quote
6 Dec
Ovid is, I think, the last great tragic and epic poet of that era because he tells the story of a world where metamorphoses happen all the time—but then stop. The stories he tells are stories of a girl becoming, for instance, a tree or a plant, but not reverting to being a girl. She remains a tree, and that, of course, is tragic.
photo
1 Sep
I have distilled the many interrelatednesses, interconnectednesses, and intersubjectivities of language, linguistics, and everything into a concise graphical form. Any practitioner of the science of linguistics should be familiar with the usual formalisms and symbologies that make for such a compact depiction. This simple illustration serves as representation of and roadmap to the under-understood underlying underpinnings of language as a science, and of the mind as the seat of language. Without further ado, I present my life’s work to and for the benefit of the worldwide community of linguists. (via SpecGram—G.U.I.L.T.y Pleasures—A Complete and Comprehensive Theory of Language, Linguistics, and Everything—Jäger Haumichblau)
photo
21 Jul
Many old photographs and film mistakenly identify Titanic but are in fact Olympic. The way to tell the difference between the two is the open promenade deck (below the boat deck) as seen here on the Olympic, which was enclosed on Titanic after Olympic customers had complained of the cold there. (via S.S. Olympic: 1911 | Shorpy Historical Photo Archive)
photo
16 May
Wound Man is an illustration which first appeared in European surgical texts in the Middle Ages. It laid out schematically the various wounds a person might suffer in battle or in accidents, often with surrounding or accompanying text stating treatments for the various injuries. (via Wound Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
photo
14 May
Atlantic Ocean, Toscanelli, 1474
photo
8 May
centuriespast:
Club
ARTIST:probably Anishinaabe (Ojibwe)
DATE:c. 1750-1800
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
The French called these casse-tête.
photo
8 May
invisiblestories:
Tree representing the embedding of the parentheses in Raymond Roussel’s Nouvelles Impressions D’Afrique, Canto 1 (from Oulipo : a primer of potential literature) (via gilliflower)
Before or after macroexpansion?
quote
3 Mar
One question we often receive is usually framed more or less in the form: “what is the single-most common question that SpecGram receives from its readers?” The answer to this question may surprise you! The single-most commonly-submitted question is this very question itself. We like to think that it thus achieves a sort of self-referential, self-actuating interrogation, and thereby attains to a state of Language which most mere human languages never even approach.
photo
3 Mar
(via Effigies and Brasses: Sir Roger de Trumpington (1289))
Now that I think about it, of course dogs would chew sheaths.
quote
24 Jan
This Malbolge program displays “Hello world!”, with full capitalization and exclamation mark at the end.
('&%:9]!~}|z2Vxwv-,POqponl$Hjig%eB@@>}=<M:9wv6WsU2T|nm-,jcL(I&%$#"`CB]V?Tx<uVtT`Rpo3NlF.Jh++FdbCBA@?]!~|4XzyTT43Qsqq(Lnmkj"Fhg${z@>
quote
24 Jan
INTERCAL has many other features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as “READ OUT”, “IGNORE”, “FORGET”, and modifiers such as “PLEASE”. This last keyword provides two reasons for the program’s rejection by the compiler: if “PLEASE” does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite.
quote
1 Jan
A previously identified linguist who, when asked, “How many languages do you speak?”, replies, “That’s like asking a doctor how many diseases they have.
quote
1 Jan
It can surely be no coincidence that this phenomenon first appeared at a time when those languages spoken in what are now these United States were as far different as those same languages are now from those in current use and previously. And this process is by no means complete but continues until this very day, so much so that it is impossible to say what might have been—or indeed what might be in the future.
quote
7 Dec
If World War I snapped, as we hear tell, the threads of civilization except where it continued briefly to baste the memories of men like Valéry and Joyce, the next generation’s problem was to create works whose resonance lasted more than a season. A culture without Greek or Latin or Anglo-Saxon goes off the gold standard. How to draw upon the treasure?
