English language decreed that they should change, but because certain practices fall out of use and are replaced by new ones.

And why did they change? Actually, there are many reasons that a language changes and most changes are unconscious and unplanned, even many changes in meaning. Some originated in conscious decisions, however, and caught on because of fashion or usefulness.

[The calculation for multi-variate regression]

I have one further question. If I already have a matrix with all the covariances calculated, can I use that in some way. i.e. is there a formula that uses that as one component? Basically, I already have the covariances cov(x_i,y) and also all the cov(x_i,x_j).

I think this site has what you're looking for. Search for the section title "Obtaining b weights from a Correlation Matrix" about two-thirds of the way down. (I'm too tired right now to be sure I'm thinking of the right formula for the covariance, or cross-covariance, matrix, so I'll leave that to you.)

[Do humans have instincts? What is instinct?]

You determine this the way you answer any scientific question: by observation and experimentation. For example, take a cuckoo egg and sneak it into a nest with other kinds of birds: what does it sing? Cuckoo song, not thrush song. Raise it by hand and what does it do? Sing cuckoo song.

And, interestingly enough, if you transplant the appropriate neural tissue from Japanese quail embryos into chicken embryos, the chickens grow up singing like quail, not crowing like chickens.

[communist jokes]

Here are a few more; they're from an interesting sourcebook, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia by James von Geldern and Richard Stites.

(1) The dark of night. An automobile glides up to the apartment of a Moscow Nepman. Some men rip out the bell and pound at the door.

Pandemonium in the apartment. The residents scurry about like rats, hiding books, burning letters, throwing money out the window, stuffing gold in the mattress.

Suddenly, a shout from outside the door: "Hey, don't worry, we're not here to search you, we're only here to rob you." (120)

(2) A doomed man wishes to become a communist before he dies so that there will be one less communist in the world. (119)

(3) The Soviet censor reviews Popular Astronomy for the People, published by Gosizdat [state Publishing House]. A day later, Gosizdaty receives this telegram: "I direct your attention to an unforgivable oversight. Destroy the edition. In the next version, the planet Jupiter [sounds like yu-pitr, with "pitr" an old nickname of St. Petersburg] must be called Ju-Lenin." (212)

(4) Let's go full ahead to socialism--and you can drop me off in Warsaw. (212)

(5) A speaker at a meeting is talking on the theme "We will catch the capitalist countries." An audience member asks, "When we catch them, can we stay there?" (213)

(6) Atheist shops are now opening with ungodly prices. (284)

(7) A Soviet Communist, after showing a foreigner the Exhibition of Economic Accomplishments, in Moscow, says: "Well, now you see that socialism can be built in one country."

"Sure, that's true, but why would anyone live there?" (284)

(8) A peasant is asked, without much chance for refusal, to sign up for a two-hundred-ruble bond. He scratches his head: "Who guarantees the bond?"

"Our beloved leader Stalin."

"And if something should happen to him...?"

"The Communist Party."

"And what if something happens to the Party?"

"Wouldn't that be worth a measly two hundred to you?" (285)

(9) Marx: Being defines consciousness.

Stalin: Beating defines consciousness. (329)

[i suspect the pun in the original Russian is even closer, byt' "to be" and bit' "to beat."]

(10) In 1940, Hitler asks Stalin for help in destroying London. Stalin offers one thousand Soviet apartment managers. (330)

(11) Q: Why do Soviet doctors remove tonsils through the anus?

A: Because nobody dares open his mouth. (488)

[communist jokes]

I didn't get this one.

The idea is that after WWII Eastern Europe produced most of the industrial products of the Communist bloc since that's where all the factories were.

[Ayn Rand's use of language]

The Ayn Rand Letter was published monthly for about 5 years, and that quote comes from the essay entitled Don't Let It Go part II, Vol. 1, No. 5 (December 6, 1971).

Fortunately, it's more easily available than that; "Don't Let It Go" was reprinted in Philosophy: Who Needs It.

[communist jokes]

but I didn't get this one...

(4) Q: What is the difference between capitalism and socialism?

A: Under capitalism, man exploits his fellow man; socialism is the exact opposite.

Well, the "exact opposite" would be that under socialism, men still exploit other men. (Or that man is exploited by his fellow men.) It's one of a number of jokes that took old commie chestnuts and changed the wording slightly to undercut them completely. That one's a bit cynical; a couple of better ones are these:

(1) At the end of the great war against fascism the economy of Poland was standing at the edge of the cliff, but under Soviet leadership it took a great leap forward...and fell into the abyss.

(2) There's no difference between the United States and Poland. In the United States, dollars buy everything, zloty buy nothing, and you can criticize Reagan openly. In Poland, dollars buy everything, zloty buy nothing, and you can criticize Reagan openly. See? No difference.

