4 February 2005 (25 Shvat 5765)
Although there are correlations between physical, intellectual and emotional maturity, the third one seems to be the hardest to attain and require more conscious efforts. There are more or less objective and reliable means to measure physical and intellectual maturity, but it is not easy to quantify the degree of emotional maturity. I have found at least one fairly accurate way of guessing how mature we, including myself, are emotionally. It is according to how we react to nonemotional, nonmalicious criticisms by others directed at what we can theoretically control and change by ourselves, especially, our behaviors, vis-à-vis things we cannot theoretically change such as our places of birth.
I have noticed the following four types of reactions in such a situation: 1) you react emotionally not only to the criticisms but also to the people who made them; 2) you react emotionally only to their criticisms; 3) you accept their criticisms without being emotional but do nothing special with them; 4) you thank those who criticized you and try to incorporate their criticisms into your behaviors.
The gap lying between the first two and the last two is huge and essential. I think that receiving constructive criticisms about our behaviors is one of the most efficient ways as the first step in going up the ladder of emotional maturity. It is therefore important to have one or a few close friends who can not only criticize us constructively but be sure that we do not get angry with them and can still remain their friends. But in order to have such friends and benefit from their criticisms, we have to move from the second stage to the third mentioned above by ourselves since no one can truly change us yet at that stage; only we ourselves can make a decision to change ourselves.
I think it is extremely important that if we are to criticize others, we should guarantee them the right to criticize us, too, i.e., there must be a theoretical possibility of mutual criticisms. Of course, I am fully aware that language is imperfect and problematic as a means of expressing our thoughts and emotions, but we have no better tool. Pessimists may say that it is better to avoid using it, but being an optimist in this respect, I think it is a much healthier approach to try to make the best use of this imperfect tool. To suppress our emotions and avoid expressing them verbally is to store a dangerous quantity of seismological energy that is liable to cause far more damage than do smaller, more frequent earthquakes.
Unfortunately, I still have a long way to go to reach the fourth stage, but fortunately, I have a couple of friends who are ready to make criticisms of negative behaviors of mine.
11 February 2005 (2 Adar I 5765)
As long as some technology remains in the possession of geeks, we can learn its undocumented details and new developments even by simply watching our peers. But once it becomes a possession of the masses, the majority of people who are neither geeks themselves nor have any friends or acquaintances who are geeks are simply left out of a network that could keep them informed and updated.
The World Wide Web is a good example of such popularization of technology and the concomitant overall decline in the average knowledge about it. This applies not only to web publishing but even to web browsing. I have already stopped expecting websites that are well structured in accordance with web standards and usability. Even among sites by academics good ones are few and far between - probably only one out of one hundred or even less. Although I think that web publishing is one of the three revolutions, in addition to the invention of writing and the invention of movable type, in terms of the dissemination of written information, this should not mean that every Tom, Dick and Harry should feel ready to start publishing online without knowing anything about web standards.
Web publishing is nevertheless still restricted to less netizens than web browsing. Using the Internet without browsing websites is almost a self-contradiction now. In spite of this, or probably because of this, so many people are not aware of new technologies. I am sorry to see many people, even among my friends and acquaintances, wasting a lot of time (even before wasting their time on contents) for two reasons. The first is their continued use of an inefficient dinosaur called Internet Explorer, because of inertia and/or for lack of knowledge, when there are much better alternatives such as Firefox. The second is visiting each website individually to check if it has been updated. I may not be so exceptional among veteran netizens in that I have about 900 bookmarks and visit about 20-30 websites on a daily or at least weekly basis. If I have to check them one by one only by actually visiting them, it will be an enormous waste of my time, which, of course, I do not do as I have a more efficient way.
Personally, I consider the so-called content syndication the single most important technology on the web, except for the invention of the web itself. I think that every site that is updated periodically should syndicate itself with the so-called RSS (RDF Site Summary), RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom feed for the benefit of its visitors. Although there are a growing number of commercial, public and even personal sites that use this crucial technology, there still remain a nonsignificant number of important commercial sites such as newspapers that fail to do so, thus forcing us to waste our time to check their updates individually. Incidentally, I started syndicating my own website in September 2003.
