Favorites from languagehat
Subscribe:
Displaying post 101 to 150 of 7385
Airfoil - Bartosz Ciechanowski
"The particles are zipping around in random directions, constantly entering and leaving this region. However, despite all this motion what you’re seeing here is a simulation of still air." Elaborate 14,000-word web-essay by Bartosz Ciechanowski (previously) via lobster.rs
"Joking in humans requires quite complex cognitive abilities"
The teasing behaviour was similar to that adopted by young human children, according to the researchers, in that it was intentional, provocative, persistent and included elements of surprise, play and checking for the recipient’s response. The human equivalent might be sticking your tongue out at someone and then running away to gauge their reaction. This style of teasing could even form the foundation for more complicated forms of humour. from Why some animals have evolved a sense of humour [BBC]
Mapo Tofu Recipe: The Real Deal
I was parked in my parents’ bedroom, flipping through the channels of countless historical dramas (you can literally go through ten straight channels, and each time the screen changes, you’ll see actresses in traditional dress, fighting back tears in disturbingly clear HD), Chinese nature documentaries (run little deer, ruuuun!), and mindless extended infomercials for the best Chinese dried dates you’ll ever taste, or your money back guaranteed (…or not). Anyways, I was knocked out of my stupor when my limited Chinese vocabulary was able to detect that the latest cooking program I had settled on was featuring a professional chef explaining how to make Mapo Tofu the right way.
Not every prediction came true
The top thinkers of 1974 were gathered together in the pages of “Saturday Review,” for a special issue celebrating that magazine’s 50th anniversary. In a series of essays, each one tried to imagine their world 50 more years into the future, in the far-away year of 2024 ... The future they’d hoped for — or feared for — is detailed and debated, offering readers of today a surprisingly clear picture of the future they’d expected in 1974. from 50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974 [The New Stack]
Flaco, NYC's favorite Eurasian eagle-owl, has died
Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle Owl, Has Died
When someone vandalized his enclosure in the Central Park Zoo a little over a year ago, Flaco escaped. No one was sure if he could survive on his own, but survive he did, becoming a favorite of not only locals who went to see him in the Park but a world-wide audience who read about him.
He recently moved to the Upper West Side where residents loved spotting him from their windows. Last night, he hit a building and died.
Other links: NYT, Washington Post
The fate of Ted Tice in 'The Transit of Venus'
A question about the fate of Ted Tice in Shirley Hazzard's 'The Transit of Venus'. Beware - spoilers.
'I think too much complexity can actually be a bad thing.'
"I decided to write a sequel of sorts to a craft talk I gave in Paris last month on what I’ve been calling moral worldbuilding, which to me just means being more conscientious about the kinds of value systems we include in our work, and facing up to the fear of being called didactic or melodramatic. That talk was pretty diagnostic and focused mostly on theorizing causes of how we got there. This one focuses more on the aesthetic qualities of bad moral worldbuilding and their immediate causes. It’s pretty vibey." Brandon Taylor's new essay, living shadows: aesthetics of moral worldbuilding.
Death, Lonely Death
Billions of miles away
at the edge of the Solar System Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die
You can wag your tail / But I ain't gonna feed you no more
Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters.
Author Lynée Denise on the book's genesis: I saw this video of one of her performances from 1970 and I was like who the hell is this? Who is this woman commanding the room, commanding the band with all this dignity, all this ruthless inner peace?
