There’s a Dell one and a Sun one
And a Blue one and a Compaq one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all run just the same.
One patient’s account of depression lifted by electrodes. (Cited by SciTech Daily.)
Greg Cochran, whom I once knew slightly, is mentioned in The Economist for his theory that the high rate of neural disorders among Ashkenazi Jews is a result of natural selection for intelligence. (Also cited by SciTech Daily.)
Latin ecce, Italian ecco, Russian vot, French voilà, Esperanto jen — the nearest English equivalent I can think of is lo!, which is not in most bilingual dictionaries, for the same reason English-speakers know the word voilà. So how do I look up such a word in my English-Spanish dictionary?
Comments are always open: can you add to (or correct) the list?
Why can’t the English learn to speak?
Got an idea just now that might sell a few copies: Monty Python Annotated for Americans, containing answers to such questions as “What dialect is Palin doing in this bit?”
This thought was prompted by watching My Fair Lady. In the first scene where Higgins shows his phonetic jottings to Eliza, I obviously had to pause, and found that I could read it no better than she could; most of the characters look like International Phonetic Alphabet, but if so they’re a nonsensical jumble – and what’s the alveolar click doing in Covent Garden? “Ha!” my housemate snorts. “They couldn’t find anyone who could put together the real thing?” They rarely do, of course, but this was a major production. . . Later I learn that it’s not IPA but an older scheme, the Visible Speech of A.M.Bell.
Adventures of Mr Coo, a wacky bit of Flash animation from Basque-land. (Cited by JoAnne Schmitz.)
At Languagehat, some interesting brief remarks on the Belgian aristocracy’s efforts to seem less alien to Flanders.
Warren Meyer on why libertarians write blogs (cited by Arnold Kling)
I’m sneezing up a storm today, and the good old allergy pill hasn’t helped. I do hope it’s not the same virus that afflicted my housemate for two weeks last month.
Who is the center of the movie universe? Kevin Bacon is not even in the top thousand. Rod Steiger has the lowest total path length. But would the result be different if actors were weighted by some measure of prominence (e.g. number of credits)?
It’s annoying to find a crank on our side. Rex Curry has for some time been documenting the sordid history of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, and bully for him; but lately he’s gone a bit nuts in his efforts to demonstrate that the Nazi swastika stands for Socialism, frequently citing sources that, like this, show the word Sieg or Sieg-rune (symbol of victory, appropriate to any flavor of statism) but not Sozialismus; and here he reads a scribbled Adolf as another S-rune (standing for Sozialist, since no other German word begins with S) despite the wiggly remnants of the original letters and the cross-stroke of the f. Rex, a few pieces of unambiguous evidence – which are probably somewhere in among the chaff – would be far more effective than this farrago.
I lived in Los Angeles for three years without ever knowing how to get to the Hollywood Sign. And speaking of views from on high, every time I fly to Chicago (come to think of it, the last time was quite a few years ago) I look for Fermilab, but I’ve never spotted a buffalo.
Aaron Krowne should stick to mathematics rather than writing absurdities like this:
The H1-B program has allowed companies hiring software engineers to pay less for more engineers by running to the government for help.
As if there were no migration in a state of nature! It would be more accurate to say that the Immigration Acts (in which you’ll find the H-1B program) allow skilled natives to get paid more by running to the government to restrict supply. This incidentally reduces the wages of similar workers in other countries, giving foreign employers a price advantage (to the extent that their products are able to enter the market).
Ron Paul’s remarks on the war, to the House
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Sheldon Richman on the “Minuteman Project”:
. . . this “citizens’ neighborhood watch along our border” looks for foreigners who, by and large, are seeking better, more-productive lives for themselves and their children. The self-appointed American border guards inform the authorities when they find any. This strikes me as most out of keeping with the heritage of a country born in revolution, devoted to individual freedom, and skeptical of political power. The irony is that these Americans claim to be acting in the tradition of the original Minutemen, those brave early Americans who were always ready to engage the British forces during the struggle for independence.
I called a locksmith today and he said he recognized my voice’s “heavy tone” from a previous job. I wonder whether that’s a translation of a Chinese idiom. Perhaps my voice was gravelly, as it sometimes is in the early morning.
I sing baritone, and that word comes from Greek bary- ‘heavy’, though you’d think the metaphor would apply better to a basso profondo.