He claims: sometimes "a" makes the "ar" sound, like in ask, bath, and grass. This probably makes sense as a way of teaching Australian English, but it makes my head hurt to hear him say that instead of saying that (in non-rhotic accents) "ar" can make the "a" sound in works like large and party.
Word of the morn: myodesis, with -desis borrowed from Ancient Greek δέσῐς (désis, “binding together”), from δέω (déō, “to bind, tie, fasten”) + -σῐς (-sis, nominal suffix).
The parable of the broken window was introduced by French economist Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 essay "That Which We See and That Which We Do Not See" ("Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas") to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is not actually a net benefit to society.
The parable seeks to show how opportunity costs, as well as the law of unintended consequences, affect economic activity in ways that are unseen or ignored. The belief that destruction is good for the economy is consequently known as the broken window fallacy or glazier's fallacy.
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> A Roman walked into a bar and asked for a martinus. The bartender asked, "Don't you mean a martini?" The Roman replied, "If I wanted a double, I would've asked for it."
> I surveyed more than 10,000 UK adults chosen to be representative for age, gender, ethnicity, income and region. Asked whether, over the past month, people had laughed at them behind their back, a third believed this somewhat or totally; 38% said people had done things to annoy them and 27% that someone wanted to hurt them; 28% had been distressed because of persecution.
In Russia, сороконожки (something paired, like shoes, indicated by the ending "и", that has forty small feet - сорок is forty, ножки is small feet, and there's the connecting vowel o between the two parts)
The Nova Vulgata (complete title: Nova Vulgata Bibliorum Sacrorum Editio, transl. The New Vulgate Edition of the Holy Bible; abr. NV), also called the Neo-Vulgate, is the official Classical Latin translation of the original-language texts of the Bible published by the Holy See. It was completed in 1979, and was promulgated the same year by John Paul II in Scripturarum thesaurus. A second, revised edition was published in 1986. It is the official Latin text of the Bible of the Catholic Church. The Nova Vulgata is also called the New Latin Vulgate or the New Vulgate.Before the Nova Vulgata, t...
> Adiuro vos, filiae Ierusalem, per capreas cervasque camporum, ne suscitetis neque evigilare faciatis dilectam, donec ipsa velit.
Such gentle creatures.
> Ferculum fecit sibi rex Salomon de lignis Libani; columnas eius fecit argenteas, reclinatorium aureum, sedile purpureum: medium eius stratum ebeneum.
This is why there are no more cedars in the Lebanon. :/
The snails of Tyre are still there, though. Mostly because we forgot how to concoct the royal color from them.
> True Tyrian purple, like most high-chroma pigments, cannot be accurately rendered on a standard RGB computer monitor.
> In 1998, by means of a lengthy trial and error process, a process for dyeing with Tyrian purple was rediscovered.[37][38] This finding built on reports from the 15th century to the 18th century and explored the biotechnology process behind woad fermentation. It is hypothesized that an alkaline fermenting vat was necessary. An incomplete ancient recipe for Tyrian purple recorded by Pliny the Elder was also consulted. By altering the percentage of sea salt in the dye vat and adding potash, he was able to successfully dye
Good luck finding the antecedent of he there. Hint: It's not Pliny.
> Rather, it is a text intended to accord with modern critical editions of the Hebrew and Greek Bible texts, and to produce a style closer to Classical Latin.
@tchrist I memorized the word tyrian when I first came across it in the phrase tyrian hue
> Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide Two angel forms were seen to glide, The genii of the stream; Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue Through richest purple to the view Betrayed a golden gleam.
> The hapless nymph with wonder saw; A whisker first and then a claw, With many an ardent wish, She stretched in vain to reach the prize. What female heart can gold despise? What cat’s averse to fish?
A great verse
> From hence, ye beauties, undeceived, Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved, And be with caution bold. Not all that tempts your wandering eyes And heedless hearts, is lawful prize; Nor all that glisters, gold.
@tchrist That reminds me of an old Russian joke about a guy who goes to the market and sees "professor brains" sold for 10 rubles per kg, and "policemen brains" sold for 100 rubles per kg
My Microsoft Natural keyboard is attached to the laptop via an adaptor, PS/2 to USB, and it sometimes goes aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. I mean, you're typing and suddenly one of the letters starts repeating without the button being presseddddddddddddddddddddd
> It has been deduced that when participants were subjected to interviews confirmed as stressful by physiological indicators, their skin emitted an odor similar to stir-fried leeks containing allyl mercaptan and dimethyl trisulfide. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9246182
> In the brain’s cortex, neurons are arranged in six layers, visible under a microscope. MIT neuroscientists discovered that these layers exhibit specific electrical activity patterns consistent across various brain regions and animal species, including humans. scienceblog.com/541768/…
> Miller’s lab has previously shown that high-frequency gamma rhythms are associated with encoding and retrieving sensory information, while low-frequency beta rhythms act as a control mechanism that determines which information is read out from working memory. picower.mit.edu/news/…
Earl Keith Miller (born November 30, 1962) is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on neural mechanisms of cognitive, or executive, control. Earl K. Miller is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience with the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of SplitSage.. He is a co-founder of Neuroblox.
