Maitani

:))) - Jenny H.

\(^_^)/ - Eivind

"In this post, we’ve created a list for you of awesome websites that have free stock photos. This is not the end all – be all of sites and if you find others, please feel free to list them in the comment section. Note: Most of these images fall under a creative commons license (just make sure you attribute properly) or are old enough that the photos have returned to the public domain. (This happens once the copyright on an image expires.)" - Maitani

Found via Another Word For It http://tm.durusau.net/?p=59044 - Maitani

"During the darkest days of December, it makes me feel better to think about all the other, more profound darknesses out there in the universe. A little dose of the old perspective, you know. And boy, there are a lot of them–not just a lot of dark places, but a lot of different forms of darkness out there. In fact, there’s a lot more darkness than most of us realize, for an obvious if easily overlooked reason: Space images are calibrated to highlight faint or even invisible detail, making the universe seem like a much brighter place than it really is." - Maitani

"Consider, for instance, Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the now-famous comet being explored by the Rosetta spacecraft (and home to the intrepid, hibernating Philae lander). In all the images you see online, it looks brightly lit. Even the allegedly “true color” image, which is supposed to show what the Comet C-G would look like to the human eye up close, is a bright green-tinged gray. Here’s the truth: The comet is blacker than coal." - Maitani

"Many people have to work long hours. When it comes to the writing of novels, however, the consensus seems to be that after four hours or so of continuous writing, diminishing returns set in. I’d always more or less gone along with this view, but as the summer of 1987 approached I became convinced a drastic approach was needed. Lorna, my wife, agreed." - Maitani

"Until that point, since giving up the day job five years earlier, I’d managed reasonably well to maintain a steady rhythm of work and productivity. But my first flurry of public success following my second novel had brought with it many distractions. Potentially career-enhancing proposals, dinner and party invitations, alluring foreign trips and mountains of mail had all but put an end to my “proper” work. I’d written an opening chapter to a new novel the previous summer, but now, almost a year later, I was no further forward." - Maitani

Merry Christmas, Maitani! :) - Jenny H.

Maitani çok merci merry christmas - ramazan cekic

"If you read Brideshead Revisited for the first time in your teens (as so many of us do) you can come away with the idea of a Cinderella story: middle-class Charles is scooped up by the happy aristocracy – the deserving poor boy looking longingly through the window is allowed in, gawps at the magnificence, is grateful for the attention, and of course falls in love with Sebastian." - Maitani

"But when you read it again, you see that Brideshead is not a book about Oxford, or homoerotic love, or social climbing: it’s a book about religion – and about families. It is Sebastian who is in love with Charles, jealously wanting to keep him to himself:" - Maitani

"The winter solstice settles on 21 December this year, which means it’s the day with the least amount of sunlight. It’s the official first day of winter, although people have been braving the cold for weeks, huddled in coats and scarves and probably wool socks. It’s easy to pass over the winter solstice because of the holidays; however, many traditions center around the solstices and equinoxes, and even Christmas has borrowed some ideas from the midwinter celebration. Below are a few facts about the winter solstice and the influence it has had on religion." - Maitani

Thanks for sharing this, Maitani. :) - Jenny H.

You're welcome, Jenny. It is beautiful, isn't it. :-) - Maitani

"Back in 2006, Oxford University Press published Don Ringe’s From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, which was billed as the first volume in a new OUP series called A Linguistic History of English. That particular book wasn’t so much a history of the English language that we know as a reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. Don Ringe is a major figure in Indo-European studies (as well as historical linguistics in general), and it was great to get a state-of-the-art reconstruction from his perspective." - Maitani

"After enjoying that first volume, I would impatiently check the new arrivals shelf at the university library so I could read the second volume straightaway. Years passed, however, and nothing ever appeared. I had wondered if the series had been canceled, but now Oxford University Press finally unveiled the second volume: The Development of Old English, this time by Don Ringe and Ann Taylor." - Maitani

