Category: general

From Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough, who got it from UK Reuters, who apparently got it from Asahi (we’ll see if it ever shows up in my news feeds):

A 1,000 sq metre former bank vault under an office building in Otemachi, a central Tokyo business district, has been chosen as the site for a high-tech farm growing lettuce, tomatoes, herbs[,] strawberries and rice, the national daily Asahi said on Sunday.

The project is aimed at helping the Japanese capital’s jobless to train for careers in agriculture, the paper said.

Since they will be hydroponic farms, they could also help train future space explorers. (“We’re space explorers, and we need space!” -Keith, Voltron)

Personally, I think it would be cool to visit one. I hope they offer tours in the future.

From MSNBC:

Federal officials were investigating the cause of the wreck, but most officials were kept out of the area because of the toxic gas.

State and federal environmental officials have continued conducting air quality tests, finding either low levels or nothing at all a couple blocks away from the site. The crash site levels were higher.

“How high? We are not sure,” state Department of Health and Environmental Control spokesman Thom Berry said. The levels exceed the monitor’s limits, he said.

The evacuees will have to stay out of their homes at least until early next week. I wonder where, exactly, they are staying?

Cory Doctorow linked today to a fascinating explanation of sleep, entitled “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)“. Here’s a snippet:

Melatonin is secreted only at night (circadian clock time) and is not dependent on sleep. However, bright light tends to reduce melatonin levels. In summer, nights are short, thus the duration of the melatonin “signal” is short. In winter, nights are long, thus the duration of the melatonin “signal” is long. The duration of the melatonin signal is the cue that the circadian clock (this is in mammals only) uses to detect season, i.e., the changes in photoperiod (daylength) – information important for timing of seasonal events, e.g., molting, migration, hibernation, reproduction. Humans are only mildly seasonal – our ancestors about 70 million years ago were living in little holes in the ground, were tiny, were nocturnal, were seasonal breeders, and were hibernators. Some traces of our ability to measure photoperiod are retained in “winter blues”, or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). It is almost a form of hibernation.

Back when I was taking kung fu lessons, I was very interested in the body’s natural abilities, including the “internal body clock”. (I even wrote a Mary Sue in which I had mastered it. I also passed myself off as a man named Julien in the story…but I digress.)

I never actually discovered anything about the body clock, but this article reminds me how interesting our bodies’ natural systems are. I’d like to figure out the healthiest routine for myself, the one that would bring forth natural productivity. Analyzing sleep patterns will presumably help, as will sticking to a healthy diet. I suppose what I need to do is start compiling all the information I find on the subject.

One other part that struck me:

If you are asleep, this means you need it. If you are rested enough you cannot physically remain asleep or go back to sleep again. You are wide awake. Thus, when you see someone asleep, it is because that person needs sleep right there and then. Sleep is not laziness.

And here’s something scary.

The problem with jet-lag and shift-lag is dissociation of rhythms between cells in different tissues, i.e., your brain clock may resynchornize to the new time-zone/schedule in a couple of days, the clocks in your heart and lungs in a week, and in your stomach and liver in a month. In the meantime, everything in your body is desynchronized and you feel really bad. If you keep changing your work shift over and over again, you never get to achieve complete synchronization, leading to long-term effects on health, including significant rise in heart attacks, stomach ulcers, and breast cancer.

I now would very much like for Sean to stop working rotating shifts.

There’s far more information than just the above to be found in the piece. For example, the section “Treating Extreme Larks and Owls” is intriguing (and funny). I recommend everyone check it out.

MSNBC has an article. Brooke says it was on Good Morning America, too.

Things somehow seem even more sobering when you know that people outside your community are aware of them.

I’m going to be using this post to compare webhosts. (Yes, it’s the same one I posted on December 21. I changed the date, and now it’s back on top. Woo.) Ignore it, unless you’re interested in what I’m looking at, or if you have suggestions. I just came up with an idea for a website that I would have fun doing. It combines pretty much all of my interests. The domain name I have in mind is available. So I’m thinking about going ahead and getting it all set up.

Yes, I did just think of this. Yes, I am crazy.

