February 2012
2 posts
December 2011
1 post
November 2011
4 posts
“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally...”
– Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Breakfast of Champions. (via neil-gaiman)
October 2011
1 post
“It’s probably natural, here in the 21st century, to fret over the future of...”
– Sam Anderson
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
2 posts
Are texting teens losing empathy skills? →
“Texting teens aren’t learning empathy skills, according to psychologist Gary Small, who spoke at a Hechinger Institute seminar on digital learning in California.”
Tai Viet →
The Tai Viet script is used for writing the Tai Dam, Tai Dón, Tai Daeng, Thai Song and Tày Tac languages spoken in Vietnam, Laos, China and Thailand.
May 2011
6 posts
Archaeological News: The Voynich Manuscript: will... →
archaeologicalnews:
A 15th-century manuscript is written in a language that has baffled every expert. Is it just a brilliant hoax, or will someone eventually decipher its meaning
Somewhere deep inside the bowels of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library – the Ivy League institution’s own cemetery of…
Archaeological News: Finding on Dialects Casts New... →
archaeologicalnews:
Researchers studying the various dialects of Japanese have concluded that all are descended from a founding language taken to the Japanese islands about 2,200 years ago. The finding sheds new light on the origin of the Japanese people, suggesting that their language is descended from that of the…
Lego Death Star Ornament →
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-4-24) →
The Mountain Goats (9)
Colin Meloy (5)
Weezer (4)
R.E.M. (4)
The Avett Brothers (3)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
April 2011
13 posts
Building the Freedom Press →
“I cut the bamboo gears with a CNC router. A few of the steel parts — namely the counter weight and head arms, as well as the FREEDOM text — I waterjet cut from 3D SolidWorks files. (I like SolidWorks because it lets me run the gears and get the tolerances perfect.) The steel frame is made out of 3” I-beam that I cut and welded together in my studio. I had to buy a...
Did the Sale of Pyrex Hurt the Crack-Cocaine... →
“Pyrex is valued by cooks for its sturdiness in the kitchen, particularly its ability to withstand rapid, dramatic temperature changes that typically shatter normal glassware. It turns out that people making crack cocaine valued this quality too.”
Todd Lamb Notes From Chris →
Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the... →
“It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”
Launching a 'Handmade in Michigan' tour →
So I’m inviting you to tell me about your favorite places to shop for handmade goods in Michigan, take summer workshops and see artists in action. Are there campgrounds with regularly scheduled craft nights? Which beekeeper harvests your favorite honey? Where is the beachfront art retreat you’re attending this summer? Who is your favorite Michigan artist? Do you make Michigan-themed goods?
March 2011
13 posts
languagehat.com: NAME THAT LANGUAGE! →
This is a fun game; a couple of sentences from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are read aloud in thirty languages and you enter your guesses in the boxes provided.
Aye Can - Scots language - Scottish Census 2011 →
Can you speak Scots?
As part of this year’s census people in Scotland will be asked to say if they can understand speak, read and / or write Scots.
Listening to people on this site speaking Scots will help you decide whether or not you are a Scots speaker.
You will also find examples of writing in Scots which can help you decide if you can read Scots.
The Corpus in the Court: 'Like Lexis on Steroids' →
The explaining power of “the dictionary” is often invoked in arguments and opinions (with the behemoths, Webster’s New International and the Oxford English Dictionary, favored at the Supreme Court level), but even unabridged dictionary definitions can never encompass the variety of real-life contexts for words as they make their way in the world. For that you need a corpus....
languagehat.com: DRUM LANGUAGE. →
European explorers had been aware for a long time that the irregular rhythms of African drums were carrying mysterious messages through the jungle. Explorers would arrive at villages where no European had been before and find that the village elders were already prepared to meet them.
February 2011
12 posts
1 tag
I can haz some new words for snow? →
So how about that? In a language where we’ve welcomed crazy words like autochthonous and lingerie, surely a couple new words for snø (Norwegian) would be welcomed by winter’s journalistic zeitgeist. Let’s get to it. And maybe next time you hear someone talk about “117 words for snow” … maybe they’ll just be talking about English.
bittertwee: Like many people, I was fascinated... →
bittertwee:
Like many people, I was fascinated with the fact that on Day 2 of his appearance on Jeopardry, Watson pretty much wiped the floor with our valiant human competitors, ending round 2 up by about 30,000 dollars. And then, with all the time in the world to process, he blew the final jeopardy…
It's 10:15 in Germany. Do You Know Where Your... →
If it’s 10:15 in the germanosphere (1), you’ll have at least four options of expressing that particular moment. Those four options are all regional variants, so that, in German, you can tell with some degree of certainty which general area someone hails from by the way they tell the time at quarter past ten
When I Grow Up
When I was a teenager my dad would laugh and ask me, “what are you going to do if you grow up?” I still don’t feel grown up at 36, and it’s still hard for me to decide sometimes what I want to do if it happens.
'Moby Dick' captain's ship found →
“To find the physical remains of something that seems to have been lost to time is pretty amazing,” said Nathaniel Philbrick, an author and historian, who has been researching the Two Brothers, the Essex and their captain. “It just makes you realise these stories are more than stories. They’re about real lives.”