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Evaluate World Peace

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maitani


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Torch Song in Vienna by Michael Hofmann | The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/article...
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"“He was, very consciously,” claims Jonathan Franzen, in this latest high-profile relaunch of Kraus, “speaking to us.” There are “certain parallels,” Zohn wrote, in 1976 (in Canada, but it was repeated in 1986, in England), between Kraus’s age and ours. We need, he says, “his vibrant pacifism, his kind of defense of the spirit against dehumanizing tendencies, and his…steadfastness of moral purpose.”*" - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
"It was suggested in 1976, and again in 1986, by Karl Kraus’s early torch-bearer in English, Harry Zohn, and by others at other times, before and since, and probably in between as well, that there is a particular timeliness about the work of this Viennese Jewish writer, who was born in Bohemia in 1874 and died in Vienna in 1936. Even though most of Kraus’s writing was ad hominem and highly occasional. (This timeliness card, it seems, is one that one can always play, or at least hardly ever not. A sort of low trump, if you like.)" - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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NeuroLogica Blog » The Science of Learning - http://theness.com/neurolo...
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"So how do we get students to spend the day in lectures and actually learn a significant portion of the material?" - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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"This is very challenging. Simply lecturing is not very effective. There are different figures as to what the average “attention span” is, depending on exactly how it is measured, but the figures are generally less than 20 minutes, and as low as 5 minutes. Of course, this depends on attention to what. I can pay attention to a 3 hour movie without difficulty, if it’s Lord of the Rings or similar quality. Try listening to a 3 hour lecture on a dry technical topic, and effectively process the information presented the whole time." - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Dunhuang: A Secret Library, Digitally Excavated : The New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/online...
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Found via International Dunhuang Project <a rel="nofollow" href="http://idpuk.blogspot.de/... ; title="http://idpuk.blogspot.de/... ; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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&quot;Just over a thousand years ago, someone sealed up a chamber in a cave outside the oasis town of Dunhuang, on the edge of the Gobi Desert in western China. The chamber was filled with more than five hundred cubic feet of bundled manuscripts. They sat there, hidden, for the next nine hundred years. When the room, which came to be known as the Dunhuang Library, was finally opened in 1900, it was hailed as one of the great archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, on par with Tutankhamun’s tomb and the Dead Sea Scrolls.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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BBC Food - Curry: Where did it come from? - http://www.bbc.co.uk/food...
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In Norway we've ended up with one standardized spice mix called 'karri' and one slightly different one called 'curry.' - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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&quot;Curry is such a British favourite, the UK celebrates National Curry Week, but how was the food invented? When it's time for a takeaway, do you order a rogan josh, korma or lamb vindaloo? By doing so, you are actually tasting a slice of history. The UK has adopted curry as a &quot;national dish&quot;, with more than 9,000 Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurants and the creation of British-Asian dishes such as chicken tikka masala and balti, says the National Curry Week website. It says about 23 million people eat curry regularly. Since its inception, the word curry has &quot;changed its meaning and become ubiquitous as a menu word&quot;, says Alan Davidson, in the Oxford Companion to Food.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Purcell: Sound the trumpet - Come, ye sons of art, away - Philippe Jaroussky http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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&lt;3 - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Ombra mai fu <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.youtube.com/wa... ; title="http://www.youtube.com/wa... ; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Andreas Scholl - Al lampo del'armi (Giulio Cesare) http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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This is awesome: Andreas Scholl &amp; Philippe Jaroussky singing together - Now the night <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.youtube.com/wa... ; title="http://www.youtube.com/wa... ; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)

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Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Ashkenazi Jewish matrilineages mainly of European origin - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2013...
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&quot;If we allow for the possibility that K1a9 and N1b2 might have a Near Eastern source, then we can estimate the overall fraction of European maternal ancestry at ~65%. Given the strength of the case for even these founders having a European source, however, our best estimate is to assign ~81% of Ashkenazi lineages to a European source, ~8% to the Near East and ~1% further to the east in Asia, with ~10% remaining ambiguous (Fig. 10; Supplementary Table S9). Thus at least two-thirds and most likely more than four-fifths of Ashkenazi maternal lineages have a European ancestry.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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&quot;The origins of Ashkenazi Jews remain highly controversial. Like Judaism, mitochondrial DNA is passed along the maternal line. Its variation in the Ashkenazim is highly distinctive, with four major and numerous minor founders. However, due to their rarity in the general population, these founders have been difficult to trace to a source. Here we show that all four major founders, ~40% of Ashkenazi mtDNA variation, have ancestry in prehistoric Europe, rather than the Near East or Caucasus. Furthermore, most of the remaining minor founders share a similar deep European ancestry. Thus the great majority of Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Levant, as commonly supposed, nor recruited in the Caucasus, as sometimes suggested, but assimilated within Europe. These results point to a significant role for the conversion of women in the formation of Ashkenazi communities, and provide the foundation for a detailed reconstruction of Ashkenazi genealogical history.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Non-homophonous homographs in French - Antoine Amarilli's blog - http://a3nm.net/blog...
