A blog, and a telephone game for the classroom

This is the first post. The site has a blog now: somewhere for the occasional note or book review, but also a running record of what changes around here, so updates don't just vanish into the commit history.

The first thing worth recording is over on the teaching pages. I've been building playable versions of classic experiments, and the newest is a live, in-class transmission chain — a telephone game. It's a working version of Esper's 1966 study of an artificial language: each student learns made-up names for eight shape-and-colour figures, reproduces them from memory, and their version becomes the language the next student has to learn. Run a few chains in parallel and you can watch a vocabulary that starts out arbitrary drift, generation by generation, toward something with regular structure. A handful of other replications from the philosophy of language — Brown and Lenneberg, Heider on focal colours, Gilbert on belief, the conceptual-inflation study — are collected in the same place.

It's built for the classroom, but the experiments are open if you want to try one. More to come.