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Yesterday β€” 28 June 2024Other

The generous impulses of all were awakened by the danger that threatened

By: bq
28 June 2024 at 16:01
Welcome to the website dedicated to preserving the Civil War history & record of the men of the 13th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer infantry. The site was launched June 2, 2008. Since that time over 60 pages of detailed history have been added. These pages include newspaper stories, soldiers letters, diaries, memoirs, photos, and post-war reminiscences.... Content warning for language, racism, and violence.

It cost a recruit $12.50 for the privilege of enlisting in the exclusive 4th Battallion of Rifles, but before considering the fee, the applicant needed to be approved by a vote from members of the Boston Militia group. In spite of the cost there were plenty of applicants & there was no problem filling each company to its full compliment of men. The four rifle companies of the Fourth Battallion, Companies A, B, C, & D, became the nucleus of the 13th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers (...) Many of these men chose to go directly to the seat of war as privates in the 13th rather than wait for a chance at an officer's commission with another organization.(...) "They are a damned insubordinate lot," said brigade commander General John J. Abercrombie when asked what kind of troops they were. Amongst the material gathered here is this outstanding story attributed to (Union) Lieutenant Edward Rollins: Dr. Stringfellow's Slaves
Before yesterdayOther

Paging Gen-X

By: bq
27 June 2024 at 11:07
Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks is a tribute album released in 1995 containing cover tracks by major local bands, including one of the last recordings made by Blind Melon's Shannon Hoon before his death (3 is a Magic Number).

Track listing "Schoolhouse Rocky" - Bob Dorough and Friends "I'm Just A Bill" - Deluxx Folk Implosion "Three Is a Magic Number" - Blind Melon "Conjunction Junction" - Better Than Ezra "Electricity, Electricity" - Goodness "No More Kings" - Pavement "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" - Ween "My Hero, Zero" - The Lemonheads "The Energy Blues" - Biz Markie "Little Twelvetoes" - Chavez "Verb: That's What's Happening" - Moby "Interplanet Janet" - Man or Astro-man? "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here" - Buffalo Tom "Unpack Your Adjectives" - Daniel Johnston "The Tale of Mr. Morton" - Skee-Lo

The Rare Archival Photos Behind 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

By: bq
26 June 2024 at 14:39
While investigating the heinous Osage murders for his new book, David Grann also came to know the victims' faces: One day in 2012, when I was visiting the Osage Nation Museum, in Oklahoma, I saw a panoramic photograph on the wall. Taken in 1924, the picture showed members of the Osage Nation alongside white settlers, but a section had been cut out. When I asked the museum director why, she said it contained the image of a figure so frightening that she'd decided to remove it. She then pointed to the missing panel and said, "The devil was standing right there."

What is language attrition?

By: bq
25 June 2024 at 12:38
"When I moved to the Netherlands a long time ago (I was 33 years old at the time), I was determined to learn Dutch quickly. I did not, of course, expect to become perfect – I knew I would occasionally fumble for words, my grammar would at times be erratic, and many (if not most) conversations with strangers would quickly lead up to the inevitable question "Where do you come from?" This, after all, is what usually happens when you learn a new language later in life – and tons and tons of research are there to support this. What I did not expect was for the same things to happen to my native German." This website created by Dr. Monika S. Schmid, Professor of Linguistics, University of York, shares information about the science of language attrition, what it looks like for adults, children, and other groups, anecdotes, media coverage, celebrity examples, and research tools.

Being a good neighbour

By: bq
24 June 2024 at 13:40
Fred Rogers breaks the color barrier in a kiddie pool with Officer Clemmons in 1967. Fred Rogers Previously. The only known violation of Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Is Mister Rogers' Neighborhood the greatest television show ever made? by Emily St. James for AV Club. Segregation & Swimming Timeline in the United States. An episode of the podcast 5-4 discussing the Supreme Court case Palmer v. Thompson, in which the court decided that the Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit the city of Jackson, Mississippi from avoiding integration by closing its public pools.

3 golden age science fiction authors walked into a military institution

By: bq
23 June 2024 at 12:05
Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert Heinlein at the Philadelphia Navy Yard: In 1942 three of the country's leading SF writers – Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague De Camp – all started working together at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The US had just entered WW II, and everyone wanted to contribute. Heinlein and De Camp were too old and too unfit to fight, and Asimov hated the getting-shot-and-dying part, but they still wanted to chip in. They were three of the most imaginative people in the country, so what did the Navy actually have them doing?

a living installation fed by the incoming-tide

By: bq
21 June 2024 at 11:07
The Plum Island Museum of Lost Toys & Curiosities aims to raise awareness about marine pollution and the environmental impact of single-use plastics and other forms of non-sustainable consumption by removing debris from the shoreline and transforming it into art. ~ instagram gallery ~ start your own

authoritarianism, fascism, and the power of imagination

By: bq
19 June 2024 at 12:27
If you've never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early β€” If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whosecompany life seems empty and meaningless β€” If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next. What we can learn from the Neverending Story by Helen De Cruz (trigger warning for picture of shirtless Putin). Retro Childhood Review: The Neverending Story by Jen Zink

You got your Euro in my English!

