Andy recommends this piece by Ruger Pielke
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Many have been quick to politicize the tragedy in an effort to support whatever agenda that they were promoting before the disaster — climate change, DOGE budget cuts, operations of the National Weather Service, the Biden Administration. The one political implication of the disaster that I’m ready to call for is to reassert the importance of establishing a U.S. Disaster Review Board, a case made here at THB by Mike Smith last March.
Today, I share some data and context on the event for those wanting to go beyond seeking to use tragic deaths in hopes of scoring online partisan points. Shameful.
Before getting to relevant data and research, my view — This tragedy occurred in a location that has among the greatest risks in the nation of flash flooding, where kids in summer camps have previously been swept away to their deaths, and where warning systems are (apparently and incredibly) not in place. This tragedy never should have happened and it should never happen again.
Just a bit more background — early in my career I studied the use of weather forecasts and warnings at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, including flood warnings. Overall, the U.S. has seen tremendous progress in forecasts, warnings, evacuations, with a long-term drop in death rates from flooding. However, this week’s tragedy shows that we still have much work to do.
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are emoji a language?
Well - no, but they might be something of a symbiotic virus within real languages.
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So: language is human communication. It is spoken or written. It is made up of words, and those words must be combined in a regular, agreed-upon manner.
Emoji satisfy the first clause. At this point in time, two decades or more since emoji came into being, it is not a stretch to claim that we use them to communicate. Equally, it goes without saying that if emoji are to be either a spoken or written language, then they must be a written one. Emoji were born as visual symbols, and, aside from their workmanlike Unicode names, they have no direct verbal equivalents. Finally, can emoji constitute words used “in a structured and conventional way”? This is less clear cut. The rules and conventions that govern written languages are typically described in terms of orthography, which relates to how the language is written and how its words are spelled, and grammar, which describes how words are combined to make comprehensible clauses and sentences. Emoji has neither.
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05:24 in General Commentary, society and technology | Permalink | Comments (0)