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Cetacean needed

From Philip Taylor: A nice pun on Wikipedia’s ubiquitous "citation needed" Wikipedia's list of cetaceans, which reads (in part): Tamanend's bottlenose dolphin Tursiops erebennus Cope, 1865 NE Unknown     [cetacean needed] Lovely pun indeed! Tamanend's bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops erebennus) is a species of bottlenose dolphin that inhabits coastal waters in the eastern United States. […]

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Codices of Tetepilco

From Tlacuilolli*, the blog about Mesoamerican writing systems, by Alonso Zamora, on March 21, 2024: *At the top left of the home page of this blog, there is a tiny seated figure (click to embiggen) with a sharp instrument held vertically in his right hand carving a glyph on a square block held in his left hand.  […]

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Kabbalistic phonetics

From Francis Mercury van Helmont, Alphabeti verè naturalis Hebraici brevissima delineatio : quae simul methodum suppeditat, juxta quam qui surdi nati sunt sic informari possunt, ut non alios saltem loquentes intelligant, sed & ipsi ad sermonis usum perveniant, 1667:

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China Babel

My basement is full of unpublished manuscripts.  I call it the "Dungeon", because it is dark, dank, and crowded with books and papers — much worse than my office, which has achieved a fabled reputation for its crampedness — and very cold in the winter, though it does have a wonderful bay window on the […]

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Schwa

xkcd (3/15/24) (image URL) (explanation; transcript; discussion)

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"Gentle onsets" are everywhere

President Joe Biden is known for having overcome a serious stuttering problem as a child — see e.g. "Biden’s Stutter: How a Childhood Battle Shaped His Approach to Life & Politics", or "Joe Biden's history of stuttering sheds light on the condition". It also seems clear that the techniques that he developed to overcome the […]

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Scythians between Russia and Ukraine

To situate the Scythians linguistically, before delving into their history and culture, let us begin by noting: The Scythian languages (/ˈsɪθiən/ or /ˈsɪðiən/ or /ˈskɪθiən/) are a group of Eastern Iranic languages of the classical and late antique period (the Middle Iranic period), spoken in a vast region of Eurasia by the populations belonging to the Scythian cultures and their descendants. The dominant ethnic groups among the Scythian-speakers were nomadic pastoralists of Central Asia and the Pontic–Caspian steppe. Fragments of their speech […]

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"The Three Body Problem" as rendered by Netflix: vinegar and dumplings

Basic background, from Wikipedia: The Three-Body Problem (Chinese: 三体; lit. 'Three-Body') is a story by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin which became the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy—though the series as a whole is often referred to as The Three-Body Problem, or simply as Three-Body. The series portrays a fictional […]

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The textbook racket industry

SMBC dramatizes an all-too-common dynamic in the textbook industry. The initial negotiation:

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A charlatanistic malapropism returns

In "At the rind of the debate" we noted an odd use of the word exegesis in the Charlatan  Magazine: "the foreign-born population has grown by 4.5 million under Biden's exegesis". Readers diagnosed this as a malapropism for aegis, and another example from a more recent issue of the same publication ("Nightingale", 3/17/2024) confirms the analysis: […]

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How AI affects the environment: electricity

"The complex environmental toll of Artificial Intelligence:AI is very much mostly not green technology"Devika Rao, The Week US (21 March 2024) I do not mean to be an alarmist or a negativist, but this is something that people are talking / concerned about, so we should take a look at it too.

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AI-assisted substitute vocal cords

This is what the device looks like and how it is made: Jun Chen Lab/UCLA The two components — and five layers — of the device allow it to turn muscle movement into electrical signals which, with the help of machine learning, are ultimately converted into speech signals and audible vocal expression.

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Was rongorongo an independent invention of writing?

Below is a guest post by Kyle Gorman and Richard Sproat: Ferrara et al. [1] report on the results of a study of several specimens of kohau rongorongo, the enigmatic, undeciphered texts of Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui). These texts, inscribed on wood—mostly driftwood that washed ashore on the island—may have numbered in […]

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