In Power of Babel John McWhorter has a beautiful term for the moment in acquiring a new language when you realize that this is going to be much harder than you thought: dammit! moments.

In learning any language on earth, we come to a point, often right at the outset, when we encounter something that from the perspective of our own language makes us think, "Dammit! How can anybody speak this every day?"

McWhorter argues that almost every language on earth is 'unnecessarily' complicated (there are a handful of exceptions, but I'll get to them in a moment). The truth is, a lot of the trappings we take for granted in European languages are unnecessary.

Anyone who has studied French or German has wondered why it's necessary to keep track of whether a table or an onion is a he or a she. Many languages have gendered nouns, although this appears to serve no functional purpose. But even where the features of a language have some functional use, they may not be strictly necessary. Tenses, for example. Many languages have them, but not all. And in fact you can get by without them based on context.

In English, we might say, "Yesterday, I was in my boat." 'Was' indicates that this occurred in the past. But wait, doesn't 'yesterday' also do that? In many languages, you would say "Yesterday, I am in my boat" with no loss of clarity.

There's an argument to be made for tenses, though, in that they can at least speed up the process of indicating when an event or action occurred. At least English avoids those grammatical constructions of really marginal utility, like reflexive verbs. Right?

Not so fast, dude. Remember our previous discussion about a, an and the? Yep, articles. Talk about marginal utility. Anyone who has ever spoken with a foreigner who hails from one of the (many) languages without articles will know that there's no piece of our language more likely to trip people up. Does it really matter whether it's "I took a bus to school" or "I took the bus to school"?

Every language has words to indicate specificity, and in fact our articles descended from the words for 'one' and 'that'. "I took that bus to school," "I took one bus to school." Linguistically, this is a much more common way of handling the problem of specificity, when it's actually needed. Why English feels the need to mark the specificity of almost every noun is almost as confusing as the whole gender fixation.

Of course, I suspect the real dammit! moment for foreign learners is realizing that English has no rhyme or reason when it comes to spelling and pronunciation. Poor bastards.

So, European languages are pretty complex beasts. Do you think that, on average, it would be safe to say that they tend to be MORE complex then, say, the languages of tribal bushmen? After all, our languages have had to evolve to suit the hurly-burly complexity of modern life. Surely people living in the forest participating in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle have no need for advanced linguistic complexes?

Maybe not, but McWhorter says that they have them anyway, and in spades. In fact, he claims that generally speaking the language of an isolated tribal group is likely to be much more complex then one of the 'Big Ten' languages. Often, the only word to describe the grammars that these groups deploy is 'baroque'. These small languages may employ a multitude of tones, nouns with dozens of genders, an array of verbs that are all entirely irregular, or 'word soup' word orders that make it difficult to figure out what's being said even when you have a word-for-word translation in front of you!

This seems counter intuitive at first. But the reason for it might come to you if you think about English as it's spoken in the ghettos of America. This dialect of English is famous for evolving very quickly and in very strange ways ("Fo shizzle my nizzle," anyone?). It's clear that the people who speak it enjoy this strange form of word invention, and this is often true of close-knit communities.

So, imagine a South American tribe that has been living in the mountain rain-forests for hundreds of years, with little or no contact with any other people. They have no reason to teach their language to anyone from the outside world. And being in constant contact with each other allows them to participate in the kind of word-play and invention that human beings seem to have an endless taste for. Over time their language will take on so many layers and odd branches that it may well remain virtually unintelligible to any intrepid translator who might find his way into their jungle.

McWhorter refers to this as "language as an inside joke," which I think communicates the idea here pretty succinctly.

Meanwhile, back in the wider world, the "Big 10" languages are continually undergoing a process of simplification. Their requirement that they be teachable to non-native speakers means that they are constantly being 'sanded down', made simpler and more consistent. Not enough, alas, to get rid of articles and noun genders, but at least enough to keep the irregular verbs to a minimum and the word order relatively straightforward.

