Monday 12 July 2021

arrivederci, fed04.17

Se oggi la situazione è complessa, non c’è ragione di credere che invece fosse semplice nel passato.

So why Italian? Sure it’s a beautiful language but isn’t Mandarin (Arabic, French, or even German) more widely spoken and, therefore, more useful?

In my book, the beauty of Italian trumps the perceived usefulness of German. But, if it’s not enough, there are many more reasons to learn this language and its history. Look no further than this fantastic MOOC (or its little sister) to discover, indeed, why Italian. By a telling coincidence, I finished this course yesterday, just as Italy defeated England in the Euro 2020 finals.

L’italiano nel mondo is a complete opposite of Italian Language and Culture. No unconvincing skits with pretend students. No silly examples that nobody ever uses. And no English spoken whatsoever. This ten-week course is offered by Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (FedericaX) and presented by Nicola De Blasi, professor of Italian linguistics at the said university. Here’s the syllabus:

    Lezione 1 — Italiano lingua internazionale
    Lezione 2 — Italiano nel cinema e nel teatro
    Lezione 3 — Italiano nel mondo contemporaneo
    Lezione 4 — Geografia dell’italiano
    Lezione 5 — Le origini dell’italiano
    Midterm Exam
    Lezione 6 — L’italiano ai tempi di Dante e di San Francesco
    Lezione 7 — L’italiano nuova lingua di cultura
    Lezione 8 — Italiano e dialetti
    Lezione 9 — Le innovazioni dell’italiano
    Lezione 10 — La continuità dell’italiano
    Final exam

Each lesson contains two short-ish (7—8 minutes) videolectures, each followed by a reading, and, starting from Lesson 3, very simple self-evaluation. For those who do this course “for real”, there are also midterm exam and final exam; not for freeloaders like me though.

The videolectures feature little more than a “talking head” of Prof. De Blasi. Most of the time, he is sitting in the nice surroundings, usually with bookshelves behind him, and uses no other props than (physical) books when he is talking. Kind of old school; I like it. (I also would like, one day, sit at the table like that, on my own, and lecture to the world; or maybe just sit at the table like that. Never mind.)

Curiously, up to the Week 6 all the videos have both Italian and English subtitles. Starting the Week 6, English subtitles have disappeared. Not that I needed them too much: I found that I understand about 70% of what De Blasi says without them, and then there is Italian transcript that I can use. Still, I duly informed the course staff about that and got a prompt response:

Hello,

thank you for your feedback. We try to make every course available in other languages as well, but this one is completely in Italian and we are working on the English translation that we hope we'll put up as soon as possible. Meanwhile you can find a shorter version in English at this link: https://www.edx.org/course/italian-language-around-the-world

Happy learning,

FedericaX Team

I followed the link and discovered that Italian Language around the world is a five-week course which, most likely, just uses the videos of the first five weeks of L’italiano nel mondo. Oh well.

The readings, also in Italian of course, build on the lectures and provide the visual support that, one may feel, is missing from the videos. For example:

The language, academic it may seem, is easy enough to understand. And if not, Google Translate is doing a decent job, apart from the moments where some examples of mediaeval Italian are given. On more than one occasion, Google Translate helpfully suggested to switch to Corsican.

Thursday 6 May 2021

ci vediamo, Italian1x

A few years ago, I started Italian Language and Culture: Beginner by WellesleyX only to abandon it after a week or so. This year, I decided to have another go at it.

This course is said to be “a new iteration of our course Italian Language and Culture: Beginner (2019—2020)”. In reality, a lot of material dates from much earlier time.

Friday 16 April 2021

this is the extent of serendipity

According to Wikipedia, Charles J. Pedersen (1904—1989) “is one of the few people to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences without having a PhD”. Pedersen received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987, twenty years after he published his classic paper on crown ethers [1].

