People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.
Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone – so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.
Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.
Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.
Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.
The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.
References
Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.
Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture
Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science
27(5) 737–747.
Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish:
Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.
I think freedom of sexuality is something that we all need and very few of us have
I think sexual pleasure is a legitimate thing to want and ethically pursue
I do not judge people for the (consensual) sex that they have or want
I will not tolerate slut-shaming
I will not tolerate hatred of people based on gender or orientation (including asexual)
I will not tolerate hatred of sex workers
I believe comprehensive, honest, non-judgmental sex education is necessary for public health and happiness
I think understanding of sexual consent–what it is, why it matters–is sorely lacking in society and crucially important
I reject preconceptions of what kind of sexuality a person should have, whether these preconceptions are based on gender, age, culture, disability, survivor status, or basically anything else
I value people’s individual freedom of choice in determining their sex lives (including the choices not to have sex)
What I Don’t Mean
Everyone should have sex
Everyone should have kinky, non-monogamous, exhibitionistic, pansexual sex
Accepting someone’s sexuality means you have to participate in it, watch them engage in it, or hear about it in detail
I just realized I haven’t told you guys about how 3rd President of the United States Thomas Jefferson haunts my dorm room.
Okay so basically at the beginning of the year, weird shit began happening in our dorm room, me and my roommate would hear/see things, TVs and phones and computers would start on there own and do other weird things.
We decided jokingly that the room was haunted and named the ghost Jeff and even made it a door tag.
Me and my roommate began to notice a trend it the activity of “Jeff” He always seemed to act up most when I talked shit about Thomas Jefferson or James Madison’s personality/policies/etc.
We began to joke that it was Thomas Jefferson or James Madison (hell we even joked it might be Dolley)
Well the other day, our ghost confirmed himself as “Thomas Jefferson.”
After a particularly rude attack on Thomas Jefferson character (I claimed the best thing he ever did was die.) A fucking giant ass jumbo size box of Mac and Cheese fell off of the tallest shelf in our dorm room.
I’m talking one of these babies but it’s like a 20 pack. To me it’s obviously that this is obviously proof that “inventor” of mac and cheese, 3rd President of the United States who was born and died in Virginia travelled to Upstate New York in an area he never even came close to in his life to haunt my dorm
My roommate is not convinced though: She still thinks it could be James Madison.
But a Madison-sized ghost couldn’t have reached the mac and cheese (We conducted an experiment to see if Madison would have been able to reach it when he was only 5′4″ and being 5′4″, I couldn’t even reach it jumping up and down.)
So yes, me and my roommate have proved undeniable that Thomas Jefferson haunts our dorm room.
Also she pointed out that we randomly named the ghost “Jeff” which is pretty fucking close to Jefferson. Coincidence? OBVIOUSLY NOT.
“But a Madison-sized ghost couldn’t have reached the mac and cheese”
I’m so glad I was alive to see this sentence written.
Why were you regularly shit talking founding fathers tho
So there has been a bit of “what if humans were the weird ones?” going around tumblr at the moment and Earth Day got me thinking. Earth is a wonky place, the axis tilts, the orbit wobbles, and the ground spews molten rock for goodness sakes. What if what makes humans weird is just our capacity to survive? What if all the other life bearing planets are these mild, Mediterranean climates with no seasons, no tectonic plates, and no intense weather?
What if several species (including humans) land on a world and the humans are all “SCORE! Earth like world! Let’s get exploring before we get out competed!” And the planet starts offing the other aliens right and left, electric storms, hypothermia, tornadoes and the humans are just … there… counting seconds between flashes, having snowball fights, and just surviving.
To paraphrase one of my favorite bits of a ‘humans are awesome’ fiction megapost: “you don’t know you’re from a Death World until you leave it.” For a ton of reasons, I really like the idea of Earth being Space Australia.
Earth being Space Australia
Words cannot express how much I love these posts
Alien: “I’m sorry, what did you just say your comfortable temperature range is?”
Human: “Honestly we can tolerate anywhere from -40 to 50 Celcius, but we prefer the 0 to 30 range.”
Alien: “……. I’m sorry, did you just list temperatures below freezing?”
Human: “Yeah, but most of us prefer to throw on scarves or jackets at those temperatures it can be a bit nippy.”
Other human: “Nah mate, I knew this guy in college who refused to wear anything past his knees and elbows until it was -20 at least.”
Human: “Heh. Yeah everybody knows someone like that.”
Alien: “……. And did you also say 50 Celcius? As in, half way to boiling?”
Human: “Eugh. Yes. It sucks, we sweat everywhere, and god help you if you touch a seatbelt buckle, but yes.”
Alien: “……. We’ve got like 50 uninhabitable planets we think you might enjoy.”
“You’re telling me that you have… settlements. On islands with active volcanism?”
“Well, yeah. I’m not about to tell Iceland and Hawaii how to live their lives. Actually, it’s kind of a tourist attraction.”
“What, the molten rock?”
“Well, yeah! It’s not every day you see a mountain spew out liquid rocks! The best one is Yellowstone, though. All these hot springs and geysers from the supervolcano–”
“You ACTIVELY SEEK OUT ACTIVE SUPERVOLCANOES?”
