The Weird, Random, and Interesting things that Fit Nowhere Else Thread..

[Raithe]

Since the Weird things thread seems to have slid away, I thought it was about time to throw a fresh one up for the new year..

 

With the wide variety of Obsidianites here, this one might catch some interest:

 

Wall Street Journal - What the World Will Speak in 2115

 

 

 

In 1880 a Bavarian priest created a language that he hoped the whole world could use. He mixed words from French, German and English and gave his creation the name Volapük, which didn’t do it any favors. Worse, Volapük was hard to use, sprinkled with odd sounds and case endings like Latin.

It made a splash for a few years but was soon pushed aside by another invented language, Esperanto, which had a lyrical name and was much easier to master. A game learner could pick up its rules of usage in an afternoon.

 

But it didn’t matter. By the time Esperanto got out of the gate, another language was already emerging as an international medium: English. Two thousand years ago, English was the unwritten tongue of Iron Age tribes in Denmark. A thousand years after that, it was living in the shadow of French-speaking overlords on a dampish little island. No one then living could have dreamed that English would be spoken today, to some degree, by almost two billion people, on its way to being spoken by every third person on the planet.

 

Science fiction often presents us with whole planets that speak a single language, but that fantasy seems more menacing here in real life on this planet we call home—that is, in a world where some worry that English might eradicate every other language. That humans can express themselves in several thousand languages is a delight in countless ways; few would welcome the loss of this variety.

 

But the existence of so many languages can also create problems: It isn’t an accident that the Bible’s tale of the Tower of Babel presents multilingualism as a divine curse meant to hinder our understanding. One might even ask: If all humans had always spoken a single language, would anyone wish we were instead separated now by thousands of different ones?

 

Thankfully, fears that English will become the world’s only language are premature. Few are so pessimistic as to suppose that there will not continue to be a multiplicity of nations and cultures on our planet and, along with them, various languages besides English. It is difficult, after all, to interrupt something as intimate and spontaneous as what language people speak to their children. Who truly imagines a Japan with no Japanese or a Greece with no Greek? The spread of English just means that earthlings will tend to use a local language in their own orbit and English for communication beyond.

 

But the days when English shared the planet with thousands of other languages are numbered. A traveler to the future, a century from now, is likely to notice two things about the language landscape of Earth. One, there will be vastly fewer languages. Two, languages will often be less complicated than they are today—especially in how they are spoken as opposed to how they are written.

 

Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world’s language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that’s unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard and AC current for similar reasons.

 

Also, the tones of Chinese are extremely difficult to learn beyond childhood, and truly mastering the writing system virtually requires having been born to it. In the past, of course, notoriously challenging languages such as Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Arabic, Russian and even Chinese have been embraced by vast numbers of people. But now that English has settled in, its approachability as compared with Chinese will discourage its replacement. Many a world power has ruled without spreading its language, and just as the Mongols and Manchus once ruled China while leaving Chinese intact, if the Chinese rule the world, they will likely do so in English.

 

Yet more to the point, by 2115, it’s possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to today’s 6,000. Japanese will be fine, but languages spoken by smaller groups will have a hard time of it. Too often, colonialization has led to the disappearance of languages: Native speakers have been exterminated or punished for using their languages. This has rendered extinct or moribund, for example, most of the languages of Native Americans in North America and Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Urbanization has only furthered the destruction, by bringing people away from their homelands to cities where a single lingua franca reigns.

 

Even literacy, despite its benefits, can threaten linguistic diversity. To the modern mind, languages used in writing, with its permanence and formality, seem legitimate and “real,” while those that are only spoken—that is, all but a couple hundred of them today—can seem evanescent and parochial. Few illusions are harder to shed than the idea that only writing makes something “a language.” Consider that Yiddish is often described as a “dying” language at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are living and raising children in it—just not writing it much—every day in the U.S. and Israel.

 

It is easy for speakers to associate larger languages with opportunity and smaller ones with backwardness, and therefore to stop speaking smaller ones to their children. But unless the language is written, once a single generation no longer passes it on to children whose minds are maximally plastic, it is all but lost. We all know how much harder it is to learn a language well as adults.