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thanks Maitani, I've shared it at <a rel="nofollow" href="https://fr.quora.com"... ; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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You're welcome, Adriano.:-) - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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What Did Proto-Indo-European Sound Like?—And How Can We Know? | GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/cultura...
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&quot;A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
&quot;Archaeology magazine recently published an article entitled “Telling Tales in Proto-Indo-European”, which included a recording of a short text in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the ancestor of modern languages in Europe and parts of Asia. This recording, made by Dr. Andrew Byrd of the University of Kentucky, a student of UCLA’s Indo-European expert H. Craig Melchert, drew considerable attention in the media (see here, here, and here). The text read by Byrd is a short parable called “The Sheep and the Horses”, which was originally written by a German philologist August Schleicher in 1868, as a way to experiment with the reconstructed PIE vocabulary. Here is the English translation of the story (which may sound familiar to people who watched the movie Prometheus):&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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The Ojibwe People's Dictionary - http://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/
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Meegwitch! - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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&quot;The Ojibwe People's Dictionary is a searchable, talking Ojibwe-English dictionary that features the voices of Ojibwe speakers. It is also a gateway into the Ojibwe collections at the Minnesota Historical Society. Along with detailed Ojibwe language entries and voices, you will find beautiful cultural items, photographs, and excerpts from relevant historical documents. Whenever possible, we provide examples of documents in the Ojibwe language.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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BBC News - Himalayas still uphill for climate report - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...
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&quot;Although the latest global update on climate change says the vast majority of glaciers worldwide have continued to shrink, scientists have admitted that the Himalayas remain an area where they still have very limited information.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
&quot;Glaciologists involved in the cryosphere chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) first phase report, launched last week, said there was no good sample of Himalayan glaciers that could help them forecast their future behaviour. &quot;The Himalayas are one of the areas we really are data-poor,&quot; said Prof David Vaughan from Cambridge University, UK, and one of the two lead coordinating authors of the ice chapter in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). &quot;We really need good samples of lots of glaciers and their measurements; we would like to have a larger number of benchmark glaciers,&quot; he told BBC News.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Preserving Endangered Jewish Languages | GeoCurrents - http://geocurrents.info/cultura...
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&quot;Prior to World War II, the majority of the Jewish people, up to 11 million in total spoke Yiddish, a Slavic-influenced Germanic language written in the Hebrew script. The territory occupied by Yiddish speakers was vast, extending from the French-German border in the west to Smolensk in the east. Most Yiddish speakers in Europe perished in the Holocaust and in Stalin’s Gulag system, and few of those who survived passed the language onto their children. In early days of Israel, Yiddish bore a stigma of the language of the ghettos and of the Jews being “the sheep going to slaughter”. Therefore, Israel’s 300,000 Holocaust survivors refrained from speaking Yiddish in public and, until recently, only people in the Chassidic (ultra-Orthodox) world, along with the very elderly, spoke Yiddish as their first language—or at all. Various sources give very different figures for the number of Yiddish speakers worldwide. According to the 2013 edition of the Ethnologue, there are 1,505,030 speakers of Eastern Yiddish, a dialect that developed in the Slavic-speaking lands of Eastern Europe (of them 215,000 in Israel), and merely 5,400 speakers of Western Yiddish, a dialect spoken largely in Germany. In contrast, the Modern Languages Association reports fewer than 200,000 in the United States. Other estimates are also given, for example, of a worldwide Yiddish-speaking population of about two million in 1996 in a report by the Council of Europe.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
&quot;Among the many endangered languages around the world are several languages and dialects once spoken by Jews in various parts of the diaspora, including Europe, Iran, India, and the Caucasus region. Not all Jewish languages have been discovered and described, and a few have probably passed away unnoticed. Sarah Benor, a professor at Hebrew Union College who specializes in Jewish languages, puts the number of endangered Jewish languages at around two dozen. The assimilatory tendencies in the Americas; the horrors of World War II; the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union; the rise of nationalism in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East; and—ironically—the creation of the State of Israel, which promoted Hebrew at the expense of other Jewish languages, all led to the weakening and even demise of many mixed Jewish languages, such as Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, and others. In Israel, Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Arabic were associated with Sephardim Jews who have generally had a lower socio-economic status than Israelis of European background. But even Yiddish, the language of the more socio-economically powerful Ashkenazim Jews, was looked down upon in Israel.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Fwd: Minoan, Mycenaean and Archaic/Classical Greek Civilization (lots of other cool maps inside) - http://explorethemed.com/ via Eivind http://friendfeed.com/history...