"A team of scientists, led by the University of Toronto's Barbara Sherwood Lollar, has mapped the location of hydrogen-rich waters found trapped kilometres beneath Earth's surface in rock fractures in Canada, South Africa and Scandinavia." - Maitani

"Common in Precambrian Shield rocks -- the oldest rocks on Earth -- the ancient waters have a chemistry similar to that found near deep sea vents, suggesting these waters can support microbes living in isolation from the surface." - Maitani

Volume of world's oldest water estimated http://www.bbc.com/news... - Maitani

"Winter encourages a certain kind of idiosyncratic imagery not found during any other season: white, powdery snow, puffs of warm breath, be-scarfed holiday crowds. The following slideshow presents a lovely compilation of quotes from the eighth edition of our Oxford Dictionary of Quotations that will inspire a newfound love for winter, whether you’ve ever experienced snow or not!" - Maitani

"The first fall of snow is not only an event, but it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment, then where is it to be found?" It snowed here last night :) - Eivind

"The idea of a "Mother Tongue" has long preoccupied me, and I once wrote a lengthy paper about the relationship between Taiwanese and Mandarin entitled "How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language"." - Maitani

"The topic has now come back to me from a different angle, one that I might title "How to Remember your Mother Tongue and (Temporarily) Forget Your Global Language"." - Maitani

"The occasion for these reflections was a letter that I received from a Mexican scholar named Soledad Jimenez Tovar who spent the last five years in Germany at a Max Planck Institute and in Kazakhstan doing fieldwork. In Germany she spoke German and lots of English, and in Kazakhstan she spoke mostly Russian and some Mandarin which she used when trying to converse with the Dungans there." - Maitani

"Proofreading is a recurring theme on Sentence first, with regular posts looking at particular items of usage and examples of where proofing fell short. But although it’s part of my day job, I haven’t written often about the act itself." - Maitani

"I was recently approached by Maggie Biroscak at Jimdo for some thoughts on the subject. Maggie’s article has now been published, and offers great tips on proofreading your own text, while acknowledging the limitations of this approach. It features quotes from Dawn McIlvain Stahl, online editor of Copyediting.com, and me." - Maitani

"The (multi)set of (character-level) n-grams of a word consists of its sequences of n consecutive characters. For instance, the 2-grams of "gram" are "gr", "ra", and "am". Duplicates are counted, e.g., for "toto" the 2-grams are "to", "ot", "to". Given the dictionary of all words in a language, we can compute the multiset of all n-grams." - Maitani

"It turns out that this multiset is quite characteristic of the language. For instance, to identify the language of a piece of text, it is often enough to compute its n-grams, normalize it as a frequency distribution, and compare it to the distribution of known languages: usually the closest distribution is that of the language in which the text is written." - Maitani

up - Maitani

"A former student of mine drew my attention to a recent article in Slate written by Alyssa Pelish and titled “The Stimulating History of Coffee: Why You Hear This Word Around the World” (the image on the left is reproduced from the article). Pelish starts with a little thought-experiment about how one would order a coffee while travelling around the world: Kaffee in Berlin, caffè in Rome, kofi in Lagos, Nigeria, kŏfī in Delhi, India, and кофе (pronounced /’kofè/) in St. Petersburg, Russia. She correctly points out that these words sound alike in many languages, describing these words very poetically as “the two reliable syllables, the seesaw of vowel sounds punctuated by velar stops and fricatives”. I am not sure about the reliability of syllables or how one would go about measuring it, or whether the alternating consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) pattern can be called a “seesaw”. But the explanation Pelish provides for why these ‘coffee’ words are so similar the world over is entirely wrong and ignorant." - Maitani

Interesting idea. Jynnan tonix all round while we discuss. - Technodad

"A new study challenges the idea that distraction is necessarily a problem for learning. Researchers found that if attention was as divided during recall of a motor task as it was during learning the task, people performed as if there were no distractions at either stage." - Maitani