[communist jokes]

You cannot forgot the "In Soviet Russia" Jokes

Soviet jokes include some true classics. Here are some I like:

(1) In a Soviet prison, all the other prisoners were crowded around the new guy. One of them asked him, "So, how long are you in for?"

"Ten years."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing!"

"Don't give us that! You only get five years for that!"

(2) Back in the late 50s, three prisoners had just been put together in the same cell of a Hungarian jail and were getting to know each other. The first one said, "I supported Nagy."

The second one said, "I opposed Nagy."

The third one said, "I am Nagy."

(3) Eisenhower and Khrushchev ran a footrace and Eisenhower won. The next day Pravda reported that Khruschev finished second and Eisenhower last but one.

(4) Q: What is the difference between capitalism and socialism?

A: Under capitalism, man exploits his fellow man; socialism is the exact opposite.

(5) A young Jewish man went to his rabbi and said, "I need a job, so I'm going to join the Party. I have a problem though. I simply can't grasp this material dialectic. Can you help me?"

His rabbi said, "It's quite simple. Here. Two chimney sweeps are in the same chimney. When they come out, one is dirty and the other is clean. Which one washes himself?"

"Hmm...I don't know."

"The clean one washes himself, because he sees that the other chimney sweep is dirty, and the dirty one looks at the clean one and thinks he too is clean."

"Hmm, okay, I think I see."

"Then answer this. Two chimney sweeps are in the same chimney. When they come out, one is dirty and the other is clean. Which one washes himself?"

"The clean one."

"No, the dirty one does. When they come out, each of them looks at his own hands, so the dirty one washes himself."

After half a minute, the young man says, "Okay, I think I see."

"Good. Now answer this. Two chimney sweeps are in the same chimney. When they come out, one is dirty and the other is clean. Which one washes himself?"

"The dirty one."

"No, they both wash themselves. The clean one looks at the dirty one and thinks he's dirty too, while the dirty one looks at his own hands..."

"Enough of this! You're just saying whatever it takes to get the answer you want!"

"Ah! Now you understand the material dialectic!"

There's a large collection of Soviet jokes here, including a couple of different versions of jokes above. And there's a fine collection of them in Petr Beckmann's Hammer and Tickle, if you can find that.

[Classical Music]

Take Peter and the wolf for example: there is something eerie about that music, and it is very special, tons of imagination in it.

Huh? Peter and the Wolf is by Prokofiev, not Tchaikovsky.

[movies you'd like to see made]

I completely forgot the Golden Compass series by Philup Pullman and Spring-heeled Jack which pullman did a graphic novel for.

I believe The Golden Compass is currently filming--it has Eva Green and Nicole Kidman in it. In any case, it's scheduled to be released in exactly one year (December 7th, 2007). Is that a cool coincidence or what? (And maybe all the goofy Christian types will consider that another date that will live in infamy--and I sure hope the script doesn't ruin the wonderful atheistic thrust of the books.)

[Is it okay to use the word Nig*er?]

Some of the Chinese policemen were conversing in Chinese and one of them repeatedly said a word that sounded like "Nee-gah." Luckily, no one noticed because I was quick to tell him to shut up, but I just about had a heart-attack.

My guess is nèige, pronounced like "nay-guh." It means "that one," and is also used as a hesitation sound like uh.

[Meaning of Nakedness]

One's face can be far more personal and precious than their naked body (without sight of the face attached to it). There is nothing more revealing of a person's character than their face. Yet the face is accessible to all. But also, a face, in order to be decoded must have someone who can decode it. The personal meaning of a face only becomes clear once the other person has the ability to understand the observed. To other people, the personal meaning of a face is entirely concealed, even though it is right there in front of their waking eyes.

Reminds me of the old story from back in the days of all-female dorms. One woman had just gotten out of the shower and was walking back to her room with nothing but a small towel when the word came that there was a man on the floor. Her towel was just big enough to wrap around her chest or her waist but not both. So, she wrapped the towel around her most identifiable feature, her head, and proceeded to her room.

[Harry potter through the eyes of an objectivist]

In (almost) every Goosebumps book, the protagonist is unbelievably weak and unable to cope with the huge force of evil unleashed against him. The end of almost every Goosebumps book involves the protagonist seemingly okay, only to have an even more powerful evil come back to attack him in the end, often as a result of his own stupidity or irresponsability.

I remember a couple of years ago, I was talking with a friend who told me he had just gotten a book on Tibet by Aurel Stein. I was flabbergasted: "R.L. Stein has written a book on Tibet? That must be appalling." Then when we straightened it out, he was flabbergasted: "Why would think I'd have anything to do with R.L. Stein?"