Thornton is sometimes overlooked in music history, but her rendition of "Hound Dog" came first, and was a smash hit to boot. More happily “Ball and Chain” became one of Janis Joplin’s signature songs with Big Mama’s blessing, after Joplin encountered Thornton singing it in a Divisadero St club in San Francisco. Dubbed "Big Mama" for her size, Thornton had raised herself out of poverty, turning professional singer at the age of fourteen in 1940. [Previously on MeFi]
Thornton is sometimes overlooked in music history, but her rendition of "Hound Dog" came first, and was a smash hit to boot. More happily “Ball and Chain” became one of Janis Joplin’s signature songs with Big Mama’s blessing, after Joplin encountered Thornton singing it in a Divisadero St club in San Francisco. Dubbed "Big Mama" for her size, Thornton had raised herself out of poverty, turning professional singer at the age of fourteen in 1940. [Previously on MeFi]
Crypto PAC Jumps Into Senate Race, Opposing Katie Porter in California
From NYT (ungated and nytimes.com): Fairshake revealed two weeks ago in federal filings that it and two affiliated super PACs had amassed a combined roughly $80 million in 2023, with most of the money coming from three major cryptocurrency players: Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and Andreessen Horowitz. It is not exactly clear what about Ms. Porter has drawn the crypto industry’s ire other than her record as a progressive who favored regulating the industry to better favor consumers and made the grilling of a financial chief executive a viral moment a few years ago.
New York Times, Get out of My School
Politics this, plagiarism that. Harvard is in the limelight, which means that the student journalists of the Harvard Crimson have picked up some competition.
Burrowed out in ancient times by the slithering of a giant worm
Many an ancient road is a sunken road. They are formed by the passage of people, animals, and vehicles over time. Things of beauty, they are found hither and yon, including in Middle Earth. They should be considered as critical sites of the Anthropocene, signature human impacts on the land that are important, perhaps vital, and still not wholly understood. Also known as holloways, they have inspired literary and artistic reflection, conjuring images of fantastic landscapes. Note that, per Wikipedia, a holloway is not the same thing as a tree tunnel, an excavated road, or a gully.
Mary Reynolds: The Other Ark -- Acts of Restorative Kindness
She won the biggest awards in Landscape Gardening, a movie made about her, commissioned for some of the boldest landscaping projects in Ireland. She stopped being a gardener. What happened?
“It’s very simple. I looked out onto my garden. A fox ran across, it was probably winter/spring last year, which isn’t that unusual. Then a couple of hares ran after him, and I thought, well that is unusual. And then a family of hedgehogs. Now, they are nocturnal, so I knew something was going on. I went for a wander and it turns out a digger had gone in across the road. It used to be an acre of gorse, bramble, hawthorn, blackthorn, but someone had cleaned out the whole field to replace it with a garden. I stood there in horror – and realized I’d done this many times in my career."
A financial-advice columnist falls for an elaborate scam
The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger
The man on the phone knew my home address, my Social Security number, the names of my family members, and that my 2-year-old son was playing in our living room. He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger. “I can help you, but only if you cooperate,” he said. His first orders: I could not tell anyone about our conversation, not even my spouse, or talk to the police or a lawyer.
Proof that the Hugo Awards were censored
The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion
by Jason Sanford and Chris M. Barkley. The latter received from Diane Lacey copies of e-mails that were exchanged between her and Kat Jones and Dave McCarty, fellow volunteer administrators of the 2023 Hugo Awards at the Chengdu Worldcon, showing that the three of them made dossiers of Hugo Award nominees deemed to be potentially troubling to local business interests and authorities. Jones, the 2024 Hugo Administrator, has resigned from her position, after releasing a statement. Diane Lacey has apologized for her part. There have been many responses to these revelations, including by Cora Buhlert, Camestros Felapton and MeFi's Own John Scalzi.
At first glance the pivotal scene has nothing sinister about it
"A medievalist's mind can be bizarre to behold. If you had been drudging through a cartulary — a collection of charters copied into a single volume — for the last month, what would you choose to publish:
(a) its complete text, as the last word on the matter;
(b) a simpler calendar, as a guide to its contents;
(c) a ghost story?
If your name is M.R. James, the correct answer is the last one!"
(a) its complete text, as the last word on the matter;
(b) a simpler calendar, as a guide to its contents;
(c) a ghost story?
If your name is M.R. James, the correct answer is the last one!"
"Marry, here's grace and a cod-piece; that's a wise man and a fool."