"New and Forthcoming from De Gruyter Open New in 2014 from De Gruyter Open" - Maitani

"They appear throughout the Middle East: Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have these antique Persian designs dotted around their towns and cities. They are windcatchers, known in the area as Bâdgir. Serving as ventilation systems they have given the people of the Middle East air conditioning for thousands of years. Yet despite their antediluvian origin, windcatchers may even provide a solution for some very modern architectural problems." - Maitani

"Windcatchers come in a vast array of sizes and a number of different styles. They function in one of three ways. Some direct the airflow downwards and use direct wind entry. Others direct airflow up either using a temperature gradient assisted either by the sun or the wind. " - Maitani

"“TELL me, why should we care?” he asks." - Maitani

"It’s a question I can expect whenever I do a lecture about the looming extinction of most of the world’s 6,000 languages, a great many of which are spoken by small groups of indigenous people. For some reason the question is almost always posed by a man seated in a row somewhere near the back." - Maitani

"You're ready to check out at the supermarket. There are only eight items in your cart, so you look for the express lane. The sign above says "10 items or less." Do you: — Head for the register without a second thought? — Rue the decline of the English language because you were taught that the sign should say "10 items or fewer?"" - Maitani

Often times, the express lane takes longer... typical human conundrum. - Adriano

"Plainly, something is up with the business of parenting, the way we parent, the things that are now perceived as minimum parenting standards. The fact that I’m conjugating the word at all, that it has become an activity rather than a relationship, indicates the extent to which it now amounts to a set of skills, techniques, rules; it has become something that one does well or badly, the judgment of which is determined by yardsticks that claim, via medicine or neuroscience, to be definitive, yet are one titchy study from the University of Utah away from refutation. The atmosphere is febrile with disapproval: all normal under–standing of acceptable risk, never mind the understanding that behaviour might reasonably differ from one individual to another, is suspended." - Maitani

"The hazelnut (or "cobill nut" as they were called in the fifteenth century) also appears in one of the mid-fourteenth-century mystery plays performed for the feast of Corpus Christi in York, designed to inspire the audience's direct involvement with salvation history. In the play The Offering of the Shepherds, the shepherds arrive at the site of the Nativity and lament the fact that they have only humble gifts for the baby Jesus. The second shepherd presents the infant with two hazelnuts, strung together as a bracelet:" - Maitani

"Thou Sonne, that shall save bothe see and sande, Se to me sen I have thee soght, I am ovir poure to make presande Als myn harte wolde, and I had ought. Two cobill notis uppon a bande, Loo, litill babe, what I have broght, And whan ye sall be Lorde in lande, Dose goode agayne, forgete me noght, For I have herde declared Of connyng clerkis and clene That bountith askis rewarde, Nowe watte ye what I mene." - Maitani

"I had just arrived home from my summer vacation — a week in a Minnesota cabin whose brochure warned “no crabbiness allowed” — when I came upon a study that declared New York the “unhappiest city in America.” I doubt many people were surprised by the results — New Yorkers, both in lore and reality, can be hard to please, and famously outspoken about their grievances — but as a born-and-raised New Yorker, and as a philosopher, I was suspicious of how the study defined happiness." - Maitani

"Researchers Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger III set out to look at one aspect: how testing can consolidate our memory of facts. In their experiment they asked college students to learn pairs of Swahili and English words. So, for example, they had to learn that if they were given the Swahili word 'mashua' the correct response was 'boat'. They could have used the sort of facts you might get on a high-school quiz (e.g. "Who wrote the first computer programs?"/"Ada Lovelace"), but the use of Swahili meant that there was little chance their participants could use any background knowledge to help them learn. After the pairs had all been learnt, there would be a final test a week later." - Maitani

I don't think this method is "counterintuitive". I have always felt that the best way to retrieve items from memory is to teach them to others. I am convinced that teaching as a means of learning is even more efficient than testing. - Maitani

