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How to Use the Feynman Technique to Identify Pseudoscience http://bigthink.com/neuro... http://assets1.bigthink.c...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way: You say, 'Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language. Without using the word "energy," tell me what you know now about the dog's motion.' You cannot. So you learned nothing about science. That may be all right. You may not want to learn something about science right away. You have to learn definitions. But for the very first lesson, is that not possibly destructive?" - maitani - -

maitani to maitani's feed, History, Linguistics
Discovering Visigothic Manuscripts at the British Library http://britishlibrary.typ... http://britishlibrary.typ...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 8 ] -

"It was the year 1878 when the then British Museum acquired a collection of fourteen manuscripts and incunabula from the Spanish Benedictine monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos. The addition of these manuscripts to the already well-populated treasuries of the Museum completed an extraordinary interesting corpus of medieval codices written in the Iberian Peninsula’s most characteristic script, Visigothic." - maitani - [ 1 ] -

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A Calendar Page for November 2015 http://britishlibrary.typ... http://a7.typepad.com/6a0...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 6 ] -

"In November, the threshing and winnowing is taking place: two peasants in the foreground are beating and raking the harvested wheat to separate the grain from the chaff; another in the background is wielding a flail. A woman is pouring swill out for the pigs, while doves and pigeons gather in the dovecote and on the thatched roofs of the barns waiting to feed on any loose grains. This month, marked by the Zodiac symbol of the centaur for Sagittarius, saw the celebration of several important festivals in the Christian calendar, each illustrated in the roundels to the left: All Souls’ Day, the Commemoration of Souls in Purgatory, St Martin of Tours (shown mounted on a horse, cleaving his cloak in two and giving half to a beggar), and the deaths of St Clement, Pope and Martyr (shown being thrown into the Black Sea with an anchor tied around his neck, as punishment for converting local pagans), St Catherine (shown being beheaded, her wheel in the background) and St Andrew (shown being crucified on the saltire)." - maitani - [ 2 ] -

maitani to maitani's feed, Linguistics
Why dogs and puppies are swear words in India: A short guide to Hindi profanity for the BJP http://scroll.in/article/...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 3 ] -

"English swear words can, by and large, be grouped into three categories: sexual (genitals, the F-word etc.), bodily functions (the most obvious being "shit") and social identity (race, nationality, parentage or even disability – on Indian Twitter, variants of the word “retard” and "moron" are shockingly common)." - maitani - -

"Most subcontinental languages such as Hindi-Urdu have a rather different set of principles which drive their profanity. They can broadly be divided into religious, sexual (including incest) and honour." - maitani - -

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Weihnachtsmarkt in Würzburg https://lh3.googleusercon...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 3 ] -

maitani to maitani's feed, History, Linguistics
Who were the first people ever recorded in writing? https://cranberryletters.... https://static1.squarespa...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 4 ] -

"Who were the first people ever recorded in writing? /u/MissingPuzzle actually dug deep and found the answer: A Sumerian slave owner and his two slaves. Digging a little further, I found that the tablet is dated to ~3100 BCE." - maitani - [ 1 ] -

"Reading the tablet starting at the top and going down by column, it reads 2 KUR.SAL GAL SAL EN PAP X SUKKAL GIR3gunû or in English "Two slaves held by Gal Sal: En-pap X and Sukkalgir."" - maitani - -

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‘Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World,’ by Tim Whitmarsh http://www.nytimes.com/20... http://static01.nyt.com/i...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 6 ] -

"The major thesis of Tim Whitmarsh’s excellent “Battling the Gods” is that atheism — in all its nuanced varieties, even Morgenbesserian — isn’t a product of the modern age but rather reaches back to early Western intellectual tradition in the ancient Greek world." - maitani - [ 1 ] -

via 3quarksdaily http://www.3quarksdaily.c... - maitani - -

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EU tries to shut out migrants, is it right response? http://omanobserver.om/eu... http://omanobserver.om/wp...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - -

"Securing general endorsement of the principle that Africans with no legal status in Europe must be sent home, even forcibly, was a key EU objective at the summit [in Valletta]." - maitani - -

1 other comments...