For a brief moment in the Renaissance, in between the invention of the microscope, printing press, and pencils – along with other technologies that uphold modern society – upper class men were rather preoccupied with erecting another innovation: the codpiece. from How the codpiece flopped [BBC]
Prefer the problems of community to the problems of not having community
An Examination of Non-traditional Friendships.
Ezra Klein talks with Rhaina Cohen in a wide-ranging conversation about Western friendship conventions; how we don't have words for rich platonic friendship; how these friendships can be the basis for healthy child-rearing; the high expectations of marriage culture; the loneliness epidemic.
EZRA KLEIN: What happened to drain so much of the ardor out of friendship? Male friendship and female friendship alike but I think even more male friendship. I think it’s still quite common for female friends to profess a kind of love to each other. It’s not that common for male friends.
Why Do Women Get More Autoimmune Diseases? Study of Mice Hints at Answer
Why Do Women Get More Autoimmune Diseases? Study of Mice Hints at Answers.
Four in five people with an autoimmune disease are women. New research points to an RNA molecule involved in silencing one of their X chromosomes as a potential culprit.
[STOP in the name of HUMANITY]
Why Deleting and Destroying Finished Movies Like Coyote vs Acme Should Be a Crime
Whatever the technical legality of writing off completed films and destroying them for pennies on the dollar, it’s morally reprehensible: Oller memorably calls it “an accounting assassination.” Defending it on grounds that it’s not illegal is bootlicking. The practice also has a whiff of the plot of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”. The original idea of Brooks’ hustler protagonists Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom was to mount a play so awful that it would close immediately, and they can live off the unspent money they raised from bilking old ladies. When the show unexpectedly becomes a hit, they blow up the theater. The biggest difference between the plot of “The Producers” and what happened to “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs Acme” is that in “The Producers,” the public got to see the play.Background: The Final Days of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: Offers, Rejections and a Roadrunner Race Against Time, in which WB executives axe a completed and likeable film they've never even seen for a tax write-off after a token, bad-faith effort at selling it.
'Ut Sementem Feceris, Ita Metes'
Overlooked No More: Voltairine de Cleyre, America’s ‘Greatest Woman Anarchist’ (NYT-archive link) de Cleyre was a poet of merit as told by Elizabeth King's essay on her poetry, 'Pearl of Anarchy. Voltairine de Cleyre’s radical poetry is more timely than ever.' The anarchist library has a collection of her poetry on-line
Carved with curious but distinctive signs
June 1, 1952, was Whitsunday, and provided the young Michael Ventris with a convenient break from his duties as an architect. At the end of the day he would write his 20th Work Note on Minoan Language Research, with the somewhat disbelieving title, “Are the Knossos and Pylos Tablets Written in Greek?” Responsibility was disclaimed: this was only “a frivolous digression”, that would “sooner or later come to an impasse, or dissipate itself in absurdities.” It became instead one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century. from Cracking the Code of Linear B by Theodore Nash
A difficult year ahead for Ukraine
After a not very successful campaign in 2023 Ukraine is facing some difficult obstacles and tough choices in 2024. Inside is a collection of status reports and commentary on where the war is now.
Berthe Morisot comes into her own
"It is almost impossible to believe that these paintings have been overlooked. The qualifying statements people often make about their so-called domesticity and how Morisot did the best she could within a limited sphere, even when meant as a defence of the work, are entirely unconvincing: what is ‘the domestic’ but the core of life, of eros, and of work?"
Numbats in the wild doing better than expected
Numbats (small insectivorous marsupial that eats termites) in the wild doing better than expected despite prescribed burn with dire consequences. There was once thought to be fewer than 1000 numbats left in the wild, but a new study in southern Western Australia suggests that number is far greater. A video of numbats.
Palestine Is in Asia: An Asian American Argument for Solidarity
An expansion of solidarity:
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of acclaimed works like The Sympathizer, explores what it really means to be Asian American now, and how the question of Palestine is relevant for Asian Americans.
