language
aardvarchaeology | December 5, 2011
The Curiosity rover, a science robot the size of a car, is on its way to Mars where it will use a new landing system and hopefully spend several fruitful years trundling about. One of the coolest instruments on it is a laser gun coupled with a spectrometer: Curiosity can zap a rock from a distance and determine its chemical composition by looking at the colours of the light emitted by the heated material. I'm going to watch this mission closely.
On the rover is the above sundial cum camera calibration target, designed by Jon Lomberg (who already has three pieces of art on Mars). Note the…
aardvarchaeology | November 1, 2011Year after year, the Swedish language is spoken by a smaller percentage of the world's population. And year after year, the geographical area where Swedish is spoken shrinks a little. But year after year, Swedish is spoken by an increasing number of people. How does this work?
Although Swedish speakers in Sweden and SW Finland have low nativity figures, and thus lose relative ground locally to Finnish speakers, and globally to the fecund masses of e.g. India, Sweden also receives immigrants who cause the country's population to grow slowly but steadily. And they all learn Swedish. In my area…
milhayser | October 3, 2011
On Developing Intelligence, Chris Chatham shares a new study which demonstrates that performing new tasks actually reverses the accustomed workflow between different parts of the brain. Chris writes "Cole et al demonstrate that the causal influence is from [the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex] to [the anterior prefrontal cortex] during the encoding and performance of a novel task. Practiced tasks, by contrast, were associated with a complete reversal of these effects, with APFC primarily influencing DLPFC activation during preparation and performance." These results invite a re-evaluation…
aardvarchaeology | September 11, 2011
My wife just returned from Beijing where she's been collecting interviews for a TV project. And I find that her beauty is not luxurious imagination.
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 2011Dear Reader, please try saying "ENSKTBLEH". Yes, six consonants in a row. ENSKTBLEH. OK? Now sing it, loudly and happily. Go!
I've spent three happy days at the first ever Picture Stone Symposium in Visby, listening to papers, moderating some bits and giving a presentation of my own that went down pretty well. And one evening I was reminded of a) that I'm a weird singer, b) that one of C.M. Bellman's least felicitous phrases occurs in one of his best-beloved song lyrics.
During a reception Thursday night in the Picture Stone Hall of the Gotland County Museum, a UK colleague asked me and a…
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2011When annoyed, my dad (born in '43) will sometimes use a pretty awesome expletive that has largely fallen out of fashion. Men då får han väl se till och ordna det då, för höge farao! "So he'd better make sure to get it done then, by the Great Pharaoh!"
This expression belongs to a common category of mild Swedish curses where a word similar to something nastier is used. Farao is similar to fan, "devil". Likewise, we'll say jösses (Jesus), tusan (a thousand [devils]) and sjutton (seventeen [thousand devils]) . Meanwhile, Swedish doesn't even have a word for "bugger" and the activity seems…
aardvarchaeology | July 9, 2011
My wife's from Zhejiang province, and so is this can of pickled cabbage that she bought yesterday. I like the label a lot. It's not quite Engrish: of course, we would say "people's mess hall", but the Chinese characters actually denote an extremely basic canteen-like eatery. A mess hall, a canteen, maybe a refectory; very latter-day Maoist. It's a correct translation.
I endorse the pickled cabbage of the Chun'an Qiandaohu Nongxing Food Co., Ltd.. It is by far good enough to be served not only in mess halls.
aardvarchaeology | June 13, 2011
Fecal sample submission window.
Dan, be cake. Because the Danish-Belgian Cake Company says so.
"Busen" means "breasts" in German and "the naughty one" in Swedish.
No appointment needed. Come whenever you lie fallow.
"Shroff" means "tariff" in Engrish. Maybe.
Porular blog Aardvarchaeology a rad.
aardvarchaeology | June 9, 2011
"Lie Fallow" means "in your spare time, without a prior appointment" in Engrish.
Everybody loves Engrish, the surreal dialect of English found on signs, in menus, on clothing etc. in the Far East. Much of it seems to stem from blind over-use of dictionaries, where the non-Anglophone user picks one of the possible translations of a term at random. Here are a few examples I've caught recently at restaurants.
The breakfast menu at our hotel in Hecheng had some fine variations on rice porridge and its condiments.
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2011One of the stranger concepts in Tolkien's writings is that of "High Elves". Why are these elves high? It has nothing to do with drugs, though in the Tolkien Society we used to joke about them smoking lembas. And it has nothing to do with stature, though nobility and body height go together in Tolkien, nor with elevation above sea level. I've got an idea.
