Sithel

Attention all intrepid postal aficionados! There are three brand new projects available to test your mailing mettle. That means there are now nine badges you can earn. The previous tasks are joined by

1. Secrets Can you keep a secret? We hope so. 
2. School Days Revisit the classroom with mail art.
3. Prohibited Push the limits of what can be mailed.

Push the boundaries of your correspondence by enrolling in the Initiative Response. This program is a call and response, based on themes and culminating in the endowment of an emblem upon completion of the tasks. Each initiative has three tasks you need to complete in order to be awarded that initiative's emblem. There is no time-limit or obligation to complete these tasks. Only those who submit completed initiatives will be awarded emblems. 

Additionally, you can now choose to download the tasks. No stopping, no waiting for this creativity train. Of course, we have left the option of receiving your missions via the mail, but you can save a few pennies and us a stamp or two if you got the digital route. All mailed Initiatives are $12 while their downloadable options are $10. Looking forward to see what you come up with!

wuglife:

Hahaha, oh man this is beautiful!

A quick explanation:

• Pokémon only say their species name
  
• This Meowth appears to be able to converse with the trainer
• Meowth* says that it is in fact only saying its name, thus behaving as all other Pokémon
  *thus it is not actually a ‘Meowth’ but a species of a name that consists of every utterance it ever said or will say
• If its linguistic behavior is indistinguishable from a human’s linguistic behavior, who is to say that humans aren’t also only saying their species name over the course of their lifetime?

One of the reasons this is brilliant is because “infinite utterances with finite resources” is a key tenet of human language. We (humans) can respond to unexpected situations with novel, unexpected, and unique utterances. In other words, how could every single utterance be pre-programmed into us, when (at our birth), there are words that don’t yet exist that we will use in our lifetime? Concepts we can’t imagine now? Things that don’t exist yet?

(remember this? who could have predicted this headline when you were born?)

For instance, Pokémon: Pokémon was released in 1996. If you were born before then, there would have to be a remarkable coincidence in genetics and biology for your pre-programmed linguistic behavior to include that word (as so many other people also, coincidentally, had that word programmed into them).

This isn’t logical.

Unless, the universe itself is pre-programmed. Freaking out yet?

Don’t worry, quantum physics suggests that this can’t be the case (or at least is highly implausible). The universe is too unpredictable to be pre-programmed. So what does that leave us with?

If something can produce linguistic behavior (i.e., utterances) that are indistinguishably similar to humans’ linguistic behaviors, this means that it can (seemingly) respond appropriately to otherwise unexpected circumstances. After all, the endangered ferrets can be discussed, as can Pokémon, as can whatever else is going on in the news. If the universe is too unpredictable to be preprogrammed, then utterances can’t be preprogrammed in our genetic code or in our brains. Unless we’re all just very lucky all the time…?

Anyway, this is a great demonstration of how a thought experiment can help you test hypotheses about language. It’s not 100% conclusive, but it’s a good way to start thinking about how one might test a hypothesis, or what one would need to find in order to support or disprove a hypothesis.

This is the most amazing and elaborate addition to the novel sentences files yet. 

Last of the headbanding posts, I promise!

I saved the best one for now.. This book is 1984 by George Orwell. And it has amazing pictures in it, some of which I have posted already when I blogged about the endpapers. All of the pictures are in hues of brown/grey/black.. But they also have an occasional green or red accents. So to make them stand out, I decided on red and green headbands.

Yes, this does make it a bit christmassy. But I added a small twist for my top graphite edge..   (also, if you look closely, there is another small bloodstain in the bottom of this book, not sure how I keep on puncturing my fingers while sewing)

See! The colours aren’t that christmassy anymore. And it has this very cool disruption by the invasion of the grey/brown/black colours (just like in the pictures!). You can already guess that I’m quite proud of this. Sorry for that.

I wanted C to be for cats, but thought it ought to be for calligraphy.

Fortunately my brain rejects anything serious, and so I bring you – Calligraphic Cats!

I adapted the shapes from the two catlike beasts from the luttrell psalter and I think they work well.

Cats are in laid and couched work. I’m doing most of the lettering in split stitch.

I’m not entirely sure “calligraphic” is an actual word, but I don’t care/.

A post shared by Tristan (@tristan.dudine.photography) on Aug 7, 2017 at 11:06am PDT

Every month that Patreon funding remains over the $400 mark I sift through my back catalog and bring up a selection of maps that my patrons then vote on as to which will be released under the free commercial-use license. This month we start by releasing the Kraken on a recent favourite – The Lost Ossuary!

