Serendipitous cognation
During a Usenet search yesterday, I hit upon a message written in Russian, a language I don't speak. As I was idly looking at the message wondering where to go next, my gaze hit upon the word язык.
Now, as mentioned before, I hardly have any Russian at all, but I do know the Cyrillic alphabet. I have also recently taken up a very slow and non-serious study of Czech. One of the very few Czech words I know is jazyk (language). It turns out that the Russian word does indeed mean the same as the Czech one, so they probably have common descent.
So studying smaller languages isn't quite useless.
(Yay! Posting in Unicode works! You may laugh, but being able to do all the steps from multi-language keyboard entry through storage to viewing the text in the web browser without any kind of trouble was far from the norm only a couple of years ago.)
[Monday, Nov 29, 2004 @ 19:26] | [language] |
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archive.org favourites
A while ago, I discovered the free movie archives at archive.org. There are lots of fun videos there. One of the most downloaded videos is Perversion for Profit (downloadable in two parts), a 1964 propaganda movie in which George Putnam spends half an hour continuosly ranting against pornography. Personally, I find Come Join the Fun even more amusing, as it is an edited version of the above, in which George Putnam appears to have the totally oppsite opinion. I think people who form their opinions mostly out of what they see and hear on TV and the radio should watch this movie and compare it to the original, since it demonstrates, in a striking manner, how much you can distort what a person says, simply by splicing and pasting together the video.
Other highlights include Pipe Dream, a computer animation of a collection of music instruments played solely by steel balls shot out of PVC tubing, and The Turing Test, a computer-rendered game show in which three (partly fictionalized) AIs compete against each other about who can provide the most human-sounding answers.
[Thursday, Nov 25, 2004 @ 18:06] | [miscellaneous] |
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Clean shoes
The youth club that I use to pass every time when I walk to the bus stop, appears to have been torn down, and entrepeneurs are busy building something new on the same site.
A large fence has been erected, which directs pedestrian traffic into the football field of the adjacent high school. This football field is very mud-prone, so after walking across it one day, my shoes became very dirty. I made a mental note to wash them sooner or later, but I never found the time nor energy to do so.
But then, only a few days later, the first snow came. And in the following days, lots of it. All the snow that I've trod in for the past few days appears to have actually worn all the dirt and mud away, without any deliberate efforth from my side. If I'd been a good boy and washed them earlier, none of this would have had any effect.
Laziness prevails!
[Friday, Nov 19, 2004 @ 22:44] | [miscellaneous] |
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