I just found that article on the EU-Africa summit in Valletta, which hits home with me, because I have worked with a group of Ethiopian asylum seekers for a little while. I won't go into a political discussion. The EU's objective to treat these people as a burden that should be discarded is deeply inhumane. It is a shame I even have to mention that these people who have come to Europe need to be treated with the same respect we expect for ourselves, and, if anything, they will be enriching our society. - maitani - [ 2 ] -

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A Normally Weird Language http://langevo.blogspot.d... http://1.bp.blogspot.com/...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 5 ] -

"Every week, the digital magazine Aeon publishes several ambitious essays, by competent writers, on culture, philosophy, science, technology and other interesting subjects. One of last week’s authors is John McWhorter, professor of linguistics and American studies at Columbia University; the topic is the English language. The essay is entitled “English is not normal”. Professor McWhorter argues not only that English is genuinely “weird” (anyone who has followed his publications already knows it) but makes a stronger claim that it “really is weirder than pretty much every other language”. Now that is a really weird thing to say, so let’s see how it is argued." - maitani - -

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Tom Waits (Big Time 1988) [07]. Strange Weather https://www.youtube.com/w...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - -

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In ‘Letters to Véra,’ Vladimir Nabokov Writes to His Wife http://www.nytimes.com/20... http://static01.nyt.com/i...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 6 ] -

"One of Nabokov’s most striking peculiarities was his near-pathological good cheer — he himself found it “indecent.” Young writers tend to cherish their sensitivity, and thus their alienation, but the only source of angst Nabokov admitted to was “the impossibility of assimilating, swallowing, all the beauty in the world.” Having a husband who was so brimmingly full of fun might have involved a certain strain; still, the fact that Véra was not similarly blessed is just a reminder of the planetary norm. Indeed, their first long separation came in the spring and summer of 1926, when she decamped to a series of sanitariums in the Schwarzwald in the far southwest, suffering from weight loss, anxiety and depression." - maitani - [ 2 ] -

2 other comments...

That's lovely <3 - maitani - -

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maitani to maitani's feed, Linguistics
What Is Linguistic Complexity and How to Measure It? http://www.languagesofthe...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 4 ] -

"Just to rank the complexity in general is, of course, not very interesting. It is more interesting to correlate complexity with other parameters. And recent studies show that the complexity of the language, this absolute linguistic complexity, is closely linked to the social situation in which the language has existed, with socio-linguistics. It turned out that simpler languages are usually languages with larger numbers of speakers, languages of inter-ethnic communication, while the more complex languages are exactly the languages that have fewer speakers, languages whose range of speakers is limited." - maitani - [ 1 ] -

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Romlex http://romani.uni-graz.at...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 5 ] -

"ROMLEX documents the Romani lexicon. It gives users an opportunity to consult materials in different dialects of Romani, and to obtain translations into different languages." - maitani - -

"Romani, Romanes, Romany The language of the Roma, the Sinti, and the Calé. Romani and Romanes are the general names for the "language of the Roma, the Sinti, and the Calé". Romani is the only Indo-Aryan language that has been spoken exclusively in Europe since the middle ages. It is part of the phenomenon of Indic diaspora languages spoken by travelling communities of Indian origin outside of India. The name Rom or Rrom, which is the self-designation of the speakers, also surfaces in other travelling (peripatetic) communities that speak Indian languages or use an Indic-derived special vocabulary: Lom (Caucasus and Anatolia) and Dom (Near East). In India itself, groups known as Dom are castes of commercial nomads: service-providers such as metalworkers and entertainers." - maitani - -

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maitani to maitani's feed, History
CyArk http://www.cyark.org/abou...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"CyArk was founded in 2003 to ensure heritage sites are available to future generations, while making them uniquely accessible today. CyArk operates internationally as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with the mission of using new technologies to create a free, 3D online library of the world's cultural heritage sites before they are lost to natural disasters, destroyed by human aggression or ravaged by the passage of time." - maitani - -

maitani to maitani's feed, Linguistics
Nonantum, the New England Town With Its Own Special Language http://www.newenglandhist... http://www.newenglandhist...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 9 ] - [ 1 ]

"No matter where Nonantum natives go, they can tell someone is from their village when they hear them speak Lake Talk. Lake Talk is the unique argot of Nonantum, one of the 13 villages of Newton, Mass. Unintelligible to outsiders, it binds tighter the already close-knit Italian-American community." - maitani - - [ 1 ]