"Over the past 14 years, about 17,000 immigrants have perished in the Mediterranean, trying to overcome the material and virtual walls that surround the European Union today. That's 60 times the number of people who lost their lives attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in 28 years." - Maitani

up - Maitani

"Imagine you are asked what single alteration in people’s behavior might best improve the lot of mankind. How foolish would you have to be to reply: have them learn to read with a pen in their hands? But I firmly believe such a simple development would bring huge benefits." - Maitani

"We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us. We allow worlds to be conjured up for us with very little concern for the implications. We overlook glaring incongruities. We are suckers for alliteration, assonance, and rhythm. We rejoice over stories, whether fiction or “documentary,” whose outcomes are flagrantly manipulative, self-serving, or both. Usually both. If a piece of writing manifests the stigmata of literature—symbols, metaphors, unreliable narrators, multiple points of view, structural ambiguities—we afford it unlimited credit. With occasional exceptions, the only “criticism” brought to such writing is the kind that seeks to elaborate its brilliance, its cleverness, its creativity. What surprised me most when I first began publishing fiction myself was how much at every level a novelist can get away with." - Maitani

Lovely :) - Eivind

I want to add that Würzburg Residence and the Marienburg Fortress as well as the beautiful Alte Mainbrücke were used as filming locations for the 2011 movie The Three Musketeers. :-) - Maitani

"At 5pm CET, we will begin broadcasting a conference on Greek and Latin in an Age of Open Data. The conference will run over four days for three hours each because we want to maximize the geographic range while reaching people in reasonable times of the day. (Not everyone is so lucky -- our colleagues Donald Sturgeon and John S. Y. Lee in Hong Kong are, for example, gamely preparing to present in the middle of the night)." - Maitani

"We will post the final information about connecting on the following link: http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo... " - Maitani

"A little while ago a link to this list of 23 maps and charts on language went around on Twitter. It’s full of interesting stuff on linguistic diversity and the genetic relationships among languages, but there was one chart that bothered me: this one on the history of the English language by Sabio Lantz." - Maitani

"The first and largest problem is that the timeline makes it look as though English began with the Celts and then received later contributions from the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and so on. While this is a decent account of the migrations and conquests that have occurred in the last two thousand years, it’s not an accurate account of the history of the English language. (To be fair, the bar on the bottom gets it right, but it leaves out all the contributions from other languages.)" - Maitani

"The slaughtering of animals and preparing of meat for the winter are the labours highlighted in these final calendar pages of the year.   On the opening folio can be found the beginning of the saints’ days for December.  Below, a roundel miniature shows two men in a barn; one has his hands firmly on the horns of a bull, holding him steady, while the other man is preparing to deliver the coup de grâce with a wooden mallet.   In the facing folio, another man is butchering a hog outdoors, wielding a long, sharp knife.  A bucket of blood is beneath the slaughtering table, and above, we can see a wooly ram (perhaps aghast at the carnage), for the zodiac sign Capricorn.  Surrounding this scene is another golden architectural frame, populated with angels playing musical instruments, and a kneeling monk above, perhaps in honour of the feast of the Nativity." - Maitani

"The aim of the project is the reconstruction and online publication of about 1700 prints, which appeared between 1500 and 1900. In a next step forms of semantic networks are to be approached in separate subprojects. This is to be illustrated through the direct contextualisation of objects from Philipp von Stosch's Gem Collection." - Maitani

"The aim of the project "Reception of Antiquity in a Semantic Network" within the Arachne database is the development and provision of web-based prints from the period between 1500 and 1830. The project’s basis is defined by engravings to classical, Near Eastern and Egyptian Archaeology of the 16th till the 19th century from the library of the Rome Department of the DAI. These early prints (e.g. travel, research and excavation reports, catalogs) have been published in the examination of the excavations and discoveries of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean region." - Maitani

via AWOL AncientWorldOnline http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2014... - Maitani