Sometimes too the author embellished the story. St. Denis is the patron saint of France. He is supposed to have been the first bishop of Paris and to have suffered martyrdom through being beheaded. According to legend, he immediately stood up and walked a good distance, carrying his head in his hands, to the place where the church which bears his name is now situated, a little to the north of Paris. This was miraculous enough, you would have thought, but there are ways to improve on it. In later lives there are saints who do exactly the same thing, but walk even further or are accompanied by other beheaded martyrs also carrying their own heads. In fact this motif became so common that the experts have invented a special name for this kind of saint: cephalophores. This is from Greek, and of course means “headbearers.”

Janson’s “Natural History of Latin”

If you consult this map of American dialects, you’ll find that Midland is objectively the best dialect. It’s also a fundamental truth that on rhymes with dawn.

You may also be interested in the famous pop vs. soda debate.

Jayus

Indonesian — “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.”

Torschlusspanik

German — “Translated literally, this word means “gate-closing panic,” but its contextual meaning refers to “the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.” “

Iktsuarpok

Inuit — “To go outside to check if anyone is coming.”

Link shamelessly stolen from swiss-miss.

I recently finished reading William Goldbloom Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel. As was the case with the Atlas of Remote Islands, most of my reading time was spent beaming at the very unlikeliness of the book’s existence. Borges’ work could be described as “literary nerd-sniping,” so the notion of a mathematician devoting a book to an analysis of one of his stories makes perfect sense — it’s just so rare to see those spheres overlapping.

The mathematics the book employs isn’t terribly difficult, since it’s written for the interested layman. Conversely, if you did your undergrad degree in math (or something else sufficiently mathly) you’ll probably find yourself skimming occasionally, but there’s still quite a lot in there to enjoy. The book is very good at communicating the pleasure of doing mathematics for its own sake, and that aspect really struck a familiar chord with me. Who doesn’t enjoy discovering that The Library would contain enough books to fill 10 ^ 1,834,013 universes?

Finally, any writer who in the preface defines his intended audience as “Umberto Eco” has won a fan for life.

Benjamin Bagby performs Beowulf in the original Old English. The opening scene is above. It’s very impressive – the man’s got quite a presence.

The hidden gem in the above video, though, is the completely-open-to-interpretation audience reaction.

Nice find, Cooney!

• Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
• Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
• The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.
• In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn’t remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: “The vase broke itself,” rather than “John broke the vase.”

…in recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were allowed to count normally, they did great. If they simultaneously did a nonlinguistic task—like banging out rhythms—they still did great. But if they did a verbal task when shown the dots—like repeating the words spoken in a news report—their counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their language skills to count.

First of all, when I say “proved,” what I will mean is “proved with the aid of the whole of math.” Now then: two plus two is four, as you well know. And, of course, it can be proved that two plus two is four (proved, that is, with the aid of the whole of math, as I said, though in the case of two plus two, of course we do not need the whole of math to prove that it is four). And, as may not be quite so clear, it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is four, as well. And it can be proved that it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is four. And so on. In fact, if a claim can be proved, then it can be proved that the claim can be proved. And that too can be proved.
Now, two plus two is not five. And it can be proved that two plus two is not five. And it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is not five, and so on.

Thus: it can be proved that two plus two is not five. Can it be proved as well that two plus two is five? It would be a real blow to math, to say the least, if it could. If it could be proved that two plus two is five, then it could be proved that five is not five, and then there would be no claim that could not be proved, and math would be a lot of bunk.

So, we now want to ask, can it be proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is five? Here’s the shock: no, it can’t. Or, to hedge a bit: if it can be proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is five, then it can be proved as well that two plus two is five, and math is a lot of bunk. In fact, if math is not a lot of bunk, then no claim of the form “claim X can’t be proved” can be proved.

So, if math is not a lot of bunk, then, though it can’t be proved that two plus two is five, it can’t be proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is five.

By the way, in case you’d like to know: yes, it can be proved that if it can be proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is five, then it can be proved that two plus two is five.

Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages offers an overview of the history of artificial languages (Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, etc.). I’m pretty sure that anyone who likes my blog would enjoy it. *cough* Julia.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, as read aloud in the original Akkadian by Antoine Cavigneaux.

For more voices from the beginning of the world, see also part of the epilogue of the Codex Hammurabi and an incantation to ward off rabies. And there’s a lot more. Thanks, Cambridge!

It seems that there’s some scholarly debate over the specifics of cadence and pronunciation, but based on what we know this is about as good as it gets.

(via Open Culture)

“Instead of turning off the lights, you close the lights. You have a coffee instead of having coffee. You fall pregnant instead of getting pregnant,” he says.