Kicking Out The Last Jam
This past Friday, Wayne Kramer, legendary co-founder and guitarist of the incendiary and massively influential MC5, died at the age of 75.
We are both more isolated and less private than we’ve ever been
Though the city has survived a series of local and national recessions in recent decades, San Francisco is said to be in a ‘doom loop’ because so much office space and so many shops have been abandoned since the pandemic. Tech layoffs drove some of the shutdown, but the industry also enabled a mass white-collar withdrawal from the workplace – employees working from home, sometimes leaving the region to work remotely. More than the shrinkage of the population and the emptying out of downtown, the new mood of the city seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact. The city remains the densely urban place it always was, but the way people inhabit it is increasingly suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises. from In the Shadow of Silicon Valley by Rebecca Solnit [LRB; ungated]
Zoozve — Now it's Official (plus contest to name an Earth quasi-moon)
Breaking news about Zoozve
The International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Small Bodies Nomenclature has made a decision, and that decision is to accept Radiolab's suggestion to name Venus' quasi-moon Zoozve! (Why did they suggest this? Previously.)
The Paranormalization of the Plastic Bag
No, Aliens Haven’t Visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?
via Longreads. "Thoughtful, sensible-seeming, non-crankish people at Harvard, at The New Yorker, at the New York Times, and at the Pentagon seemed to be drifting ever closer to the conclusion that alien spaceships had visited Earth. Everyone was being appallingly open-minded. Yet even after more than 70 years of claimed sightings, there was simply no good evidence. In an age of ubiquitous cameras and fancy scopes, there was no footage that wasn’t blurry and jumpy and taken from far away."
Taking the Prize
The Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize has been awarded
to a team that joined forces after their earlier successes. The team provided about 5% of the first scroll, which looks to be part of an Epicurean work. The organizers also announced the 2024 goal: 90% of the first four scrolls scanned and segmented!
“I don’t know anyone who loves them.”
Behold, the bin chicken: Sydney’s stinky, grimy but (mostly) beloved bird (WaPo gift link)
Meet the Australian white ibis. It's not pretty, it smells bad, it poops huge, and it's always in your trash. Of course, some humans have now become fans of it, dressed like "sexy bin chickens," and made a rude song and a fake documentary about them, previously mentioned here in 2017.
Time for Novel Argot
Now, with cocktail culture saturating the country anew, we’re in the middle of a glittering renaissance of bar lingo. The most common terms thrown about today are both functional and fun; they also offer a vivid snapshot of the current state of the industry in the U.S. and the way it is evolving. Reflecting the increasing crossover between restaurants and bars, for instance, many of-the-moment twists of the tongue are pulled directly from the restaurant industry (think “86’d,” “heard” and “behind.”). At Silver Lyan in Washington, D.C., for example, bartenders address each other as “chef,” as a sign of deference and respect, an organic evolution of their in-house language that predates The Bear. And as bars continue to adopt high-level scientific techniques, the nuances of redistilling, centrifuges, rotovaps and clarification demand their own attendant terms. from The New Vocabulary of Cocktails [Punch]
So you want to be an artist. Do you have to start a TikTok?
Everyone’s a sellout now
Vox article describing the challenge for artists, writers, musicians who just want to practice their craft: Sorry, you need to be a highly-promoted brand first.
RIP actor and activist Don Murray
Don Murray
's work as an actor, and life as a human being, was pretty damn great, and overlooked in the US's idiot celebrity culture. There are many comments worth reading from people who knew or appreciated him following his NYTimes obit.
Alyanna Padilla on the Steady Rise of Asian-American Voices in Cinema
“Representation Matters” feels like such an overused statement these days. Discussions about diverse films on press tours and in the media almost always include the question: “What does it mean for you to be an *insert member of underrepresented, marginalized community here* in the industry? It is such a loaded, cloying question and many artists feel pressured to represent every member of their community, simply by doing their job.
Sports make ya grunt and smell. See, be a thinker, not a stinker.
