Russian Sledges

"I had a teacher who was talking about abstinence, she said, 'Imagine you're a stick of gum and when you engage in sex, that's like getting chewed, and if you do that lots of times, you're going to become an old piece of gum, and who's going to want you after that?" Smart says those words rang in her memory. She felt ruined.

McCain working on bill to allow for 'a la carte' cable TV packages - The Hill's Hillicon Valley:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is working on legislation that would pressure cable and satellite TV providers to allow their customers to pick and choose the channels they pay for, his office confirmed on Wednesday.

In addition to pressuring cable providers to offer channels a la carte, McCain’s new bill would bar TV networks from bundling their broadcast stations with cable channels they own during negotiations with the cable companies, according to industry sources. So for example, the Disney Company, which owns both ABC and ESPN, could not force a cable provider to pay for ESPN in order to carry ABC.

The industry officials said the bill would also end the sports blackout rule, which prohibits cable companies from carrying a sports event if the game is blacked out on local broadcast television stations.

The bill also includes a provision that would boost Web TV service Aereo, according to the industry sources.

The bill would pull the broadcast licenses of companies that switch high-value programming from over-the-air television to cable channels, according to the sources.

“Not everyone is excited about David Bowie’s return: The Catholic League yesterday attacked the singer’s new video for “The Next Day,” calling it the work of a “switch-hitting, bisexual senior citizen from London” that “is strewn with characteristic excess.””

-

David Bowie’s ‘The Next Day’ Clip Attacked by Catholic League

to be fair, “switch-hitting, bisexual senior citizen from London” is a way better moniker than “Catholic League president”

PURCHASE, NY—Following the saboteur antics of a prankster focus group that reportedly convinced company officials the drink was not only palatable but delicious, PepsiCo announced Thursday the launch of its new Mountain Dew CinnaBlast beverage.

Noiser writes "The Israeli pop singer Aya Korem published her new song "Computer Engineer" as a website that shows translation to the Perl programming language along with the lyrics. Perl is quite a good match, given that the Perl community has a long tradition of publishing "Perl poetry", and this song proves that this tradition is very much alive. No Flash is required to view the website, so if you are an HTML5 geek, have no worries."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link

njkischuck:

Suited up. Eyegasm. (streetfsn)

Body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been buried at undisclosed location, Worcester police say - Boston.com:

pointless autoplaying video on link

WORCESTER — The body of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been laid to rest somewhere outside Massachusetts, according to a funeral home official briefed on the situation. Worcester police said the remains of the 26-year-old have been “entombed.’’

Tsarnaev’s remains were removed sometime before midnight Wednesday from the Graham Putnam & ­Mahoney Funeral Parlors where his body has been since last Friday, the official said.

The burial location was approved by Ruslan Tsarni, Tsarnaev’s uncle, who has represented the family as he and funeral home director Peter Stefan tried to find a cemetery willing to accept the remains, the official said.

Worcester police confirmed in a statement that Tsarnaev had been entombed, but did not disclose the location.

“As a result of our public appeal for help a courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide the assistance needed to properly bury the deceased,” police said. “His body is no longer in the city of Worcester and is now entombed.”

New York Daily News

Cleveland 'hero' and Internet celeb Charles Ramsey says criminal past made ... New York Daily News He never claimed to be a hero — or a saint. In fact, Charles Ramsey said his criminal past — which surfaced after he helped three women escape from Cleveland's house of horrors — led him to become a better man. "Those incidents helped me become the ... Cleveland Hero Was A Repeat Domestic AbuserThe Smoking Gun Cleveland hero Charles Ramsey is a convicted wife beaterWashington Times Charles Ramsey interviews reveal risks of jumping on a good story too soonPoynter.org KENS 5 TV -Reuters -Boston.com all 446 news articles »

Cleveland police have found, inside the house where he is alleged to have kept at least three young women captive for ten years, a 2004 letter written by Ariel Castro, 19 Action News' Scott Taylor reports.

mode-et-modele:

Ann Demeulemeester A/W 2013*

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says it's still unclear whether the Boston bombings were foreign-directed, but he says they were clearly, quote, "foreign-inspired."

rachel shared this story from ZooBorns.

---

David Bowie’s last music video had him cavorting with Tilda Swinton, but for his new clip, the Thin White Duke has doubled his celebri-quotient. “The New Day” features a robed Bowie crooning to a bar full of clergy and whores, including bishop Gary Oldman and stigmata-prone prostitute Marion Cotillard. Directed by Floria Sigismondi, the clip was written and conceived by Bowie and is just about as dark as that notion suggests. Watch below and repent.

