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10 quotes to inspire a love of winter | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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"Winter encourages a certain kind of idiosyncratic imagery not found during any other season: white, powdery snow, puffs of warm breath, be-scarfed holiday crowds. The following slideshow presents a lovely compilation of quotes from the eighth edition of our Oxford Dictionary of Quotations that will inspire a newfound love for winter, whether you’ve ever experienced snow or not!" - maitani - -

"The first fall of snow is not only an event, but it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment, then where is it to be found?" It snowed here last night :) - maitani - -

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Language Log » Mother Tongue: lost and found - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"The idea of a "Mother Tongue" has long preoccupied me, and I once wrote a lengthy paper about the relationship between Taiwanese and Mandarin entitled "How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language"." - maitani - -

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"The topic has now come back to me from a different angle, one that I might title "How to Remember your Mother Tongue and (Temporarily) Forget Your Global Language"." - maitani - -

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Tips from professional proofreaders | Sentence first - http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014...

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"Proofreading is a recurring theme on Sentence first, with regular posts looking at particular items of usage and examples of where proofing fell short. But although it’s part of my day job, I haven’t written often about the act itself." - maitani - -

"I was recently approached by Maggie Biroscak at Jimdo for some thoughts on the subject. Maggie’s article has now been published, and offers great tips on proofreading your own text, while acknowledging the limitations of this approach. It features quotes from Dawn McIlvain Stahl, online editor of Copyediting.com, and me." - maitani - -

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The strangest and least strange French words according to n-grams - Antoine Amarilli's blog - http://a3nm.net/blog/ubac.html

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"The (multi)set of (character-level) n-grams of a word consists of its sequences of n consecutive characters. For instance, the 2-grams of "gram" are "gr", "ra", and "am". Duplicates are counted, e.g., for "toto" the 2-grams are "to", "ot", "to". Given the dictionary of all words in a language, we can compute the multiset of all n-grams." - maitani - -

"It turns out that this multiset is quite characteristic of the language. For instance, to identify the language of a piece of text, it is often enough to compute its n-grams, normalize it as a frequency distribution, and compare it to the distribution of known languages: usually the closest distribution is that of the language in which the text is written." - maitani - -

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3quarksdaily: Ian McKellen analyzes Macbeth speech - http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks...

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Why the ‘Coffee’ Words Are Not Cognates - Languages Of The World | Languages Of The World - http://languagesoftheworld.info/bad-lin...

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"A former student of mine drew my attention to a recent article in Slate written by Alyssa Pelish and titled “The Stimulating History of Coffee: Why You Hear This Word Around the World” (the image on the left is reproduced from the article). Pelish starts with a little thought-experiment about how one would order a coffee while travelling around the world: Kaffee in Berlin, caffè in Rome, kofi in Lagos, Nigeria, kŏfī in Delhi, India, and кофе (pronounced /’kofè/) in St. Petersburg, Russia. She correctly points out that these words sound alike in many languages, describing these words very poetically as “the two reliable syllables, the seesaw of vowel sounds punctuated by velar stops and fricatives”. I am not sure about the reliability of syllables or how one would go about measuring it, or whether the alternating consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) pattern can be called a “seesaw”. But the explanation Pelish provides for why these ‘coffee’ words are so similar the world over is entirely wrong and ignorant." - maitani - -

Interesting idea. Jynnan tonix all round while we discuss. - maitani - -

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Distraction, if consistent, does not hinder learning -- ScienceDaily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"A new study challenges the idea that distraction is necessarily a problem for learning. Researchers found that if attention was as divided during recall of a motor task as it was during learning the task, people performed as if there were no distractions at either stage." - maitani - -

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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: New and Forthcoming from De Gruyter Open - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2014...

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"New and Forthcoming from De Gruyter Open New in 2014 from De Gruyter Open" - maitani - -

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The Windcatchers of Persia ~ Kuriositas - http://www.kuriositas.com/2012...

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"They appear throughout the Middle East: Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have these antique Persian designs dotted around their towns and cities. They are windcatchers, known in the area as Bâdgir. Serving as ventilation systems they have given the people of the Middle East air conditioning for thousands of years. Yet despite their antediluvian origin, windcatchers may even provide a solution for some very modern architectural problems." - maitani - -

"Windcatchers come in a vast array of sizes and a number of different styles. They function in one of three ways. Some direct the airflow downwards and use direct wind entry. Others direct airflow up either using a temperature gradient assisted either by the sun or the wind. " - maitani - -

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Why Save a Language? - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2014...

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"It’s a question I can expect whenever I do a lecture about the looming extinction of most of the world’s 6,000 languages, a great many of which are spoken by small groups of indigenous people. For some reason the question is almost always posed by a man seated in a row somewhere near the back." - maitani - -

"“TELL me, why should we care?” he asks." - maitani - -

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'Fewer' Or 'Less?' The Express Lane Language Debate : NPR - http://www.npr.org/2014...

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I'd do either, but mentally congratulate the store that uses "fewer." - maitani - -

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^LOL - maitani - -

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Zoe Williams: the madness of modern parenting | Books | The Guardian - http://www.theguardian.com/books...