 

In a community where only older people now speak a language fluently, the task is vastly more difficult than just passing on some expressions, words and word endings. The Navajo language made news recently when a politician named Chris Deschene was barred from leading the Navajo nation because his Navajo isn’t fluent. One wishes Mr. Deschene well in improving his Navajo, but he has a mountain to climb. In Navajo there is no such thing as a regular verb: You have to learn by heart each variation of every verb. Plus it has tones.

 

That’s what indigenous languages tend to be like in one way or another. Languages “grow” in complexity the way that people pick up habits and cars pick up rust. One minute the way you mark a verb in the future tense is to use will: I will buy it. The next minute, an idiom kicks in where people say I am going to buy it, because if you are going with the purpose of doing something, it follows that you will. Pretty soon that gels into a new way of putting a verb in the future tense with what a Martian would hear as a new “word,” gonna.

 

In any language that kind of thing is happening all the time in countless ways, far past what is necessary even for nuanced communication. A distinction between he and she is a frill that most languages do without, and English would be fine without gonna alongside will, irregular verbs and much else.

 

These features, like he versus she, certainly don’t hurt anything. A language isn’t something that can be trimmed like a bush, and children have no trouble picking up even the weirdest of linguistic frills. A “click” language of southern Africa typically has not just two or three but as many as dozens of different clicks to master (native speakers have a bump on their larynx from producing them 24/7). For English speakers, it seems hard enough that Mandarin Chinese requires you to distinguish four tones to get meaning across, but in the Hmong languages of Southeast Asia, any syllable means different things according to as many as eight tones.

 

But the very things that make these languages so fabulously rich also makes it hard to revive them once lost—it’s tough to learn hard stuff when you’re grown, busy and self-conscious. There are diligent efforts to keep various endangered languages from dying, but the sad fact is that few are likely to lead to communities raising children in the language, which is the only way a language exists as its full self.

 

Instead, many communities, passing their ancestral language along by teaching it in school and to adults, will create new versions of the languages, with smaller vocabularies and more streamlined grammars. The Irish Gaelic proudly spoken by today’s English-Gaelic bilinguals is an example, something one might call a “New Gaelic.” New versions of languages like this will be part of a larger trend, growing over the past few millennia in particular: the birth of languages less baroquely complicated than the linguistic norm of the premodern world.

 

The first wave in this development occurred when technology began to allow massive, abrupt population transfers. Once large numbers of people could cross an ocean at one time, or be imported by force into a territory, a new language could end up being learned by hordes of adults instead of by children. As we know from our experiences in the classroom, adults aren’t as good at mastering the details of a language as toddlers are, and the result was simpler languages.

 

Vikings, for example, invaded England starting in the eighth century and married into the society. Children in England, hearing their fathers’ “broken” Old English in a time when schooling was limited to elites and there was no media, grew up speaking that kind of English, and the result was what I am writing now. Old English bristled with three genders, five cases and the same sort of complex grammar that makes modern German so difficult for us, but after the Vikings, it morphed into modern English, one of the few languages in Europe that doesn’t assign gender to inanimate objects. Mandarin, Persian, Indonesian and other languages went through similar processes and are therefore much less “cluttered” than a normal language is.

 

The second wave of simplification happened when a few European powers transported African slaves to plantations or subjected other people to similarly radical displacements. Adults had to learn a language fast, and they learned even less of it than Vikings did of English—often just a few hundred words and some scraps of sentence structure. But that won’t do as a language to fully live in, and so they expanded these fundamentals into brand-new languages. Now these languages can express any nuance of human thought, but they haven’t existed long enough to also dangle unnecessary things like willfully irregular verbs. These are called Creole languages.

 

It’s far easier to manage a basic conversation in a Creole than in an older language. Haitian Creole, for example, is a language low on the complications that make learning Navajo or Hmong so tough. It spares a student from having to know that boats are male and tables are female, which is one of the reasons that it’s so hard to master French, the language from which it got most of its words.