Read more

A co-author of a new Heritage Foundation study highly critical of the Senate’s bipartisan immigration proposal also wrote a doctoral dissertation in which he argued that immigrants generally have an I.Q. that is “substantially lower than that of the white native population.”

On the web site of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in the "Early Edition" section, is an article by Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade: "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia". The authors claim that a set of 23 especially frequent words can be used to establish genetic relationships of languages that go way, way back — too far back for successful application of the standard historical linguistics methodology for establishing language families, the Comparative Method.  The idea is that, once you've determined that these 23 words are super-stable (because they're used so often), you don't need systematic sound/meaning correspondences at all; finding resemblances among these words across several language families is enough to prove that the languages are related, descended with modification from a single parent language (a.k.a. proto-language).

This is the latest of many attempts to get around the unfortunate fact that systematic sound/meaning correspondences in related languages decay so much over time that even if the words survive, they are unrecognizable as cognates (sets of words descended from the same word in the parent language).   This means that word sets that have similar meanings and also sound similar after 15,000 years are unlikely to share those similar sounds as the result of inheritance from a common ancestor; if they were really such ancient cognates, they would almost surely not look much alike at all. (See "Scrabble tips for time travelers", 2/26/2009, for a discussion of some earlier work.)

I'm not qualified to judge Pagel et al.'s statistics, although I remain skeptical of their basic claim that words that haven't been replaced often in a handful of language families with vastly different time depths can be predicted to be super-stable in all language families. But there are problems with their premises in this article, in which their goal is to compare words from seven different language families and to show that, according to their statistics, all seven should be grouped together into a single super-family. I think they have a serious garbage in, garbage out problem.

Pagel et al. used their statistical method to compare reconstructed words for the seven language families they identify: Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Dravidian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Kartvelian, and Uralic. One problem is that Eskimo is not a language family; it's part of the Eskimo-Aleut language family, and any effort to find deeper genetic relationships for Eskimo that doesn't take Aleut data into account is not likely to be useful.

A more serious problem is that Altaic is at best highly controversial as a proposed language family. The hypothesized Altaic family comprises three well-established families — Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus — plus Korean and Japanese. It's a very old idea, but efforts to provide convincing evidence that all these languages belong in a single Altaic family have failed to convince most specialists. A prominent recent exchange appeared in the journal Diachronica (2004, 2005), starting with Stefan Georg's devastating review of Sergei Starostin et al., Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages, and continuing with Starostin's reply and Georg's reply to the reply. In his reply, Starostin commented plaintively that he had hoped `that the publication of more than 2000…Altaic etymologies would put an end' to the dispute about whether an Altaic language family exists. To this Georg responds, though not in these words, that 2000+ unconvincing etymologies do not add up to any convincing etymologies at all.

In his review, Georg criticizes Starostin et al. for erroneous reconstructions of words in the individual language families and for a very loose standard of semantic "matching". The latter may be the most common criticism of word comparisons in efforts to establish very distant linguistic relationships; the other major criticism is a very loose standard of phonetic "matching". Given enough semantic and phonetic latitude, it's possible to amass a large number of "matching" sets of words for any set of two or more randomly selected languages. (If you don't believe me, try it: take bilingual dictionaries and search for similar-looking words that have vague semantic connections. It's an easy exercise.)