Revisiting his work for Current Contents® (remember them?), he wrote [2]:

In 1961, at age 57, I began to study the effects of uni- and multidentate phenolic ligands on the catalytic properties of the VO group. The desired ligands, up to and including the quadridentate, had been synthesized. Now, the quinquedentate ligand, bis[2-(o-hydroxyphenoxy)ethyl] ether, was to be prepared by reacting a catechol derivative containing a protected hydroxyl (contaminafed with 10 percent catechol) with bis(2-chloroethyl) ether. The expected quinquedentate ligand was obtained, but nature lent a hand to provide the hexadentate dibenzo-18-crown-6 in 0.4 percent yield. This is the extent of serendipity.
Other crown ethers were synthesized, and when their unique properties had been determined, an exhilarating period of research was inaugurated: every successful experiment produced a significantly novel result.
The crown ethers might have been stillborn in another environment. They were discovered in the Elastomer Chemicals Department of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, but what had they to do with elastomets? Moreover, the small amount of the byproduct might have been tossed out or disregarded as something other than the desired product. However, with the support of the top departmental management (C.J. Harrington, A.S. Carter, H.E. Schroeder, and R. Pariser), I worked independently with these compounds for nearly eight years. During the period leading to the paper, my sole coworker was T.T. Malinowski, a laboratory technician. I also had the resources of the analytical groups and the chance to consult with anyone on the technical staff of the company.
The editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Gates Marshall, wrote of the manuscript: “You are clearly reporting a monumental piece of work...” But he complained that the experimental section “...looked as though it had been copied verbatim from a laboratory notebook.” He contributed to the frequency of citation by allowing two unusual features in the paper: length (20 pages) and a new system of nomenclature (crown) for identifying compounds whose official names boggle the mind.

I don’t know about you but I find all this astounding. A guy sans Ph.D. is allowed to work for eight years on something that has nothing to do with his company’s products. Two years before his retirement, he publishes a single-author experimental paper on synthesis and characterisation of 33 cyclic polyethers, plus proposes the new nomenclature system for crown ethers that we still use today. It is as if the management knew he’s gonna win the Nobel and just let him work toward it.

References

  1. Pedersen, C.J. (1967) Cyclic polyethers and their complexes with metal salts. Journal of the American Chemical Society 89, 7017—7036.
  2. Pedersen, C.J. This Week’s Citation Classic. Current Contents®, no. 32, August 12, 1985, p. 18.

Monday 15 February 2021

what’s the matter

In high school (1981—1983) I was taught that (physical) matter (материя) (1) consists of substance (вещество) and energy (энергия). However, in the English-speaking world matter (2) is usually understood as something that has mass (more precisely, rest mass) and occupies space. It does not include photons or waves. So, matter (2) is the same as substance. I find the concept of matter (1) useful for it allows us to talk about conservation of matter even when there is no conservation of mass as, for example, in nuclear reactions.

In Soviet times, the definition of matter (3) that we all were supposed to know by heart was the one given by Lenin in the Chapter II of his 1909 book «Материализм и эмпириокритицизм» (Materialism and Empirio-criticism):

Материя есть философская категория для обозначения объективной реальности, которая дана человеку в ощущениях его, которая копируется, фотографируется, отображается нашими ощущениями, существуя независимо от них.
Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.

Now Lenin’s concept of matter does not include dark matter and dark energy whose existence is postulated to explain certain cosmological hypotheses. Quite apart from the fact that Lenin did not know about them, neither dark matter nor dark energy can be observed (that’s why they are “dark”) and thus are not given us in our sensations. Of course, that could change in future. But, for the time being and for most practical applications, matter (1) is pretty much equivalent to Lenin’s matter (3).

Here’s an anecdote that my mum told me on a few occasions. Back in her student days, she also had to take an oral exam on “diamat” (диамат; short for dialectical materialism). The standard practice was, upon entering the examination room, to draw a “ticket” (билет), i.e. a slip of paper with the questions. So she took her “ticket” and sat down at a desk.

A student being examined at that very moment was finding himself in hot water. Not just any student: one of the top students of her class.

“Well, my friend, maybe you should come again another time, when you are better prepared”, the professor eventually suggested.

The student did not object. He got up and headed towards the exit. To the professor’s surprise, my mum also got up and began to pack.

“And where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“Home.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know anything. Will come back when I am better prepared.”
“Nonsense!” cried the professor. “You must know something if you came to this exam.”
“But I know that I don’t.”
“Are you Socrates or something?”
“No, but...”
“Are you telling me you don’t even know the Lenin’s definition of matter?”
“Why, of course I do know that.”
“Kindly tell us.”

And so she did. “Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality” and so on and so forth.

“See?” said the professor. “Everybody look at her. She says she doesn’t know anything but she knows when I ask the question. Where’s your grade book?”

A grade book (зачётная книжка, or «зачётка») contained the record of exams and scores throughout the student’s university life.

“Here, your five.” (“Five”, or “excellent”, was the top score.) “And you”, he turned to the first student who, by some reason, still was hanging around, “you’re coming back another time.”