[Male Female differences/ Women Presidents etc]

Y'all suggested that I am biased since men behave better around women (and vice versa), but my judgement is not only based on interactions with men, but on observations of interaction that happen not in my presence (between man and men).

If they're interactions that occur when you're not present, how exactly do you observe them? You see, there are quite a few men who act differently towards other men when women are present and when they're absent.

[Male Female differences/ Women Presidents etc]

Would you (any of you) please describe how exactly she was better?

I assume you mean "my superior" rather than "better." (And better than whom, other girlfriends? Well, we needn't get into gory details there; I'll just grin and let you draw your own conclusions.) Basically that in all cases the woman was from six to twenty-something years older than me, further advanced in her career, and simply more knowledgeable, more experienced, and more worldly than me.

and did you have a working relationship where she was your supervisor, or something similar?

They were academic colleagues.

And a bonus question: would you have a problem being in a romantic relationship with a woman who is also your supervisor at work?

I'd have serious qualms about that, but it wouldn't be an unconditional block.

I have something to say about differences between men and women in most people. I have noticed, in my 25 years of experience, that women usually tend to be bitches, while guys are nice: not just to women but also to other men. (Bold added.)

Well, that explains it right there! Seriously, my impression is that that sort of behavior is more common among women younger than, say, 25-27. I've run into far too many young women (and probably as many young men) who were quite sheltered growing up and hadn't grown up yet; I've even had to work with a few. It's a question of maturity, and it could well be that men in our culture are usually put in positions that force them to mature more readily and a bit earlier than women. However, since I have low tolerance for BS and don't suffer fools (though if need be I'm happy to make a fool suffer), I simply avoid unnecessary dealings with them, and since I'm at an age where most of the people I deal with are real adults I miss out on a lot of nonsense and can easily ignore the rest. Which is to say I don't really know if there's a marked tendency for young women to be manipulative backbiters and young men to be fairly normal, nor do I care.

Added in editing: I just noticed aequalsa's post just before mine, and I agree with him. I remember quite a few men who were just like the two-faced women-trawlers he mentioned who act entirely differently in the presence and the absence of women. Again, that's the sort of behavior that makes me keep my distance from a fellow, but it does seem rather less common among men over 30 years old or thereabouts, though perhaps that's just my selection bias at work.

[wedding ring inscription]

The time has come for me to get an inscription on the inside of my fiancee's wedding ring. I've had a hard time coming up with something to put, because I already used a line from our song on a picture frame, and I don't wanna be sappy and say something too cheesy.

How about "One ring to rule them both / And in the darkness bind them"? Heh.

[Male Female differences/ Women Presidents etc]

Question: Do any of you men, think they can be turned on by a woman who is intellectually and professionally superior to them? Would you want to have a romantic relationship with such woman?

Yes, I've had such romantic relationships more than once.

[High School and Public Education in general]

The solution is to eliminate mandatory education laws, as well as eliminating government support of (and restrictions on) education. Many people think that education is of no use to them, and for some of them this is probably true.

I should point out that I agree with all of David Odden's posting, and wholeheartedly with this sentence. Keep it in mind when reading my earlier posting; to my mind at least he and I agree except in emphasis. (Whether he thinks so, I don't know.)

[High School and Public Education in general]

It is extremely hard to see any value in the "education" I receive at my high school. Every last bit of information is aimed at getting enough points to secure that A. The idea of learning is lost amidst the big point scramble.

Yes, public education is usually a god-awful mess, with thoroughly disintegrated curricula and classrooms whose most valuable service is to keep the thugs and punks off the streets for a third of the weekday. (This varies across the country, of course, because public education is very decentralized in the US, with a good deal of local control and influence that can outweigh the homogenizing, dumbing stream coming out of our Deweyite schools of education.)

Even more angering to me is the material we learn seems utterly pointless for the type of career I wish to pursue. Why am I in calculus classes when I want to go into accounting? Why am I learning about Puritan history in a literature class?

This contradicts what you said above--either that or you're equating the value of an education with straight-out job training, in which case what's the point of studying literature at all if you're going to be an accountant? In other words, just what is the idea of learning, anyway? Why is it utterly pointless, because you can't see how it will help you pull in the big bucks and get ahead in financial circles? Whether your high school actually delivers on it, the education you get there should be intended to teach you the basic facts (at the very least) you need to know as a reasonably intelligent adult, train you how to think and write logically and clearly, and introduce you to the history and culture of the society you live in regardless of your eventual career. And frankly, I think anyone who comes out of high school not knowing basic calculus has been miseducated, and not knowing enough Puritan history and thought to appreciate their significance in, say, Milton or Hawthorne, much less American history before the Civil War, has been shortchanged. Of course, that includes the great majority of American high school students, but then much public education in this country really is a god-awful mess.