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:) - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)

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The Legacy of Greco-Roman Mapmaking - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2013...&
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&quot;Long before people could look upon Earth from afar, completing a full orbit every 90 minutes, the Greeks and the Romans of antiquity had to struggle to understand their world’s size and shape. Their approaches differed: the philosophical Greeks, it has been said, measured the world by the stars; the practical, road-building Romans by milestones.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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&quot;Long before people could look upon Earth from afar, completing a full orbit every 90 minutes, the Greeks and the Romans of antiquity had to struggle to understand their world’s size and shape. Their approaches differed: the philosophical Greeks, it has been said, measured the world by the stars; the practical, road-building Romans by milestones.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Mystery of Medieval Mega-Volcano: Solved! - D-brief | DiscoverMagazine.com - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief...
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&quot;For decades, scientists have been searching for the volcano responsible for the largest spike in sulfate deposits in the last 7,000 years, which were revealed in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The spike indicated a massive eruption around 1257. The medieval eruption may have sent up to eight times more sulfate into the stratosphere than the 1883 eruption of Karaktau, often held up as an archetype of volcanoes behaving badly. Researchers say the 1257 mystery spew is comparable in scope to a second-century AD eruption in the Taupo Volcanic Zone of New Zealand, known as the most intense historic volcanic event. The 1257 eruption had global consequences: Tree-ring records, as well as historical and archeological sources, show that the Northern Hemisphere experienced catastrophic floods, crop failures and unseasonable cold the following summer. A handful of possible suspects had been investigated, including New Zealand’s Okataina and Mexico’s El Chicon. One by one, however, they’d been ruled out through radiocarbon dating or, in the case of Ecuador’s Quilotoa, by comparing localized deposits with the chemical composition of those found in the polar ice cores.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)

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How Do You Say ‘Blog’ in German? - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2013...
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&quot;The Duden has been around since 1880, and this isn’t the first time English words have been added. But the new edition has caused an uproar among linguistic conservatives. After the additions were announced, the German Language Society, an unofficial organization that has tasked itself with protecting the German language, voted the editors of the Duden the “language adulterers of the year,” accusing them of legitimizing the demise of German.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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The Sprachpanscher debate, continued - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Understanding how infants acquire new words across cultures - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...
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The Order of Words: Understanding Differences in How Children and Adults Learn <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.sciencedaily.c... ; title="http://www.sciencedaily.c... ; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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&quot;Sandra Waxman, Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, is senior author of a new study providing the first ever evidence comparing how infants (monolingual, from Korea) acquiring Korean learn new nouns and verbs. Researchers have long suggested that in &quot;noun friendly&quot; languages including English, infants' attention is focused primarily on objects, typically marked by nouns. In &quot;verb friendly&quot; languages including Korean, Japanese and Hindi, verbs are said to enjoy a more privileged status because infants' attention is focused more directly on the actions and relations typically marked by verbs.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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The Seed-Saving Gardener | The Medieval Garden Enclosed | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - http://blog.metmuseum.org/cloiste...
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I save seeds from everything, even stuff I won't ever plant again. It allows me to trade/donate. - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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&quot;How many of you gardeners out there take the time to save your garden seed? The allure of planting seeds in the spring is easy to understand, but do you linger over drying seedpods later in the season, waiting to harvest next year’s generation? Seed saving may seem like an onerous counterpart to seed sowing, but the task is endlessly rewarding. It’s not just about securing a free source of new plants for the following year or two; there are other benefits to reap, so to speak. By selecting seed from among the garden’s most healthy specimens you promote added vigor in subsequent generations of plants. You get to witness the often overlooked beauty of a plant engaged in seed production. And, really, is there anything more satisfying than sowing the seed you collected from your own garden? For the seed-saving gardener, it doesn’t get much better than that.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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The 10 Greatest Books Ever, According to 125 Top Authors (Download Them for Free) | Open Culture - http://www.openculture.com/2013...
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&quot;1. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy iPad/iPhone - Kindle + Other Formats - Read Online 2. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats – Read Online 3. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy iPad/iPhone - Kindle + Other Formats - Read Online 4. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov Hear Nabokov read the next to final chapter here. 26 minutes of classic audio. 5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats - Read Online 6. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare iPad/iPhone - Kindle + Other Formats - Read Online 7. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald Kindle + Other Formats – Read Online 8. In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust Swann’s Way [1922] Within a Budding Grove [1924] The Guermantes Way [1925] Cities on the Plain [1927] The Captive [1929] The Sweet Cheat Gone [1930] Time Regained [1931] 9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov Read Online 10. Middlemarch, by George Eliot&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
&quot;So how about something similar for books, you ask? For that, we can look back to 2007, when J. Peder Zane, the book editor of the Raleigh News &amp; Observer, asked 125 top writers to name their favorite books — writers like Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Michael Chabon. The lists were all compiled in an edited collection, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, and then prefaced by one uber list, “The Top Top Ten.”&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Language Log » Sprachpanscher? - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...
