Language Log

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "If you draw a diagonal line from lower left to upper right, that's the ICP 'Miracles' axis."

[The ICP reference, if you don't get it…]

Smut Clyde at Riddled continues to generate Google Translate poetry:

In "Intriguing properties of neural networks" (2013), Christian Szegedy et al. point out that

… deep neural networks learn input-output mappings that are fairly discontinuous to a significant extent. We can cause the network to misclassify an image by applying a certain imperceptible perturbation…

For example:

"Tory MP suspended for racist remark" says the Financial Times headline, just two hours ago as I write this. A Conservative member of parliament suspended from the party within hours after being recorded making a racist remark in a public meeting! A remark involving "the N-word", too! As an anti-racist with no love for the Tories, I was eager to find out the details of this latest embarrassment. But in seconds after I turned to the first newspaper account I realized I was in for a disappointment. It turns out to be fake news. Anne Marie Morris, the very successful Conservative MP for Newton Abbot in the southwestern county of Devon, did not call anyone a nigger.

Adam Cancryn, "Why a GOP senator from Trump country opposes the Senate health bill", Politico 7/9/2017:

“Collaborating with Democrats on the other side, to me, is not an exercise in futility,” Capito said, noting that she has spoken with Manchin and other Democrats about tackling health care together. “That may be where we end up, and so be it.”

Speculating further than that, she added, is premature. Senate Republicans could quickly strike a deal, pass a bill and follow through on their seven-year repeal pledge before the month is out.

“I think that remains to be seen,” Capito said. “That’s the eye of the needle, and I think it’s being tried to be threaded. But I’m not sure.”

Created by Jonathan Smith:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "You're saying that the responsibility for avoiding miscommunication lies entirely with the listener, not the speaker, which explains why you haven't been able to convince anyone to help you down from that wall."

In an update to his post "Becoming an adjective", Geoff Pullum notes that the existence of name-derived adjectives like Shakespearean and Kafkaesque might have been what "Jane Jacobs … is an adjective" was meant to mean. But he doesn't also note that there are at least two semantic domains where it's long been common to use people's names as modifiers: streets and mathematical concepts.

The hundred or so scholars at the conference on narrative factuality I'm attending here in Freiburg, Germany come from all over Europe and North America, plus a few other countries.  All proceedings are in English, and every single person here, both young and old, speaks English like a native (except for one person who came to Europe from China as an adult, another individual who has lived in Israel her whole life, and a professor from Francophone Switzerland — the latter three all in their sixties and seventies, and all three speaking English quite well, though not like a native).  No matter what types of literature or philosophy we're discussing, it's all done in English, except for names, titles, and technical terms.

A friend points out to me that according to this Abe Books description of a hardback copy of Jane Jacobs' classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, on the back cover it is reported that Toronto Life made the following assertion:

Jane Jacobs has become more than a person. She is an adjective.

If you care to read on, I will do my best to explain the meaning of this comment.

"Who'll win at Wimbledon? Just listen to the pitch of the grunts", University of Sussex press release 7/4/2017:

Never mind counting aces and killer shots. If you want to predict the outcome of a tennis match, pay attention to the players’ grunts.

As Wimbledon prepares for another year of the on-court cacophony from the likes of Rafael Nadal and Victoria Azarenka, a new study has revealed that grunts produced by players during tennis matches they lost were higher in voice pitch than during the matches they won.

What’s more, psychologists at the University of Sussex found that players displayed differences in their grunt pitch long before the scoreboard made it clear whether they would win or lose.

A recent Non Sequitur: