Hi everyone

[sunlit_stone]

So I decided to try out Dreamwidth, because there's been kind of a revival on Tumblr and also... To be honest I'm looking forward to trying something that's a little more slow-paced than Tumblr, which always makes me feel a little overwhelmed (at the ripe old age of twenty-three, ha).

I guess we'll see how it goes!

First step: poke at themes.

Comments

[lusentoj]

Oh yeah, I've thought about that too! On Tumblr and Twitter, you see stuff on "your dashboard", "your space".

Yeah, it's way better. Even when you're on the "non-English" side, if you're talking to ex. an immigrant from an English-speaking country you can normally tell a huge difference in how they act / react compared to everyone else...

The English-speaking diet and culture is really the big cause of the problem I think. When you eat processed/junk food (sugar, white flour, rapeseed oil, artificial food colorings etc) it actually alters how your brain and body work, I mean you're literally eating poison so of course your brain isn't working properly, you're quicker to anger, you can't think as well so you're slower to learn and can't grasp logical conclusions as easily, your memory is worse so you think repeating the same argument is saying something new. Ignoring the poison aspect these concentrated foods also suck the nutrition out of their bodies, and then they couple that with general malnutrition because they don't eat stuff like (non-pasteurized) fermented foods or offal regularly.

This diet still hasn't completely reached most parts of the world. England's been eating like this since I dunno, the 1700's or something, but Sweden for example didn't get white sugar and white flour into the general population's everyday food until the early 1900's, Iceland and Japan were closer to the 1950's (even when they had it, in the beginning it was so little it was ridiculous, like "cookie dough" had just 1 spoonful of sugar in it — and still today they eat less sugar/white flour than ex. Sweden). Most of these other countries still eat relatively well, especially in rural areas or older populations, though in the past 5-10 years we've been seeing a huge increase in junk food around the world thanks to American propaganda on the internet and TV, and American companies (Starbucks, McDonald's, Burger King, 7-11...) existing around the world. At the same time we've been seeing a huge increase in mental and physical problems around the world.

Anyway, in English-speaking countries you grow up with EVERYONE around you sick, mean, lazy and irritated so you basically think it's okay to do whatever you want. In other countries they still aren't all that far gone, and they often have better education too, in some way or another (they actually study a foreign language or three and their own ancient language, their math level is higher, they're taught cooking and sewing and building, etc). I dunno, I think it's mostly the diet and secondarily the education that's the real root of the problem. Some of this stuff like Twitter and Tumblr — the "instant feedback/gratification/endless entertainment" stuff is also linked to it I think, I mean when you have a bad diet you also have less patience and feel bored more easily so you want stuff "now now now".

[sunlit_stone]

Yeah. Here you have a reading page, but it feels really different from a dash--maybe because it's not your central location in the way your dash is, like you don't make new posts from there and everything, or maybe because you can't reply to things directly from there? It feels more like you're watching things through a window, and less like things are appearing in your living room, if that makes any sense

Huh, that's an interesting perspective, I'd never thought about it like that. (I'm kind of curious to see if French Twitter is better now, French being the only language other than English I understand well enough read tweets in :P *waves teensy Quebec flag* Do you mind if I ask where you're from?) It's definitely true that your diet can affect your mood--on a smaller scale (okay this sounds ridiculous but I swear it's true) but if I'm feeling unhappy half the time I just need to eat a tomato and I feel better. It's not even, you eat something tasty so you feel better--I mean, I like tomatoes, but not as much as clementines or strawberries or whatever. It just brightens up my mood.

...okay, I'm probably taking this way too seriously, sorry, but I got really curious about this and wondered about whether there was a (national) correlation between amount of sugar eaten and performance on math tests. So I looked at the sugar-eaten-per-country here and the math performance per country here (as far as I can tell these were within a year or two of each other) and for the countries that were in both lists plotted rank in the sugar-eating list against the math scores. Here's my result (sorry for the shitty quality, I have to do all this on my phone):

(I can send you the data if you'd like)