The first (and probably the last) question new (and oldtime) users of RSS/Atom feeds ask themselves is which feed aggregator to use for this purpose. They have the following four main types of choices: 1) web-based aggregators, 2) standalone aggregators (generally using the rendering engine of a browser), 3) aggregator plugins/extensions to browsers, 4) mailers as aggregators. The first has the advantage that you can check the feeds you subscribe to anywhere, but it is inconvenient to be forced to log in every time. The second requires you to waste an extra (for me redundant) process in that you use a separate tool other than your default browser. Until quite recently I thought the fourth - I used Thunderbird for this purpose - would be the best solution, but for the same reason that applies to the second, i.e., because you use a broswer anyway after receiving feeds, it does not seem so efficient. So my choice, at least as of this writing, is the third. Since the feed aggregator is seemlessly integrated with your browser, you do not have to waste your time as in the other three options. Unfortunately, there are not so many aggregator plugins yet for the browser I have been using - Firefox. For the time being, I am using Sage though it is rather limited in functionality, at least in its present version.
18 February 2005 (9 Adar I 5765)
Although the 22nd Jerusalem International Book Fair, which was held this week, was a disappointment, it helped me reaffirm one sociolinguistic fact that had been clear to me (and to many others) - the special status of English literacy in Israel (and probably in many other parts of the world). The dominance of Hebrew books, both academic and popular, displayed in the book far was of course self-explanatory. What drew my attention was the nature of English books. Those in other languages, including German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Polish, were mostly nonacademic, hence apparently for general readers with literacy in respective languages as their mother tongue or second language. About half of the English books were academic ones dealing with a wide variety of subjects not confined to the culture of one specific language. All this must be a reflection of economic calculation, i.e., there are a sufficient number of people who read books in English as a (or the) language of science.
I know that there are two groups of people, some of whom are researchers and sometimes linguists, who take extreme positions about English: on the one hand, those who denounce English as the main cause of what they call "linguistic imperialism", and on the other, those who naively praise English. I have neither of the extreme emotional reaction to the dominance of English in our age, nor do I want to waste my time arguing for or against it. It is simply a fact of life for me. I think that lack of active literacy and oracy in English is a severe intellectual handicap for anyone who engages him- or herself in any academic pursuit, but on the other hand, I do not think that we non-native speakers of English should deify English and its speakers. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad in this language; it simply happens to have the strongest power and influence in the known history of our race.
25 February 2005 (16 Adar I 5765)
As far as sarcasm, my innate language, is concerned, I have three mentors: Groucho Marx, Woody Allen and my good old friend Jack Halpern. All of them happen to be Jewish and are steeped in the cultural legacy of East European Jewry, which probably distinguishes itself from the other Jewries in its sarcasm. Although I know that not everyone in Israel has sense of humor in general and of sarcasm in particular and is of East European origin, just as not everyone in Japan is a master of judo or karate, I tend to forget this.
I am therefore surprised to see people with no sense of humor here in Israel. In Japan I got used to the fact that many of my students did not react to my jokes at all, party because they did not find it polite to laugh in class, and party because they often did not understand my jokes "tainted" with Jewish flavor or sometimes did not even notice that I told them jokes at all. But if this happens in Israel, I naturally try to find reasons for it not elsewhere but in myself and the lack of sophistication of my jokes. Sadly, however, I already know that even in Israel there are (a minority of) people who simply never laugh nor have any facial expressions at all. Not only am I really scared by such people, especially in my university courses in Israel, but also am I afraid that they are very dangerous to themselves in that they have no built-in mechanism to deactivate bombs in themselves before they explode.
One of the many things I liked about my late grandmother, who passed away on 16 May 2003, is the fact that she never stopped being optimistic and laughing, even in her last years when she was bed-ridden. When she was still healthy, her words were often very harsh, if not sarcastic, because she often told people the unvarnished truth they were not always ready to face. But in the end they appreciated the sincere words she said with optimistic and encouraging smiles, and they loved and respected her dearly. I really miss her and her smiling face that is deeply engraved in my memory.