Links for 2009-11-03

"I'm not real sure how I got here in the first place, and when you think about it you really have to go all the way back to school, and mom thought I should be a doctor and dad thought I should be an industrial wood lathe and I wanted to be the Cenozoic Era and we tried to work out a compromise but lookin back it was really the kinda situation where nobody was gonna end up really satisfied in the end"

"Pretty much every successful proposal starts with a variant of the following structure:

1. Topic X is important and interesting.

2. But.

3. This is how we will address "But."

The rest of the proposal reiterates those three points with enough detail to make it believable. "

Swine flu hysteria claims another victim.

"The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art.

But let's remember that this aesthetic delight is mainly savored by the outside observer, often a professional savorer like myself. Professional linguists or anthropologists are part of a distinct human minority. Most people, in the West or anywhere else, find the fact that there are so many languages in the world no more interesting than I would find a list of all the makes of Toyota. So our case for preserving the world's languages cannot be based on how fascinating their variegation appears to a few people in the world."

November releases feature the mysteries of Grigori Perelman, the evolutionary origins of reading, and new strategies for containing deadly strains of flu.

It's fun for at least half of the family.

"The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has started an inquiry into the extent to which liberal arts colleges discriminate against female applicants -- in an attempt to minimize gender imbalances in the student body. On Friday, the commission agreed on a set of colleges -- primarily in the Washington area -- to investigate, but declined to release a full list.

The issue is an extremely sensitive one for many liberal arts colleges, many of which in recent years have worried about their gender ratios reaching points (60 percent female is commonly cited) where they face difficulty in attracting both male and female applicants"