2min chapter

Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes Thought

Long Now

CHAPTER

How to Speak a Language Like Kuktayur

In order to speak a language like this, you must stay oriented. So even to say hello in Kuktayur is in English, we say, how are you fine? And the answer should be something like north-northwest in the far distance. That is literally to get past hello. You have to know which way you're going. People who speak languages like this do have a great sense of direction. They are able to perform feats of navigation that we used to think were beyond human ability. We knew for a long time that animals, different kinds of animals, had orientation abilities that seemed to surpass human orientation abilities. Well, turns out there are people in the world who

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Speaker 4

It is weighing down a shelf currently it's in one of our backdrops it's a joy to roll but also you have to choose where you roll it very carefully because

Speaker 1

it is 20 pounds it's

Speaker 3

a weapon and you really don't want to drop it on your toe like it's a closed toed shoes only uh activity to roll it you

Speaker 1

need safety shoes to play dungeons and Dragons. Yes. What other stuff have you been working on? Because last time I saw you, it was out at Open Source in California. Which is a great event. Love it.

Speaker 4

We're

Speaker 3

working on, currently, and I don't know exactly when this is going live, but we're working on our annual pumpkin project where we try to preserve a carved pumpkin in resin forever it usually fails in some way which is why we keep doing it and trying new methods this is year five yeah this is year five i

Speaker 4

remember

Speaker 1

footage of you drilling into one of them afterwards and just having goo leak out which

Speaker 4

yes oh yeah yeah like they rot inside of the resin cages and they build up pressure, and we were worried that this one was going to explode. So we had to do a controlled release of the pressure. You had to do trepanation on a pumpkin. That's amazing.

Speaker 1

Yes. Well, very best of luck with the show today. You are joined by a new player to lateral. He is a mathematics fellow at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, and his YouTube channel is Tom Rocks Maths. He has just come back from travelling the world doing maths engagement. Tom Crawford, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2

Pleasure to be here, Tom. I've been looking forward to this ever since you followed me on Instagram about a year ago. So I don't know if I'm allowed to reveal that, but that's how

Speaker 1

we got in touch. It is lovely to have you on the show. Tell us about the travels. What have you been doing the last few months?

Speaker 2

Yeah, so I had a load of talk invitations in these far places and I figured I'm going to turn it into a whole trip. So I took a sabbatical, went and did a whole host of talks in 15 different countries, which was really fun. And attempted to write a book, but attempted being the key word because, you know, spending five months traveling around 15 countries doesn't leave much time for actual writing. Yes. So my editor's not very happy with that. But, you know, I loved the trip and the book has started. Which,

Speaker 1

to be honest, is more than most potential authors ever manage. I

Speaker 2

agree. I agree. I'm glad we're on the same team. The Toms have got each other's back.

Speaker 1

Have you been listening to Lateral? Is this a surprise to you or do you know what's coming?

Speaker 2

I have listened to a few episodes but I felt like given the vibe I got of the show, I think I'm probably better prepared having less an idea of what's going to happen.

Speaker 1

And the mathematics knowledge, looking at the questions that I can see in front of me, is not really going to help at all. So very best of luck to you and to all of our players. And as host of what your parents call that out-of show, it's my job to get us going. So let's rip open the parcel tape and unpack question one. In 1874, Gustave de Laval started his own company to manufacture bottles, using his technique of rapidly rotating molten glass instead of manual glassblowing. However, the business soon proved to be a financial failure. Why? And I'll give you that one more time. In 1874, Gustave de Laval started his own company to manufacture bottles, using his technique of rapidly rotating molten glass instead of manual glassblowing. However, the business soon proved to

Speaker 4

be a financial failure. Why?

Speaker 1

Caitlin

Speaker 4

and I have made small glass beads, so we have the very, like, we have one percent of knowledge about working with glass, which probably will do us no good to answer this question.

