maitani

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‘A Piece of Cake’ http://chronicle.com/blog... http://chronicle.com/blog...

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"It started with an email from my eclectic friend Wes Davis. He said he’d been reading Tinkerbelle, by, he told me, “Robert Manry, a copy editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer who, in 1965, took a leave of absence from his job and sailed a 13-and-a-half-foot wooden boat across the Atlantic, from Falmouth, Mass., to Falmouth, England.” He’d come upon a passage he thought would interest me. Manry is just starting out and it’s a beautiful day, “the wind strong enough to keep us moving along briskly.” He observes: “I told myself that if most of the days ahead were as pleasant as this, our trip would be a breeze, or, as the English say, a piece of cake.”" - maitani - -

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COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY http://compmyth.org/journ... http://compmyth.org/journ...

1 decade ago - Comment - Hide - - -

The inaugural issue of Comparative Mythology has been published! - maitani - -

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ahah so many thanks then! I gave a glance to it, a few papers are looking at Witzel's last work (and he's the one behind the board, I suppose). I must say I haven't examined his last book thoroughly, and specially the quite controversial theory of a Laurasian mythology, as opposed to one from Gondwana. The paper about the Ashvins is written by Allen and I liked it much. - Haukr - -

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maitani to maitani's feed, History
A Calendar Page for May 2015 http://britishlibrary.typ... http://a4.typepad.com/6a0...

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"The Zodiac sign for May is Gemini, portrayed here unusually as conjoined twins (cephalothoracopagus twins, to be precise, who are joined at the thorax and share a single head). May is the month in which the Finding of the Holy Cross is celebrated. The event is depicted in one of the roundels, with the Pope and other figures standing as witnesses. In the scene below, the gentlewoman and her lapdog make a reappearance, boating on a river. She is playing music on a lute, while one of her companions accompanies her on an instrument resembling a recorder. In the background, two gentlemen are out hunting: they are riding on horseback, one of them bearing a hawk on his wrist. A servant follows, carrying a lance and also a hunting bird." - maitani - -

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Hofgarten http://i.imgur.com/TMCGjH...

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Hofgarten http://i.imgur.com/3rWLn4... http://i.imgur.com/EVQUD4...

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The Great & Beautiful Lost Kingdoms http://www.nybooks.com/ar... http://www.nybooks.com/me...

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"“People of distant places with diverse customs,” wrote a Chinese Buddhist monk in the mid-seventh century, “generally designate the land that they admire as India.”" - maitani - -

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"Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia, Fifth to Eighth Century an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, April 14–July 27, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition by John Guy. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 317 pp., $65.00" - maitani - -

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Desert Dust Feeds Amazon Forests http://science.nasa.gov/s... http://science.nasa.gov/m...

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"April 29, 2015: The Sahara Desert is one of the least hospitable climates on Earth. Its barren plateaus, rocky peaks, and shifting sands envelop the northern third of Africa, which sees very little rain, vegetation, and life." - maitani - -

"Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean thrives the world’s largest rainforest. The lush, vibrant Amazon basin, located in northeast South America, supports a vast network of unparalleled ecological diversity." - maitani - -

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maitani to maitani's feed, Linguistics
Cutthroat compounds in English morphology https://stancarey.wordpre... http://people.ucalgary.ca...

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"Cutthroat compounds name things or people by describing what they do. A cutthroat cuts throats, a telltale tells tales, a wagtail wags its tail, a killjoy kills joy, a scarecrow scares crows, a turncoat turns their coat, rotgut rots the gut, a pickpocket picks pockets, a sawbones saws bones (one of the few plural by default), and breakfast – lest you miss its hidden-in-plain-sight etymology – breaks a fast. The verb is always transitive, the noun its direct object." - maitani - -

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Me too. :-) This makes me view this familiar and unexciting word in a very different light. - maitani - -

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Sunshower http://en.wikipedia.org/w... http://upload.wikimedia.o...

1 decade ago - Comment - Hide - - -

"A sunshower or sun shower is a meteorological phenomenon in which rain falls while the sun is shining.[1] These conditions often lead to the appearance of a rainbow, if the sun is at a low enough angle.[1] Although used in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Britain, the term "sunshower" is rarely found in dictionaries.[2] Additionally, the phenomenon has a wide range of sometimes remarkably similar folkloric names in cultures around the world. A common theme is that of clever animals and tricksters getting married or related to the devil, although many variations of parts of this theme exist." - maitani - -

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Most of my pictures aren't visible any more... - maitani - -

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maitani to maitani's feed, History, Linguistics
Agriculture Came with Men to the Indian Subcontinent http://www.unz.com/gnxp/a... http://upload.wikimedia.o...

