The wonders of human #languages:
“#ASL [American Sign Language] shares more with spoken #Japanese than it does with #English”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#Among_sign_languages
“#Spanish and #Portuguese are show the highest intelligibility, followed by Spanish and #Italian. #French is clustered further from the three mentioned above and #Romanian shows the smallest degree of intelligibility. However, for Romanian a high asymmetric intelligibility was measured. Romanians understand all the other Romance languages to a much higher extent than vice versa.”
https://www.linguistics.fi/contact/Book_of_abstracts_10.7.2014.pdf#page=114
W3C announces Seth Dobbs as next CEO
Seth Dobbs will commence in his new role as W3C CEO on November 13, 2023.
"I'm honored and thrilled to be joining W3C as CEO," said Seth Dobbs. "In all my time I'm not sure there is any development that has had a more profound and durable impact on our world than the Web.I look forward to joining the W3C community to help steward us into the next chapter.”
https://www.w3.org/news/2023/w3c-announces-seth-dobbs-as-ceo/
“The fact that this book is about a grown adult man lusting after a 12-year-old girl should be justification enough for some not to read it, but the general consensus surrounding #Lolita’s enduring popularity is that #Nabokov’s writing is beautiful; it’s just the premise that’s disturbing. I don’t know about you, but no amount of beautiful prose should be enough to get over a premise as problematic as that of Lolita.”
Absurd and childish. Then, don’t read anything involving murder or war — those are worse deeds than sexual abuse (even of a child).
Out of the window goes half the literary canon, some of the best #books humanity had produced.
Be a grown-up and read about difficult subjects, stories with nuance, ambiguity, shades of grey. It’s fiction, after all. You may learn a thing or two.
Un buen resumen del despropósito y el alarmismo (y la ignorancia) que supone meter internet, derechos de autor y abuso (pornografía) infantil en el mismo saco:
If you know me, you’d think that I’d hate big #ShoppingCentres.
But I like them quite a lot in general, and whenever I’m at one of them (not very often) I usually wish I visited more often.
What can I say 🤷♂️
@koalie, I think you would love this reinterpretation of Little Nemo; the art is amazing:
https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Pes-Little-Nemo-Pe/dp/1951719166/ref=sr_1_1
#PSA:
This is an emoji → 😜
This is an emoticon → ;-P
This is a blog → https://marginalrevolution.com/
This is a (blog) post → https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/09/winnie-and-nelson-portrait-of-a-marriage.html
What else?
It's mind-boggling how many animals get slaughtered for human meat consumption every single day.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-every-day
#animal #animals #murder #anthropocene #data #vegetarian #vegan #statistics #information #knowledge #science #cows #chickens #goats #sheep #ducks #pigs #fish
After Monty Python ended, Graham Chapman worked with an up-and-coming young writer named Douglas Adams on a new sketch comedy show for the BBC. It was called "Out of the Trees," and it bombed. Only one episode was made, and that aired only once, on January 10, 1976.
Once the Beeb gave up on "Out of the Trees," they did to it what they did to so many other programs of that era: they erased it. They wiped the master tapes so they could be re-used. "Out of the Trees" went into the history books as lost media.
That changed nearly 30 years later, when Chapman's partner, David Sherlock, approached Dick Fiddy, an archivist at London's National Film Theatre. Sherlock revealed that Chapman had in fact recorded a copy of "Out of the Trees" onto videotape the one and only time it aired.
But there was a problem. That air date was in 1976, before VHS or Betamax became global videocassette standards. Chapman had in fact recorded the show on one of the very earliest home videotape formats -- Philips' "Video Cassette Recording" (VCR), which had reached the market in 1972. The rise of Beta and VHS had, however, led Philips to abandon its VCR format. The last compatible players had been made in 1979. By the mid-2000s, they were impossible to find. Sherlock had been left with an historic tape, and no machine to play it on.
Fiddy says it took two years to build a compatible player, but eventually it was done. And that is why you can watch "Out of the Trees" on YouTube today.
Is it any good? Ehhh, not really. It's not Chapman or Adams' best work, that's for certain. But it's a good example of what the future will hold for lots of cultural artifacts, if we're not careful.
#ChatGPT just answered a burning question of mine that two human pharmacists could not answer. Yipee!
https://chat.openai.com/share/08da5a60-93ea-456d-be95-467da614ff78
Technologist, Spaniard, male, 42