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"Divia," Lake language for crazy, could come from the Italian word "divila," : Welsh Romani has a noun "divio" - "lunatic, madman", so it is very probable that "divia" originates from a variety of Romani, not from any Italian dialect. http://romani.uni-graz.at... - maitani - [ 1 ] -

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The secret languages of the Bazaars http://www.balcanicaucaso... http://www.balcanicaucaso...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 3 ] -

"They were multilingual places where secret languages were spoken. What has remained in the Balkan Bazaars of these codes, invented in order to understand each other and yet not be understood by outsiders?" - maitani - -

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Migrating birds take a pause in the Baltic https://whyevolutionistru... https://pbs.twimg.com/med...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"Regular readers will know that the BBC has a series of natural history programmes based on UK wildlife through the seasons, generally named after the annual three-week spring series Springwatch. Autumnwatch, the briefer autumnal version, began last night on BBC2 and had some gorgeous images (website here; non-UK viewers can watch clips too)." - maitani - -

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Hofgarten im Herbst, aus einem Fenster fotografiert https://lh3.googleusercon...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 10 ] -

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The first breathtaking images are in from Cassini’s close encounter with Enceladus, Saturn’s ‘geyser moon’http://blogs.discovermaga... http://blogs.discovermaga...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 8 ] -

"As NASA’s Cassini spacecraft dove toward Enceladus on October 28, its cameras captured a trove of visual data — and today, the first images have reached home. I think you’ll agree that they are truly breathtaking." - maitani - [ 1 ] -

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How Proust's 'madeleine moment' changed the world forever http://www.telegraph.co.u...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"The novels were hugely influential on writers all over the world, in that they introduced the idea of writing about "streams of consciousness". Through Proust's ubiquitous narrator, they relay in great detail not just what is perceived, but also what is remembered, and the repeated and constant links between perception and memory. Even those who have not read the novels are aware of the journey of memory on which the narrator goes when he tastes a madeleine dipped in tea; it has become "the Proustian moment"." - maitani - -

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Auf der Dachterrasse https://lh3.googleusercon...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

maitani to maitani's feed, History
Welcome to TCA http://classicalanthology... http://classicalanthology...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 4 ] -

"The Classical Anthology is a collection of beautiful, inspiring and memorable passages from Greek and Latin literature, each with a translation so that anyone can enjoy them and share them. It includes anything written in Greek or Latin, from earliest times to the present day." - maitani - -

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via AWOL http://ancientworldonline... - maitani - -

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Hanni (2) https://lh3.googleusercon...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 9 ] -

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Announcement: Crowdsourcing Cappelli's Lexicon abbreviaturarum http://ancientworldonline... http://www.adfontes.uzh.c...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 3 ] -

"The Ad fontes project (www.adfontes.uzh.ch) is going to hack Cappelli! We want to digitally hack the Lexicon abbreviaturarum of Adriano Cappelli into pieces in order to digitize and make each and every abbreviation systematically searchable. The „Cappelli“, printed in 1899, is a benchmark book for abbreviations in Latin and Italian, containing about 15'000 abbreviations." - maitani - -

1 other comments...

"By crowdsourcing Cappelli, the abbreviations are going to be searchable beyond alphabetical traits. Browsing through the pages of Cappelli will be a thing of the past. You will be able to filter the abbreviations by identified letters or the position of abbreviation or contraction signs." - maitani - -

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maitani to maitani's feed, Linguistics
Repeating aloud to another person boosts recall http://www.sciencedaily.c... http://images.sciencedail...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - -

"Repeating aloud boosts verbal memory, especially when you do it while addressing another person, says Professor Victor Boucher of the University of Montreal's Department of Linguistics and Translation. His findings are the result of a study that will be published in the next edition of Consciousness and Cognition. "We knew that repeating aloud was good for memory, but this is the first study to show that if it is done in a context of communication, the effect is greater in terms of information recall," Boucher explained." - maitani - -

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THE WATERS OF ROME http://www3.iath.virginia... http://www3.iath.virginia...

9 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

A refereed, on-line journal of occasional papers concerned with water studies and the city of Rome - maitani - -

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