Speaker 2

I'm also thinking, interestingly, after Tom was telling me my math knowledge would not help, this to me sounds like a fluid dynamics problem. The way that, because the glass is going to, as I'm thinking, I'm picturing you're rotating it, it's going to spread out due to centripetal, centrifugal, Coriolis force, one of the rotational forces. It's going to cause it to spread out. This is what

Speaker 1

your PhD was in, right? Fluid dynamics? My

Speaker 2

PhD was in fluid dynamics, exactly, yeah. So you saying my maths knowledge wouldn't help, I don't think it answers the question, but it feels like it's relevant. Maybe.

Speaker 4

Now, I think the thing is, if everyone is doing it one way and this guy is doing it a different way, is it just that he can't get enough sourced parts? Like, not all of the standard components work for his method. So his method is just more expensive just because he's the only one doing it.

Speaker 3

Or if he has to put a lot of money into training employees to do it.

Speaker 4

Yeah, I mean, there's so many standard, non-twisty logic answers that

Speaker 1

come to mind. And I dismiss them out of hand because I'm like, it's too simple

Speaker 4

of an answer. Yes.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I can tell you that the new manufacturing process worked really

Speaker 2

well. So if it worked really well, it must have been really expensive. It must have cost so much that he couldn't have made any money from doing it.

Speaker 4

Or were his competitors jealous of him, so they've sabotaged him? So

Speaker 2

did the question tell us why he stopped? I've completely forgotten the question already. The business proved to be a

Speaker 1

financial failure. Okay, so it was, right.

Speaker 3

So it is something money-related. It failed financially, not functionally.

Speaker 1

Yes.

Speaker 3

Which, I mean, makes me think that there's something about the new method that just wasn't cost-effective. I don't know if for some reason you like go through more glass doing it that way. Like there would be more waste or something.

Speaker 1

At the risk of giving away the answer, I don't think you could be

Speaker 4

more wrong. Oh my God. Oh, so it's opposite made him too much money. It was too efficient with the use of glass? I

Speaker 3

mean, that's where my brain goes, but I don't understand.

Speaker 4

How can something be too efficient? I

Speaker 3

mean, maybe there's something in how... Oh, I have an idea. Oh, it's like water bottles. Okay, you know how to reduce the use of plastic, they made water bottles thinner and flimsier, and then people didn't like them. So was it more efficient with the use of glass? And then people like it didn't use as much glass per bottle. And so people didn't like the bottles as much because they didn't feel as like heavy and high quality. Or

Speaker 2

is it the size that it made? Maybe it could only make a certain size bottle. And everyone was so used to that, you know, it's like when you buy a bottle of Coke, a bottle of beer, there's a size, there's a certain shape and size that you're expecting. So maybe this method, like you're saying, gave something that felt different or had a different shape and therefore wasn't popular.

Speaker 1

It was very popular. These were great glass bottles. What

Speaker 4

he did is he made so many, so high quality, that he saturated the market, he flooded it, he took care of all of the glass bottle needs of his area, and then no one was buying any more glass bottles. It was the opposite of planned obsolescence. He did too good of a job, and he put himself out of business.

Speaker 1

Yes, right. He caused a collapse in the price of glass bottles. Yes.

Speaker 3

Oh my gosh. He was too good. He out-engineered himself.

Speaker 1

Yep. Because before then, every glass bottle had to be manufactured by a human making a bottle with glass blowing. And all of a sudden, actually, we don't need that anymore. We can just mass produce loads of them. And what's the key thing about glass bottles compared to, like, a lot of the stuff today? They're reusable. Yeah, they're reusable. They're reusable. Exactly right. So he filled the market with glass bottles, the price crashed, and suddenly the factory was no longer

Speaker 4

necessary.

Speaker 2

It's

Speaker 4

so exciting when you get the answer.

Speaker 2

It's actually basically the same story as, or you could say it's the same story as what has just happened with Tupperware, the company, right? They make these incredibly long-lasting, reusable plastic containers, and they've made them so good, nobody buys more Tupperware, so now the business has just come bankrupt.