Cheetaweb

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20 GB traffic/month

500 POP accounts

500 FTP accounts

20 MySQL databases

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FuitadNET shared hosting

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FTP/POP Accounts 100

MySQL Databases 15

Subdomains 5

Domain Alias (aka Domain Re-directing) 1

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E-mail Forwarding

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E-mail Auto Responder

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(Webalizer *AND* Urchin)

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PHP Scripting

Perl (CGI)

Unlimited FTP Access

Web-based Control Panel

$4.99/mo

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POP3 Accounts 25

Subdomains 10

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Unlimited POP3, MySQL, FTP, Subdomains

CGI-BIN

Webmail

SSI

Apache

Perl

PHP

SSL

Liquid Web Inc.‘s Shared Webmaster level

$19.95/mo. (Paid Monthly)

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I don’t like 1&1 Internet Inc.‘s push-button websites.

I was checking out MSN’s “10 for ’05” movie preview article, and it was amazing–I wanted to see pretty much every single movie they mentioned. I mean, check it out.

Batman Begins is finally coming out. I am dying to see this movie, especially since the villain is the splendid Ra’s Al Ghul.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire will appear in November. The actors are too old for the parts, really, but I think this one should work out okay–if the director and writers managed to deal with the uberlength of the book, and found some way to translate those ellipses into screen tension. ;>

Mr. and Mrs. Smith looks fantastic and fun. I loved True Lies.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory…now, I’ll admit, I’m not really into Depp’s hair for this one. But come on. Roald Dahl’s unnerving insight into kid justice + Johnny Depp + Tim Burton = good movie.

I’m attracted to Sin City purely based on the cast and MSN’s brief premise blurb.

I have to see Revenge of the Sith, obviously. Here’s hoping it won’t suck. (And here‘s why it probably will suck, if you missed my rant before.)

War of the Worlds and King Kong are movies I will probably see out of a sense of respect for science fiction canon. I’m not supremely excited about them, but I’m excited at the idea that there are movies like these out there.

Fantastic Four!

Even Memoirs of a Geisha, which is based on a book that may or may not (oooh, implicature) be a breach of confidentiality and a betrayal of trust on the part of Arthur Golden, is appealing to me, especially after seeing Hero. I don’t know, some of my previous ire seems to have bled away, and now I’d just like to see what the filmmakers have done with the story. I’m hoping they can capture some of the mystical feel that was so vivid in Hero.

So yeah. About the only thing that could make this year better would be Spider-Man 3. (2007 ;_;)

Mari linked today to the Augusta Chronicle’s story on the train crash in Graniteville yesterday. From a picture caption in the article:

A Norfolk Southern freight train with two locomotives and 42 rail cars struck a locomotive with two rail cars parked at a siding at Avondale Mills Thursday morning, releasing chlorine into the air and other chemicals on the ground near downtown Graniteville, SC.

And from the article itself:

At least eight people died and more than 260 sought treatment for exposure to deadly chlorine gas released after a chemical-laden freight train slammed into a parked locomotive in Graniteville early Thursday, officials said.

I remembered them talking about the evacuation last night on the radio, but at the time I was driving home from biking with Brooke, and we’d gotten rained out, and I was totally drenched…so I guess I was too distracted to fully comprehend what I was hearing.

Pretty scary, especially since it occurred right along the road Mari takes to work. I’m glad it didn’t happen during her commute.

I mentioned previously that I think I’m becoming a fan of Language Log’s Mark Liberman.

Well, now I know I am. Look what he did today!

The Simpsons has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture’s greatest source of idioms, catch phrases and sundry other textual allusions. It’s especially rich in those meta-cliches that Glen Whitman dubbed snowclones. One that we’ve discussed previously is “I, for one, welcome our new __ overlords”.

According to an apparently authoritative list, Homer Simpson uses the meta-cliche “mmm… ___” 97 times in 14 seasons, including 83 different values for the appreciated object.

One thing bothered me: “donuts” was repeated in the list. But Liberman made up for it with his conclusion!

There are many common non-authentic values: “mmm… coffee” with 865 hits, “mmm… scotch” with 224, “mmm… licorice” with 124, “mmm… bourbon” with 107.

And even “mmm… linguistics” with 23. A new slogan: “Linguistics: almost 1/4 as popular as bourbon”. As if, alas.

I love this guy.

Mmm…linguistics.

