Language Matters

On February 18, I went to a screening of the film Language Matters at City Lore, a gallery on East 1st Street on New York City. The film focused on three places in the world with dying languages: the top end of Australia, Wales, and Hawaii. In all these places, English has taken over and the original languages are at risk. There are over 6,000 languages in the world, and about half of them are expected to die out by the end of this century. Watching Language Matters inspired me to learn more languages.

Flyer from the event

English, Spanish, and other world-dominant languages began to replace other languages during the era of colonization. The schools established in colonized areas were generally taught in English only, and children were often forbidden or even punished for speaking their first language. The prohibition against speaking indigenous languages resulted in people speaking more and more English.

In Wales, any child caught speaking Welsh in school was forced to wear a sign called a "Welsh Not" around their neck, and at the end of the day, the child would be punished by a whipping. In Hawaii and Australia, similar efforts were made to force students to speak only English, and most of the time the efforts worked. Children stopped speaking their first language and stopped passing it down to their own children. The language then died a slow death, and the set of knowledge that went along with it disappeared too.

Now the era of colonization is essentially over, and people are starting to make efforts to preserve their languages. In Wales and Hawaii, there are schools for children that are taught only in Welsh or Hawaiian respectively. In Australia, schools are still taught in English, but the elders of many villages where the original languages are still spoken are making sure the languages will be passed on by teaching them to all the children. In all three areas covered in Language Matters, song was used to pass on language and culture.

Another valuable way to preserve a language is by writing it down and making a record of it, and that is the job of ethnographers and linguists. Having a written record of a language is both helpful to science and to the people who speak the language. In the past, scientists often took from cultures without giving back, as in the case of Minik and Robert Peary, but today scientists try to create mutually-beneficial relationships.

Mono-linguistic society is a new concept. In the past, people were generally multilingual.  Each language offers its own unique way of viewing the world, and in losing languages, we lose diversity of thought.

The words of a language provide windows for us to see the world through.

Cyanotype Printing Experiment (somewhat successful)

Last week I went to a program for teens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art about photography. At first I was a little nervous about this workshop. Photography is not really my thing, and the only photos I take are for this blog. But then, I found out that part of the workshop was on the science of photo preservation. Once I found that out, I started to get excited. "Science," I thought "Yes, I can do this!"

My original cyanotype

In the photo preservation class, we made cyanotype prints. This printing process was invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842 when he realized that ferric (iron) salts, in combination with some other salts, could be reduced to a ferric state by exposing them to ultraviolet light. In this state, the salts could be used to create a blue and white image. In that same century, Anna Atkins published the first ever book with photographs, instead of drawn illustrations, using cyanotype prints of algae.

Cyanotype in sodium bicarbonate

I used lace, a feather, printed napkins, ribbons, and a leaf to make a design for my print. Cyanotypes can be exposed using sunlight, but in my class we used a UV ray machine since we were in a photography lab, and it happened to be late afternoon on a winter day when UV rays would be insufficient.

The bleached cyanotype

Cyanotypes have a blue background and white images. However I did not want my print to be just plain blue and white. Luckily one of the cool things about cyanotypes is that they can be bleached using sodium carbonate, or sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and then dyed a new color with tea or coffee. The sodium carbonate or bicarbonate breaks down the iron so that the tannin in the dye can latch on more easily.

Cyanotype in the tea

I used sodium bicarbonate to bleach my print. The fact that sodium carbonate and bicarbonate bleach cyanotypes shows that base environments are not good for storing photographs, as they might fade the photos.

The dyed cyanotype.
Not exactly what I envisioned.

After bleaching my cyanotype, I soaked it in black tea for about 24 hours. The dying process did not go as well as I planned as the whole paper turned brown, not just the background.

Well, I guess I'll just have to try again to see if I can get a nice brown and white print!

The Real Reason McDonald's Burgers Don't Rot

Have you ever heard the myth that McDonald's hamburgers don't rot because they are full of dangerous chemicals? Well, I recently read an article by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt which shows that while McDonald's does not supply great food, there is no reason to believe their burgers and buns have anymore chemicals than the burgers and buns at an ordinary supermarket.

Barely any mold grew on these dry potato flakes

  J. Kenji Lopez-Alt made a homemade burger roughly the same size as a standard McDonald's burger and kept them both in the open air right next to each other for 25 days. Neither burger rotted because they both dried out! Since living organisms can't survive without water, it's no surprise that mold didn't grow. The faulty conclusion in previous experiments with McDonald's food that just won't decompose is due to bad experimental procedure that was all experiment with no control.

These wet potato flakes exploded with mold

   I recently conducted a few experiments myself on what conditions are best for growing mold, and I found warm, dark, and moist locations are far superior to dry, light ones. So it's no wonder that two relatively small burgers left out in the open dried out before mold had any chance to grow.

   J. Kenji Lopez-Alt also conducted another experiment where he kept both a McDonald's burger and a homemade burger in sealed plastic bags. This time both burgers rotted because the plastic trapped the moisture.

   While there are still countless reasons to dislike McDonald's and assume that their food is unhealthy, just read Fast Food Nation or watch Super Size Me, but the fact that their burgers don't rot isn't one of them.

Minik: The Lost Eskimo

Yesterday in my anthropology class at the American Museum of Natural History, I watched the film Minik: The Lost Eskimo. This film documented the story of five indigenous people the explorer Robert Peary brought from Greenland to New York City for study in the 1890s. The story is not a happy one, especially for the Minik and his family, but their story does mark the end of old anthropological methods and the beginning of modern ones.

Minik as a young boy in New York

All of the indigenous people died, except Minik and one twenty-three year old young man who was sent back to Greenland where he successfully re-joined his people.

Minik, however remained in New York under the care of the William Wallace who worked for the AMNH, and he was not able to return to Greenland until he had already lived most of his life in the US. Minik forgot his native language and he had a hard time re-connecting with his people. He longed for America and came back to the city. Minik was in a tough situation. He was an outsider both among his own people and in America.

Robert Peary

Minik's story illustrates the end of the age of the explorers like Peary and the end of the idea that the physical features of a group of people determines who they are. Today we know that someone's physical features do not determine the way they act, but in the 1800s and early 1900s even scientists believed that someone's physical body could determine their beliefs and actions.

I love learning about new advancements in any scientific field, but I also love to look back on the history of science and see how far we've come, in both scientific equipment and methods and in the way we think. Minik: The Lost Eskimo is a great film and it is only about an hour long. Anyone interested in history and science should check it out!