So here there's actually a positive correlation between amount of sugar eaten and how well they do in math! It's not very tight, though--you can see the scatter points all over the place. I'm pretty sure that what's actually going on is that my data doesn't distinguish between 'not eating that much sugar because you're eating healthily' and 'not eating that much sugar because you're starving' or 'we eat well enough but we don't actually have any teachers', or whatever. You'd probably get more interesting results out if you limited it only to countries which met certain stability and non-starvation requirements. Unfortunately that is too much graph-making for me, my limit is one line-chart a day, ha

I always figured that part of it was the whole, well, cultural/linguistic hegemony thing, though. You know? It's like the thing where "everyone knows two political systems, their own and the Americans'"--Americans act like they're the centre of the bloody world (which was another thing on tumblr, people would act as though what was true of the States--politically, historically, whatever--was true everywhere *rolls eyes*).

ETA: okay, I realized I'm not going to be able to get the picture to show, so I... uploaded it as an icon and switched my icon to the graph. Once you've looked at it I'll get rid of it and switch my icon back to default, 'cause this is just silly

[lusentoj]

wow, you did some hard work haha! actually there's something you have to know when reading about sugar that most people don't talk about: sugar goes under like 10 different names and no one ever tests/measures them all at once. so for example, if it says "concentrated fruit juice", that's fruit sugar just as concentrated as table sugar. "high fructose corn syrup" is simply a mix of 2 different sugar-syrups, if i remember correctly. but they don't have to count this stuff as "sugar" because they can usually pretend it's a separate thing, that's one of the ways they can claim we don't eat any higher amounts of sugar today than we did 10-30 years ago, even though it's obviously a huge lie.

the other main problem being, america performs bogus research so they can keep selling junk food (many countries blindly accept american research), so when they do studies they don't actually distinguish between natural sugar (say, whole pieces of fruit, or sugar your body makes after eating starch) from man-made sugar (table sugar, glucose syrup, caramel etc), despite that they're drastically different. in an extreme example, i saw an american study which just so happened to be funded by a honey & high fructose corn syrup company, where they said natural honey affects the body in exactly the same way as high fructose corn syrup "so there's no reason to not buy either one of them". except, the "honey" that they tested actually had high fructose corn syrup in it, their control group wasn't 100% pure honey. so if you do read studies and stuff you REALLY have to watch out for that kind of thing.

as for education scores, they also teach math differently from country to country. for example, japanese kids learn multiplications tables by memory-aids connected to words, kinda like "seal x dog = 42". and i've also read studies saying that more logical languages get better test results in all subjects, ex. a language with "two ten" being the name for "twenty" is going to have kids better at math, "life-science" instead of "biology" is going to be better at science, simply because it takes less effort even in doing stuff like understanding instructions. so there's really a lot of factors no matter what you look at!

i was born and raised in the USA, but at age 18 i moved to iceland, then age 20 i moved to sweden. now i'm 25 and still in sweden, and am a swedish citizen with a swedish wife, but i'm gonna do an exchange to japan next semester and i'm hoping i can just find a job and stay there so i don't have to come back to sweden after...

i don't know if french twitter would be nicer, i hear they don't like foreigners and stuff so maybe they have a cultural mean streak too haha.

what annoys me the most about the "america is every country!" thing is actually about racism. in sweden the only slaves were other swedes, and they were generally speaking very well-treated. when swedes did stuff like came to america and made their own colonies in order to convert natives to christianity, they actually learned the natives' languages and translated the bible to their language, they didn't do forced conversion and forced language-learning or anything. they don't (or didn't) eat, talk, dress, etc. the same as americans in any way. and here in sweden, you can be bullied for being "foreign" if you simply have brown hair, it has nothing to do with the color of your skin and instead it's more like "you have a russian nose!". so when a tumblr person goes "white cis men act like x or y", or "white people will never know racism", they've obviously never met white swedish men. or "black people are blah blah", but they're not talking about black people in japan or france or something. i feel like tumblr's the most racist place i've ever been to and it's really disturbing.

[lusentoj]

i can't see it in the icon, it's too small ;_; just upload it to tinypic and copy-paste the url?

[sunlit_stone]

Well, it's nice to be able to do something :/

Okay, yeah, huh, that makes sense. *frowns at companies* God I hate that shit. It just makes it so ridiculous and tiring to try to get to the truth, and it's not like nutrition's not a complicated enough subject even without people actively obfuscating about it--which, I mean, I realize that's the point, but, ugh. It's just so tiring.

