Everybody seems to enjoy sharing dialect maps displaying the boundaries of different American regionalisms. So it was only a matter of time before this enticing form of data visualization got satirized. On Twitter, Josh Cagan takes it in an absurdist direction. these maps that have been going around showing various regionalisms have been really illuminating, […]
[This is a follow up to "Preserved wife plum" (7/12/17), after which there ensued a vigorous and enlightening discussion on the terminology for plums, apricots, pastries, and so forth.] My wife was born in Shandong in 1936, but fled from the Japanese with her family to Sichuan before she was one year old, and she […]
Geoff Pullum suggests that the flap over an MP’s use of nigger in the woodpile is overdone: Anne Marie Morris, the very successful Conservative MP for Newton Abbot in the southwestern county of Devon, did not call anyone a nigger.… Ms. Morris used a fixed phrase with its idiomatic meaning, and it contained a word which, […]
Yesterday's NYT has an article by Javier C. Hernández titled "China’s Religious Revival Fuels Environmental Activism" (7/12/17). It's a long article, filled with a lot of New Age, ecological phraseology that is uncharacteristic of the usual political, military, and economic discourse of the antireligious PRC. I was drifting along, not paying too much attention to […]
The following is a guest post by Tony Thorne of King's College London, originally appearing on his blog. It provides an alternative view to that expressed by Geoff Pullum in his post, "Tory uses N-word… not." On July 10 Samir Dathi tweeted: "Anne Marie Morris suspended for using N-word. Good. But why is someone who […]
No, these are not plums consisting of preserved wives, nor are they plums made by preserved wives, nor are they anything else you are likely to think of based on the English name. Why am I even talking about this? How did this bizarre subject come up? In a comment to "Vegetable students" (7/11/17), David […]
Do Victor's posts stoke your appetite for fine foods? Feast on these:
The four main aspects of learning a language are "tīng shuō dú xiě 听说读写 (simplified) / 聽說讀寫 (traditional) ("listening, speaking, reading, and writing"). A few days ago in Singapore, an event was held to promote Mandarin in accordance with this fourfold approach. Unfortunately, at the launch of the campaign on July 10, 2017, on the […]
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 […]
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