So, strangely the large, widely-spoken languages are usually simpler than small, obscure ones.

But they've still got plenty of dammit! moments in store for the unwary learner.

The only exceptions to the dammit! rule are new languages. McWhorter spends a chapter on pidgins and creoles, because these unique products of colonization and globalization give us a lot of insight into the fundamentals of language.

Very briefly, when two groups of people who don't speak the same language meet, they often develop a 'pidgin' to communicate in. Pidgins are extremely basic, invented on the spur of the moment to facilitate simple communication. They tend to involve the simplest parts of both languages. Any shades of complexity are thrown to the wayside.

But a pidgin is not a complete language. It lacks a real grammar and doesn't have a wide-enough vocabulary to encapsulate all concepts. But sometimes, if contact between the two groups is sustained, like it was when the Europeans started colonizing Southeast Asia, the pidgin grows into a full language. We call these languages creoles.

When a creole is born, it's like a brand new language. It tends to be very, very simple grammatically and have few linguistic 'curlicues'. Creoles usually have a word order of subject-verb-noun. Verbs have no tense. Short words known as 'particles' usually proceed the verbs to modify them and give them a tense.

While of course creoles carry some features of the languages that spawned them, these features are often very simple, and they rapidly evolve beyond the recognition of speakers of the original languages. For instance, in Tok Pisin, "em bai go long maket" translates as, "she will go to market." Were you able to get that from that sentence? Tok Pisin is an English creole!

In his epilogue, McWhorter discusses the possibility of reconstructing the 'ur language', Adam and Eve's tongue from which all others are presumably descended. Alas, given thousands of years of history and the random, haphazard fashion in which languages change he concludes that this endeavor is extremely unlikely to succeed. We can't know what the first language sounded like.

But the interesting thing is that new creoles give us a pretty good idea of how that first language's grammar probably worked. The language features listed above are common to creoles across a wide swath of peoples, cultures and geographies. There does seem to be some consistency in the way that new languages are created. They start simple with a basic word order and particle-modified verbs, and then over time they evolve (often spectacularly!) in complexity and nuance.

So Adam and Eve probably spoke a relatively simple language, but they're not around today to tell us how it sounded. It's probably just as well, though.

I imagine that if they had to learn English, they'd pretty quickly find themselves slapping their foreheads and saying "Dammit! How can anyone speak this way?!"

When I first moved The Netherlands, the language experience was somewhat disorienting. As I listened to everyone around me rattle on in Dutch, I felt as though I was on the verge of comprehension. If I could just listen a little harder, just pay attention a little more, the language would suddenly 'come into focus' and I would understand it.

Alas, that elusive comprehension remained over the horizon for many months of hard study.

But it's perhaps not surprising I felt this way. John McWhorter states in The Power of Babel that Dutch is probably the closest language to English, especially Old English.

Unfortunately, English isn't close to Old English. In fact true English words make up only about 1% of the modern English language! All the rest are imports from Old Norse, Norman French, Greek and of course Latin, not to mention bits and pieces from virtually every other culture we've ever come into contact with.

Grammatically, English remains in the Germanic family. But alas for us English speakers, it is really all alone in a class by itself. McWhorter says that that's what makes life hard for English-speaking natives when they decide to acquire a second language.

My experience in Amsterdam was that a native German speaker could be conversant in Dutch within about two months of arriving. McWhorter says that Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are so similar that they are really different dialects rather than languages. And a Dutch or German speaker would find many familiar things in them and acquire them rapidly.

Likewise, Spanish speakers are well on their way to speaking Italian and Portuguese. Even French, the odd-ball of the Romance languages, will come quickly, because for all its strange sounds it uses the same fundamental grammar and word-order.

Meanwhile, the English speaker who wants to learn a Germanic language finds that the core of the language is somewhat familiar. Those few Old English words that we have left are almost all important ones: a, an and the, and itself, the pronouns, words like water and old, and our irregular verbs, esp. the many odd forms of to be all have their roots in Old English.