So I went to the website from which Pagel et al. got their data, the Languages of the World Etymological Database, and checked their 23 words in the Altaic database, which is presumably derived from Starostin et al.'s three-volume etymological dictionary. Only two of the 23 words have a single "Proto-Altaic" etymon each in the database, `what' and `spit (verb)'. All the others (except perhaps `I', `we', and `ye', which I couldn't find due to problems with the search function) have 2-7 "Proto-Altaic" forms each, and at least nine of the words have five or six each. How did Pagel et al. decide which "Proto-Altaic" word to compare to their other six reconstructed proto-languages? They apparently examined all of the possible words for each translation, e.g. five "Proto-Altaic" words for `that', four for `hear', 5 for `flow', 4 for `hand', and so forth; they then chose just one proto-word for each meaning, namely, the one `that the LWED proposed as cognate between language families', and used that one for their statistical analyses. This is a puzzling procedure, for two reasons. First, the Altaic database (and the Indo-European database too, and perhaps others as well) often lists more than one proto-word as cognate with words in some of the other six proposed language families. Pagel et al. do not say how they decided which set of putative cognates to select. Second, while acknowledging that linguists often `propose more than one proto-word for a given meaning', they observe that these proposals `can reflect synonyms in the proto-language or, more likely, uncertainty as to which of the words used among a language family's extant languages are most likely to be cognate to the ancestral word.' But if they believe (erroneously!) that synonyms are unlikely in proto-languages, and that apparent synonyms probably reflect linguists' uncertainty, how can they be confident that any selection from one of several options for a given meaning for the proto-language is the genuine one and only word for that meaning in the proto-language? What does this indeterminacy do to their claim that words for certain meanings are super-stable, unlikely to be replaced over thousands of years? And doesn't it introduce an element of circularity into their statistical calculations when they choose the set of proto-words to be compared according to its putative match with other language families and not according to an independent criterion?

There are other serious problems too. Unlike Altaic, most of the other families in the LWED databases are genuine language families. But if the "Proto-Altaic" reconstructions are representative of the quality of the reconstructions for the established families, it would be rash to rely on them. This is in spite of the fact that some of the reconstruction databases (e.g. Indo-European and Dravidian) are based on standard etymological dictionaries. The "Altaic" database contains variables in numerous reconstructions — usually V for an unspecified vowel, but also optional and alternate consonants — that make phonetic "matching" even easier (and therefore less reliable). This is a feature of many reconstructions carried out by people engaging in long-range comparison of languages, including efforts to establish a Nostratic super-family. In at least some of the individual LWED databases, the reconstructions based on standard sources have been `revised and significantly modified' (quoting George Starostin, Dravidian database) by others, and those others are believers not only in Altaic but in the super-family Nostratic. Reconstructions carried out by true believers in Nostratic are all too likely to be influenced by knowledge of words with vaguely similar meanings and/or forms in other proposed Nostratic languages — namely, in the LWED databases, the seven families compared by Pagel et al.

I also checked Pagel et al.'s supposedly super-stable words in the LWED's Indo-European (IE) database. One notable fact is that, of these 23 words, English retains only 6 or 7, assuming that the LWED's database is accurate — a fact that might be expected to limit Pagel et al.'s confidence in the reliability of their 23 words as an indicator of genetic relatedness. The count for English depends in part on whether the IE database has accurate reconstructions — `spit' in particular is dubious, because this IE database disagrees with the Oxford English dictionary (OED) here and the sounds don't match well enough to be convincing. I haven't checked all of the relevant LWED etymologies, but it looks there's a reasonable Proto-Indo-European etymology for the English words give, man, mother, fire, flow, and worm, in their current meanings.

The IE database has a sizable number of eyebrow-raising etymologies; like the database for "Altaic", it does not inspire confidence, although there is of course no question about the relatedness of the IE languages. There are many variables in the reconstructions, and many the forms themselves often bear little resemblance to mainstream Indo-Europeanists' reconstructions. The semantic looseness is often extreme. For instance, the database glosses a reconstructed form *(a)den@gh- (where @ = schwa) as `to reach, to seize, to have time'. Among the proposed descendants of this form are a Tocharian B form meaning `rise, raise oneself up', an "Old Indian" (Sanskrit?!) form meaning `reach, strike', an "Old Greek" (Ancient Greek?!) form meaning `with the teeth, biting together', and an Old Irish form meaning `repress, oppress, suppress, crush, put down'. This is typical of the semantic latitude. Formally, too, there are problems. The proposed "Old Indian" descendant of this proto-word is given as daghnoti, possibly on the assumption that the nasal of the reconstructed root metathesized with the gh; but the nasal of the Sanskrit form is a present tense suffix, not part of the root at all. So Sanskrit (by whatever name) doesn't match the database's proto-word phonetically.

If the reconstructions used by Pagel et al. for their statistical analyses are not reliable in either form or meaning, then the statistical results of comparing these reconstructions cannot provide any evidence for distant relationships among the seven groups they compare. If the selection procedure for choosing among several candidate proto-words to use for the statistical analysis is flawed, then there may be problems with the statistics as well. But even if there are no statistical flaws, the Pagel et al. paper is yet another sad example of major scientific publications accepting and publishing articles on historical linguistics without bothering to ask any competent historical linguists to review the papers in advance.

