Everybody's talking about the eye-roll of the century, the eye-roll that has gone wildly viral in China. It's undoubtedly the most exciting thing that happened at the Two Sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC) that began on March 5 and will most likely end soon. It was a foregone conclusion that President Xi Jinping […]
Daniel Drezner, "Five thoughts about the firing of Rex Tillerson", WaPo 3/13/2018 [emphasis added]: There is no signature idea or doctrine or accomplishment that Tillerson can point to as part of his legacy. He was woefully unprepared for the job on Day One and barely moved down the learning curve. His incompetence undercut his ability […]
There's a roundly execrated publication of the CCP called Global Times in English. The Chinese name is Huánqiú shíbào 环球时报. Associated with the People's Daily, it is infamous for its extreme, provocative, anti-Indian, anti-Japanese, anti-Western (especially anti-American) editorials and articles. Now it seems that some Indian Tweeps are referring to the Global Times as "Gobar […]
Photograph of a slide shown during a lecture at a university in Sichuan:
…in Alta, Utah, where I'm conducting field research into how many words skiers have for snow, evidence of the polysemousness of Twitter: Do you want to know what her Twitter is? [Apparently meaning 'her Twitter handle'] I have a Twitter. [By the same guy, apparently meaning 'a Twitter account'] Extra added bonus: I'm writing this on […]
Just as all school children in the PRC learn to read and write through Hanyu Pinyin ("Sinitic spelling"), the official romanization on the mainland, so do all school children in Taiwan learn to read and write with the aid of what is commonly referred to as "Bopomofo ㄅㄆㄇㄈ "), after the first four letters of […]
Earlier today, I discussed (or at least linked to) a serious econometric study arguing that the morphology of future time reference is meaningfully correlated — perhaps causally correlated — with the distribution of attitudes towards "willingness to take climate action" ("The latest on the Whorfian morphology of time"). A short time later, with the radio […]
Take a look at Astghik Mavisakalyan, Clas Weber, and Yashar Tarverdi, "Future tense: how the language you speak influences your willingness to take climate action", The Conversation 3/7/2018, which is a re-presentation for a general intellectual audience of a technical paper by the same authors that appeared a month earlier,:Astghik Mavisakalyan, Yashar Tarverdi, and Clas Weber, […]
At Arrant Pedantry, Jonathon Owen continues the conversation about begs the question (Skunked Terms and Scorched Earth). Citing my previous post Begging the question of whether to use "begging the question", Jonathon describes me as writing that "the term should be avoided, either because it’s likely to be misunderstood or because it will incur the […]
When I was in graduate school, some of my best friends were mathematicians. I was always intrigued by their approach to problem solving. They told me that merely solving problems was not satisfying to them. Rather, their goal was to solve problems elegantly. This morning, I was reminded of the modus operandi of mathematicians when […]
Tom Simonite, "AI has a hallucination problem that's proving tough to fix", Wired 3/9/2018: Tech companies are rushing to infuse everything with artificial intelligence, driven by big leaps in the power of machine learning software. But the deep-neural-network software fueling the excitement has a troubling weakness: Making subtle changes to images, text, or audio can […]
Browser extensions sometimes can cause unexpected problems, e.g.: "The Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks" (3/7/18). Often, however, they can be very helpful if they do what you want them to do. Jonathan Smith writes: Do you use the web browser Chrome? If so try adding the extension "Convert Chinese to Pinyin (Mand)". It does […]