By: bq
18 June 2024 at 11:08
The European Union has twenty-four official languages, but, according to Jeremy Gardner, a senior translator at the European Court of Auditors, the real number is closer to twenty-three and a half. Gardner has compiled an anthology of offenses committed in what has come to be known as Eurenglishβ€”an interoffice dialect that, as he writes in "A Brief List of Misused English Terms in E.U. Publications," relies upon "words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the E.U. institutions." Lauren Collins for the New Yorker (2013). A PDF version of Jeremy Gardner's report from 2016 is available here: "words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the EU institutions and often even to standard spellcheckers/grammar checkers ('planification', 'to precise' or 'telematics' for example)"

Previously includes a link to this useful Mental Floss article.

The Struggle to Contain, and Eat, the Invasive Deer Taking over Hawaii

By: bq
17 June 2024 at 11:25
Invasive species are well known to be a threat to the native ecosystem (usgs.gov pdf titled Wild Sheep and Deer in Hawai`iβ€”a Threat to Fragile Ecosystems). Axis deer are particularly damaging, running rampant on Maui. They were introduced to the Big Island in 2009 and it took 5 years of government sponsored effort to successfully eradicate them. One of those involved in that project, Jack Muise (long interview on the podcast The Drive with the story of his life and how he got started) has started a business humanely hunting axis deer for commercial resale. The Struggle to Contain, and Eat, the Invasive Deer Taking over Hawaii. Axis deer were first brought to the islands in the 1860s. Now they number in the tens of thousands. (Modern Farmer). How Hawaii Became the Source of a Rare and Tasty Breed of Venison (By Evan Bleier for Inside Hook) "Harvested at night across 250,000 acres from 50 to 75 yards away using surveillance drones, UTVs and long-range rifles equipped with infrared scopes, Maui Nui's deer are killed under the watchful eyes of a USDA inspector in a manner that is designed to make the deer unaware they are being hunted."

An amazing woman has gone to sleep and her language with her

By: bq
16 June 2024 at 19:49
A linguist shares the story of his study with the last remaining speaker of South Tsimshian As shared to r/linguistics in 2013: "Today, Violet Neasloss, aka Nanny Violet, passed away. she was the oldest resident of Klemtu BC, 99 years old, and also one of the happiest, quickest, and most caring. With her death, the South Tsimshian, or SgüüXs language is now sleeping, but because of her, and the hundreds of hours of exhausting mental work she committed to over those months, at some point in the future, members of her community will have the option to wake it up again, and some have already started.

here is a video link of us recording - she upbraids me for my lack of knowledge about the kitchen, and finishes by showing the care she took over what knowledge she shared with the recordings, always careful that never a bad word was said about anybody, though she wasn't so careful when talking about things she felt were hurting her community"

The Art of Translation

By: bq
15 June 2024 at 11:06
See how a translator carries a book from one language to another, line by line. Much like a crossword, a translation isn't finished until all the answers are present and correct, with each conditioning the others. But when it comes to literature, there is rarely ever just one solution, and my job is to test as many as possible. A word can be a perfect fit until something I try in the next clause introduces a clumsy repetition or infelicitous echo. Meaning, connotation and subtext all matter, but so does style. Below are two attempts to show the thought processes involved in the kind of translation I do. Sophie Hughes for the New York Times.

I Built the World's Largest Translated Cuneiform Corpus using AI

By: bq
9 June 2024 at 21:10
TL;DR I used a custom-trained Large Language Model (T5) to create the world's largest online corpus of translated cuneiform texts. It's called the AICC (AI Cuneiform Corpus) and contains 130,000 AI translated texts from the CDLI and ORACC projects.

Also of interest: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative - By making the form and content of cuneiform texts available online, the CDLI is opening pathways to the rich historical tradition of the ancient Middle East. In close collaboration with researchers, museums and an engaged public, the project seeks to unharness the extraordinary content of these earliest witnesses to our shared world heritage. Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus - Oracc is a collaborative effort to develop a complete corpus of cuneiform whose rich annotation and open licensing support the next generation of scholarly research.

Stories of language loss often mask other, larger losses

By: bq
8 June 2024 at 21:12
Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? After moving abroad, I found my English slowly eroding. It turns out our first languages aren't as embedded as we think. Madeleine Schwartz for the NYT: "For a long time, a central question in linguistics was how people learn language. But in the past few decades, a new field of study called "language attrition" has emerged. It concerns not learning but forgetting: What causes language to be lost?"

"We lost and we gained," she said.

By: bq
7 June 2024 at 17:41
When desegregation came to Harlan County, Ky.: An oral history. Karida Brown for the Washington Post. "As we commemorate the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education this month, let us not forget: It was Black children who did the work of desegregating our schools.... The narratives in this piece come from oral histories I conducted from 2013 to 2016 with African Americans who, like my parents, remember the "colored schools" of Harlan County, particularly those in two small Appalachian coal towns, Lynch and Benham. Their experiences β€” revisited from the vantage point of their 60s, 70s and 80s β€” give texture to a complex transition from a pre- to post-civil rights era."archive.is link
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