Carl Weathers has passed away (1948-2024). Here he was on stage 10 months ago at Star Wars Celebration. From MGM on Youtube, the best of Apollo Creed. Col. Dillon's death scene from Predator. Carl Weathers on the Rich Eisen Show about his football career. "Carl Weathers" meeting Tobias Fünke at Burger King. And Din Djarin meeting with Greef Karga in the first episode of The Mandalorian.
we’ve found it folks: mcmansion heaven
It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water.McMansion Hell (previ-ously on MeFi) explores the arcane architecture of 354 County Road 211 in Bremen, Alabama -- a gaudy (or Guadían?) wonder known locally as the Castle at Smith Lake.
Look at it. Just look.
The Ukraine War Is Dividing Europe’s Arctic Indigenous People
It has driven a wedge between Sámi in Russia and those in Nordic countries
[Foreign Policy Magazine]
Russia’s war is splitting the indigenous Sami in two [The Economist]
Russia’s war is splitting the indigenous Sami in two [The Economist]
Dogsandsnow
These Happy Dogs Love Sliding Down Snowy Hills [3m15s] That's what it is.
How to Comment on Social Media by Rebecca Solnit
On Lit Hub, Rebecca Solnit writes about how to comment on social media:
1) Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might’ve mentioned/written a book on/devoted their life to. Listening/reading delays your reaction time, and as with other sports, speed is of the essence.
‘Lake Mungo’ (2008): The Oral History
Lake Mungo made a modest impact when it was first released in 2008. It premiered at the Sydney Film Festival, screened at South by Southwest in 2009, and premiered in the United States as part of the After Dark 4 horror anthology in 2010. Yet residencies on Tubi, Shudder, and Amazon Prime exposed new audiences to this sad, frightening, and fascinating film more than a decade after its release, and its explorations of grief fit more comfortably with a horror landscape influenced by The Babadook (2014) and Hereditary (2018) than the 2000s post-Blair Witch Project (1999) found footage explosion.
That's no moon
Millennia-old mystery about insects and light at night gets a new explanation
"At night in the Costa Rican cloud forest, Yash Sondhi and a small team of international scientists switched on a light and waited. Soon, insects big and small descended out of the darkness. Moths with spots like unblinking eyes on each wing. Shiny armored beetles. Flies. Once, even a praying mantis. Each did the same hypnotic, dizzying dance around the bulb as if attached to it with invisible string."
Why does Elmo keep getting dragged into the pits of despair?
Elmo Asked an Innocuous Question: Elmo was not expecting it to open a yawning chasm of despair. (NYT gift link)
“Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?”
In thousands of responses, social media users let Elmo know that no, actually, they were not doing too hot.
A nipple and some jockstraps
This last weekend, Seattle's Joint Enforcement Team (JET), which is a coalition of Seattle Police, Fire, the state Liquor and Cannabis Board (LCB), and others, raided four gay bars, among other nightlife venues, over "lewd conduct". They found a bartender’s exposed nipple and a few people wearing jockstraps.
Здорово! ser la leche! macizo! ヤバイ! knorke!
untranslatable.co
is a searchable database of slang from nearly 100 languages.
Won't Panic
We require leaders who recognize before disaster strikes that mass panic is largely a myth, not after they have mismanaged it. This is a hard thing to ask of a governing class. One reason this myth has persisted despite decades of evidence to the contrary is that narratives of panic are a useful crutch for leaders under pressure. By projecting their own insecurities onto the masses they lead, elites find a ready scapegoat for their own failings. A leader who does not measure up to the demands of disaster will find it easier to blame the crowd for panic than accept the crowd’s harsh judgments on his own performance. from The Myth of Panic [Palladium; from 2021]
BLM lawyer's house searched, work product allegedly taken
An attorney
for Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles leader Melina Abdullah is demanding that the Los Angeles Police Department return or destroy any privileged attorney-client records officers may have photographed while searching his Hollywood home this week. (LA Times, not paywalled for me but if it is for you I'll try to find another link) Less info but same story at AP