In In the Name of Love, Miya Tokumitsu takes apart the mantra, “do what you love, love what you do”. Being fortunate enough to enjoy what I do at work for the most part, I was in thrall to this aphorism until it was pointed out to me a few years ago how implausible this was for most people. Miya says,
DWYL is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.
This is an aide memoire, but I thought it worth pointing to. Objective-c’s foundation library offers several amazing classes for language processing; far superior to built-in functionality I’ve seen elsewhere. The two central players are CFStringTokenizer and NSLinguisticTagger.
CFStringTokenizer allows you to tokenize strings into words, sentences or paragraphs in a language-neutral way. It supports languages such as Japanese and Chinese that do not delimit words by spaces, as well as de-compounding German compounds. You can obtain Latin transcription for tokens. It also provides language identification API.
GENETICALLY modified maize causes cancer: that was the gist of a study, among the most controversial in recent memory, published in September 2012 in the journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology. Well, actually, it doesn’t. The journal has just retracted the article. It would be too much to say that GM foods have therefore been proven safe. But no other study has so far found significant health risks in mammals as a result of eating GM foods.
A newly published study, “Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain”, shows that male and female brains exhibit distinct patterns in the way neurons are connected to each other.
One could suggest the headline, Gender stereotypes map directly affect the growing brain, tenuously extrapolated from this paragraph in the Independent, a variant of which is also in the Guardian:
The research was carried out on 949 individuals — 521 females and 428 males — aged between 8 and 22. The brain differences between the sexes only became apparent after adolescence, the study found.
HTML is a clumsy language to write in, and I’ve long used a plain text markup language to format posts on this site. Until now, I used an older system called textile. I didn’t use that anywhere but this site, so was always having to look up the syntax. While not an excuse for my lack of writing, the prospect of syntactic frustration did add a further small blockade to my getting started.