Today's xkcd illustrates why topic modeling can be tricky, for people as well as for machines: The mouseover title: "As the 'exotic animals in homemade aprons hosting baking shows' YouTube craze reached its peak in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo announced he was replacing the Statue of Liberty with a bronze pangolin in a chef's hat."
Ewan Spence, "Apple Leak Reveals Radical New MacBook Pro", Forbes 5/4/2020: Apple may finally be getting round to updating the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Intel’s tenth generation processors. The good news is that the MacOS powered laptop going to get a bucketload of extra power.[…] This laptop is loaded to bear in terms of memory […]
Readers of Language Log will certainly be aware of Tocharian, but when I began my international research project on the Tarim Basin mummies in 1991, very few people — only a tiny handful of esoteric researchers — had ever heard of the Tocharians and their language since they went extinct more than a millennium ago, […]
At the end of the May 1 episode of the NPR show "Milk Street", host Christopher Kimball interviews Dr. Aaron Carroll about a recent California court decision that could force coffee to come with a label warning that it contains a chemical known to cause cancer. The chemical in question is acrylamide, and it's apparently […]
For many years, Melinda Takeuchi, professor of Japanese art history at Stanford, regularly competed with horse and carriage in combined driving events. Here's an example of what the sport looks like. Not long ago, her carriage driving days came to an abrupt end due to an accident, which she describes thus: I had a horrendous […]
The last two comments, here and here, to this post ("Once more on Sinitic *mraɣ and Celtic and Germanic *marko for 'horse'" (4/28/20), like hundreds of others that have been posted on Language Log over the years, show how linguists need to at least think about the significance of archeological findings for their deliberations. It […]
From Paul Shore: I don't know whether the item below, an Amazon translation of an Amazon customer review, is Language-Log-worthy; but I thought that at the very least you might be amused by its sublime anti-logic. The January 1, 2017 review, written by "横川いずみ", is of Freedom Betrayed, Herbert Hoover's massive, radical critique of U.S. […]
I've previously featured comedy turns from Kylie Scott ("Drunk in the club after Covid") and Sarah Cooper ("How to medical"), lip-syncing recorded passages from Donald Trump's press events. Here's another approach, from @JaneyGodley, substituting her own voice for that of the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon: “Don’t be wearing American tan tights round your […]
A little over two years ago, I made a rather detailed post on Lycogala epidendrum, commonly known as wolf's milk or groening's slime, and its metaphorical applications in China: "Wolf's milk, a slime mold attractive to young Chinese?" (4/7/18) During the interim, the popularity of this lowly amoeba has only grown, until it has become […]
A recent NYT headline seems like the premise for a particularly dark dystopian movie: Emily Oster, "Only Children Are Not Doomed", NYT 4/27/2020. A sort of cross between 12 Monkeys and Lord of the Flies? No: The coronavirus pandemic has created a lot of confusion, but it also may bring into focus a question many […]