language laboratory oder verenglischen

The Local, Germany’s English language daily, profiles an Italian living in Berlin who, frustrated with obstacles to practising the German language properly and gaining a better mastery of it in an international office setting turned to inventing needful compound words to express contemporary, specific anxieties that no word exists for. Though this lexicon is by its nature a non-standard and idiosyncratic one, building it is a clever way to strenghten one’s vocabulary and imagination. For the nonce, verenglishchen is to rebuff a foreigner’s best efforts to address another in his or her native language by replying in English. I ought to embark on the same sort of project.

living with a vulcan

The spectacular images and increased understanding of solar activity that have been keeping astrophysicists occupied and excited over the past few weeks—as part of NASA’s broader programme LWS (Living with a Star, which sounds like a network television reality show—are being won by a probe that’s positioned itself so it is not blinded by the Sun and can make out details that were made invisible by too much glare beforehand.
Not being able to stare into the Sun, as Business Insider brilliantly reports, has had a long career of challenging science. To account for the observed anomalous orbit of Mercury, most were convinced there had to be another, tiny planet orbiting even closer to the Sun. Such theories proved true in another instance—incidentally giving Newtonian Mechanics someone of a pardon and reprieve, and the hunt was on for the elusive Planet Vulcan. Albert Einstein, as he undermined the foundations of classical physics, dispelled the myth of Vulcan with his Theory of Relativity which included the curvature of space-time by massive objects Rather staking his reputation on there not being an intermediary planet as Neptune’s eccentricity was explained by Uranus and Pluto, in 1915 Einstein proposed that Mercury took the smoothest path it could through warped space in order to explain the observed wobble. Once Vulcan did not materialise, Einstein’s theories were in a much more secure position.

woodstock

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings directs our attention in a thoughtful and expansive book review of graphic artist Chip Kidd’s recently published programme and kind memoir that imparts a great sense of reverence and goodness for the touchstones of Charles Schutz’ Peanuts characters.
The enduring success of the franchise comes about as perhaps for the humanities one of the longest running autobio- graphies and confessionals, Schultz claiming he was not only Charlie Brown but a little of every character, Snoopy included. Not only does feature explore the complexities portrayed with a sometimes conflicted and existential gang as only Schultz could create—a vexed bafflement on par with Hamlet serialised, but there is also a touching account of how the Peanuts reflected current events and fears over segregation in the States and brought in the character of Franklin in response.

nuance and nudge

Mental Floss has a funny and informative comparison chart of how emojis are rendered differently on different devices, and the deviation from the norm seems quite significant for much of the core vocabulary.
It’s really interesting to think that we rarely stray from our familiar, native ecology and might never appreciate how one meaning is subject to code-switching (alternating between two different syntaxes) in a sort of meta-communication. Of course, it is humorous rubbish that our short-hand might become garbled but the general ramifications might become something broader in terms of precision and understanding.

5x5

wiki, wiki, wiki wiki-room: Wikipedia’s agnostic, philosophical co-founder is a healthy skeptic of the developing product

format-wars: after four decades, Sony is retiring Beta-Max

non-verbal: as an encore of the facial recognition algorithms that guessed one’s age, there a new application that produces an emotional composite from one’s expressions

cast-offs: as a fashion-statement, Dutch designer folds newspapers into disposable shirts you’d think twice about throwing away

thin white duke: David Bowie gets down on Soul Train