== Education ==
Earl Miller received a Bachelor of Arts degree (summa cum laude, with honors) in psychology from Kent State University in 1985, Master of Arts...
Word of the eve: spatial computing in the primate brain
> The research, led by scientists at MIT, shows that the brain creates distinct spaces in the cortex for each general rule and controls those patches with brain rhythms, a concept the authors call “spatial computing.” news.mit.edu/2023/…
> Thus, the brain can easily sustain a consistent understanding of a process even when the specific contents keep changing (like the time and temperature for bread versus cookies).
@tchrist Reviving the Tyrian purple dye is a great achievement but nothing compared to his ability, as a non native speaker, to speak English with so little foreign accent, if any.
If you listen very, very closely now and then a fleeting oddity leaks through, but is gone from your mind even more quickly.
I think that probably means he has spent a substantial period of his formative years immersed in North America or its English.
But often I am wrong about this. So much is available remotely now. Undubbed films, and more.
I was also slightly surprised when his Arabic was replaced with French and I suddenly knew what he was saying. It was very late last night, and I'd have to listen again to be sure.
It's not like they use the entire snail. They extract a tiny organ from each one, and use just that.
And you can exercise some control over the range of hues produced by varying the proportion of the contribution made by each of the three species they use for this, one somewhat more bluish purple through violet, the other two more reddish purple but still not the same red between them.
Hercules's Dog Discovers Purple Dye or The Discovery of Purple by Hercules's Dog is an oil painting by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens painted circa 1636, towards the end of his career. It depicts the mythical discovery of Tyrian purple by Hercules and his dog, and was one of dozens of oil on panel sketches made by Rubens for the decoration of the Torre de la Parada in Spain. A completed painting based on Rubens's sketch was made by Theodoor van Thulden in 1636–1638, and is now held by the Prado Museum.
== Description ==
The painting shows a scene from an origin myth in the Onomasticon (...
The hypobranchial gland is a glandular structure which is part of the anatomy of many mollusks, including several different families of gastropods, and also many protobranch bivalves. This gland produces mucus as well as biologically active compounds. The cephalopod ink sac is a modified hypobranchial gland.
== Anatomy and function ==
GastropodsThe hypobranchial gland is found in many sea snails, including those in the families Haliotidae, Buccinidae, Mitridae and Costellariidae. It usually presents itself as a thickening of the tissue located in the roof of the animal's mantle cavity. This is...
> Shellfish purple is composed of a mixture of indigo dyes: indigo, monobromoindigo and dibromoindigo with smaller amounts of the corresponding indirubins. It is the bromoindigos which are exclusively the signature components, there being no other source.
6,6'-Dibromoindigo is an organic compound with the formula (BrC6H3C(O)CNH)2. A deep purple solid, the compound is also known as Tyrian purple, a dye of historic significance. Presently, it is only a curiosity, although the related derivative indigo is of industrial significance. The molecule consists of a pair of monobrominated indole rings linked by a carbon-carbon double bond. It is produced by molluscs of the Muricidae species.The pure compound has semiconductor properties in the thin film phase, which is potentially useful for wearable electronics, and has better performance than the parent...
> Did you know that the tiniest insects in the world have no nuclei in over 95% of their CNS neurons? Despite this apparent "deficit" , they still go about their lives flying, feeding and searching for hosts.
> The main chemical constituent of the Tyrian dye was discovered by Paul Friedländer in 1909 to be 6,6′-dibromoindigo, derivative of indigo dye, which had been synthesized in 1903.[5][6] Although the first chemical synthesis was reported in 1914, unlike indigo, it has never been synthesized at commercial level.[7][8] An efficient protocol for laboratory synthesis of dibromoindigo was developed in 2010.
Are these the Mymaridae, the "fairy wasps" or "fairyflies"?
> The generic name Mymar (and by extension, Mymaridae) was derived by Curtis from the Greek word μΰμαρ (mymar), an Aeolian variant of the standard Greek μῶμος (mōmos, "spot" or "blot")
> Their bodies are smaller than a single-celled Paramecium.
> It has long been assumed that credit assignment is best solved by backpropagation, which is also the foundation of modern machine learning. Here, we set out a fundamentally different principle on credit assignment called ‘prospective configuration’.
> Our theory addresses a long-standing question of how the brain solves the plasticity-stability dilemma, for example, how it is possible that, despite adjustment of representation in the primary visual cortex during learning43, we can still understand the meaning of visual stimuli we learned over our lifetime.
I guess you gotta punch your weight in the Republican party. And that means he wasn't as big, fat, stupid, vile, self-pitying and crazy as Trump. Still, he didn't miss that by much.
@alphabet OK, that part is rescinded, even though it forms part of the building litany of adjectives in the standard insult: "You big fat idiot!" etc. Strictly theater, don't take offense.
William Howard Taft (September 15, 1857 – March 8, 1930) was the 27th president of the United States, serving from 1909 to 1913 and the tenth chief justice of the United States, serving from 1921 to 1930, the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for reelection in 1912 by Woodrow Wilson after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice, a position he held until a month before his death.
Taft was born...