3 Links: SOPA law won't make the judicial cut; how to learn eleven languages; and why Chinese football sucks

US courts unlikely to give SOPA a pass even if Congress does

Today marks a massive, internet-wide protest against two internet censorship bills currently before the US Congress: SOPA and PROTECT-IP. Wikipedia has blacked out its English language website, Google has blacked out its ubiquitous logo, and even that venerable bastion of cute cats on the internet has joined the protest.

At this point it looks like no legislator in their right mind would touch these bills with a ten-foot-pole. House sponsors are already ripping out some of the most offensive and dangerous provisions of SOPA and the Senate looks all set to kill their version of the bill with procedural 'discussions' that will probably lead exactly nowhere. On top of all this, the Whitehouse has voiced its disapproval.

But suppose, just suppose that somehow SOPA or something very like it were to pass both houses of Congress and be signed off by the President. Would the bill have a chance against the inevitable legal challenges that would follow?

Ars Technica says no: the courts have already spent a decade shooting down a similarly over-broad censorship law called the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA:

From the get-go, the case did not go well for the government. A judge for the Eastern District easily saw matters from the plaintiffs' perspective. COPA would deny access to legitimate content to adults who did not possess credit cards, and put serious interactive content behind verification walls, he noted.

"Evidence presented to this Court is likely to establish at trial that the implementation of credit card or adult verification screens in front of material that is harmful to minors may deter users from accessing such materials and that the loss of users of such material may affect the speakers' economic ability to provide such communications," Justice Lowell A. Reed wrote in a preliminary injunction against the law.

In addition, Reed challenged the legislation's insistence that it was the least burdensome approach to the problem. He invoked a crucial Supreme Court decision to bolster his argument—the "least restrictive means" standard outlined in Elrod v. Burns (1973): "If the State has open to it a less drastic way of satisfying its legitimate interests, it may not choose a legislative scheme that broadly stifles the exercise of fundamental personal liberties."

It is "not apparent" to this court that the government can prove that COPA is the least restrictive means available for protecting minors from objectionable content on the 'Net, Reed concluded.

Read the whole thing.

Are there really people who know dozens of languages?

Journalist slash linguist Michael Erard has written a book about his efforts to track down some of those legendary individuals who supposedly speak eleven, twelve or even dozens of languages - fluently.

CARDINAL MEZZOFANTI of Bologna was a secular saint. Though he never performed the kind of miracle needed to be officially canonised, his power was close to unearthly. Mezzofanti was said to speak 72 languages. Or 50. Or to have fully mastered 30. No one was certain of the true figure, but it was a lot. Visitors flocked from all corners of Europe to test him and came away stunned. He could switch between languages with ease. Two condemned prisoners were due to be executed, but no one knew their language to hear their confession. Mezzofanti learned it in a night, heard their sins the next morning and saved them from hell.

 Thus begins a very interesting piece from The Economist.

Mr Erard says that true hyperpolyglottery begins at about 11 languages, and that while legends abound, tried and tested exemplars are few. Ziad Fazah, raised in Lebanon and now living in Brazil, once held the Guinness world record for 58 languages. But when surprised on a Chilean television show by native speakers, he utterly flubbed questions in Finnish, Mandarin, Farsi and Russian (including “What day is it today?” in Russian), a failure that lives in infamy on YouTube. Perhaps he was a fraud; perhaps he simply had a miserable day. Hyperpolyglots must warm up or “prime” their weaker languages, with a few hours’ or days’ practice, to use them comfortably. Switching quickly between more than around six or seven is near-impossible even for the most gifted.

 OK, so eleven languages might be less impressive than fifty but most us stumble badly when it comes to picking up even one extra language. Does Mr. Erard figure the key to hyperpolyglottery?

At the end of his story, however, he finds a surprise in Mezzofanti’s archive: flashcards. Stacks of them, in Georgian, Hungarian, Arabic, Algonquin and nine other tongues. The world’s most celebrated hyperpolyglot relied on the same tools given to first-year language-learners today. The conclusion? Hyperpolyglots may begin with talent, but they aren’t geniuses. They simply enjoy tasks that are drudgery to normal people. The talent and enjoyment drive a virtuous cycle that pushes them to feats others simply shake their heads at, admiration mixed with no small amount of incomprehension.

The whole thing is here.

Why a country of 1.6 billion people can't produce a decent football (soccer) team

This is one of those simple questions with answers that have profound implications. Chinese people love football. There are 1.6 billion Chinese people. Why can't China produce a single star player? Why is their national team a national joke?

One more from The Economist:

In a country so proud of its global stature, football is a painful national joke. Perhaps because Chinese fans love the sport madly and want desperately for their nation to succeed at it, football is the common reference point by which people understand and measure failure. When, in 2008, milk powder from the Chinese company Sanlu was found to have been tainted with melamine, causing a national scandal, the joke was: “Sanlu milk, the exclusive milk of the Chinese national football team!”

Everyone is free to take aim, and publicly. When China was dispatched 2-0 by Belgium in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing (pictured above), a presenter on national CCTV said: “The Chinese football team decided to get out quickly, so as not to affect the people’s mood while they watch the Olympics.” Chinese fans chanted for the ouster of the head of China’s Football Association, Xie Yalong. The authorities sacked Mr Xie shortly after the games.

All this hints at something rather unique and powerful about the place of football in Chinese society. It is, like all organised sport in China, ultimately the domain of the government; so, according to the Communist Party’s normal methods, senior football officials should be provided at least some protection from scrutiny. In general the secretive state machinery of sport is shielded from public inspection, as it manufactures medal-winning Olympic athletes in dozens of disciplines. Chinese football, though, is so flagrantly and undeniably terrible and corrupt that all potshots are allowed: at officials, referees, owners and players—even, implicitly, at the heart of the communist system itself.

Solving the riddle of why Chinese football is so awful becomes, then, a subversive inquiry. It involves unravelling much of what might be wrong with China and its politics. Every Chinese citizen who cares about football participates in this subversion, each with some theory—blaming the schools, the scarcity of pitches, the state’s emphasis on individual over team sport, its ruthless treatment of athletes, the one-child policy, bribery and the corrosive influence of gambling. Most lead back to the same conclusion: the root cause is the system.

To find out why The Economist thinks that a country that is able to virtually mine gold medals at the Olympic Games can't master a team sport, you should read the whole thing.