conversation

On the purity of science careers; the waste of civilization and other assorted snippets... and a happy Feast of St Nikolaus The Rise of the Science Politician - Matt B. continues provocative Conversations. There is an interesting thread on this on The Astronomers fb. On The Inevitability of Kardashev Civilizations - the Astro Wright continues to lay the ground work for some fun speculation Waste Heat: Parametrizing Alien Civilizations - the Astro Wright series continues with a reformulation of the Drake Equation appropriate to K3 civs. What Do We Want Graduate School To Be? - astrobites…
Talking with someone comes so naturally that we forget sometimes how skilful it is. Rhythms of conversation and cues of grammar need to be judged so that people can take their turns at talking without cutting off their partner or without leaving pregnant pauses. The former is rude, the latter awkward. That's certainly how things are usually conducted in English, but a new study suggests that this pattern of turn-taking  applies across human cultures. By studying 10 languages from all over the world, Tanya Stivers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics discovered a universally…