Mike Johnson blesses MTG
From The Hill on Xitter — Mike Johnson on Marjorie Taylor Greene:
Q: “Marjorie Taylor Greene. No fan of yours.”
Mike Johnson: “Bless her heart.”
Q: “Is she a serious lawmaker?”
Mike Johnson: “I don't think she's proving to be. No. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about her.” pic.twitter.com/YDcFFVhMJm
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) May 1, 2024
Host: Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Johnson: Mmhmm.
Host: No fan of yours.
Johnson: Bless her heart. Bless her heart.
Host: Is she a serious lawmaker?
Johnson: I don't think she's proving to be. No. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about her. I’ve gotta do my job.
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Data Science graphic of the month
stephsmithio, "Swear words in Taylor Swift albums [OC]", r/dataisbeautiful:
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An eccentric translation of the bible
[This is a guest post by IA]
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An editorial dialog with GPT-4
Let's set the stage. A writer has drafted an essay for a publication that has specified a maximum word count of 5,000, and a preferred range of 1350 to 2700. The draft totaled 4,869 words, so it was within the limit, but not in the preferred range. Facing an imminent deadline, and knowing that I have a GPT-4 subscription, the writer asked me to try using ChatGPT to produce a (draft of a) shorter draft.
Last night I tried, with results that were both interesting and frustrating.
The goal was not to test GPT-4, but (perhaps) to speed up the creation of a shorter draft. And I'm not going to comment on the content of the edited version — which I gather was mostly good enough to be useful, but sometimes wrong, misleading, or meaningless.
The full dialog is below. Commenters will no doubt notice my poor-quality "prompt engineering", but still, the interaction suggests that counting words is not one of GPT-4's strengths…
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Languageness
Jichang Lulu briefly alluded to work on languages of Italy in the dialectometry thread (here [the whole comment is well worth reading, as are the comments by Jonathan Smith [here — this one on an earlier thread, here, here, and here] on that post). He also thought that Language Log readers might find of interest some comments in this paper by Mauro Tosco.
"Measuring languageness: Fact-checking and debunking a few common myths", DIVE-IN
“Interestingly, the more traditional classifications are marred by purely sociolinguistic analyses – and quite often their accompanying political and ideological underpinnings – the more they are proven wrong when dialectometry is applied.”
(Tosco: homepage; International Research Group on Contested Languages)
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Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England
"They are known as one of archaeology’s great enigmas – hollow 12-sided objects from the Roman era with no known purpose or use."
So begins this article by Jessica Murray in The Guardian (4/29/24):
Mysterious Roman dodecahedron to go on display in Lincoln
There are no known descriptions or drawings of object in Roman literature, making its purpose unclear
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Passyunk
Zoe Greenberg, "Are we saying 'Passyunk' wrong?", The Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/23/2024:
In this time of widespread division and chaos, The Inquirer decided to unite all Philadelphians by documenting the definitive way we pronounce “Passyunk.” Were we motivated to act by a random New Yorker article confidently declaring this word is pronounced “‘passion’ with a ‘k’”? Absolutely. But our quest grew far beyond that.
The effort left some of us, and those we interviewed, questioning who we were and what we know on a fundamental level. One woman interviewed by The Inquirer, for example, claimed to pronounce the word exactly the same as her husband, who proceeded to pronounce it completely differently.
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Tianjin topolect: linguistic diversity in China (and India)
In our perennial discussions on the supposed mutual intelligibility of the countless, so-called "Chinese dialects" of the allegedly monolithic / monolingual Hànyǔ 漢語 ("Sinitic"; my colleague IA calls it "Hannic"), we seldom take into account the actuality of what these innumerable lects sound like on the ground / street. Let's take a listen to this 4-year-old kid from Tianjin, which is close (70 miles) to Beijing, singing in the local Muttersprache, here.
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Spelling with Chinese character(istic)s, pt. 5
Serious questions about "religion" in Sinitic
Below the fold is for advanced specialists in Chinese philology, theology, and lexicography. Even for them, it is recommended that readers prepare themselves by reviewing "Spelling with Chinese character(istic)s, pt. 4" (7/4/16).
[This is a guest post by IA]
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Thou shalt be trespassed, as it were
BREAKING: University of Florida students chose to breakdown their encampment after being handed this of Allowable Activities and Prohibitive Items and Activities.
Look at those Consequences for Non-Compliance
University of Florida's chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of… pic.twitter.com/l4jYjrSVcr
— Stu (@thestustustudio) April 26, 2024
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