When punctuation geeks assembled earlier this month at Punctuacon, our annual convention, we spent the usual two or three hours whining about the pathetic size of our gathering, compared to Comic-Con International in San Diego, Dragon*Con in Atlanta or any of those tiresome Star Trek conventions that draw multitudes to worship at the shrine of William Shatner. We have no heroes like Shatner, just ourselves and our proud tradition of judging and promoting the images and ideograms of language -- and our totally imaginary convention.

That should be enough, but a love for punctuation, signage and graphic symbols remains a lonely passion. It's hard not to be bitter.

Why can't the rest of the world understand that a well-designed semicolon or an expertly made STOP sign is every bit as enthralling as a mint Batman first edition, an early sketch of the Jedi, or a photograph signed by Margot Kidder herself? Why can't they care about the tragically missing apostrophe on the logo of a certain coffee-shop chain?

Still, Punctuacon was happier this year than usual, mostly because we could forget about what had become at previous conventions the most melancholy issue on the agenda: Who will save the octothorpe?

via The National Post.

September 1, 1939, the day Hitler's army invaded Poland, is one of the most infamous dates of the 20th century. But how many of us recall September 17, 1939, when Soviet forces charged into Poland from the west? Germany and Russia, acting together on terms laid out in a secret pact, tried to destroy an entire country - and nearly succeeded. The sinister partnership would not last. Two years later, Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, which would spell doom for the Wehrmacht. In the West, we think of the heroics of D-Day, but it was the Soviet Army that ultimately broke the Nazi war machine; the British and Americans merely finished it off. Stalin ends up in the history books as a saviour, along with Churchill and Roosevelt, in the struggle against Hitler. Even now, it is far easier to think of Stalin as an opponent of Hitler than as a partner. We like to tell ourselves that the virtuous side won the war, but what happened in the east confounds such notions. Even before a shot was fired, Stalin had the blood of a nearly four million Soviet citizens on his hands. Between them, the Soviets and Germans killed nearly 200,000 Poles - targeting doctors, lawyers, scientists, professors, and religious figures. They all died in a region that the historian Timothy Snyder, in his striking and important new book, calls the "bloodlands".

It was a place of shifting allegiances, an ethnic and linguistic patchwork. The zone extended east from central Poland into western Russia, and from the Baltic States in the north to the Black Sea in the south. It was a place where German, Slavic, Baltic and Jewish cultures collided and mingled.

This was the terrain of Europe's killing fields, "where the power and malice of the Nazi and Soviet regimes overlapped and interacted". Here is where the Holocaust unfolded with a grim relentlessness. The scale of battles - at Kursk, for example, where some 7,000 German and Soviet tanks clashed - dwarfed any of those fought on the Western front. The death toll, civilian and military, exceeded 20 million. Some of the regions of the bloodlands were doubly or triply occupied. It was a theatre of immense, pervasive suffering, which almost defies comprehension.

via Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

Researchers have noted, for example, that within backpacker enclaves there is a clear hierarchy based on shorthand status cues curiously similar to those of home. Whereas back home income and influence might lend to status, backpackers fixate upon travel experience and fashion. Anderskov’s research subjects assert that “real backpackers” travel at least three months, and they demonstrate their credibility through their clothing, spending, and storytelling. Backpacker novels confirm this ideology, frequently using such markers to communicate experience and travel savvy. In Gardner’s “Losing Gemma,” for example, readers learn immediately upon meeting Coral that the character’s “scuffed canvas carry-all” and well-worn clothing (a “dark red sarong, tied loosely around her concave stomach, a droopy cheesecloth top, and leather flip-flops”) advertise her two years of travel experience. Through these grungy fashion details, she is identified as “a true traveler, her soft Western edges eroded by months or even years of vivid Third World Experience.” Before long, Coral rescues the passports and money carelessly lost by two travel neophytes, Gemma and Esther, and recommends they deliberately roughen their bags in order to boost their street cred.

In addition to such strict adherence to anti-fashions, all the novels depict disheveled backpackers earning rite-of-passage by enduring the workaday hardships that come with independent travel in the developing world. When Sutcliffe’s Dave suffers a bout of diarrhea, he notes that, “crapping your pants ... is a dire and miserable experience; but having crapped your pants—I mean, that’s a pretty good conversational party piece.” Over time, status within the community’s hierarchy hinges on the accumulation of such difficult travel experiences, which travelers collect and trade like blue-chip stock portfolios.

