Language Log

[This is a guest post by Frank Clements]

I saw something about Japanese dialects recently that might interest you. The makers of the Marvel movies are trying to recover the enthusiasm that's been lost due to their more recent films being critically panned and scandals with major actors, so they're introducing the classic Marvel villain Dr. Doom, who is traditionally the main villain of the Fantastic Four (created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee). They've brought back Robert Downey Jr. to play him, even though he's already played Iron Man, and they haven't explained how that is going to work.

Today's SMBC:

Recent stock-market volatility reminds us of this KAL cartoon:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: IMO the thymus is one of the coolest organs and we should really use it in metaphors more."

… or maybe I should say "associative memory"? Or whatever we should call the emerging modes of interaction with Meta Ray-Bans? Anyhow, here's a recently re-published Girls With Slingshots comic (original in 2008):

Frazz for 7/8/2024 and 7/9/2024:

Today's SMBC:

Today's xkcd:

(…with a bit of philosophy and psychiatry in the mix…)

Dinosaur Comics for 6/17/2024:

The same day's xkcd — "Pascal's Wager Triangle":

Frazz for 6/17/2024:

Today's xkcd is (or should be)  the illustration for a week or two in every introductory course on the sound side of language:

Mouseover text: "Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay."

Today's xkcd:

According to Wikipedia,

A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not – in other words, a query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not in set". […]

Today's SMBC: