Language Log

From John Allison's Scary Go Round for 12/23/2016:

Fritz Ruehr sent a cartoon that he found this morning on reddit:

The spirit is willing, though the grammar is weak …

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!"

See "Modification as social anxiety", 5/16/2004.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "It me, your father."

In yesterday's Dilbert , Dogbert has a typically clever/evil idea:

Today's SMBC starts with this panel:

An unusually large number of people have suggested that I should post about the latest SMBC comic. Since I'm on the other side of the world, with slow and erratic internet, I'll just post the link, and note that (implied pornography aside) it would be good phonetics assignment to replace Zach's letter strings with IPA symbols.

Today's PHD Comics::

Tim Leonard points out that today's Questionable Content has a piece of dialogue in which their (in "their ship"), though referring to a male individual, could not felicitously be exchanged for his:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "* Mad about jorts".

Ray Norris, "Why old theories on Indigenous counting just won’t go away", The Conversation 9/5/2016:

Last year researchers Kevin Zhou and Claire Bowern, from Yale University, argued in a paper that Aboriginal number systems vary, and could extend beyond ten, but still didn’t extend past 20, in conflict with the evidence I’ve mentioned above.  

As a physicist, I am fascinated by the fact that the authors of this paper didn’t engage with the contrary evidence. They simply didn’t mention it. Why?  

Although my training is in astrophysics, I have for the last few years studied Aboriginal Astronomy, on the boundary between the physical sciences and the humanities, and I am beginning to understand a major difference in approach between the sciences and the humanities.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "I'm excited about the proposal to add a 'brontosaurus' emoji codepoint because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different groups of pedantic people into a single glorious internet argument."

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover Title: "The 95% confidence interval suggests Rexthor's dog could also be a cat, or possibly a teapot."