Learning Dutch I was gratified to find that it had articles in common with English. Having articles of speech is actually a bit odd for languages in general, but Germanic languages tend to have them: an and the correspond nicely to een and het* in Dutch, for example. Also nice: if a verb is irregular in English, it's also probably irregular in Dutch, although probably in a different way. But at least you know what to look for.

So picking up the core of a Germanic language isn't too bad, but after that it gets hard. They treat complex verbs rather differently and the 'high level' language is completely alien. We use virtually no OE words for complex, multi-syllabic words, so unless one is lucky to find that the Germanic language in question also cribbed from Latin (occasionally the case in Dutch) then one is going to be doing a lot of rote memorization for several years just to read the newspaper.

Try and learn a Romance language, and the situation is reversed. The 'core words' are completely alien, as we don't use the Latin-descended words for 'is', 'love' or 'fish' in Modern English. Once you get into the higher-level language, though, the Latin-based suffixes and prefixes should be familiar. But conjugating those verbs and keeping track of noun gender is probably never going to come easily.

It's strange that English has taken such a separate path from other European languages. And while it's certainly not unusual for a language to take on outside words, for a language to be overwhelmed by them to the degree that English has been has certainly set it apart.

There is good news, at least for our great-great-grandchildren. Given English's momentum as the global lingua franca, it's likely that it will be with us and heard around the world for a long time. And when it does evolve into one or more different languages, well, hopefully our descendants will have a leg up on them from having spoken our unique mother tongue.

* I know it looks like a misspelled the, but it actually is closer kin to it.

I might have mentioned earlier that I am currently reading a really brilliant book by John McWhorter called The Power of Babel - A Natural History of Language. If you have any kind of interest in language, you really need to get ahold of a copy.

Broadly, this book concerns itself with understanding what language is and how languages evolve and change over time. It also is a survey of not just the English language at its relatives but of the vast diversity of languages that span the globe. You'll encounter the strange, the baroque and the bizarre with languages like Fula, Swahili, Cantonese, Javanese and others. But even as he's holding the oddities of these tongues up to the light, McWhorter is always careful to explain how they got that way. And the explanations will change your conception of what a language is.

Here's a brief breakdown of the book. See if it doesn't intrigue you -

• Introduction - Where did languages begin, and when, and what's so special about them anyway?
• 1) The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones - This chapter demonstrates the specific kinds of changes that languages can undergo over the course of time, especially the 'erosion' of language that always seems to be happening.  It explains why this process is inevitable.
• 2) The Six Thousand Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages - One of the author's major points is that there is no such thing as a language, really.  All languages are dialects: interrelated, constantly evolving and impossible to truly untangle into discrete 'languages'.
• 3) The Thousands of Dialects Mix with One Another - The author continues to illustrate the point that 'language' and 'dialect' are not separate things, by surveying a remarkably wide array of 'languages' and 'dialects' and showing the surprising ways in which they are similar... and different.
• 4) Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones - This chapter examines pidgins and creoles, the special cases of language that dramatically illustrate the human capacity for linguistic expression.
• 5) The Thousands of Dialects of Thousands of Languages All Developed Far Beyond the Call of Duty - The flip-side of the first chapter: if languages are always eroding, they are also always becoming more complex.  This chapter examines the whys and hows of the many odd and over-complicated features of languages.
• 6) Some Languages Get Genetically Altered and Frozen - One can't deny that literature, education and technology have had a serious impact on many modern languages.  This chapter examines the nuts and bolts of those effects.
• 7) Most of the World's Languages Went Extinct - We are losing languages all the time.  This effect has been exacerbated by globalization, but has in fact been going on for thousands of years.  Discusses the whys and what can be done.
• Epilogue: "Extra, Extra!  The Language of Adam and Eve!" - If all languages descended from a single, original language, what can we know about that language?  Is it possible to reconstruct it? 

