Hou tu pranownse Inglish
There are rules for pronouncing American English given the spelling; there are just a lot of them, and they’re ugly. No one’s going to get educated people to change how they spell–they’ve invested too much in learning it, and there’s too much legacy. But the way people speak, their dialect, varies widely with geography. So why not introduce a new one that pronounces words as they’re written?
Uto-Aztecan links with Hebrew
http://farms.byu.edu/display.php?table=jbms&id=112
Some excerpts:
“Also worth noting is the relative strength of comparative linguistic evidence. The nature of comparative linguistic evidence provides large bodies of data—several thousand words per language—that is nonforgeable. Ruins and buildings yield some facts, though who built them is not always one of the facts revealed. Words of a translation can be debated endlessly, and written records can feasibly be forged, but no one can fabricate a language family of several Native American tribes speaking a variety of related languages…
“In addition to numerous lexical similarities, some features of Northwest Semitic morphology are still productive in UA, i.e., are still functionally active, such as the masculine plural suffix and niqtal prefix, while much more is fossilized, i.e., nonfunctional “frozen” patterns are detectable such as the feminine plural, qittel forms, hiqtîl and huqtal forms, etc. With that in mind, consider a few of some 1,000 identified similarities between Hebrew and Uto-Aztecan…
“Among Latter-day Saint scholars are a few Semitists, to whom queries regarding the validity of the Semitic data can be directed. As for Latter-day Saint Uto-Aztecanists, I know of no others besides myself. Therefore, because it may be difficult for nonspecialists to assess the merit of proposed linguistic connections, it may be well to mention that I have privately shared this material with five Uto-Aztecanists (linguists who have studied and published in UA linguistics) and four of the five were quite overwhelmed at the quantity and quality of the evidence—two spoke very highly of it; two, in surprise, could hardly speak at all after seeing it; and the fifth did not like the proposal generally, but offered no substantive refutations.”
Touch-sensitive plant
Mimosa pudica – this stuff was all over the place in Guatemala. The tender leaves fold up, drop down, and expose lots of thorns.
Totally. Awesome.
http://michaelpaulus.com/gallery/v/character-Skeletons/
Assigned as homework in middleschool:
http://michaelpaulus.com/gallery/v/character-Skeletons/album02
Cellular automaton for land combat
This CA was developed to simulate land combat and presented in a Smithsonian lecture. Really cool pictures.
Universality of nonlinear media
Here’s a neat paper comparing cellular automata and solitons in several different nonlinear media.
Powers of 10 toward the black hole in the center of the galaxy
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/%7Ehanson/Movies/blackhole.mov
Also see Hanson’s other visualizations here:
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~hanson/
and this 3-d projection of the 5-d Calabi-Yau manifold:
http://www.bathsheba.com/crystal/calabiyau/
Coolest crossover idea I’ve ever heard
Terminator, The Matrix, and Battlestar Galatica:
http://randytayler.livejournal.com/21122.html
"I looked out the window and what did I see…"
Salting your popcorn with liquid sodium and chlorine gas!
White and nerdy
Coming from one who speaks Javascript and Klingon, Weird Al’s White and Nerdy is brilliant.