The Lost Ossuary

The Lost Ossuary is a small dimensional rift beneath the Lobachevsky Church. Cut out of the stone beneath the church as a set of crypts and ossuaries, the Lost Ossuary displays bizarre geometries to those who would try to map it out. Routings through the Ossuary make little sense, with paths connecting with far less than 360 degrees of angle between them, and some secret passages connecting areas that should be hundreds of feet apart.

To confuse matters more, the ossuary has two types of construction – rough hewn crypts and the carefully built ossuaries and tombs. Both areas are completely contiguous, and yet seem to cut each other up at times. In all, the structure is a nightmare for any who would try to map it out.

This is of course because the planar topology of the Ossuary is a cube – however this is never apparent to those within it – the faces do not involve any changes in angles – the floors remain consistent and flat instead of switching by 90 degrees as one walks over the “angle” in the cube.

Exploring the cube will probably result in some weird maps… here’s a very simple map of just part of the crypts themselves that ends in the same room in two different locations, reached through two different doors.

In time, any attempt to map the Ossuary from the inside will result in a map that crosses over itself and comes back from point A to point A with those two locations at wildly different parts of the map.

The Lost Ossuary works not only for classic fantasy gaming, but would be a perfect spot for a bit of adventure in a Call of Cthulhu campaign (non-Euclidean geometry), or for other games that deal in strange places and possible hyper-tech (Numenera, The Strange, or something happening just inside a rift in Rifts).

Once the adventure is over, however, it might be fun to show the party exactly what was causing all the chaos.

Here I’ve taken the map and made it into an actual cube to show how the halls and chambers connect.

I printed it on some fairly heavy paper stock (it would be significantly easier to assemble using cardstock, mind you) and trimmed it so that there were tabs that I could use to assemble it. A bit of glue or tape and it goes from 2 dimensional to 3.

And for those who prefer their maps without a grid – here is the Lost Ossuary again:

The Lost Ossuary (no grid)

This map is made available to you under a free license for personal or commercial use under the “RELEASE THE KRAKEN” initiative thanks to the awesome supporters of my Patreon Campaign. Over 400 awesome patrons have come together to fund the site and these maps, making them free for your use.

Because of the incredible generosity of my patrons, I’m able to make this map free for commercial use also. Each month while funding is over the $400 mark, we choose a map from the blog’s extensive back catalog to retroactively release under this free commercial license. You can use, reuse, remix and/or modify the maps that are being published under the commercial license on a royalty-free basis as long as they include attribution (“Cartography by Dyson Logos” or “Maps by Dyson Logos”). For those that want/need a Creative Commons license, it would look something like this:

Cartography by Dyson Logos is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Charles Frederick Worth | Evening Gown | c.1898
A superb example of dressmaking from the House of Worth, this dress exhibits the aesthetic of the last years of the nineteenth century. The fashionable reverse S-curve silhouette of the dress and the dramatic scroll pattern of the textile reflect the influence of the Art Nouveau movement. The striking graphic juxtaposition of the black velvet on an ivory satin ground creates the illusion of ironwork, with curving tendrils emphasizing the fashionable shape of the garment. In order to achieve this effect, the textile was woven à la disposition, with the intent that each piece would become a specific part of the dress. With this technique, the design of the fabric is intrinsic to the design of the dress.
#whattheywore #historicalfashion #fashion #fashiondesign #fashionhistory #historyoffashion #vintagefashion #art #vintage #historicfashion #defunctfashion #historicalfashion #costume #costumedesign #couture #costumehistory #histoireducostume #historiadamoda #weddinggown #weddingdress
#wedding #legomuttonsleeve #victorian #victorianfashion #houseofworth #charlesfrederickworth

plutoniarch:

adz:

Autonomous Trap 001

“What you’re looking at is a salt circle, a traditional form of protection—from within or without—in magical practice. In this case it’s being used to arrest an autonomous vehicle—a self-driving car, which relies on machine vision and processing to guide it. By quickly deploying the expected form of road markings—in this case, a No Entry glyph—we can confuse the car’s vision system into believing it’s surrounded by no entry points, and entrap it.”

-James Bridle

using salt circle motor runes to trap driving AI is the most cyberpunk thing I’ve ever seen

It’s easy to find words that distinguish between other voiced/voiceless pairs in English - bus and buzz, fine and vine - but the two sounds represented by the “th” sequence in English are rarer and harder to learn, especially since English uses the same spelling for both of them.  