This book is chock full of moist tidbits.  If you've ever wanted to know why all those European languages have genders for their nouns, where the heck tonal languages came from, why it's so hard for native English speakers to learn other languages and why Charlie Brown is bald (he's only eight years old!) then you need to read this book.  Although it's dry in parts, it never gets too technical and the author's rather random illustrations and pop-culture references (see the Charlie Brown bit) are engaging.

Since I'm so taken with it at the moment I'm sure I'll be blogging further about it.  But you really should take a look for yourself.

How to make any statement creepy: add "...ladies" to the end.

Ex: "When's the next flight out... ladies?"

How to make any statement insulting: add "...even for you" to the end.

Ex: "This banana split is pretty good... even for you."

How to jump into a conversation when you don't know what the topic is: break in at any interval of silence with, "But where do you draw the line?"

Via Freakonomics -

Wired has profiled Paul Offit, the inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, and his ongoing battles with the anti-vaccination crusade, who have selected him as one of the unofficial villains of their movement. Some have gone so far as to label him a "biostitute."

Personally, I find the label "biostitute" extremely unwieldy. Even "bio whore" would be catchier. I think that the movement's propaganda team needs to go back to the drawing board on that one.

There are a lot of interesting issues here: human perception of risk, the workings of the pharmaceutical industry, knowledge and the internet, etc. But I think the most interesting question is this: given that we're a large, ordered society of people living in close proximity together, where do we draw the line in requiring people to participate in things like vaccinations?

Because arguably people who forgo vaccinations put more then themselves at risk. They are also risking their entire community. As the article points out, a non-vaccinated person in a group of vaccinated people can actually be more risky to someone who is vaccinated, but whose vaccination has not 'taken'. This is a condition that cannot be identified ahead of time.

More broadly, large swaths of unvaccinated population could allow diseases that have been almost eradicated to run rampant.

At the same time, there's something deeply distasteful about forcing anyone to inject something into their body.

What do you think?

For our last Bad Movie Night, we watched Clue, which several of us had never seen. I rather enjoyed it. I thought the writing was hilarious and the character acting by the large ensemble cast was pitch-perfect.

Of course famously the film has three endings, all of which we watched. Even though the third ending is, in my opinion, far and away the most plausible and satisfying, I find the concept of multiple endings to be pretty intriguing.

I mean think about it. Imagine seeing Clue in 1985, knowing nothing about the multiple-ending gimmick. You catch the film on a Wed. night, and then at work the next day you start discussing with your coworker. "Man, I totally knew that Miss Scarlett did it," you say. "Are you kidding?!?" he retorts, "it was Mrs. Peacock!"

The discussion which ensued before the two of you straightened things out would be fascinating.

Sadly, as far as my Googling can turn up, people going into the theater probably knew there were multiple endings as the gimmick was part of the marketing. That's a missed opportunity for a unique social experiment, as far as I'm concerned!

Maybe the time is ripe to try it for real.

The fact is, it's fairly common for a film to have multiple endings. Many, many films get reshoots after initial test screenings. When audiences react badly to an ending, it's not uncommon for the studio to demand that a new one be cut together. (Going strictly by DVD special features, it's my experience that these changes are virtually always for the better, studio interference notwithstanding.)

Meanwhile, international and foreign films are sometimes released with actual multiple endings. It's not unheard of for a film that had an ambiguous or downer ending in its original release to turn up in the US with a happy ending, at least of sorts.

If you've ever watched the 'alternate ending' on your special edition DVD, the changes in tone that a new ending supplies can be striking. A different ending can change a film from a cerebral thriller to a frenetic action flick. It can have you leaving the theater with a sense of confusion or an air of satisfaction. It can be the line between whether a film was brilliant or absurd.

The ending is the last thing you see in the movie, so it is going to have a disproportionate impact on how you perceive the tone of a movie. If the ending has a disproportionate amount of action, you're more inclined to think of what you've just seen as an 'action movie'. If the ending is happy, you're more inclined to label the movie as 'upbeat', even if everything that came before was doldrums and depression.

Even more importantly, for many films, is that the ending explains or interprets the rest of the film. Clue is of course a sterling example of this. There are three different explanations for the events that lead up to the climax, and three different reinterpretations of the characters involved.

Finally, and I think this is of paramount importance, the ending decides the themes of the film. Every story is a problem in search of a resolution. How that resolution is achieved is thematically significant. A story where all the bad guys get what's coming to them has strong themes of good versus evil and justice. This is a world where morality triumphs, the world that we all, theoretically, want to live in.

Take the same story, but now the good guys are killed too. Now you have themes of sacrifice and you find yourself living in a more tragic world. And then sometimes the story ends with the bad guys winning, or people just dying at random. These stories tend to ponder existential themes - who are we? Do we really matter? What does it mean to be human?

These are just a few examples. There are many different possibly themes to a story, and even more endings that get you there. But the point is that tweaking an ending even slightly could radically alter our perception of a movie.

I think it would be very cool for someone to release a movie that really played with that. Shoot two or three different endings and send different prints to different theaters. Don't tell anyone that you're doing it. Watch the confusion that results.

The key would be to make the endings differ in subtle ways: reordering key events, or emphasizing different things. I think a straight up happy ending versus sad ending would be too obvious, too quickly figured out. Likewise an ending where everyone turned out to be space aliens or where it was all a dream. Keep it subtle, just enough to twist the viewers' perceptions and expectations of the film they just saw.

Then see what people have to say.

Audience Participation: What kind of ending do you like best. Which was your favorite ending to Clue?

I'm quite honestly still getting my head around the new Muse album - "The Resistance" sounds at first blush like its half a Queen tribute album and half the soundtrack to a seventies sci-fi film. But of all people, Strange Horizons has reviewed it and declared that its all of a piece.

Anyway, possibly you should read the review if only for the novelty of a SF-short magazine reviewing a rock album.

I am still ploughing through Katherine Kerr's Deverry series (which I wrote about here and here). I'm on, what, the twelfth book? Thirteenth? I am losing count. At any rate, there's only a couple to go, and one of those unpublished as yet.

Katherine Kerr continues to work her page-turning ensorclement on me. I just can't put these things down. I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly why, although I have some theories.

( Some ruminations on the art of page turning... )

That said, I am getting slightly less enamored of these later books. A certain world-weariness seems to grip all the characters. Not that this has ever been a series about shiny, happy people but I could do with a little less existential angst. The series seems in general darker and less joyful. Meanwhile many of my favorite characters have died off and the ones that remain, well, they don't endear themselves to me with their frequent stupid decision making.

I'm still scratching my head over why I'm supposed to like the female wizard who left her husband for an arrogant elf-spirit.

The funny thing is, I don't find that these flaws are specific to Kerr's series in particular. This disenchantment seems to follow me into any series that runs longer than three or four books. Or really, any long-form storytelling at all - I don't think I've stayed with many TV shows past their third season (sorry 'Lost', sorry 'House).

Of course the obvious explanation is that familiarity breeds contempt. Even the shiniest, most original new author will repeat themselves over time. Eventually the unique stylistic flourishes or cleverly deployed plot devices or endearing characterizations seem old hat, and we begin to see the man behind the curtain, as it were. Certainly, that's a factor.

But another thing I've noticed is that authors who write long-lasting series seem to have trouble resisting the urge to 'go dark'. Each book in a series feels a bit more grim then the last. There are fewer moments of levity, catharsis gets harder to find, and vanquishing the villains seems to come at a higher and higher cost. Meanwhile the characters get more flawed, more world-weary, more mired in existential angst.

