Words Without Voices https://loopvids.s3.amazonaws.com/2022/22Jun06_Post.mp3 One of my favorite scenes from TV and Movies is from the first season of “The Last Kingdom.” The English were fighting against the Vikings. And one Viking leader lost a battle, and converted to Christianity. This is more or less historically accurate. In real life, the […]
The Most Coveted Human Instinct
The More Things Change https://loopvids.s3.amazonaws.com/Mar10_Post.mp4 One of our best features as humans is something called a collective memory. Many animals can learn. One common things many “wild” animals learn is a simple equivalency. Humans = Free Food They see humans, and if they’ve learned this, the start to carefully move close. […]
Thought To Word Evolution
Way Back When Once upon a time. There were no words. No language. Only gestures. And grunts. The biggest question. For anthropological linguists. Did words lead to advanced thinking. Or did advanced thinking lead to speaking. Only Recent Exists https://loopvids.s3.amazonaws.com/Jan03_Loop.mp4 Written languages. Weren’t created until […]
Digging Holes With Amnesia
The End of Magic One curious thing that happened in the middle ages was the invention of the printing press. Before the printing press was invented, people had to write things based on what they heard. This is why all those old school written documents have letters that don’t seem to make sense. […]
Immortal Monkey Apocalypse
Shakespeare Experiment There’s a theory that if you put enough monkeys on an island, each banging away on a typewriter, they’ll eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare. This is true in theory, so long as they bang on a typewriter long enough, a certain percentage of the random stuff they type will make […]
Origins Of The Gods
Learning Center I went to an interesting lecture a couple of nights ago at a local learning center. The topic was the history of written language. It was only an hour, but the guy who taught went through a really quick bullet point overview, which was fascinating. Reading and writing are things we […]
Editorial Magic
Invention of Writing Without question, one of the most profound inventions of human history was written language. Humans have been able to speak and think for at least 50,000 years, but written language has only been around for a few thousand. This means that for most of human history, our thoughts and words were […]