1 decade ago - Comment - Hide - - -

"I am often asked by people online to give an “elevator pitch” as to the genetic history of the Indian subcontinent. At this point we’ve got ~90 percent of the story I think. Modern humans arrived in the Indian subcontinent ~50,000 years ago, and pushed onward to East Asia, but over the past ~10,000 years massive changes have occurred genetically due to the intrusion of populations form the northwest and northeast, with likely total cultural turnover. What do I mean by this? First, it’s highly probable that all of the extant language families of the Indian subcontinent are rooted in lineages which were present outside of the Indian subcontinent before the Holocene. In other words, during the Ice Age the ancestral linguistic entities which gave rise to Indo-European, Dravidian, and Austro-Asiatic, were present outside of confines of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan. The only exception here are the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islanders.*" - maitani - -

article by Razib Khan - maitani - -

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What Did Proto-Indo-European Sound Like?—And How Can We Know? http://languagesoftheworl... http://languagesoftheworl...

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"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):" - maitani - -

"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." - maitani - -

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Introduction to Homeric Greek: Volume 1 http://hour25.heroesx.chs... http://i.imgur.com/bhBLJR...

1 decade ago - Comment - Hide - - -

"This Introduction to Homeric Greek series was created by members of the Hour 25 Community in coordination with Professor Graeme Bird as a community-generated, open access educational resource. The series is designed as a gentle introduction for absolute beginners." - maitani - -

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If any of you gives this a try, I'd like to hear what you think about it. As soon as I have time to look into this, I'll comment on it here (but that won't be before the end of May, unfortunately). - maitani - -

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maitani to maitani's feed, Linguistics
On cups and mugs http://david-crystal.blog... http://rlv.zcache.de/i_li...

1 decade ago - Comment - Hide - - -

Image found here: http://www.zazzle.de/i_li... - maitani - -

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Very interesting. Thanks. - bentley - -

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Birds show surprising resilience in the face of natural stresses http://www.sciencedaily.c... http://images.sciencedail...

1 decade ago - Comment - Hide - - -

"Life as a wild baby bird can involve a lot of stress; competing with your siblings, dealing with extreme weather, and going hungry due to habitat loss are just a few examples. However, birds have an amazing capacity to overcome stresses experienced early in life and go on to reproductive success as adults, according to a new article." - maitani - -

This reminded me of "my" stork family. It is indeed amazing how they all overcome really stressful and dangerous situations. Not only the the fledglings, but also the parents. http://www.storchennest-h... - maitani - -

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maitani to maitani's feed, Linguistics
Anglicizing German http://arnoldzwicky.org/2... http://arnoldzwicky.s3.am...

1 decade ago - Comment - Hide - - -

"A beef on weck is a sandwich found primarily in Western New York. It is made with roast beef on a kummelweck roll. The meat on the sandwich is traditionally served rare, thin cut, with the top bun getting a dip au jus. Accompaniments include horseradish, a dill pickle spear, and french fries." - maitani - -

"The kummelweck roll gives the sandwich its name and a distinctive taste. A kummelweck (sometimes pronounced “kimmelweck” or “kümmelweck”) is topped with kosher salt and caraway seeds. Kümmel is the German word for caraway, and weck means “roll” in the south-western German dialects of the Baden and Swabia areas (northern Germans generally say Brötchen), although the kind of weck used for this sandwich in America tends to be much softer and fluffier than a standard German Kümmelbrötchen or Kümmelweck." - maitani - -

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Near Hattusa http://i.imgur.com/3uiIw6...

1 decade ago - Comment - Hide - - -

maitani to maitani's feed, Linguistics
Space as a matter of attention http://www.babelsdawn.com... http://www.babelsdawn.com...

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"There might seem to be a very large number of ways attention can be shifted, but fortunately the gestalt psychologists have managed to reduce the number of things perceived to two categories: the figure and the ground. Carstensen calls the figure the LO (locative object) and the ground the (RO) reference object, but that has proved too confusing for me and I'm sticking with gestalt terminology. Gestalt psychology leaves us with only three possible attention shifts. (A fourth, ground to ground, does not work. One of the grounds becomes a figure):" - maitani - -

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My point exactly :) - barrywynn - -

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All the Young Dudes: Generic Gender Terms Among Young Women http://daily.jstor.org/yo... http://daily.jstor.org/wp...

