Language Log

Mike Ives, "Charles Kao, Nobel Laureate Who Revolutionized Fiber Optics, Dies at 84", NYT 9/24/2018 [emphasis added]:

Working in Britain in the late 1960s, Dr. Kao and a colleague played a crucial role in discovering that the fiber optic cables in use at the time were limited by impurities in their glass. They also outlined the cables’ potential capacity for storing information — one that was far superior to that of copper wires or radio waves.

As commenters on the NYT obit point out, optical fiber (like copper wires and radio waves) is used for transmitting information, not storing it.

Madeleine Ngo, "Penn's physics department has started listing gender pronouns on its website", The Daily Pennsylvanian 9/26/2018:

Penn's Physics and Astronomy Department now lists gender pronouns on its website for some of its student, faculty, and staff members in an effort to combat stigma, encourage respectful communication, and promote the department's inclusivity.

The Diversity and Inclusion in Physics group initiated the project last semester with graduate students at the helm. In April, students and members of the department were emailed and given the option to submit their pronouns to be publicly shared on the website.

The department has been updating its website to include the responses. Physics and Astronomy Administrative Coordinator Glenn Fechner, who manages the department’s website, collected people’s pronouns and added them to each individual biography.

Eoin Cullen wrote in:

I recently learnt that although Taipei  たいぺい is generally used as the Japanese reading for Taipei 台北, NHK still uses the colonial form Taihoku たいほく.  Is this still true in 2018? Why would the national broadcaster persist in using an archaic term? To me, it seems it would be comparable to the BBC insisting on using the name Ceylon to refer to Sri Lanka.

I asked several colleagues who are specialists on Japanese what the significance of this usage might be.

Today's nomination for the Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding:

It's safe to believe the people the people you believe are smart believe are smart are smart, but not safe to trust the people the people you trust trust.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) September 23, 2018

Other examples here.

[h/t Ben Zimmer]

I found this by chance while surfing on Pinterest:

From Zeyao Wu:

Adrian Bailey sent in this Yemeni restaurant menu from @wokeeth's Twitter account:

My mum just sent me this pic of a Yemeni restaurant menu. Come read the translations pls. pic.twitter.com/2vSgTJmIi1

— 🎈🤫 (@wokeeth) August 24, 2018

When I was in Hamburg, Germany a few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised to come upon a pastry shop that sold egg tarts warm out of the oven.  They were just divine!  I think they were called pastéis de nata from the term used for them in Portugal, which seems to be the homeland (or one of the homelands) of this heavenly dessert.  Here the word pastéis is translated into English as "pastels", but it's something altogether different from the art medium, and it has a broad spectrum of manifestations as different types of pies and cakes.

Following up on Kai von Fintel's post "Nurses say yes and no" — the (mis-)interpretation of generic plurals has been a frequent topic here. "Generic comparisons", 11/7/2011, surveys some of this material, starting from a presentation by Sarah-Jane Leslie of her work in "Do all ducks lay eggs? The generic overgeneralization effect", Journal of Memory and Language 2011. And going back a bit further, in "Mandatory treatment for generic plurals?", 9/13/2009, I proposed "a voluntary ban on the use of generic plurals to express statistical differences, especially in talking to the general public about scientific results in areas with public policy implications".

Question #1 on this November’s ballot in Massachusetts concerns a proposed law
to limit the number of patients that can be assigned to a nurse at any one time.
More than $15 million dollars have already been spent on campaigning about this
question. Lawn signs on both sides of the debate abound in the state:

Now, inquiring minds might wonder: what is it, do nurses say yes or do they say
no?

Thorin Engeseth sent in these two photographs of a Zara brand shirt that his wife bought yesterday:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Cauchy-Lorentz: "Something alarmingly mathematical is happening, and you should probably pause to Google my name and check what field I originally worked in.""

One piece of the "Boston diagnostic aphasia examination" is a picture description task, for which a standard stimulus is the line drawing shown below on the left:

For one example of how such descriptions can be used, see Naomi Nevler et al., "Automatic measurement of prosody in behavioral variant FTD", 2017. Because it's a standard part of a standard examination, there's been a good reason to continue to use this drawing — but I've often joked that if I were the examination subject, I'd probably spend half of my description time commenting about the picture's 1955-era vibe.