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"Plainly, something is up with the business of parenting, the way we parent, the things that are now perceived as minimum parenting standards. The fact that I’m conjugating the word at all, that it has become an activity rather than a relationship, indicates the extent to which it now amounts to a set of skills, techniques, rules; it has become something that one does well or badly, the judgment of which is determined by yardsticks that claim, via medicine or neuroscience, to be definitive, yet are one titchy study from the University of Utah away from refutation. The atmosphere is febrile with disapproval: all normal under–standing of acceptable risk, never mind the understanding that behaviour might reasonably differ from one individual to another, is suspended." - maitani - -

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Cobill Nuts, Christmastide, and The Cloisters | The Metropolitan Museum of Art - http://www.metmuseum.org/visit...

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"Thou Sonne, that shall save bothe see and sande, Se to me sen I have thee soght, I am ovir poure to make presande Als myn harte wolde, and I had ought. Two cobill notis uppon a bande, Loo, litill babe, what I have broght, And whan ye sall be Lorde in lande, Dose goode agayne, forgete me noght, For I have herde declared Of connyng clerkis and clene That bountith askis rewarde, Nowe watte ye what I mene." - maitani - -

"The hazelnut (or "cobill nut" as they were called in the fifteenth century) also appears in one of the mid-fourteenth-century mystery plays performed for the feast of Corpus Christi in York, designed to inspire the audience's direct involvement with salvation history. In the play The Offering of the Shepherds, the shepherds arrive at the site of the Nativity and lament the fact that they have only humble gifts for the baby Jesus. The second shepherd presents the infant with two hazelnuts, strung together as a bracelet:" - maitani - -

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Companions in Misery - NYTimes.com - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...

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"I had just arrived home from my summer vacation — a week in a Minnesota cabin whose brochure warned “no crabbiness allowed” — when I came upon a study that declared New York the “unhappiest city in America.” I doubt many people were surprised by the results — New Yorkers, both in lore and reality, can be hard to please, and famously outspoken about their grievances — but as a born-and-raised New Yorker, and as a philosopher, I was suspicious of how the study defined happiness." - maitani - -

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BBC - Future - Psychology: A simple trick to improve your memory - http://www.bbc.com/future...

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I don't think this method is "counterintuitive". I have always felt that the best way to retrieve items from memory is to teach them to others. I am convinced that teaching as a means of learning is even more efficient than testing. - maitani - -

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"Researchers Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger III set out to look at one aspect: how testing can consolidate our memory of facts. In their experiment they asked college students to learn pairs of Swahili and English words. So, for example, they had to learn that if they were given the Swahili word 'mashua' the correct response was 'boat'. They could have used the sort of facts you might get on a high-school quiz (e.g. "Who wrote the first computer programs?"/"Ada Lovelace"), but the use of Swahili meant that there was little chance their participants could use any background knowledge to help them learn. After the pairs had all been learnt, there would be a final test a week later." - maitani - -

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Eurozine - Moving walls - Giovanni Cocco - http://www.eurozine.com/article...

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"Over the past 14 years, about 17,000 immigrants have perished in the Mediterranean, trying to overcome the material and virtual walls that surround the European Union today. That's 60 times the number of people who lost their lives attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in 28 years." - maitani - -

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(btw Fabrizio Gatti is an amazing journalist) - maitani - -

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A Weapon for Readers by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/blogs...

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"Imagine you are asked what single alteration in people’s behavior might best improve the lot of mankind. How foolish would you have to be to reply: have them learn to read with a pen in their hands? But I firmly believe such a simple development would bring huge benefits." - maitani - -

"We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us. We allow worlds to be conjured up for us with very little concern for the implications. We overlook glaring incongruities. We are suckers for alliteration, assonance, and rhythm. We rejoice over stories, whether fiction or “documentary,” whose outcomes are flagrantly manipulative, self-serving, or both. Usually both. If a piece of writing manifests the stigmata of literature—symbols, metaphors, unreliable narrators, multiple points of view, structural ambiguities—we afford it unlimited credit. With occasional exceptions, the only “criticism” brought to such writing is the kind that seeks to elaborate its brilliance, its cleverness, its creativity. What surprised me most when I first began publishing fiction myself was how much at every level a novelist can get away with." - maitani - -

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Würzburger Weihnachtsmarkt mit Marienkapelle

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La città di Würzburg è anche nota per essere stata distrutta quasi dalle fondamenta dai bombardamenti angloamericani nella seconda guerra mondiale, essendo stata colpita nelle ultime settimane del conflitto, quando le difese antiaeree tedesche non esistevano praticamente più e quando lo scopo delle incursioni era puramente terroristico. - maitani - -

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Nel 1994 a Schweinfurt si giocava Schweinfurt-Wurzburg. Tra gli spettatori c'era Holger Geschwindner, ex cestista tedesco che aveva imparato lo sport dai militari americani di stanza in Germania. Geschwindner arrivò puntualissimo come suo solito, ma la partita delle squadre giovanili che precedeva il match di cartello era ai supplementari, per cui Holger vide gli ultimi minuti della partita degli Under 16. Tra i giovani del Wurzburg notò un lungagnone biondo, scoordinato e a disagio. a fine partita, andò dai genitori del ragazzo e disse loro: "Se voi me lo fate allenare, ne farò il miglior giocatore del mondo". - maitani - -

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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: Greek and Latin in an Age of Open Data -- Conference on Google Hangout December 1-4, 17:00-c. 20:00 CET - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2014...