A lot of people give up and just use near-minimal pairs like “think” and “this”, or “theta” and “they”, but there are actually a few true minimal pairs that you can use: 

thigh  -  thy
ether  -  either 
thistle  - this’ll 

It’s worth noting that function words in English, like pronouns, prepositions, and determiners, tend to have ð, while content words, especially nouns, tend to have θ.

Theta θ and eth ð are also found in the following noun/verb minimal pairs, at least for many dialects:   

wreath  -  wreathe 

teeth  - teethe

loath  -  loathe 

sheath  -  sheathe

sooth  -  soothe 

Here the vowels differ, but the theta θ to eth ð, noun to verb relationship is preserved: 

cloth  -  clothe

bath  -  bathe

breath  -  breathe 

Make sure to try them at full volume, not whispering, because whispering involves turning off your vocal cords (which is why you can whisper when they’re inflamed with laryngitis). 

These sounds are called dental fricatives or interdental fricatives, because the sound is produced by a thin stream of air friction where the tongue is at (dental) or between (interdental) the teeth. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the voiceless interdental fricative, theta, is written θ, and the voiced interdental fricative, eth, is written ð. 

As a bonus, here’s a minimal pair for ʒ and ð, thanks to recent developments in clothing technology: pleasure and pleather. 

marzipanandminutiae:

feels-for-the-fictional:

satanpositive:

Roses are red, that much is true, but violets are purple, not fucking blue.

I have been waiting for this post all my life.

They are indeed purple,
But one thing you’ve missed:
The concept of “purple”
Didn’t always exist.

Some cultures lack names
For a color, you see.
Hence good old Homer
And his “wine-dark sea.”

A usage so quaint,
A phrasing so old,
For verses of romance
Is sheer fucking gold.

So roses are red.
Violets once were called blue.
I’m hugely pedantic
But what else is new?

It’s for the same reason
(To continue this thread)
Why people with orange hair
Are known as redheads 

It’s rare that a language
Would suffer the lack
Of basic distinctions
Like red, white, and black

But studies have shown
That the colours are linked
Later words that develop 
Are orange, purple, pink

It may seem obscure
This colour typology
But you do the same
When you’re sorting the laundry

We normally decide how to pronounce an unfamiliar word by drawing analogies with English words we already know. For example, we knew how to pronounce “-ly” from words like “slowly,” so it isn’t too hard to figure out how to pronounce “bigly.”

But sometimes this approach runs into problems. In this case, there just aren’t any common English words ending in -efe. A wild-card search on the very comprehensive dictionary aggregator OneLook yielded the following list of words: jefe, fefe, efe, hefe, okeefe, hogrefe, keefe, reprefe, tefe and kefe. Pretty obscurefe.

So we have to search further afield. Maybe we go for the Spanish word “jefe,” meaning “boss.” Maybe we look to a different vowel, as in “fife” or “cafe.” Maybe we look to other spellings of the /f/ sound at the end of a word, like “ff” as in “fluff,” “gaffe” and “coiffe.”

The problem is that none of these is a close analogue, making it unsurprising that several Twitter polls have found that people are strongly split. But it looks like the lack of -fefe endings won’t remain true for long. People have started smashing covfefe together with other words to refer to the covfefe meme. There now exists the “threadfefe” (a thread about covfefe), an “exorfefe” (an exorcist of the word covfefe), a “presifefe” (president) and the slogan “If u think you’re above covfefe you’re part of the probfefe.”

lewisandquark:

So if you’ve ever picked out paint, you know that every infinitesimally different shade of blue, beige, and gray has its own descriptive, attractive name. Tuscan sunrise, blushing pear, Tradewind, etc… There are in fact people who invent these names for a living. But given that the human eye can see millions of distinct colors, sooner or later we’re going to run out of good names. Can AI help?

For this experiment, I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. (RGB = red, green, and blue color values) Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?

One way I have of checking on the neural network’s progress during training is to ask it to produce some output using the lowest-creativity setting. Then the neural network plays it safe, and we can get an idea of what it has learned for sure.

By the first checkpoint, the neural network has learned to produce valid RGB values - these are colors, all right, and you could technically paint your walls with them. It’s a little farther behind the curve on the names, although it does seem to be attempting a combination of the colors brown, blue, and gray.

By the second checkpoint, the neural network can properly spell green and gray. It doesn’t seem to actually know what color they are, however.

Let’s check in with what the more-creative setting is producing.

…oh, okay.