On the one hand, it seems realistic, right? Maybe these are just signs of a maturing author, one less willing to take the easy out and cook up a false happy ending. Fair enough. Real life is hard, and short on happy endings.

But, if you want to talk realism, you should consider the positives too: humans are remarkable in their ability to adapt to difficult situations and to draw strength and joy from little things. People who go through difficult times do pick up scars, but they also often learn and grow and become more themselves, in some sense.

But my sense is that it isn't a question of characters becoming more 'real'. Rather, over time authors have a tendency to turn their characters into sounding boards for their own personal philosophies and into soapboxes for their pet issues. Which is within their rights, I suppose, but possibly detrimental to the reader's enjoyment. Loyal readers will stick with you 'til the end, no matter who you kill off and what Obvious Parallels you draw between your world and the real world. But there are some of us who silently shake our heads and turn away and go find newer stories to enter into.

In Kerr's case, she hasn't quite driven me away yet. And with only two books left, she's going to have to try really hard at this point. Plus, she keeps adding dragons to the story, and I'm just a sucker for that.

Audience Participation: I am curious if other people tend to get disenchanted by long-form serial stories. And if so, why?

Saturday it was gorgeous again - cool weather, blue skies, the complete package. Joel suggested that we drive down to St. Augustine in the evening. He wanted to try out his new digital SLR. Evening light and scenic environs would make for a photographer's dream.

We set out with his wife Erin and eventually found ourselves in the well-tended garden in front of the Lightner Museum. We wound up taking lots of great portraits of Erin, Erin and Joel, and even a decent one of yours truly, but I think the best photo of the day came early on.

St. Augustine, being a pretty serious tourist attraction, boasts a lot of costumed street entertainers. You don't often catch them on their way to (or from?) work. But as Joel was setting up his tripod in front of the Lightner, I looked up in time to see the fellow below cruising up to the stoplight.

"Joel, bring your camera!" I barked. Joel wrenched it off the tripod and ran up to the street. "Wave!" he shouted to the man on the crotch-rocket.

The man waved.

Joel took a picture.

So I guess this December the Large Hadron Collider will go back online and begin its search for the Higgs boson... unless it is being sabotaged from the future!!!

Was mankind not meant to find the Higgs boson? Or have eminent physicists finally flipped their lids?

One way or another, we're going to find out!

It's really not fair. When I go out at 8:00 on an October morning to get in an early run, I don't expect to face 90% humidity and 80 degree weather. But alas, despite a light breeze I was pouring sweat by the time I was half way through with my route.

We've had 100+ degree days this week. Honestly, that's hotter than it got through most of this unusually wet summer. My aunt and uncle were visiting from Seattle and they greatly bemoaned the heat. I felt bad for them, as usually this is THE time of year to be in Florida.

At least it's not raining every day. Although in this heat, I kind of miss it.

I've always had a slight distaste for 'Banned Books Week'. At the root of my unease is the fact that I don't see a lot of government censorship of books going on nowadays. Who in fact is banning these books that we're supposed to be reading?

It turns out, almost no one. The vast majority of the list is books that have been 'challenged', virtually always by private citizens and virtually always unsuccessfully. Which, last time I checked, did not constitute censorship in any sense of the word*. And in the light that this editorial throws on it, Banned Books Week starts to look a lot more like a powerful, secretive lobby making fun of concerned parents.

A celebration of Banned Books is a great idea if it actually addresses a problem. For instance, if it was raising awareness about books banned in, I don't know, say Iran. That would be cool. But when it's a bunch of librarian activists getting huffy because old Mrs. Tweedle is worried about Harry Potter, it starts to smack of self-righteousness to me.

Mind you, I'm in favor of lots of books being available. I'm in favor of parents doing the job of okaying what their parents read and not waiting on schools or libraries to do it. If that's what this is about, fine.

But calling it 'Banned Books Week' just seems a little disingenuous.

* And these are librarians. Shouldn't they know what a word means?