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"The first time I was addressed as ‘bro’ by a female friend I must admit I was a little taken aback, but not as surprised as when I overheard a friend addressing her mother-in-law as ‘dude’. These days (particularly in American speech) it’s not difficult to find instances of so-called masculine generics being used by young women amongst themselves to refer to other women. Formerly gendered terms like ‘dude’, ‘bro’ (and perhaps the more gender-obscured slang variants such as ‘brah’) are following words like ‘guy’ and ‘man’ in becoming increasingly gender neutral in many speech contexts." - maitani - -

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In the German language, under the influence of English, we just begin to use gender-neutral terms, but we are still far behind your language in this respect. When we talk about a title or function a person has, some tend to use a gender-neutral term, especially when the term is English, e.g. Master of Arts, and we have "Frau Doktor" or "Frau Professor", but we also have "Doktorin" and "Professorin". Because of our grammar (and because of feminism?) we are suckers for gender discrimination. It is unpredictable which tendency is going to prevail. - maitani - -

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The Teaching Brain (book review) http://www.truthdig.com/a... http://www.truthdig.com/i...

1 decade ago - Comment - Hide - - -

“The Teaching Brain: The Evolutionary Trait at the Heart of Education” A book by Vanessa Rodriguez with Michelle Fitzpatrick - maitani - -

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I'd like to know that, too. I suspect the quality gaps between "good" and "bad" schools are huge. - maitani - -

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maitani to maitani's feed, Linguistics
What Part of “No, Totally” Don’t You Understand? http://www.newyorker.com/... http://www.newyorker.com/...

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"Not long ago, I walked into a friend’s kitchen and found her opening one of those evil, impossible-to-breach plastic blister packages with a can opener. This worked, and struck me as brilliant, but I mention it only to illustrate a characteristic that I admire in our species: given almost any entity, we will find a way to use it for something other than its intended purpose. We commandeer cafeteria trays to go sledding, “The Power Broker” to prop open the door, the Internet to look at kittens. We do this with words as well—time was, spam was just Spam—but, lately, we have gone in for a particularly dramatic appropriation. In certain situations, it seems, we have started using “no” to mean “yes.”" - maitani - -

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Magnolia http://i.imgur.com/o5wkpu...

1 decade ago - Comment - Hide - - -

Lovely. :) - Jenny H - -

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‘Manet Paints Monet’ http://www.nybooks.com/bl... http://www.nybooks.com/me...

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"In the summer of 1874, Claude Monet was living in Argenteuil, a suburb on the Seine some seven miles north of Paris, and Édouard Manet was spending time at his family’s property in nearby Gennevilliers, just across the river. Two paintings made by Manet that summer are the subject of Willibald Sauerländer’s new book, Manet Paints Monet: A Summer in Argenteuil, which Colin B. Bailey reviews in The New York Review’s April 23 issue. Monet’s influence is crucial to what Sauerländer considers to be Manet’s “conversion” to Impressionism. Yet their acquaintance was not always amiable." - maitani - -

That's fantastic! <3 - Jenny H - -

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Cyrenaica, part 4: Cyrene https://rambambashi.wordp... https://rambambashi.files...

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"Cyrene was one of the great cities of the classical Greek world, comparable to Athens, Miletus, Syracuse, and Corinth. It was founded by people from the small island of Thera (Santorini), who first settled on another small island, off the African shore, before they settled on the mainland. When the colony proved successful, other settlers came, who founded Barca, Taucheira, and Euesperides (Bengazi). Ptolemais and Apollonia were originally the ports of Barca and Cyrene, but eventually became cities in their own right." - maitani - -

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Marooned in an overgrown tea garden http://www.bbc.com/news/m... http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/n...

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"India became a major tea producer after the British set up plantations in the 19th Century to break China's monopoly. The huge estates have traditionally provided for all their workers' needs - but if owners shut them down, thousands can be left without jobs, health care or enough to eat." - maitani - -

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An experimental bird migration visualization http://www.enram.eu/ http://www.enram.eu/wp-co...

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"Every year hundreds of millions of birds migrate to and from their wintering and breeding grounds, often traveling hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers twice a year. Many of these individuals make concentrated movements under the cover of darkness, and often at high altitudes, making it exceedingly difficult to precisely monitor the passage of these animals." - maitani - -

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At that scale you don't see individual birds or flocks of birds, but you can get a sense of the volume of migration and the direction that it's going. There are ways to tell if the radar is picking up birds or something else (like dust). I think flight direction vs wind direction is one. Also, a stream of migrating birds will show up as a blue or green circle around the radar station. - John B. - -

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After learning new words, brain sees them as pictures http://www.sciencedaily.c...

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"When we look at a known word, our brain sees it like a picture, not a group of letters needing to be processed. That's the finding from a new study that shows the brain learns words quickly by tuning neurons to respond to a complete word, not parts of it." - maitani - -

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I'm not fluent in Spanish, but I think there must be groups on the internet whose members offer something like that. - maitani - -

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maitani

Warning!