Some people amuse themselves at inventing languages and scripts; that sport’s most famous player was of course Tolkien. And some avidly study whatever notes Tolkien left concerning his Elvish language family.

Tolkien invented at least three scripts: Sarati, an alphasyllabary; cirth, a full alphabet; and tengwar, used both as an alphasyllabary (in the Ring Verse) and as a full alphabet (on the West Gate of Moria). But in human history such scripts have been invented less often than syllabaries, in which no two of the symbols for ti ta ki ka are similar. (The alphabets listed are more numerous, but most of them are descended from the same Semitic ancestor and most of the alphasyllabaries from Brahmî.) So I wonder whether the T-linguists would be offended if one were to design a syllabary for Elvish.
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State control of the economy, maintaining the forms but not the substance of private property — isn’t that a definition of fascism?

I’ve been puzzled, by the way, at the argument that the Fifth Amendment allows takings only for ‘public use’. Seems to me the plain language of it restricts only such takings, leaving takings for private use wide open.

This post from Shanghai makes me wonder how widespread is the notion of counting sheep.

Miyazaki’s film (ハウルの動く城) of Diana Wynne Jones’s novel Howl’s Moving Castle is pretty, of course, but the story got lost somewhere. The royal sorceress has an unexplained grudge against Howl, an eccentric but kind young wizard with an unexplained reputation for crimes against beautiful girls; several people are afflicted by curses; and there’s a war on. But true love puts things right in the end. Okay, whatever.

WiReD summarizes the work of Kiwi maverick philosopher Peter Lynds:

His answers make the mathematics of space and time look strange. If instants don’t exist, then calculus – in which equations depend on fixed before-and-after positions in space – doesn’t accurately describe reality.

Er, what? How does calculus depend on fixed positions?

It’s surprising that I had not heard before of the mathematical sculptor Rinus Roelofs. His Möbius-double could be seen as a metaphor for half-spin particles.

John Cowan writes:

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.)