Last.fm’s Endangered Language group, featuring a more or less weekly newsletter describing an endangered or potentially endangered language and an artist who performs using it. They also have set up the Minority Language Radio.
“Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean you understand it. That is the common fallacy that all adults make—and no child ever does,” says Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, England de Valpine professor of applied mathematics. Mahadevan enjoys explaining mathematically the phenomena of everyday life: practicing the old-fashioned method of scientific inquiry called natural philosophy, where one wonders about everything.
– Jonathan Shaw
The Ultimate Project: 10000 Year Journey
When you’re thinking interstellar, long time frames are inescapable. Are we capable as a culture of planning missions that last not only longer than a single human lifetime, but longer than multiple generations? Steve Kilston (Ball Aerospace & Technologies), with help from Sven and Nancy Grenander, clearly thinks so. The three are behind the fittingly named Ultimate Project, a starship designed to carry one million humans across the light years separating us from the nearest stars, creating colonies and perhaps going on from there, a ten thousand year star journey that could turn into a trek through the galaxy lasting for millions more.
Molotch’s course is called “The Urban Toilet,” and its remarkable syllabus reads almost like a parody of Allan Bloom’s worst nightmare, bringing the jargon of gender and ethnic studies, city planning, and industrial design to bear on the most euphemized of subjects.
— Ben McGrath in The New Yorker
Improv Everywhere strikes again:
The Phantom time hypothesis is a theory developed by Heribert Illig (born 1947 in Vohenstrauß) in 1991. It proposes that there has been a systematic effort to make it appear that periods of history: specifically that of Europe during Early Middle Ages (AD 614–911) exist, when they do not. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence.
The theory also stems from the belief that during the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in Europe (AD 1582), while compensating for a ten day discrepancy in the old Julian calendar, many dates were falsely (or ineptly) recalculated as the new system created a thirteen day discrepancy.
In addition to Illig’s hypotheses, there exist several variations. Notable examples include those of Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko, who hypothesized that history - as is generally accepted - consists of a series of events that have been recorded multiple times from different perspectives, with each iteration being assigned to a different time period, thus making a few events over a short period appear to be many events over a long time period. Uwe Topper hypothesized that most of the world’s history was written after the 16th century, and that much of that which occurred prior to AD 1400 should not be considered factual. Other notable proponents include Hans-Ulrich Niemitz, Christoph Marx, Angelika Müller, and Manfred Zeller.
Looking at the Sun Can Trigger a Sneeze
>Have you ever emerged from a matinee movie, squinted into the sudden burst of sunlight and sneezed uncontrollably? Up to a third of the population will answer this question with an emphatic “Yes!” (whereas nearly everyone else scratches their head in confusion). Sneezing as the result of being exposed to a bright light—known as the photic sneeze reflex—is a genetic quirk that is still unexplained by science, even though it has intrigued some of history’s greatest minds.
– Karen Schrock
Interesting… I always blamed it on the temperature change.
It looks like this one, clouds permitting, will be visible across most of the US, running from 8:43p Eastern on 2/20 to about midnight.
Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
Well, I’ve been saying this for a number of years: that now we’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write. A lot of what we’re experiencing now is unsurprising because we’ve been prepped for it by science fiction. But I don’t think surrealism is the right way to put it. Surrealism is so often a matter of dreamscapes, of things becoming more than real – and, as a result, more sublime. You think, maybe, of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and the way that he sees these giant catastrophes as a release from our current social set-up: catastrophe and disaster are aestheticized and looked at as a miraculous salvation from our present reality. But it wouldn’t really be like that.
– Kim Stanley Robinson
