tingilinde

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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the gop manosphere and pollution

They love it.. somehow they think it shows their manhood.  

Krugman's commentary on the cost of energy sources - fossil fuels are no longer the cheapest. 

 

vaccinating vampire bats against rabies

Really clever - an oral vaccine that they spread to each other via grooming.

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For farmers in Latin America, vampire bats live up to their dark reputation. Their bites weaken cows and open the way for infections. Worst of all, the rabies they sometimes carry can kill livestock and, occasionally, people as well. Now scientists have developed an innovative way to vaccinate the bats against the virus—by making use of their extraordinary fondness of mutual grooming.

In a study published as a biorXiv preprint on 12 June, researchers showed that after they applied an oral vaccine in the form of a thick gel to the fur of some members of a colony of common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus), mutual licking helped spread the vaccine rapidly through the population. “The idea that they are proposing is innovative—I don't know of any other effort to vaccinate bats, let alone vaccinate bats orally,” says Luis Escobar, a disease ecologist at Virginia Tech who was not involved in the study.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

ann telnaes speaks truth yet again

 

 

oh my gosh!

One of the best gigantic jet photos - taken a few days ago from the ISS as it passed over Mexico.

 

on the history of pizza

'almost pizzas' have been around for a long time, but the word and the first real pizza happened a bit over a thousand years ago.  A brief history.

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For truly modern pizza we need to turn to Naples in the 18th century. A bustling port city, its largely working-class population lived cheek-by-jowl in cramped buildings that often lacked cooking facilities. They needed cheap food that could be eaten on the go, and pizza was the perfect solution. In the 1789 book Collezione di tutti i poemi in lingua Napoletena (Collection of all poems in the Neapolitan language) we have a detailed list of the pizza-type things available there:

Pizzella. It is a generic name for all types of cakes, focaccias, schiacciate; and therefore some adjectives are added to distinguish them. Here are the main ones. Fried pizza. Pizza a lo furno co l’arecheta. Pizza rognosa. Pizza sedonta. Pizza torn. Pizza di cicoli doce. Pizza di ricotta. Pizza rustica. Pizza d’ova faldacchere. Pizza di bocca di Dama Oc.

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a second attempt at feynman's 'room at the bottom' challenge

more on flash floods

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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ferrets

They can be like this.

a tip of the hat to Greg

 

the divided dial

An ongoing series from the folks at On the Media.  FM vs AM radio with some shoftwave thrown in.  I've listened to a few of the episodes on how the rightwing came to dominate AM radio while complaining about a media bias against them. 

 

on memory

Fascinating new work trying to explain how it works.

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In a study investigating how people recall stories, the team discovered a general law that governs the way we store and compress meaningful memories. Although memories align with an individualized sense of what matters, our brains use a common architecture to organize our recollections, nesting information in a hierarchal structure that helps us navigate them efficiently.

Even more striking is the team’s finding that these hierarchal structures give rise to a universal pattern in the way people encode and communicate what they remember. For the first time, scientists are offering evidence that humans compress information into a limited number of “building blocks” that represent detailed stories.

These units of information are capacious, able to summarize ever greater swaths of information as a narrative grows. But no matter how long or short the original story—whether it is War and Peace or a quick jolt of horror from Stephen King—people will still use the same finite set of units to relay their memory of the narrative.

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anxious teens

Is substituting smartphones for play and looking at a screen for hours a day good or bad for a teenager's mental health?  Is there something more complicated? A Molly Fischer essay in The New Yorker.

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Like Twenge and Haidt before him, Richtel proposes a name for today’s teens: “Generation Rumination.” But he situates their turmoil in a consideration of adolescence as a cultural, sociological, and psychological stage that has emerged in recent centuries. The distress teens feel is, he believes, a reasonable response to a world whose challenges are increasingly abstract and intellectual rather than physical. “Generation Rumination is growing up in the realm of the mind and psyche,” he writes. “Asking why some are struggling is like asking why some adolescents of yesteryear skinned their knees and broke their bones while trekking over a mountain to explore new terrain.” At the same time, adolescence itself has changed as the age of puberty has fallen. Since the eighties, a growing body of research has found that girls in particular are starting puberty much younger than was once considered typical—as early as six or seven. Richtel argues that this means young people are now stranded for longer than ever in a state of heightened vulnerability; he describes studies indicating that adolescent brains are particularly drawn to novelty and social information (in addition to the risk-taking and poor judgment for which they’ve traditionally been known), laying them especially open to the temptations of the phone. “Changing environment + changing puberty = neurological mismatch,” he writes. Richtel intersperses his research with the stories of several teens, who help illustrate the broad strokes of his theory. “I don’t want to blame the internet, but I do want to blame the internet,” one kid, who’s struggled with anxiety and depression, tells Richtel. “I feel like if I was born in 2000 BC in the Alps, I’d still be depressive, but I think it’s wildly exacerbated by the climate we live in.”

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The the caveat that I'm not an expert or a parent, I think the advice of no smartphone or social media before high school is a good idea - if the kids are allowed freedom to play and learn.  Unfortunately the phones are becoming social necessities for third graders these days.

 

 

 

 

happy birthday corinne!

 

Happy Birthday to Corinne!

 

my artist sister

 

the texas weather event

From environmental journalist Andy Revkin...

sorting out the signal from the noise.

 

a neanderthal rendering factory

A largish effort about 125,000 years ago.

 

Abstract

Diet played a key role in human evolution, making the study of past diet and subsistence strategies a crucial research topic within paleoanthropology. Lipids are a crucial resource for hunter-gatherers, especially for foragers whose diet is based heavily on animal foods. Recent foragers have expended substantial amounts of energy to obtain this resource, including time-consuming production of bone grease, a resource intensification practice thus far only documented for Upper Paleolithic populations. We present archaeological data from the lake landscape of Neumark-Nord (Germany), where Last Interglacial Neanderthals processed at least 172 large mammals at a water’s edge site. Their (partial) carcasses were transported to this location for the extraction of within-bone nutrients, particularly bone grease. This “fat factory” constitutes a well-documented case of grease rendering predating the Upper Paleolithic, with the special task location devoted to extraction of nutritionally important lipids forming an important addition to our knowledge of Neanderthal adaptations.