Jure Robic is a soldier in the Slovene army who is one of the world's champion ultra-endurance bike racers. For those of you not clear on the concept, imagine the Tour de France, only the riders aren't sleeping.

This kind of race stretches physiology and psychology to the breaking point. How does Robic do it? Well, during the race he kind of goes... psychotic.

‘‘During race, I am going crazy, definitely,’’ he says, smiling in bemused despair. ‘‘I cannot explain why is that, but it is true.’’

The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a typical weeklong race, his speech goes staccato. By Day 3, he is belligerent and sometimes paranoid. His short-term memory vanishes, and he weeps uncontrollably. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback.

Fascinating. And like many extreme personalities, what Robic does actually provides some insight into some scientific mysteries.

...Robic does not excel on physical talent alone. He is not always the fastest competitor (he often makes up ground by sleeping 90 minutes or less a day), nor does he possess any towering physiological gift. On rare occasions when he permits himself to be tested in a laboratory, his ability to produce power and transport oxygen ranks on a par with those of many other ultra-endurance athletes. He wins for the most fundamental of reasons: he refuses to stop.

In a consideration of Robic, three facts are clear: he is nearly indefatigable, he is occasionally nuts, and the first two facts are somehow connected. The question is, How? Does he lose sanity because he pushes himself too far, or does he push himself too far because he loses sanity? Robic is the latest and perhaps most intriguing embodiment of the old questions: What happens when the human body is pushed to the limits of its endurance? Where does the breaking point lie? And what happens when you cross the line?

Interestingly, there is a new theory that physical fatigue exists not in the muscles, but in the mind. Scientists now speculate that there is a mental governance system at work here rather than the physical brake of lactic acid that had long been hypothesized. The brain, not the body, is attempting to slow the athlete and keep them from using up all their physical resources.

Robic's hallucinatory insanity may actually be a mechanism for side-stepping this internal regulator.

The whole NYT article is here.

Interesting/fun discussion over at Marginal Revolution: why are some albums longer than others?

The question:

I had a very MResque thought today I wanted to share with you. Why are the typical lengths of albums across different music genres so different? In particular, I was thinking most of my rap albums are at least over the hour mark and many run all the way up to the 80-minute maximum. They're usually packed with intros, skits, and lots of 5 minute tracks that have extended intro and outro instrumental beat only sequences. My metal albums, on the other hand, have an average run length of no more than 40 mins. Most albums are between 8 and 10 tracks with little in the way of tangential material. These different run-times show up in other places too. For example, my older jazz albums (i.e. Kind of Blue, Time Out, Blue Train) typically run around 45 mins with a half dozen or so tracks yet my newer jazz albums like MMW's The Dropper run almost the whole 80 mins. Also, prog. rock bands tend to produce much longer albums than garage rock bands. Even adjusting for the fact that prog bands emphasize longer musical passages, they could compensate by just having fewer songs or garage rock bands could just have twice as many (like the White Stripes did on their first album).

Tyler Cowen responds with some possibilities, although I don't think any of his answers knock the ball out of the park.

I would suggest that there are a few different factors that influence the number of songs that are recorded in the studio. One is obviously expense. A standard four-piece live band is probably only be able to lay down one track a day in the studio. If they are still at the garage-band stage, i.e. just breaking out, that's going to get expensive fast.

Meanwhile, bands that have a lot sampling and electronic parts are going to work faster, because they can put most of the parts together on their own time. Rap would probably fall under this category, although I admit to total ignorance of how the rap studio process works.

Techno acts tend to have long albums, for instance. But in their case the studio is usually redundant - virtually every techno virtuoso is going to have their own home studio, even if that studio is just a laptop.

Of course you can't discount the rise of home studio in this equation. Technology is making having your own an affordable proposition for a moderately successful act. That's going to increase the number and kind of bands who are willing to spend more time recording.