 

Creole languages were created world-wide during the era that the textbooks call Western “exploration.” African soldiers created an Arabic Creole in Sudan; orphans created a German one in New Guinea. Aboriginal Australians created an English Creole, which was passed on to surrounding locations such as, again, New Guinea, where under the name Tok Pisin it is today the language of government for people speaking hundreds of different native languages. Jamaican patois, South Carolina’s Gullah and Cape Verdean are other examples.

 

Modern population movements are now creating a third wave of language streamlining. In cities world-wide, children of immigrants speaking many different languages are growing up speaking among themselves a version of their new country’s language that nibbles away at such arbitrary features as irregular verbs and gendered objects. It’s a kind of compromise between the original version of the language and the way their parents speak it.

Linguists have no single term yet for these new speech varieties, but from Kiezdeutsch in Germany to “Kebob Norsk” in Norway, from the urban Wolof of Senegal to Singapore’s “Singlish,” the world is witnessing the birth of lightly optimized versions of old languages. These will remain ways of speaking that are rarely committed to the page. Yet as we know from languages like Yiddish, this will hardly disqualify them as thriving human languages.

This streamlining should not be taken as a sign of decline. All of the “optimized” languages remain full languages in every sense of the term, as we know from the fact that I’m writing in one: An Old English speaker who heard modern English would consider it confounding and “broken.” That any language has all irregular verbs, eight tones or female tables is ultimately a matter of accident, not design.

 

Hopefully, the languages lost amid all of this change will at least be described and, with modern tools, recorded for posterity. We may regret the eclipse of a world where 6,000 different languages were spoken as opposed to just 600, but there is a silver lining in the fact that ever more people will be able to communicate in one language that they use alongside their native one.

 

After all, what’s peculiar about the Babel tale is the idea of linguistic diversity as a curse, not the idea of universal comprehension as a blessing. The future promises both a goodly amount of this diversity and ever more mutual comprehension, as many languages become easier to pick up, in their spoken versions, than they once were. A future dominated by English won’t be a linguistic paradise, in short, but it won’t be a linguistic Armageddon either.

 

 

[Guard Dog]

 

I though my house was haunted.... it wasn't. He's still alive and gone now.

 

Actually I didn't really think the house was haunted since 1) I don't really believe in ghosts, and 2) I built this place (actually I had Jim Walter Homes do that but still)

 

 

[Raithe]

And just because..

 

http://youtu.be/JEhY-b_Ih6A

[Hurlshort]

coon.jpg

 

I though my house was haunted.... it wasn't. He's still alive and gone now.

 

Actually I didn't really think the house was haunted since 1) I don't really believe in ghosts, and 2) I built this place (actually I had Jim Walter Homes do that but still)

 

I'm pretty sure we have a racoon under the house too, he's been driving the dog nuts.  I know we had a cat under there for awhile, and before that we had a short stay from a skunk.  Yay for crawl spaces.

[Guard Dog]

This guy was in my attic, which isn't very big. He got in through a broken eave vent. I fixed it and took off the big vent and "encouraged" him to leave with a CO2 fire extinguisher.

[Raithe]

[Woldan]

[Raithe]

Oh Kraft. You strike once again after taking over Cadbury...

 

Guardian - Shellshock - Coming Clean on the Crème Egg Chocolate Change

 

 

 

Stop all the clocks. Cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.

Monday 12 January 2015 will go down in confectionary history as a bad day. A hurtful day.

The day when it was revealed that Cadbury’s Creme Eggs have changed forever.

 

No longer shall the egg shell be made from delicious Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate. It will instead be made from disgusting, foul, vomit-inducing “standard cocoa mix chocolate”.

“It’s no longer Dairy Milk. It is similar, but not exactly Dairy Milk,” said a spokesman for Cadbury, which since 2010 has been owned by the US giant Kraft, with a flippancy almost as hard to stomach as this new, Frankenstein’s monster of an egg is bound to be.

 

The spokesman said the new chocolate had been tested on “consumers” – industry shorthand for “idiots”, clearly – and had been “found to be the best one for Creme Egg”.