“Shit, man, we swim in the groundwater near them.”
Sounds like the “Damned” trilogy by Alan Dean Foster.
“And you say the poles of your world would get as low as negative one hundred with wind chill?”
“Yup, with blizzards you cant see through every other day just about.”
“Amazing! when did you manage to send drones that could survive such temperatures?”
“… well, actually…”
“… what?”
“…we kinda……. sent……….. people…..”
“…”
“…”
“…what?”
“we sent-”
“no yeah I heard you I just- what? You sent… HUMANS… to a place one hundred degrees below freezing?”
“y-yeah”
“and they didn’t… die?”
“Well the first few did”
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE???!?!?!?”
My new favorite Humans are Weird quote
“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE?”
aka The History of Russia
aka Arctic Exploration
aka The History of Alaska
Being from Alaska, this was sort of how I felt going to college in the lower 48′s and learned that no one else had been put through a literal survival camp as a regular part of their school curriculum, including but not limited to:
1. Learning to recognize all forms of animal tracks in the wild so you can avoid bears and moose and search out rabbits and other small animals to eat.
2. Extensive swimming and climbing on glacial pieces with competitions to see who could last the longest, followed by a group sit in the sauna so we wouldn’t get hypothermia (no, not kidding, I really did this many times as a kid!)
3. How to navigate using the stars to get back to civilization.
4. How to select the right type of moss from the trees to start a fire with damp wood (because, y’know, you’re in a field of snow. Nothing is dry.)
5. How to carve out a small igloo-like space to sleep in the snow to preserve body heat and reduce the windchill so you won’t freeze to death in the arctic.
“I’m telling you, I don’t think we need to worry about territory conflicts with the humans. You know all those deathtrap hell-worlds in the Argoth Cluster?” “Those worthless rocks? Yeah.” “80% of them are considered ‘resort destinations’ by those freaky little primates.”
This would be an interesting read if this was a book.
Like, an alien invasion is about to start and the book is a chronicle of how the aliens couldn’t handle both humans in general and the range of environments and ended up being destroyed through the eyes of one of the aliens.
Like a caption from the book would be something like
“So we sent a recon team to this place called Russia, but all we’ve heard back thus far is about the temperatures, giant monsters with fur the humans call “Bears”, and that once again, we have been reminded of how heavily well armed almost ever human settlement is.
Thus far we have lost more than a good chunk of our forces through experiments gone wrong, unsuccessful fire fights, and above all else, the humans seem to be more worried about these strange variation of their species calling themselves “Clowns”.
I don’t know what a Clown is, but sounds as if it is the dominant faction of this planet, and considering we only just found out humans practically poison themselves with this thing called beer and only get stronger and more violent, I don’t ever want to encounter such a being.
I believe this invasion was a mistake.“
I’ve been reading a bunch of these and all I can think about now is aliens finding out about our insane ability to walk away from accidents.
“Human Colony SDO435**, this is Gxanimi survey vessel 3489. We regret that we must inform you that the wreckage of your ship ‘Gecko Flyer’ has just been detected on planet F56=K=. We offer expressions of sympathy for this catastrophe.”
“Shit, thanks for telling us, we’ll be right there.”
“Why?”
“To find our people, of course.”
“… you wish to retrieve the corpses for your traditional death rituals, of course, we understand. We have sent the coordinates.”
“What do you mean, bodies? No survivors at all? There must be some.”
“Official mouthpiece of Human Colony SDO435**, the ship has crashed. It has impacted the planet’s surface at speed. Moreover, this might have happened as much as five vek ago. We do not understand why you speak of ‘survivors’.”
“Oh, there’ll be survivors. There always are.”
“(closes hyperspace voicelink) How sad that they are unable to accept the reality of their loss.”
*
“Hey, Gxanimi survey vessel 3489, thanks for letting us know about the Gecko Flyer. More than half the crew made it!”
“Made what?”
“They survived! A couple of lost limbs and so on, but they’ll be fine.”
“… but that vessel was destroyed! Images have been examined!”
“Oh, well, everyone in the fore-below compartment was crushed, obviously, but the others made it out.”
“… but the crash was vek ago! Excuse we… at least eighty of your ‘days’! How could they survive without a ship? Without shelter and supplies?”
“Well, the wreckage gave them some shelter, and of course the emergency supplies kept them going until they could start growing stuff. It’s actually a nice little planet, they said. Quite a lot of edible flora and fauna. T-shirt weather, in summer, too.”
“What is… t-shirt weather?”
“Oh, you know, when it’s comfortable to go around with only modesty covering over the epidermis. Exposed limbs.”
“That planet is so cold that even water solidifies in its atmosphere!”
“Well, in winter, obviously. But we like that. Listen, our people have been raising crops down there, and that’s usually how we rule a planet as ‘colonized’…. is anyone else using it, or can we call it?”
“Er… we have claimed the warmer planets in the system, but we believe we could come to some arrangement.”
