Smart Energy

Some say — and you’ll hear this a lot in the wake of the Republican apocalypse — that history is written exclusively by the winners.

That used to be true. Now there is the League of Secret Historians publishing in their second generation.  And we can read the history of the world through its musics, as in this bit that draws upon the particulars of Greek modes, e.g. the Dorian and Ionian.

Unlike other Mycenaean centers, such as Mycenae and Pylos, it is not known whether Athens suffered destruction in about 1200 BC, an event often attributed to a Dorian invasion, and the Athenians always maintained that they were “pure” Ionians with no Dorian element. However, Athens, like many other Bronze Age settlements, went into economic decline for around 150 years following this. [wikipedia]

The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures.

Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.

Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of southeast Asia.

via Ancient tribal language becomes extinct as last speaker dies | World news | guardian.co.uk.

To exist or not to exist, that is the unicorn's question.

The belief that unicorns do not exist. More generally, a form of atheism that considers the proof that a deity exists to be no more convincing than the proof that a unicorn exists. — Urban Dictionary

<From Greek a = not, monokeros = unicorn (mono = one, keros = horn), ism = belief>

Since I cannot deny with absolute certainty that there are no gods, I decided to go with amonokerism to explain my beliefs.

Have some fun with Translation Party and bounce between English and Japanese. Try entering “This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York highlands.“

The Oxford English Dictionary’s December ’08 list of new words includes “ew” (as in “yuck”) and “podcast.” Ew joins

a large family of imitative words expressing disgust or aversion, ew takes its place, alongside ugh, ough, auh, yah, pew, faugh, and many more, on the list of words which have attempted to tackle the age-old problem of how to represent in print what are essentially inarticulate sounds. Even within the scope of this one entry, many different opinions prevail as to how one should spell ew, as the variants section shows: we have found examples of euuw, euuww, euw, euww, ew, and eww, plus instances in which even more “u”s or “w”s (or both) are pressed into service: as many as 6 “u”s or 16 “w”s have been sighted. Read the rest of this entry »

Good news from Harper’s weekly email:

Scientists discovered the “magnetosphere,” a layer of ions and electrons surrounding the earth described by one physicist as a “warm plasma cloak,” and a study suggested that the Milky Way is traveling through space 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously thought, meaning it will collide with the galaxy Andromeda far sooner than predicted. “The galaxies will be dramatically stirred up,” said Gerry Gilmore of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, “but they are very squidgy, so they will stick together and eventually all the stars will die out, and it will become one huge, dead galaxy.”

“Squidgy” is Brit English for “soft and squishy” and “maybe a bit fat,” according to the Urban Dictionary. But in the case of colliding galaxies, I think it may mean “zorch strokin’, fast and bulbous.” Just a guess.

In any case, another delightful union to look forward to.

I’ve been doing a little research in preparation for my last day, tomorrow, in Michigan. I discovered a list of Banished Words from Lake Superior State University, the smallest and most Canadian-friendly public university in Michigan. It’s located on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which is where I’m headed in the morning.

LSSU has been creating annual lists of Banished Words since 1976. Many times imitated, they claim to be the first and, heck, I believe them. I like the LSSU Banished Word site as an amateur linguist and you might, too, as you can add your comments to the list of words.

Among this year’s banished words is “organic.” John Gomila, New Orleans, Louisiana, for instance, writes that “The possibility of a food item being inorganic, i.e., not being composed of carbon atoms, is nil.” Amen; it’s like the difference between “all natural” and “man made,” as if humans weren’t natural.

Another is “sweet” as an exclamation of approval or concord; way over used and, I admit, I’m guilty. Shall I banish myself to Canada?

“Decimate” makes the 2008 list, as well it should. It’s never used correctly; in the vernacular usage, people say “decimate” when they mean “total destruction.” But a quick scan of the word’s formation clearly reveals that it means “one in ten.” To destroy one in ten of something is not “total.” Sweet. Let truthiness in semantics reign supreme.

I was delighted to see “webinar” on the list, as I’m constantly bombarded with emailed offers to take expensive webinars that promise to teach me all sorts of little niche aspects of Web marketing. Thing is, this is a self-perpetuating marketing scheme and what I’ve learned from webinars is that if you want to make money on the Web, you should offer webinars.

Check out the LSSU Banished Word list here.

Large carnivore’s have been on my mind lately, as my Web development team (the amazing Phil and Rose) just finished a refresh of WSU’s Large Carnivore Conservation Lab’s Web site. I’m pretty sure the Large Carnivore Lab is going to offer you better advice than this, but it probably won’t be as funny:

I found this sign on a section of Flickzzz called Very Weird Signs. Probably not entirely work safe. More advice for dealing with animals:

The comments on the source post raise doubts as to the legitimacy of some of the signs portrayed there (i.e., they’re a bunch of damn fakes; who was it that said there are lies, damn lies, and Photoshop?), but that doesn’t detract from the irrepressible creativity of the collection.

Me luv LOLcats.

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