He added: “The Creme Egg had never been called Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Creme Egg. We have never played on the fact that Dairy Milk was used.”

As true as that may be, it offers little consolation for fans of the original.

 

The combination of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and whatever it is that goes into the cream/creme that forms the centre of a true Cadbury Creme Egg is one of the all-time great double acts. Would you separate Laurel and Hardy so lightly? Bill from Hillary? Romeo from Juliet? Bell from spigot?

 

Of course not. It would be outrageous, not to mention unfair. All those individuals are or were utterly dependent on the other. Their relationships are or were watertight. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and whatever it is that goes into the cream/creme that forms the centre of a Creme Egg deserved the same respect. The same longevity.

The Cadbury Creme Egg was a rare thing in this modern age. Its subtle blend of delicious chocolate and sweet, creamy/cremey yolk was a throwback to the days when chocolatiers took pride in their work.

 

Without the Dairy Milk shell – and I say this without having tried the new product, obviously – we are left with nothing less than an abomination. This new Creme Egg is a Creme Egg that is barely worthy of the name. Fabergé, hen, goose … are you watching? Are you willing to have this, this … thing sully your fine work?

 

There are already two differing Creme Eggs. There is the UK-manufactured flagship, a full 40g of chocolatey egg glory. Then there is its American, dear-god-hide-it-in-the-attic sibling, a wretched creature offering a mere 34g of satisfaction.

 

Creme Egg enthusiasts thought the UK version was safe, although we should have seen the alarm signs. It is Kraft at whose doorstep this controversy should really be laid. It was Kraft, an awful, immoral, US behemoth, that bought Cadbury, a smiley, cottage-industry, whistle-while-you-work British chocolate-maker in a hostile takeover that created public outcry.

We should have seen the alarm signs. But we were high on Dairy Milk chocolate and and whatever it is that goes into the cream/creme that forms the centre of a Cadbury Creme Egg. We had our egg and we were eating it. We were safe, we thought, as we greedily wolfed down Creme Egg after Creme Egg, laughing maniacally.

Oh how wrong we were.

 

Already, this egg announcement is threatening the stability of the UK government. What havoc will this monster wreak next?

Are we really going to swallow this bad egg, America? For that is what Cadbury has wrought. A bad egg. And today will forever be known as a bad day.

 

 

[Raithe]

[Zoraptor]

 

Oh Kraft. You strike once again after taking over Cadbury...

 

 

Heh, we had a consumer revolt when they changed from superior NZ formula creme eggs to inferior British ones a few years ago. 

[ManifestedISO]

Why you gotta make me cry, Raithe. I have to live here in this country with those people in charge. *sniff* *lights Carl Sagan candle*

[Malcador]

[Blarghagh]

I wasn't sure if this fit here or in the funny things thread, but...

 

http://shipyourenemiesglitter.com/

 

You can send people you don't like a bunch of glitter to annoy them. Somebody sells this as a service.

[Guard Dog]

 If it makes you feel any better 90% of all scientific research in the US is not funded directly by the government so those guys really don't have control over anything.

[Leferd]

NASCAR driver: my ex is a trained assassin.

 

http://espn.go.com/racing/nascar/cup/story/_/id/12161197/kurt-busch-says-ex-girlfriend-patricia-driscoll-was-trained-assassin?ex_cid=sportscenterFB

[ShadySands]

Yosemite free climbers top all records with El Capitan ascent

 

Congratulations crazy people!

[Woldan]

As much as I love mountain climbing, I'd never do such thing without rope and hooks, this is totally nuts. My fingertips hurt from just looking at those pics. 

[LadyCrimson]

As much as I love mountain climbing, I'd never do such thing without rope and hooks, this is totally nuts. My fingertips hurt from just looking at those pics.

One of them is apparently already missing a finger, so even harder for him.