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"At 5pm CET, we will begin broadcasting a conference on Greek and Latin in an Age of Open Data. The conference will run over four days for three hours each because we want to maximize the geographic range while reaching people in reasonable times of the day. (Not everyone is so lucky -- our colleagues Donald Sturgeon and John S. Y. Lee in Hong Kong are, for example, gamely preparing to present in the middle of the night)." - maitani - -

"We will post the final information about connecting on the following link: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.dh.uni-leipzig... ; title="http://www.dh.uni-leipzig... ; " - maitani - -

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Celtic and the History of the English Language | Arrant Pedantry - http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2014...

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"The first and largest problem is that the timeline makes it look as though English began with the Celts and then received later contributions from the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and so on. While this is a decent account of the migrations and conquests that have occurred in the last two thousand years, it’s not an accurate account of the history of the English language. (To be fair, the bar on the bottom gets it right, but it leaves out all the contributions from other languages.)" - maitani - -

"A little while ago a link to this list of 23 maps and charts on language went around on Twitter. It’s full of interesting stuff on linguistic diversity and the genetic relationships among languages, but there was one chart that bothered me: this one on the history of the English language by Sabio Lantz." - maitani - -

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A Calendar Page for December 2014 - Medieval manuscripts blog - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

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"The slaughtering of animals and preparing of meat for the winter are the labours highlighted in these final calendar pages of the year. On the opening folio can be found the beginning of the saints’ days for December. Below, a roundel miniature shows two men in a barn; one has his hands firmly on the horns of a bull, holding him steady, while the other man is preparing to deliver the coup de grâce with a wooden mallet. In the facing folio, another man is butchering a hog outdoors, wielding a long, sharp knife. A bucket of blood is beneath the slaughtering table, and above, we can see a wooly ram (perhaps aghast at the carnage), for the zodiac sign Capricorn. Surrounding this scene is another golden architectural frame, populated with angels playing musical instruments, and a kneeling monk above, perhaps in honour of the feast of the Nativity." - maitani - -

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Arachne - Reception of Antiquity in a Semantic Network: Digital Books, Images and Objects - http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/drupal...

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via AWOL AncientWorldOnline <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ancientworldonline... ; title="http://ancientworldonline... ; - maitani - -

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"The aim of the project is the reconstruction and online publication of about 1700 prints, which appeared between 1500 and 1900. In a next step forms of semantic networks are to be approached in separate subprojects. This is to be illustrated through the direct contextualisation of objects from Philipp von Stosch's Gem Collection." - maitani - -

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The Dark & Light of Francisco Goya by Colm Tóibín | The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/article...

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"There are two ways, perhaps, of looking at Goya, who was born near Zaragoza in 1746 and died in exile in France in 1828. In the first version, he was almost innocent, a serious and ambitious artist interested in mortality and beauty, but also playful and mischievous, until politics and history darkened his imagination. In this version, “history charged,” took him by surprise, and deepened his talent. In the second version, it is as though a war was going on within Goya’s psyche from the very start. While interested in many subjects, he was ready for violence and chaos, so that even if the war between French and Spanish forces between 1808 and 1814 and the insurrection in Madrid in 1808 had not happened, he would have found some other source and inspiration for the dark and violent images he needed to create. His imagination was ripe for horror." - maitani - -

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On thinking about wine | res gerendae - http://resgerendae.wordpress.com/2014...

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"Yesterday, it was Thanksgiving Thursday in the United States. On Thanksgiving Day, I often think about wine. It is a day many associate with the drink. Beaujolais Nouveau, a bland and generic vin du primeur, is released in the week leading up to the holiday and, thanks to a marketing strategy straight from the house of De Beers, promoted as the traditional Thanksgiving wine. For me though, it is the memories of spicy Burgundies and rich Bandols that are hard to shake." - maitani - -

"As a committed wino, I think about wine quite often, but yesterday I thought about thinking about wine. A school boy error, perhaps. Most authors of books about wine I have read would, no doubt, reproach me. Wine is about unabashed hedonism, they say, not a subject for jejune philosophising or ersatz self-seriousness." - maitani - -

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Sheena Iyengar on Choice - Shunya's Notes - http://blog.shunya.net/shunyas...

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"Sheena Iyengar's excellent anthropological survey of "choice" across cultures, with special focus on its meaning in the U.S. She "studies how we make choices—and how we feel about the choices we make", including "both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones" (18 mins)." - maitani - -

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BBC News - Brown bears return to Chernobyl after a century away - http://www.bbc.com/news...

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"Camera traps, used by a project assessing radioactive exposure impacts on wildlife, recorded the images. Brown bears had not been seen in the area for more than a century, although there had been signs of their presence." - maitani - -

"Scientists have captured what is believed to be the first photographic evidence of brown bears within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ)." - maitani - -

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maitani

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