There is a larger moral here too. Early in their paper, Pagel et al. report, correctly, that after 5,000-9,000 years, `most words are thought to suffer from too much semantic and phonetic erosion to allow secure identification of true cognates', in particular (though they don't emphasize this point) because of the decay and loss of `the sound and meaning correspondences…which are thought to indicate that they derive from common ancestral words.' The authors intend their statistical method to provide evidence for relatedness of languages that are beyond the reach of the Comparative Method. Like other long-rangers with dreams of discovering bigger and bigger family groupings — maybe even the ur-human language, what the late Joseph Greenberg called Proto-Sapiens — Pagel et al. believe that abandoning the one method that is known (not just "thought") to be reliable can achieve the goal. But you still can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Here Is Today, via Ann 37

I sleep like this on planes (head in crossed arms on tray)

rachel shared this story from kittenskittenskittens.

shorm:

i-sniff-sharpies:

Cats that just couldn’t

My old cat used to sleep like this 90% of the time. I guess it’s really good at guaranteeing no light disturbance?

Original Source

Most chief information officers are not confident in their ability to estimate and track information technology spending at their agencies, a new survey finds.

A tiny goat rides atop a horse and then gets bucked off in this video shot by Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism near Cape St. Mary’s Ecological Reserve in Newfoundland.

via Newfoundland & Labrador Tourism, Daily Picks and Flicks

ladyt220:

divk:

ROFL

IEEEEE!

Present Day. Present Time.

This is old as hell and not even “true 8-bit,” but it’s going up here this afternoon anyway because “Duvet” was my strawberry jam. Not gonna lie, I stopped watching Serial Experiments Lain after like five episodes because what was even going on in that show, but I rocked Lain desktop wallpapers for years and actually picked up Bôa’s album. The original track is still too good.

BUY Serial Experiments Lain, upcoming games

By The Syrian Electronic Army

malformalady:

Native to Australia, the finger lime(Citrus australasica) is a rare rainforest tree from the Australian east coast. The finger lime holds globular juice vesicles which have been likened to a “lime caviar “, which can be used as a garnish or added to various recipes. The fresh vesicles have the effect of a burst of effervescent tangy flavour as they are chewed. The fruit juice is acidic and similar to that of a lime.

Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Each film in the trilogy is connected to a Cornetto ice cream flavour – both of the films released to date feature scenes in which one of the main characters purchases a Cornetto of the appropriate flavour. Shaun of the Dead features a red strawberry flavoured Cornetto, which signifies the film’s bloody and gory elements,[5] Hot Fuzz includes the blue original Cornetto, to signify the police element to the film,[6] and The World’s End will feature the green mint choc-chip flavour.[2][7] The use of the three flavours/colours of Cornetto is a reference to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours film trilogy.[8]

The 10 Most Exciting Cities in America:

1. Oakland, CA
2. Boston, MA
3. San Francisco, CA
4. Seattle, WA
5. Washington, D.C.
6. New York, NY
7. Milwaukee, WI
8. Atlanta, GA
9. Philadelphia, PA
10. Portland, OR

These are the 10 criteria we surveyed:

• Park acreage per person (#1: Virginia Beach)
• Percent of population between 20 and 34 years old (#1: Columbus, OH)
• Fast food restaurants per square mile (the fewer the better) (#1: El Paso, TX)
• Bars per square mile (#1: San Francisco, CA)
• Big box stores per square mile (the fewer the better) (#1: Tie, Detroit and Boston, both with 0)
• Population diversity (#1: Oakland, CA)
• Movie theaters per square mile (#1: Oakland, CA)
• Museums per square mile (#1: Oakland, CA)
• Theater companies per square mile (#1: Oakland, CA)
• Music venues per square mile (#1: San Francisco, CA)

For some reason the first two members of Category:American men novelists were Orson Scott Card and P. D. Cacek, who was also categorized in “American science fiction writers” and “American horror writers.” It took about fifteen hours for someone to realize that Cacek, whose full name is Patricia Diana Joy Anne Cacek, didn’t belong. As of this writing, she is back to being an American novelist and an American woman novelist. Ernest Hemingway is now officially an American man novelist—manly indeed. F. Scott Fitzgerald will be relieved to know that he, too, made the cut.

Here's the full, terrible Photoshopped art accompanying Yonhap's main news story about Obama and Park talking about South Korea's terrible neighbors (and fellow news image cut-and-pasters) to the North.