Later in the training process, the neural network is about as well-trained as it’s going to be (perhaps with different parameters, it could have done a bit better - a lot of neural network training involves choosing the right training parameters). By this point, it’s able to figure out some of the basic colors, like white, red, and grey:

Although not reliably.

In fact, looking at the neural network’s output as a whole, it is evident that:

1. The neural network really likes brown, beige, and grey.
2. The neural network has really really bad ideas for paint names.

The neural network figuring out white and red is tantalizingly close to how the first colour distinction that human languages tend to develop is between light and dark and red, although grey is one of the latest colour distinctions to show up. I wonder if you could tweak the parameters such that the neural network would learn to split colours in the same order that human languages do (or in a radically different trajectory). 

allthingslinguistic:

Sometimes people ask the best questions on Reddit:

What does Yoda’s syntax look like in non-English versions of Star Wars? For those who aren’t familiar with Star Wars (all two of you), Yoda is an alien who, when speaking English, uses what seems to be an OSV syntax instead of the traditional SVO syntax.

So how do foreign translations of the script handle this? I am particularly interested in what it looks like in non-SVO languages. Are there any translations where Yoda’s incorrect syntax is emulated by using an English-like syntax? Or are other languages’ syntax so free that mistakes in the use of case or verb conjugations must instead be used to emulate Yoda’s “alien” speech?

And some answers so far: 

• Czech: Free word order. Yoda speaks consistently in SOV. Interestingly enough, putting an object before a verb does sound unusual to most speakers of Czech.

• Estonian: Free word order language. Yoda retains the English OSV order. This is grammatical in Estonian, but does make it seem as though Yoda is constantly stressing the object phrase as the main point of his statements. This gives his speech an unusual quality.

• French: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.

• German: A SVO or SOV language. Yoda brings the Object to the front (OSV), like in English.

• Hungarian: A free word order language. There is nothing unusual about Yoda’s speech.

• Italian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV. Note: OSV is also the syntax used in the Italian of the less-proficient speakers of Italian from the region of Sardinia.

• Japanese: An SOV language. Yoda seems to use a more or less correct syntax, with a more archaic vocabulary.

• Korean: An SOV language. Nothing is unusual about Yoda’s grammar.

• Norwegian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.

• Romanian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV. He also places adjectives before the noun instead of after the noun, and uses an archaic form of the future tense.

• Spanish: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.

• Turkish: An SOV language. Yoda speaks in OSV. Note: This order is also used in classical Ottoman poetry, so the syntax may have been chosen in order to emphasize Yoda’s wisdom or age.

Gretchen: It’s unlikely that you’d get a language that only has three colour terms and those terms are turquoise, orange, and pink.

Lauren: Yeah, because that’s not covering a lot. I mean, it might be covering a lot of the colour space in your wardrobe but not for all speakers.

Gretchen: Admittedly there is a lot of turquoise  in my wardrobe.

Lauren: So it’s not surprising that late stage colours like pink and orange have really clear and recent etymologies in English compared to something like red or green or white. I remember when I learned this stuff in undergrad a friend of mine in the class just would not believe that you could cover brown, purple, and grey in one colour. She was just like “how could you have one word that covers all of those three??” And then one day she came to class and she was so excited and was like, “look, look at the scarf that I bought!” And it was true, you couldn’t tell, in certain contexts it looked brown and some contexts it looked purple and in some contexts it looked grey and that was her, like, theoretical proof those colours were close enough that it made sense to put them in one word.

Gretchen: Well the scarf actually brings us into an interesting point about why languages developed colour terms, which is that there’s often some relationship between produced goods whether that’s dyed fabrics or gemstones or other types of processed goods that people make into specific colours. Because if you’re thinking about the sky for example, you know, we say all the time the sky is blue, but it’s really not necessary to specify that the sky is blue. You can say the sky is dark or light, the sky is cloudy or clear, and if it’s clear and its light of course it’s blue! What other colour is it going to be? Or you can say something like the tree is living or the tree is dying, you don’t necessarily need to specify the tree is is green or that it’s red. In nature a lot of things only really come in one specific colour. Whereas once you start making cars you don’t say this car is ripe or it’s not ripe, or this car is cloudy or it’s clear, or this dress that you’re going to make is ripe or unripe or that this basket that you’re weaving is dyed a particular colour. Once you start dying stuff in colours it becomes more useful to talk about a finer variations or if you send someone to buy for you a particular thing in particular colour may want to specify exactly what that colours going be once you start colouring stuff artificially.

