Explore, if you will, the world of E-Prime. Arising from the thinking of Alfred Korzybski and the International Society for General Semantics which he founded, E-Prime consists of the subset of the English language left after expunging it of the use of the verb ‘to be’ in its two major functions of connoting identity (“I am a weblogger”) and predication (“I am nice”). Proponents feel that these uses of ‘to be’ cause major confusion of thought and consequent social problems; to start with, consider how such usage readily obscures the distinction between opinion and fact; and lends itself to stereotypy and inflexibility. This paper claims that using “E-Prime in Negotiation and Therapy” can challenge dogmatic viewpoints, clarify confusion, and defuse conflict in daily life. I don’t conduct myself as a strong proponent of E-Prime in my life; awkward circumlocutory constructions arise whenever I try to write in that way. But the difficulty in using it perhaps speaks to how early we were engrained with the associated thought patterns. Language doesn’t determine what we can and can’t think, but it does readily shape what can be thought with ease as opposed to with difficulty, IMHO. Does the challenge involved in thinking ‘outside this box’ perhaps indicate the importance of doing so? The blinks above have plenty of further links if you want to explore your identifications and predications more thoroughly.

I’ve decided, at least for now, to eliminate the Blogvoices discussion function on FmH. The comments have been sparse and, with some exceptions, have been of limited quality, and it has not apparently served as a medium to get lively discussion going. More than anything else, I found it significantly slowed down the loading of the blog page;there seems to be a long delay in accessing the Blogvoices server at most hours of the day. If you want to comment on a post, consider posting it to the FmH mailing list, where it’ll be seen by at least a handful of other interested parties besides me. You don’t have to subscribe to the mailing list (see sidebar) to post to it, but of course if you don’t, you’ll never see others’ replies. Should I keep the little ‘discuss’ icon at the end of each blog entry and have it link directly to emailing to the list?

If there’s a raucous outcry from those of you who miss Blogvoices, I’ll consider reinstalling it. Too bad it didn’t work better; it seemed like a bright idea at the time…

Home of the brave? A New Scientist editorial suggests the rest of the world get on with the business of cleaning up greenhouse gas emissions without the participation of the US, now that the Clown Prince has reversed his campaign promise on CO2 emissions.

They said it would be like negotiating with Exxon. And so it is proving. With the redneck sultans of fossil fuel in charge at the White House, George W. Bush has pulled back on even the hedged commitments to control emissions of greenhouse gases that he made during his election campaign.

Last week, he announced that a new Clean Air Act would not, after all, include controls on carbon dioxide. He blamed fears of rising fuel prices and more blackouts, as well as pleading continuing scientific uncertainties about climate change.

Forget the excuses. Bush is doing the bidding of his funders and friends, and the world be damned. His statement does not formally count the US out of the Kyoto Protocol talks on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But it does mean Bush has vetoed use of the most effective mechanism for the US to meet its promises.

How serious a blow is this? Privately, American negotiators have been saying for some time that it could already be too late for the US to meet its Kyoto commitments for 2010, because of the time it would take to get a Clean Air Act through Congress and into force. Now it’s clear that Bush isn’t even going to try.

At least the rest of the world knows where it stands, and can stop the elaborate game of trying to keep the US on board the climate train. True, the US is responsible for a quarter of the world’s CO2 emissions, but that still leaves the three-quarters that comes from everywhere else. The world can get on with the task at hand–saving the planet’s climate–and is quite capable of implementing the Kyoto Protocol without the US.

In a spin over heeler-wheelers: ‘Heeled wheels, shoes that roll, the footwear to rival scooters
– or “Heelys”, to give them their official, patent-pending title
– are steadily becoming the latest craze in Los Angeles. The
shoes have a single “stealth” wheel housed in the heel of the
shoes, allowing users to walk or run and then change to a
roll. The wheels are detachable, transforming the shoes into
fashionable streetwear.’ Why am I first hearing about these from the Irish Times?! It’ll be interesting to see how (if) this fad spreads. Drop me an email the first time you see someone wearing a pair of these outside Southern California, and I’ll post the news.

Ill Uranium Miners Left Waiting as Payments for Exposure Lapse: “A decade ago, Congress recognized the
contributions of … uranium miners and passed the Radiation
Exposure and Compensation Act of 1990, (which)
established one-time payments of up to $100,000 to miners or their families
and to people who lived downwind from the nuclear test sites in Nevada. Last
year, Congress increased the payout to $150,000, added new medical benefits
and expanded the number of workers eligible.

But after years of smooth operations, the program is broke. Scrambling last year
to pass President Bill Clinton’s final budget, lawmakers never debated the Justice
Department’s request for additional money to cover the expanded program
even as new applications were pouring in, and by May, nothing was left. And
Congress has been reluctant to act until it decides how to apportion the federal
surplus and how much to cut taxes.” New York Times

Human Body Recall! Design Problems : “…Commonplace signs of physical deterioration prompted three
experts on aging to propose a redesign of the human body, inside and out, that
could enhance its ability to last to age 100 without falling apart.” New York Times

Once, in the Jungle. A pair of filmmakers induced the now-80-year-old New York painter Tobias Schneebaum to recreate the journey he made in 1956, hitchhiking to Peru and walking into the Amazon jungle to ‘go native’ with a then-as-yet-undiscovered indigenous tribe, and the terrifying denouement in which his romanticism came crashing to the ground. New York Times Magazine

I didn’t watch ’em either.

Free for all: “Should all research papers in the biosciences be
placed in one, free-access, web library? Yes,
say 12,000 scientists.” New Scientist

NYU neuroscientist examines how brain responds to fears that are imagined and anticipated, but never experienced. “Using fear conditioning, the neural systems of fear learning and expression have been eloquently mapped with both human and animal research.
This research has indicated that a brain structure called the amygdala is critical to the expression of a conditioned fear response. But is the
amygdala involved when you encounter a fear-invoking event that you have merely heard about?” EurekAlert!