What, really?? I can buy the math thing, but the language thing just seems bizarre--do you remember where you saw that? Now I want to go check it out.

I suppose I could just limit myself to Quebec twitter, which at least if it's mean will be a familiar, homegrown meanness.

I don't know much about Swedish racial politics, but yeah, I've seen a lot of posts from people in non-American countries--even England and Australia!--saying basically "guys our racial history is just not the same, which means our racialized *groups* are not the same, you can't just assume that a paradigm that makes sense in America makes sense everywhere else..."

I have uploaded the graph! It, uh, doesn't have the names of the countries, but they're basically just in the reverse order they were in she Washington Post sugar-eating chart; the x-axis is just the countries ordered from least to most sugar-eating, the y-axis is math scores. http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=16gl5ee&s=9#.WUnAUdopDqB

[lusentoj]

No idea where I saw it, it was ages ago that I read it D : But it might've also been in Swedish, I seem to remember it was discussing why Finnish kids are better than Swedish ones in school despite that the Finnish school system is the same as the (older - it's now been changed to be much more like America's) Swedish one. I know you can find some mentions of it if you read about Chinese kids and math, because they always say the "American kids have to learn how to multiply, like two times ten is twenty... Chinese kids have it built-in to their language already, two ten - two times ten - is twenty, so they start first grade already being able to multiply basic numbers... not to mention the names for all the math terms, like no American kid knows what a matrix, quotient, exponent means the first time they see those words but other languages have instantly-understandable names for these things..." The point just being, English kids always have to first memorize the terminology (and spelling of that terminology) before they can even start learning the actual subject, where most other countries don't have to. I mean like, it's exactly the same in linguistics. In other languages, an "accusative case" is a "whom-case", "genitive" is "whose-case", dipthong is "two-vowel", suffix is "word-tail" etc so even an 8-year-old can read linguistics papers without a problem. I've studied like 10 languages and still can't read linguistics papers without a problem, LOL.

Thanks, I see the chart now haha!

[sunlit_stone]

Yeah it's not the world's best graph :/ But, I mean. It contains numbers! It contains lines! It contains an attempt to verify something empirically! That's /practically/ science :)

Huh, that makes a lot of sense! (I can't read Swedish, though, so oh well.) I always liked the whole Greek-and-Latin roots thing (because they were fun to decode and, uh, you may have gathered by now that I like languages) but I can see that they make it a lot harder if you didn't, not to mention making it much harder to get into a new field/learn the jargon. I wonder if there are any advantages? Maybe it protects against drift of meaning, since they're usually used fairly technically? Hmm.

[lusentoj]

Honestly I haven't ever heard of any advantages. It seems like it's just the same old "I'm elite so I can speak 3 fancy languages and you peasants can't so you can't read my scientific writing, stay out of my department!" stuff.... Of course now it's pretty unintentional, but still. Drift of meaning is more likely to occur when it IS a borrowed word, I think. Think of how often we borrow words wrong from the beginning (ex. "smorgasbord" actually means "sandwich-table", and people constantly mis-borrowing linguistics terms), and then think of words like "drink, child, water" which still have the same meaning today even thousands of years later lol.

[sunlit_stone]

I'm not sure if that's true, about meaning drift I mean? I mean yeah words can get borrowed to mean different things than they did in their original languages but I meant within a language, not between languages, like bio- as a prefix meaning 'life'. I wonder if anyone's studied this? Maybe there's a paper.

Mind you even if there is an advantage I really don't think it's big enough to make up for making things harder to learn. Not even just for attracting people who go on to become scientists, increasing scientific literacy for everyone is an important problem.

>"I'm elite so I can speak 3 fancy languages and you peasants can't so you can't read my scientific writing, stay out of my department!" I love this description of that attitude (I mean obviously I'm a fan of multidisciplinary learning but I really don't think you should have to master an entirely unrelated discipline before studying the things you... actually wanted to study...). Also now I am imagining some sort of attempt to rate languages on a scale of fanciness. "English: Can't seem to decide whether it wants to be French or German. Lurks around other languages and steals their vocabulary while they're not looking. 1/10."