Lauren: So certain technological innovations can give rise to the necessity for finer distinctions and colour terms.

Gretchen: And some colour terms are etymologically linked to specific things that created those colours. Purple, for example, is linked to the name of the particular mollusc that was used to make purple dye back around ancient Greece.

Gretchen: I came across a women in Eastern Europe where specifically the older women had more colour terms related to traditional dyeing methodology for textiles, whereas the younger women had become disconnected from traditional dyeing terminology for textiles and could no longer identify words like madder and russet and stuff like this that are used in traditional terms – they tended to use more industrialised colour terms. This seems to be one of those “if you use it you get more words for it” areas, like with any specialised domain.

Lauren: Yeah, there’s a professional vocabulary distinction to be made there as well. I do remember reading something, and again we’re into uncited anec-data here, but I do remember reading something that said professionals can discriminate with more technical words, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they see more colours than people who don’t have these professional words. So you might give people two similar colour chips. And someone who does fabric work will say “that’s magenta and that’s russet,” whereas someone who doesn’t have to discriminate will be like, “Well, this one’s rustier and this one’s richer red.” They can still see the difference. It’s not like not having the word prevents you. Or, people who I’m friends with in Nepal who predominantly speak a language that doesn’t have a blue-green distinction, they still see the distinction, they still prefer fabric in one colour over another one.

Gretchen: Yeah, if you’re painting your bedroom yellow, you’re not going to be like, “I dunno, all yellows look the same to me” – you probably care whether it’s like a lemon yellow or a butter yellow or a golden yellow.

Ah, dang, this was written before I kind of raced ahead of my planned goal dates. The release date for The Audacity Gambit is April 26th and links to preorder and see the cover are here.

I knew that the simple image of an arbour on fire wasn’t going to be the right thing for the final cover for The Audacity Gambit, but I wasn’t quite sure how to balance the imagery I wanted and the right look of a sort-of-New-Adult-Fantasy-novel. If I was someone who did more planning outside my head, here’s where I’d show you some cool thumbnails of concepts.

But, that’s not the kind of person that I am, not for this sort of thing. I basically let things sit and ferment in my head for a while, until the base of an idea bubbled to the surface. What about flowers? Not like, rich oil painted florals or photos thick with petals grabbed from stock image sources. What I thought of were the kind of flowers I saw on decorative items in houses growing up. Simple petals done with simpler strokes, they were often more the idea of a specific flower than an accurate one.

Called “tole painting” in my grandma’s time and “one-stroke” by the time I was seeing shows about it on PBS, it’s a kind of decorative painting that has graced the sides of many a useless item in a house aspiring to country kitsch. Like many things, its value and history is diluted with a popularity and overproduction that caused it to be labelled “tacky.” But the same strokes were used to decorate enamelled boxes in the Victorian era as the ones on empty milk can catch-alls in the 90s. And today, the same strokes are used to amazing effect on nail art.

Besides, they were something I knew I could do and my strange little personal library had resources.

YouTube does too (I particularly like this channel) and I spent some time reading and watching, practising the pleasantly simple movements. And, because I am always one to plunge into a new technique with little forethought, I pulled out paper and started painting the cover with literally no plan.
It absolutely should not have worked out as well as it did. I should have thought about the proportions of the cover, how I wanted to work text into it, where the dang arbour on fire was going to go. But I didn’t. I just painted.

Mind you, I’ve been painting in one form or another for most of my life and spent a good chunk of high school apprenticed to a mural painter, so it’s not like I was going in completely blind. I was just relying on twenty years of practise to create good instinct. Which I guess is, in itself, good instinct.

The final painting was basically what I’d seen in my head and I cannot explain to you how rare that is, even when you’re doing something you have done for years and years. There’s always some variable that comes up and alters what you were picturing, giving you a perfectly good end result but never exactly the thing you pictured.

After I scanned the painting and laid it into the cover template, I was almost angry with how well it turned out (the folks at my Patreon have got a peek), but I feel like how nicely it came together was an absolute gift. Plus, I got to try a painting technique I’ve wanted to try for years, so that was a nice bonus.

The post Designing The Cover for The Audacity Gambit: Painting appeared first on B.Zedan.

Dear Internet Denizen,

You may be interested in purchasing some algorithmically-glitched apparel courtesy of the Glitch Logos bot. We have several fine designs available. They may cause people to remark, “That design is distressing to me.”

Sincerely,
The Management

Your linguist name is your name but in IPA.