From Japan Today:

12-year-old boy returns home alone following tsunami disaster

His father Takayuki, 41, and brother Tomoki, 8, were confirmed dead, while his 41-year-old mother Masami is still missing. He escaped the tsunami unharmed and later identified the bodies of his father and younger brother.

What a horrible thing to have to go through…

This is hilarious.

From Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough:

Susan and Steven Manis say it was their fault their daughter was late for school so they shared her punishment – spending an hour with her in detention.

What a great story. Read the whole article–the best part is the last two paragraphs :D

Earlier today, David asked me if I was aware that the idea that 72 virgins are awarded to martyrs might actually come from a mistranslation. He encouraged me to Google it and see for myself.

So I did, and among the varied results I came across this interesting article:

The Virgins and the Grapes: the “Christian” Origins of the Koran (Surprise!)

I don’t really know anything about FreeRepublic.com. It appears to be a conservative activist website. The article includes a translation of an interview (originally in German) with the scholar who’s proposing that the Qu’ran is mistranslated. Some good questions are asked and answered.

Q. – Professor, why did you think it useful to conduct this re-reading of the Koran?

A. – “Because, in the Koran, there are many obscure points that, from the beginning, even the Arab commentators were not able to explain. Of these passages it is said that only God can comprehend them. Western research on the Koran, which has been conducted in a systematic manner only since about the middle of the 19th century, has always taken as its base the commentaries of the Arab scholars. But these have never gone beyond the etymological explanation of some terms of foreign origin.”

Q. – What makes your method different?

A. – “I began from the idea that the language of the Koran must be studied from an historical-linguistic point of view. When the Koran was composed, Arabic did not exist as a written language; thus it seemed evident to me that it was necessary to take into consideration, above all, Aramaic, which at the time, between the 4th and 7th centuries, was not only the language of written communication, but also the lingua franca of that area of Western Asia.”

Q. – Tell us how you proceeded.

A. – “At first I conducted a ‘synchronous’ reading. In other words, I kept in mind both Arabic and Aramaic. Thanks to this procedure, I was able to discover the extent of the previously unsuspected influence of Aramaic upon the language of the Koran: in point of fact, much of what now passes under the name of ‘classical Arabic’ is of Aramaic derivation.”

I’m all about the historical-linguistic point of view. :D Presuming the article isn’t mistranslated (wouldn’t that be ironic), it raises some really interesting questions.

I had a friend who converted to Islam, and she once mentioned the Qur’an passages that only God could understand. That always seemed weird to me. “Luxenberg” offers a pretty logical explanation.

A good read. Thanks for the tip, David.

Check out what Chris found.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/welsh/default.stm which is the welsh version of the bbc website. Now while that’s by itself isn’t all that cool, there’s a header on the left side that says “bbc vocab” and underneath that is a link that says turn on. When you do that it highlights all the words so that you can mouse over them to see the translation of the various welsh words. Now tell me that’s not cool! You can learn the almost dead language by reading the news.

Pretty crazy.

I have to admit that seeing the Welsh language referred to as “almost dead” made me sad. “Aubrey”, my maiden name, has its roots in Wales, as does my dad’s side of the family. Back in high school, I was really interested in Wales, enough that I did a lot of research into the history and culture. I bought a reference book called Wales, and I was on a constant quest to find a picture book of the country–I never have found one. I suppose it’s sentimentality that saddens me at the thought that the language that birthed my maiden name, the language of my ancestors, is dying.

I think what was striking to me about it was how matter-of-fact Chris’ statement was. Just another example of how things don’t really get to you sometimes until they’re personally relevant.

On the bright side, I just spotted a 2005 Wales calendar on Amazon.com!

Today, Geoffrey K. Pullum takes a hard look at attempts to “revive” the Cornish language, and gives us this sobering conclusion:

Always remember this, as we head into the sad time of massive language extinctions that is coming. Ask around the village and find the age of the youngest people using a language every day for all their normal conversational interaction. If the answer is a number larger than 5, the language is probably dying. If the answer is a number larger than 10, it is very probably doomed. If the answer is a number larger than 20, you can kiss it goodbye right now: no amount of nostalgic appreciation of it will make it last even one more generation as a going concern. That’s the way languages are.