Accordingly, upon meeting “older” Australian travelers in their 20s, Sutcliffe’s Dave admits, “I felt I couldn’t really talk about what I’d done, because they’d all been on the road for months and had amazing stories I couldn’t possibly compete with—about how they’d got lost in the Thai jungle with heroin smugglers, had fought off kitten-sized cockroaches in an Indonesian prison, or had done the entire Everest trek dressed in flip-flops and a Bondai Beach T-shirt.” Anderskov adds that this kind of social hierarchy is “situational and floating”—it depends on whom the backpacker is socializing with. As a result, it is possible for the initially clueless protagonists in the novels by Sutcliffe, Gardner, and Barr to accumulate status over time, with each of them near the end of their stories encountering “fresh-faced scared bunnies” who remind them of their previous, less experienced selves and confirm their advanced clout within the independent travel community. In this way, a typical story arc of the backpacker novel focuses not on a deepened understanding of local cultures, but on gaining social standing within travel communities that aren’t all that demographically distinct from cliquish subcultures back home.

via World Hum.

Before Ostler’s own ideology—entailing a fanciful technological determinism—takes hold of his argument, The Last Lingua Franca is wide-ranging and insightful. He is on firm ground when he uses historical examples to question the future of English as a global language. He shows repeatedly how governments abolish even well-established lingua francas “at the stroke of a pen” for ideological reasons. An especially neat case is the relegation of Persian both in India under British rule and in Central Asia after the Russian Revolution. For the British, this was as simple as changing the language of the courts, on the principle that “justice should be comprehensible to those being judged” and not just to the Persian-speaking elite. In the new Soviet republics of Central Asia, the lingua franca was edged out on the grounds of ethno-linguistic self-determination. The revolutionary government drew up the borders of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan according to the language spoken in each region, and raised literacy in these from less than 10 percent under Tsarist rule to almost 100 percent by 1959, at the expense of Persian. Given how easily a language can be dethroned, Ostler does not share the optimism of David Crystal, David Graddol, or Robert McCrum, in thinking that, in one form or another, English will “find itself in the service of the world community for ever.” Historically considered, English has little chance of outlasting the economic and military dominance of Anglophone powers around the world. Emerging powers will remain loyal to their mother tongues and will be unlikely to “indulge the nostalgia of their Western suppliants by speaking to them in English,” as Ostler puts it, contemplating with special glee the decline of the language in which he is writing.

Yet one could be forgiven for entertaining the thought that massive media saturation—in radio, television, movies, pop music, and above all the internet—has brought English to a point of no return. Of course, this way of thinking has its own technological fallacy: it implies that English has achieved the linguistic apotheosis denied Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, or Persian, by virtue of faster electronic communications. The major insight of Ostler’s book is that technological innovations can have unexpected consequences. In the last ten years, the fastest growing languages online were Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and French, in that order. “The main story of growth in the Internet,” he reminds us, “is of linguistic diversity, not concentration.” And there is a startling parallel with Latin and the print revolution. At first, it looked as though printing would ensure Latin’s pre-eminence, making standardised textbooks widely available. In practice, the new technology mostly benefited the vernaculars, feeding a demand for novels and pamphlets among the expanding middle-classes.

via The New Republic.

I teach at Brooklyn College, where the undergraduate writing program has for the past several years assigned a "common reading" to all incoming freshmen. This year the program selected my book How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, in which I tell the stories of seven Arab-American men and women, all in their 20s and living in Brooklyn, coping in a post-9/11 world. The criteria for the common reading are that the book should preferably be set in New York City, have a significant immigration component (since many of our students are themselves immigrants or come from immigrant backgrounds), and be in the form of life stories. It should be by a living writer, since the author is invited to the campus to talk with students. My book fit the bill. (Previous readings have included Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.)

Everything was fine until about a week before classes began. That's when the chair of my department called me to report that the college had received a small number of complaints from alumni and an emeritus faculty member about the selection. She assured me that the college was standing by its decision, and the dean of undergraduate studies subsequently told me the same thing. But I knew that in today's wired world, administrators worry about complaints' hitting the Internet and going "viral." And that's exactly what happened.

The tempest was kicked off when Bruce Kesler, a conservative California-based blogger who is a Brooklyn College alumnus, labeled me a "radical pro-Palestinian" professor in one of his posts and called the book's selection an "official policy to inculcate students with a political point of view." He said he was cutting out a "significant bequest" to the college from his will. (He didn't mention how significant his bequest would have been.) In another letter, posted on a different blog under the title "Brooklyn College-Stan," a retired Brooklyn professor wrote that assigning my book "smacks of indoctrination" and "will intimidate students who have a different point of view."

My first reaction was one of disbelief. Wow, I thought, is my writing really that powerful? But on closer inspection, it became clear to me that my detractors hadn't actually read the book. Next I realized how insulting those objections were to our students, suggesting that they are unable to form independent judgments of what they read.

I hoped the noise would fade, but within days, tabloid news media had grabbed the issue from the right-wing blogosphere. Articles appeared in New York's Daily News, The Jewish Week, and Gothamist and were picked up by The Huffington Post and New York Magazine. The New York Post ran an op-ed by a retired history professor at City College who deftly illustrated that one need read only a book's Amazon.com page to reach conclusions about it. The op-ed called the selection of my book a "scandal" and claimed that it paints "New Yorkers in particular as completely Islamophobic" (patently untrue). I received calls at home from television news shows, and the local Channel 11 even broadcast my picture, calling me "this guy!" in the teaser.

via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

WHAT happened before the beginning of time is—by definition, it might be thought—metaphysics. At least one physicist, though, thinks there is nothing meta about the question at all. Roger Penrose, of Oxford University, believes that the Big Bang in which the visible universe began was not actually the beginning of everything. It was merely the latest example of a series of such bangs that renew reality when it is getting tired out. More importantly, he thinks that the pre-Big Bang past has left an imprint on the present that can be detected and analysed, and that he and a colleague in Armenia have found it. The imprint in question is in the cosmic microwave background CMB. This is a bath of radiation that fills the whole universe. It was frozen in its present form some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, and thus carries information about what the early universe was like. The CMB is almost, but not quite, uniform, and the known irregularities in it are thought to mark the seeds from which galaxies—and therefore stars and planets—grew.

Dr Penrose, though, predicts another form of irregularity—great circles in the sky where the microwave background is slightly more uniform than it should be. These, if they exist, would be fossil traces of black holes from the pre-Big Bang version of reality. And in a paper just published in arXiv.org, an online database, he claims they do indeed exist.

Once upon a timeThe Penrose version of cosmology stands in sharp distinction to received wisdom. This is that the universe popped out of nowhere about 13.7 billion years ago in a quantum fluctuation similar to the sort that constantly create short-lived virtual particles in so-called empty space. Before this particular fluctuation could disappear again, though, it underwent a process called inflation that both stabilised it and made it 1078 times bigger than it had previously been in a period of 10-32 seconds. Since then, it has expanded at a more sedate rate and will continue to do so—literally for ever.

Dr Penrose, however, sees inflation as a kludge. The main reason it was dreamed up by Alan Guth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was to explain the extraordinary uniformity of the universe. A period of rapid inflation right at the beginning would impose such uniformity by stretching any initial irregularities so thin that they would become invisible.

As kludges go, inflation has been successful. Those of its predictions that have been tested have all been found true. But that does not mean it is right. Dr Penrose’s explanation of the uniformity is that, rather than having been created at the beginning of the universe, it is left over from the tail end of reality’s previous incarnation.

Dr Penrose’s version of events is that the universe did not come into existence at the Big Bang but instead passes through a continuous cycle of aeons. Each aeon starts off with the universe being of zero size and high uniformity. At first the universe becomes less uniform as it evolves and objects form within it. Once enough time has passed, however, all of the matter around will end up being sucked into black holes. As Stephen Hawking has demonstrated, black holes eventually evaporate in a burst of radiation. That process increases uniformity, eventually to the level the universe began with.

Thus far, Dr Penrose’s version of cosmology more or less matches the standard version. At this point, though, he introduces quite a large kludge of his own. This is the idea that when the universe becomes very old and rarefied, the particles within it lose their mass.

via The Economist.

I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live. The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish. Then I called on the name of the Lord: “O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul!”

Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful. The Lord preserves the simple; when I was brought low, he saved me. Return, O my soul, to your rest; for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.

Psalm 116.

I know this to be true.