From the 4/11 issue of New Scientist, this Tom Gauld cartoon:
We’ve been here before, in a Benjamin Schwartz New Yorker cartoon, posted here.
More quantum cat
April 16, 2015Morning: C. elegans
April 16, 2015Today’s morning name: the biological workhorse nematode, C. elegans.
A personal poemorse
April 15, 2015Iamb Trochee Dactyl …
From off
I heard them —
Mammoths!
STOMP STOMP STOMP
Their trunks aloft —
Fabulous.
The panda shirt
April 15, 2015I haven’t been inventorying panda postings (penguin postings, yes), but I have two friends who fancy themselves as pandas, so this t-shirt (passed along by Steve Carter and Aric Olnes on Facebook) definitely caught their eye:
This version from the Choke Shirt Company, which says:
Trust me, I’m a panda. Featuring a blend of fabrics that you will never want to take off, this tri-blend tee gives you the fit, feel and durability of a vintage t-shirt. $26
Trust me, I’m a doctor. Ok, of philosophy, sans the medical gear.
-ity and -ness
April 15, 2015In the NYT on the 13th, a piece by Patricia Leigh Brown on the pursuit of the Pacific lamprey by Yurok Indians in the Pacific Northwest (where the fish are called eels): in print, “In Pursuit of a Wily, Elusive, Tasty Adversary”; on the website, “Hooking a Slippery Prize Where the Klamath River Meets the Pacific”. Both the fish and the Yuroks would be worthy of attention, but here I’m picking out one very small point, from this passage in the story:
It is not for the faint of heart: Eelers die with some regularity, misjudging the intensity of the currents or being swept out to sea by sneaker waves. “We’ve lost quite a few people down there who wanted that one more eel,” said Dewey Myers, who smokes his catch in his backyard and is known for his exquisitely carved hooks.
[Eeler James] Gensaw said, “It teaches you humbleness and respect for the river.”
Genshaw uses the derived noun humbleness (with the all-purpose nominalizing suffix –ness) rather than humility (with the very restricted and specialiized suffix –ity). There is some tradition for complaining about the choice of -ness when a variant in -ity is available — on the grounds that using the -ness version makes it look like you’re ignorant of the more learnèd variant, that is, makes you look illiterate.
I don’t have a lot of patience with such complaints in general, in part because -ity variants are so often specialized in their semantics: no doubt some people would find the connotations of humility to go beyond mere humbleness. In this particular case, I simply find both variants natural; there’s no reason to insist on One Right Way.
Magnum
April 15, 2015Just went past me on television: an ad for Magnum Ice Cream Bars:
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(from the Magnum Ice Cream site; “Magnum Ice Cream Bars are made with creamy Ice Cream and Belgian Chocolate”). The bars are big in size and big in flavor. The ads tend to feature (female) models with bars in their mouths: both oral and phallic. Here’s model Lucy Wolfert in one ad:
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Magnum things are all about size and masculinity.
Allusion
April 15, 2015In Kevin Young’s April 12th NYT review of The Sellout by Paul Beatty, a comic novel on black life on the outskirts of Los Angeles:
There are more mentions of the N-word than on a Sigma Alpha Epsilon field trip. But like early Richard Pryor, Beatty seems to wish to take the word out of the shadows
The reclaiming of nigger is certainly of note, but this posting is about the allusion, to a Sigma Alpha Epsilon field trip. Either you get it or you don’t; it’s not something you can figure out.
A nightmare creature
April 14, 2015From the annals of monstrous pests: the crown-of-thorns starfish, in the Economist‘s issue of the 11th: “Coral-killers: A dilemma for the Great Barrier Reef’s ecosystem”:
Since scientists first raised the alarm 50 years ago about crown-of-thorns starfish chomping their way through the Great Barrier Reef, there have been three big outbreaks. A fourth, perhaps the most serious, is now under way. The Australian Institute of Marine Science rates the “massive explosion” of this lethal starfish strain as second only to cyclones as a cause of the reef’s decline. Several interventions, including fencing coral zones and using navy divers to remove starfish by hand, have in the past proved ineffectual. But scientists at James Cook University in Townsville, a city facing the reef, may finally have found a way to fight back.
Divers have started to inject starfish with a solution made of salts from cattle-bile. A single shot of the substance, discovered by chance during research into starfish diseases, triggers a lethal reaction.
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The creature on a coral.
AZBlogX: big dick twink
April 13, 2015On AZBlogX, a posting with an image of a big dick twink (obviously not for the kiddies or the sexually modest), with notes on beautiful penises, the phonology of the compound big dick twink, and its semantics.
James Garner
April 13, 2015(Mostly about movies and tv, but with some material on names.)
Back in my Julie Andrews posting, James Garner came up, in the movie Victor Victoria. But the actor is an old favorite of mine, thanks to two television shows.