Should we say the name of the host city of the 2018 winter Olympics the way the Koreans pronounce it [pʰjʌŋtɕʰaŋ]? Or should we say it more in accord with English phonetics? The following article by Jane Han spells out the controversy clearly: "NBC, read my lips – it's PyeongChang" (The Korea Times [2/18/18)
Xavier Marquez, "Stalin as Reviewer #2", Abandoned Footnotes 117/2018: Most people reading this blog probably know about Trofim Lysenko, who, with Stalin’s help, set back Soviet genetics in the late 1940s, preventing any discussion of Mendelian inheritance. Yet Stalin’s influence on Soviet scholarship after WWII was much more far reaching. He intervened in disputes concerning philosophy, […]
Anton Torianovski, "A former Russian troll speaks: ‘It was like being in Orwell’s world’", WaPo 2/17/2018: You got a list of topics to write about. Every piece of news was taken care of by three trolls each, and the three of us would make up an act. We had to make it look like we […]
The following full-page ad was published in a Chinese daily in Malaysia:
It's been a few years since I checked for references to the invented "science" of gender differences in talkativeness — and a scan of recent news articles for "words per day" turns up a steady drip of replications.
Many readers of Language Log will remember the visit of China's former internet censor-in-chief, Lu Wei, to the headquarters of Facebook, Apple, and Amazon in late 2014. Those were his glory days, but now his star has fallen in a most spectacular fashion: "Former Cybersecurity Head Who Sought ‘Personal Fame’ Expelled From Party", by Wu […]
As ktschwarz pointed out in the comments on yesterday's post "Easy going crazy", Google Translate is disposed to recognize text consisting only of vowels and spaces as Hawaiian, and to hallucinate a coherent if sometimes chilling translation into English. In order to exercise this option more fully, I wrote and tested a simple R script […]
Headline from the Los Angeles Times: "South Korea's obsession with speedskating isn't hard to miss."
Sticker at a gas station near the Richmond airport, courtesy of Jonathan Smith:
Today Josh Tenenbaum gave a talk here in the Interdisciplinary Mind and Brain Seminar Series, under the title "On what you can’t learn from (merely) all the data in the world, and what else is needed". One of his themes was that current RNN systems lack common sense, and so in honor of that point, […]
Or so it would seem, but the people who have looked at this scroll so far cannot make much sense of what's written on it.
Leonardo Boiko writes "It's still mid-February, but I feel like this is a strong contender nonetheless". The source: Joshua Rhett Miller, "Pastor says nothing weird was going on with bound naked man in car", New York Post 2/13/2018. The key phrase: “I won’t deny that he began to take his clothes off and propositioned me, but […]
Lorena Barba, "Terminologies for Reproducible Research", arXiv.org 2/9/2018: Reproducible research—by its many names—has come to be regarded as a key concern across disciplines and stakeholder groups. Funding agencies and journals, professional societies and even mass media are paying attention, often focusing on the so-called "crisis" of reproducibility. One big problem keeps coming up among those […]