*
It was really nice, the humans thought, how carefully most of the aliens kept an eye out for downed ships after that, once they found out that humans tended to survive anything less than explosive decompression or… well, explosions generally. They’d immediately inform the nearest outpost of a wreck’s location, or even ship survivors back themselves. It was very thoughtful.
They didn’t find out until a long time later that the Gxanimi had put out the word to every species they were in contact with. It was vital that everyone knew the things they had learned about humans after that first encounter.
1. Humans can literally walk away from an impact that renders a space-worthy hull so much scrap and would have actually liquefied a Gxanimi.
2. Humans will eat just about anything not immediately fatal to them – including, in extremis, the corpses of their dead crewmates. In fact, most human vessels keep a list of those willing to be eaten and those whose socio-religious scruples forbid it. They have a ridiculously high tolerance for dangerous substances, and if they can breathe on a planet they can probably eat something on it too. They also have something they call the ‘Watney Protocol’, which requires them to carry live soil samples, seeds, and simple tools that will allow them to start farming their own native foodstuffs on any remotely habitable planet immediately in the event of an accident.
3. Once they’ve farmed a planet, they bond with it. They’ll be polite, but it’ll take significant effort to get rid of them even so.
Conclusion: If a human ship crashes on a planet you like and want to keep, get other humans to come and get them immediately. Remove them yourself if you have to. Even the worst crash can result in a thriving colony in a few vek.
And don’t, for the love of gravitational regularity, try to solve that problem by killing off the survivors. Just don’t. It won’t work and it just makes all the rest of them mad.
Anyway so yeah asexuals and aromantics belong in the LGBTQA+ community and shouldn’t ever believe any gatekeeping assholes who tell them that they don’t ❤ stay queer and proud my loves
All the gods of myth and legend are real, but having your prayers answered depends on discovering which god can hear you. You figured out which god is listening to your prayers, but they’re not what you expected.
Suzy
was dissapointed. Most people her age had discovered their deity so
far, and she was starting to think she was godless. She turned the
next page of McBayers’ Little Book of Deities,
and tried reading their names aloud to see if she’d get a reaction.
It had taken her weeks just to get through Chinese spirits and
deities, and had finally reached the first page of Egyptian
Gods and you.
“Ammit?
Amun? Anhur?” Nothing. Her heart slowly sank again.Three
more tries, and she’d stop for now.
“Anubis?”
The
ground shook. The lights in Suzy’s room flickered and went out. A
single flame hovered in the middle of the room, and as it grew to a
blaze it changed form. Within the blink of an eye, there was a tall
figure standing in Suzy’s room. The body of a man, and the head of a
jackal. His eyes shone bright as he peered at her.
WHAT
IS IT, SUZY OF THE HOUSE MILLER?
“You’re
the deity that answers my prayers?”
INDEED.
I, ANUBIS, WHO RULES OVER THE LAND OF THE DEAD, IS HERE TO ANSWER
YOUR REQUESTS.
Suzy
thought for a moment. “O great and mighty Anubis who rules over the
afterlife, can I please have a puppy?”
Anubis
seemed taken aback.
IN
THE CENTURIES THAT I HAVE BEEN PRAYED TO, THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I
HAVE BEEN REQUESTED SOMETHING LIKE THIS. CHILD, HOW OLD ARE YOU?
“I’m
eight and a half. My mommy says that if I can take care of a puppy, I
can keep it.”
ARE
YOU CERTAIN YOU DO NOT WISH FOR ME TO BRING PLAGUES UPON YOUR ENEMIES
OR WEIGH A SOUL FOR YOU?
Suzy
shook her head. “I want a puppy.”
CHILD,
IN TRUTH THIS WISH I CANNOT GRANT. MY JOB HAS BEEN TO BRING PEACE AND
LEAD SOULS INTO THE AFTERLIFE, NOTHING MORE. IF I WERE TO CREATE A
HOUND FOR YOU, IT WOULD BE FORMED OF BONE AND SOUL ALONE.
Suzy
thought for a second. She would have liked to have a nice fluffy
puppy, but then she remembered how Aunt Marge’s Sphinx cat was still
nice, even without fur.
“No
fur is fine, as long as they don’t bite and make a mess.”
Anubis
nodded, and raised a hand. Underneath his palm an intricate symbol
appeared on the floor. It glowed bright, and the floorboards burst
apart. Up sprang a massive skeletal dog, bigger than suzy herself.
Its eye sockets held blue flame, and its jaw hang partly open in a
perpetual grin. It slowly walked over to Suzy and nuzzled her.
“What
does it eat?”
IT
WILL NOT NEED SUSTENANCE, AND WANTS NOTHING MORE THAN TO SERVE ITS
NEW MASTER. I HOPE THIS WILL SUFFICE.”
“I
love it. Thank you, Anubis.”
Anubis
looked slightly taken aback, but nodded peacefully.
FAREWELL
FOR NOW, SUZY OF THE MILLERS. IF YOU EVER NEED ANYTHING ELSE YOU HAVE
BUT TO ASK ME.
Suzy
nodded, and ran over to her parents’ room to show them her new dog.
She was pretty sure they couldn’t object to this pet.
The Archery Range 