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awesome, I just wanted to point out that possibility and the stupidity of &quot;language purity&quot; just like you also put it. What were your speciality in your studies? Me, myself I am more like a humble self-linguist, I did only a certificate program at the university. - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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but, yeah, the asshole VDS! - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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languagehat.com: LANGUAGE IN MOVIES II. - http://www.languagehat.com/archive...
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&quot;Almost a decade ago I did a post about language in movies; now I'll use Stan Carey's &quot;Films of linguistic interest&quot; as the springboard for another. Stan mentions the experimental French film Themroc, the Canadian film Pontypool, the Greek film Dogtooth (Kynodontas), Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the ’40s screwball comedy Ball of Fire (which I've seen and can recommend), My Fair Lady, The Princess Bride, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Nu Shu: A Hidden Language of Women in China, and The Grammar of Happiness, and concludes: &quot;If you have any more suggestions, or thoughts on the films I’ve mentioned, please add them in a comment, with spoiler warnings if necessary. I’ll update if I think of more.&quot; Feel free to discuss here and/or there, where there are already many suggestions in the comments (someone mentioned the first movie I thought of, Avatar).&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
Films of linguistic interest <a rel="nofollow" href="http://stancarey.wordpres... ; title="http://stancarey.wordpres... ; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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3quarksdaily: The New Dark Ages, Part I: From Religion to Ethnic Nationalism and Back Again - http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks...
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&quot;In this essay I am taking the liberty of modifying the tem &quot;Dark Ages&quot; and applying to a modern as well as a historical context. I use it to refer to a general culture of fundamentalism permeating societies, old and new. By &quot;Dark Age&quot; I mean to describe any large scale effort to dim human understanding by submerging it under a blanket of fundamentalist dogma. And far from Europe of 1,500 years ago, my main purpose is to talk about far more recent matters around the world.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
&quot;European Historians have long eschewed the term &quot;Dark Ages.&quot; Few of them still use it, and many of them shiver when they encounter it in popular culture. Scholars rightly point out that the term, popularly understood as connoting a time of death, ignorance, stasis, and low quality of life, is prejudiced and misleading.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Changing Diglossias in India - Shunya's Notes - http://blog.shunya.net/shunyas...
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&quot;I came across this interesting BBC radio program on the complex social dynamics around languages in India. It's an episode of a series called Word of Mouth that aired in April, 2013. What I enjoyed about the program wasn't so much that it yielded shocking new insights, but that the producer includes the voices of several mid-range media-wallas, and this helps make vivid the multi-poles and multilayers of the current linguistic reality.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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English and Dravidian - unlikely parallels <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.economist.com/... ; title="http://www.economist.com/... ; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: The Ancient World in JSTOR - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2009...
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&quot;JSTOR is not open access, but many will have access to it through institutional licenses. JSTOR also offers a free limited-reading option, Register &amp; Read, for those without institutional access, and has just lanched JPASS - a monthly or annual pass that provides access to 1,500 journal from JSTOR's archive collection.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Thank you, Kirsten. :-) There is lots for me to explore there. - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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The Bizarre Evolution of the Word "Cyber" - http://io9.com/today-c...
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&quot;In his writing, Weiner described what was at the time a pretty futuristic idea — that one day there would be a computer system that ran on feedback. Essentially, it would be a self-governing system. And for a long time, cybernetics remained the purview of information theorists like Weiner, and early computer programmers.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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&quot;It all started with &quot;cybernetics,&quot; an obscure term popularized by a mathematician named Norbert Weiner in the 1940s. For his groundbreaking book Cybernetics, Weiner borrowed the ancient Greek word &quot;cyber,&quot; which is related to the idea of government or governing. Indeed, the only time the word cybernetics had appeared before was in a few works of political theory about the science of governance.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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Keep Your Multilingualism to Yourself - Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://chronicle.com/blogs...
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&quot;I talked to an English-speaking American, fluent in German, who is raising his children as English/German bilinguals. He is currently resident in Germany, attached to a university in Hamburg. The main point of this visiting position is to allow him to immerse himself and his family in a German-speaking community, so naturally he wants to speak German with his German university colleagues. But to his astonishment he finds they don’t want that. They want him to use English with them. Their attitude toward his germanophone tendencies is distinctly disapproving.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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&quot;I hadn’t quite appreciated, though, that English is beginning to be so dominant and so much desired that its speakers are being condemned or bullied for having the temerity to even attempt the use of other languages.&quot; - maitani - - (Edit | Remove)
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