Another factor that needs consideration though is the label itself. I get the very strong impression that labels for some reason want a forty-minute LP from their pop/rock bands. It seems that there are quite a few bands that record scads of tracks in studio, only to wind up with the usual 10-12 making the final cut. The rest eventually surface in EPs, b-sides and free downloads.

Why do studios want short albums? I am not sure. Possibly this is a hold-over from an earlier time when radio was the only exposure that most music got. Maybe there is also some theory about the attention span of the listener, although this seems odd (it's not like a bored listener can't just turn a long album off). It could be that the labels believe that there's a trade-off between quality and quantity, and would rather have a short album full of potential singles then a long one that's more diluted. Who knows.

I do think it's true, though. For their second album, Bloc Party recorded over twenty songs in the studio. The eleven that were on the actual disc were apparently not all the ones the band would have chosen, and a sort of rogue companion album of the remaining songs have since surfaced on the internet.

I offer up a prediction based on all this: that as bands escape studio expenses and label constraints thanks to technology and the internet, albums are going to get longer, not shorter.

Hat tip to Nathan Bransford -

The dominant narrative in the media is that we're in the middle of a vampire craze, riding high on a bubble of sexy bloodsuckers. But Slate asks an insightful question - when have we NOT been in the midst of a vampire craze? Interactive graph included!

Do you think vampires will ever become truly played out? I thought so... but that was back in like 1996, and vampires are going strong today. So I am clearly in error. But will our appetite for endless permutations of "They're vampires! But with..." ever wane?

Discuss.

People have been talking about this idea virtually since the advent of Napster: that the rise of the mp3 heralds the end of the 'album' as a cohesive unit of music. Who needs labels? Who needs albums? Why not just record two or three songs that you really like and put them out there on the internet for fans to digest?

It's a testament to what a radical departure this is from the way we normally digest music that no major artists have actually done this.

Well, until now.

So, what noted rock group is crazy enough to try something like this?

I hope you guessed Smashing Pumpkins, 'cause then you got it in one. The name of the not-an-album has been announced as Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, which is actually a less ridiculous title than Mellon Colly and the Infinite Sadness, so don't hate.

Teargarden is supposed to consist of 44 songs, which will be released one at a time as absolutely-honest-to-goodness FREE downloads.

The songs will apparently break down into eleven four song EPs. Physical EPs will be released, as will a boxed set, but all physical media associated with the project is planned to be Limited Edition. In other words: downloading the songs for free is actually the Official Way To Get Them.

Hipsters United has the breakdown but generally speaking this should be a pretty interesting release to watch. And listen to!

( My thoughts... )

Via World of Psychology -

TIME has an interesting look at the power of NEGATIVE thinking. Turns out there's strong scientific evidence that so-called 'positive affirmation' does not make one feel better about oneself. In fact, it can have quite the opposite effect.

It's interesting stuff, but in this case I was more taken by the illustration for the article:



Imagine my disappointment in finding out that these aren't real books!

I've had a yen for years to drive cross-country someday. But lately I think my urge has become more specific. I want to drive across the southwest and visit ghost towns like these.

Who wants to come?

Does anyone know if there's any site out there that lets you set up your own radio station? I don't mean like a Pandora station where you help it pick songs you might like. I mean I want to pick the play-list by hand. I want to be the disc jockey. Does anyone know if there's such a thing out there?

Avast, ye landlubbers! 'Tis a good day to be a salty pirate! On this day alone can ye swindle the booty of a Tales of Monkey Island game for free! And shiver me timbers if they haven't discounted the remade Secret of Monkey Island too. 'Tis a grand day for acquiring classic adventure game swag!

Yarr. One episode of Tales of Monkey Island and no gold out of yer pocket. 'Tis a value of free ninety-nine!

In no time at all ye will find yerself treasure huntin', seeking the hand of comely wenches and crossin' swords with the Dread Pirate Le Chuck. So don't be a-feared, but prepare to click the link!