The time has come…Edition 3

• On Chomsky’s work on the origins of speech:
  

  An inquiry into speech origins could not have gone anywhere without Chomsky’s work, but re-reading him at this late date tells me it also would have gone nowhere had it stayed with his abstractions.

• What are the required elements of speech?
  

  Helping, sharing, wondering: these are the required elements if there is to be any speech at all.

• How writing affects our mental spatial representations? (Via)
  

  The fact that the children who couldn’t write didn’t show the bias, while adults educated in left-to-right and right-to-left writing systems showed opposite, language-consistent biases in agent placement strongly suggests that it is as a result of our writing system, and not the innate wiring of the brain, that our action representations are inherently spatial.

• A site to link, review and rate science videos!
• The discussion on the need for defects for super-flow in solid Helium continues (with some experiments suggesting that defect free crystals still show such flow bheaviour);
• Over at Bainite, Mathew Peet has a post of some notes of a talk by Mike Ashby on environmentally informed materials selection; and,
• Role of mathematics in understanding literature, music perception and selling jeans.

I will be Baak; in the meanwhile, happy reading!