Procure @itater - Tumblr Blog

Anyway, do you guys want to see my Cool Rocks?

This is my grandfather’s rock. It is Probably a Garnet, which he mined out himself when he was in college studying to be a geologist.

Though you may assume this is a Small Rock, it is in fact a very Large Rock, and also a very Heavy Rock, but most especially a very Square Rock, which is what makes it particularly cool.

Here we have a rock which used to be a tree. This rock is petrified wood! It was one of my very first Cool Rocks!

Speaking of rocks that used to be things that were not rocks, this rock is Petoskey stone! This rock used to be a coral. Let’s get a good look at those patterns.

Now that’s a Cool Rock!

Amethyst? It’s an Okay Rock. If you are looking for an inexpensive rock to start your collection, amethyst is the way to go. It’s a quartz with a deep purple color. A very nice, if average, rock.

Now citrine… Citrine is a Cool Rock! It’s a smoky quartz with a lovely honey color. The druzy on my chunk of citrine has a wonderful sparkle.

This is my Amazonite! It grew that hexagon shape all by itself!! This specimen is from Colorado.

Look at this shiny little slice of rock! This rock is Tiger Iron, and those bands of red and orange glow beautifully with some light behind them. These different colored bands are made from Hematite (the dark silver), Jasper (the red-orange), and Tiger-Eye quartz (the yellow-orange).

Here’s a rock you’ve probably seen before! This Cool Rock is Malachite. The patterns and rings are from the stalagmites this little egg was carved from.

Whoa, look at this giant slab of Extremely Cool Rock!!! These crystals formed in the cracks of fossilized mud, to make the awesome patterns in this geode of Septarian! This is my second best rock.

This is my Best and most Favorite Cool Rock. In this dark room it’s a dull little grey rock, but if I move it closer to the light…

Those glints of gold! Those veins of blue! This rock is most certainly Labradorite, which changes color spectacularly when the light hits it just right. Let’s put it in direct sunlight.

Yes!! YES!! There it is!! The Best and Coolest Rock!!!!!

mrsklemzak

WHY Didn’t I BECOME A GEOLOGIST OR SOMETHING?!

fluffygif

This is genius

nonamenonewhatsoever

superlinguo

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

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.

bastlynn

Ok, this is just *super cool*.

And implies that gestures have grammar. I mean. Holy. Shit.

That would also imply language development early in the species could have been not just a mouth / lip / tongue thing but also a body language thing, or that body language (literally) may predate it. Just - fucking *cool*.