 

My brain goes "wow, that's a crazy amazing physical feat, fantastic" while my vertigo goes "holy bleepbleep are you nuts why in the world etc. "

[ManifestedISO]

Maybe I'll start a support group. Or not, we don't actually need help. There is a little-known subset of society called 'people who go by their middle names'. No one knows how it happens, those who do usually blame the parents. Each one of us never even consider our given name. Signatures are uniquely badass ... initial, name, surname. The mystery of our fore-initial is a quantum leap above commoners and their unused, unloved vestigial middle. The most common plebe reaction, is ... WHY ARE YOU SO COOL THAT NO ONE BUT AN ELITE INNER CIRCLE AND YOUR DOG KNOW WHO YOU REALLY ARE.

[Gromnir]

coon.jpg

 

I though my house was haunted.... it wasn't. He's still alive and gone now.

 

Actually I didn't really think the house was haunted since 1) I don't really believe in ghosts, and 2) I built this place (actually I had Jim Walter Homes do that but still)

have been hearing some attic noises of late that make us think we got squirrels living in our house.  we really should call somebody to take care o' that.  humane catch and release is soo expensive. perhaps release a feral cat to drive out the squirrels? 

 

...

 

am not serious about the cat btw, but am almost certain about the squirrels.  

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Blarghagh]

Maybe I'll start a support group. Or not, we don't actually need help. There is a little-known subset of society called 'people who go by their middle names'. No one knows how it happens, those who do usually blame the parents. Each one of us never even consider our given name. Signatures are uniquely badass ... initial, name, surname. The mystery of our fore-initial is a quantum leap above commoners and their unused, unloved vestigial middle. The most common plebe reaction, is ... WHY ARE YOU SO COOL THAT NO ONE BUT AN ELITE INNER CIRCLE AND YOUR DOG KNOW WHO YOU REALLY ARE.

 

And then there's that moment when your name is called at a doctor's office or city hall waiting room and you get confused for a minute because that other name sounds familiar. Oh wait, that's me!

[Gorgon]

 

As much as I love mountain climbing, I'd never do such thing without rope and hooks, this is totally nuts. My fingertips hurt from just looking at those pics.

One of them is apparently already missing a finger, so even harder for him.

 

My brain goes "wow, that's a crazy amazing physical feat, fantastic" while my vertigo goes "holy bleepbleep are you nuts why in the world etc. "

 

Looks like you can walk up the other side of the rock. That's what I would have done, just sayin'.

[Woldan]

Electric powered LMP1 prototype that will participate in the 24 hours of Le Mans 2016.-  Makes 360 km/h on the straights. 

No rear wing! (massive diffuser though) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ShadySands]

Trial for Alleged Silk Road Mastermind Ross Ulbricht Is About to Begin in Manhattan

 

The part that makes me scratch my head is this

 

The other problem is that Ulbricht has never claimed he is the Dread Pirate Roberts, which, conversely, makes him legally vulnerable. Last October, a New York district judge ruled that Fourth Amendment protections, which safeguards citizens against unlawful search and seizure methods, do not apply to Ulbricht because he has not staked ownership of the server or Silk Road. Ulbricht is now faced with a wretched catch-22: either own up to authoring the site, or relinquish his constitutional legal shield.

Is this legit?

[Valsuelm]

Trial for Alleged Silk Road Mastermind Ross Ulbricht Is About to Begin in Manhattan

 

The part that makes me scratch my head is this

 

The other problem is that Ulbricht has never claimed he is the Dread Pirate Roberts, which, conversely, makes him legally vulnerable. Last October, a New York district judge ruled that Fourth Amendment protections, which safeguards citizens against unlawful search and seizure methods, do not apply to Ulbricht because he has not staked ownership of the server or Silk Road. Ulbricht is now faced with a wretched catch-22: either own up to authoring the site, or relinquish his constitutional legal shield.

Is this legit?

 

Hard to say without knowing more details. Could be a massive violation of the guy's constitutional rights, but it also may be legit given the circumstances, which are not adequately explained in the article. Then again, the article may be getting this wrong all together. It's getting at least part of it wrong, as The Silk Road is not defunct. It was shut down for a second time temporarily late last year but it wasn't long before it was up and running again.