According to Robert Foster's 1978 book Complete Guide to Middle-earth, Tolkien uses the term as a synonym for the Eldar. These were a subset of the original Elven population who accepted a summons to join the gods in their brightly lit…
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2011I'm a picky reader when it comes to entertainment, and if I don't like the first 50 pages of a novel I rarely continue. The most recent casualty of this policy is a book I was very kindly given by Birger Johansson, Rob Thurman's The Grimrose Path (2010). Its a modern urban fantasy with angels and demons and tricksters, and it failed to interest me much. Usually I don't review stuff I don't like here, since I prefer to offer the Dear Reader recommendations. But this book suffers from an interesting weakness that I can't remember coming across before, and I thought I might say something about…
aardvarchaeology | January 31, 2011
Mount Everest: named after Colonel Sir George Everest (1790-1866), British Surveyor General of India.
K2: an early land-surveyor's shorthand notation, used because nobody lived near enough to the mountain for it to have a local name.
Himmelbjerget: "Mount Heaven", 147 meters above sea level. Denmark's highest point is in fact Møllehøj, "Windmill Barrow", at 171 m a.s.l.
Kebnekaise: "Kettle Peak". Sweden's highest mountain carries this name due to a misunderstanding between local Saami and surveyors, as the mountain with the concave peak is actually nearby Tolpagorni.
Mount McKinley: the…
aardvarchaeology | January 18, 2011
The current issue of Vanity Fair (#606, February 2011) has an interesting piece on the collaboration between Wikileaks, the Guardian and other old media. On page 110 we're told that Wikileaks is "partly hosted on a server in Sweden that is lodged in a former nuclear bunker drilled deep inside the White Mountains". This confused me for a moment, since there is no mountain range of that name in Sweden. Then I realised the journalist's error and laughed.
The server plant alluded to in the article is indeed in an area known as Vita bergen, "the white mountains". But it's not a mountain range. It…
aardvarchaeology | October 28, 2010One of my pet peeves in academic prose of the more pretentious kind is the double-false conditional statement. Here's one that I've made up.
"If the adoption of bronze casting can be seen as a sign of increasing preoccupation with eschatology, then it follows that we must be continually vigilant against any appropriation of the era's heritage by the extreme right."
What I'm doing here is first putting forward a probably false or untestable statement as a condition, and then asserting baldly that one can infer something else from it, which is in fact completely unrelated. This is quite common…
cevans | October 8, 2010
In case you didn't know, reality is science fiction.
If you doubt me, read the news. Read, for example, this recent article in the New York Times about Carnegie Mellon's "Read the Web" program, in which a computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, essentially teaching itself idiomatic English as well as educating itself in human affairs. Paging Vernor Vinge, right?
NELL reads the Web 24 hours a day, seven days a week, learning language like a human would -- cumulatively, over…
aardvarchaeology | August 9, 2010
And here's star philologist and religion scholar Ola Wikander with a guest lesson in Akkadian.
The word of the day is nuḫatimmu. It means "a cook" in Akkadian (or sometimes "a baker"). Maybe something to interest Gordon Ramsay? And wouldn't it be great if there was an Akkadian version of the TV show MasterChef, named Rab Nuḫatimmê? Taken literally, that term means "top cook", "best cook", but it was also used in a slightly different context way back when. In 586 BC, when Jerusalem had surrendered to Babylonian invaders, the victors sacked the city under the command of a certain…
cevans | August 6, 2010
Let's talk about the God Particle.
It strikes me that people refer to the Higgs boson as the "God particle" in the same way some call the iPhone the "Jesus phone": with an almost pointed disregard for what such a prefix actually means. Considering the intensity of the culture wars, the popularity of the moniker is baffling. Is this about contextualizing the abstraction (and grandeur) of particle physics in a way "regular" people can understand? Does this represent a humanist concession to the religious? If so, can religious culture really be swayed by such a transparent ploy -- y'know, it…
aardvarchaeology | July 4, 2010My buddy Micke and his Japanese college room mate:
"I'm Ken Nakamura. Ken means 'heresy'!"
"Really? That's kind of... odd."
"Yes! It means 'HERESY'! Rike when you are never sick!"
"Ahaaa, you mean 'healthy'..."
"Yes! Correct! What does your name mean?"
jgoldman | July 1, 2010Imagine with me, for a moment, that the zombie invasion has begun. You try to escape, but the zombies are just too much to handle. You can't run fast enough. They're everywhere. Your favorite science bloggers have been turned into zombies and they're coming for you.
Figure 1: Thanks to Joseph Hewitt of Ataraxia Theatre for providing us with these awesome illustrations of zombified sciblings! Left to right: Christie, Sci, Bora, me, & Peter and Travis. Click on each to embiggen.
I'm sure you've always wondered what would happen as a zombie ate through your brain. How would it feel? What…