To be able to recover his honor, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that deprived him of his honor in the first place."---Olaudah Equiano
Thomas graduated yesterday. we plan a picnic today but it is really cold.
I heard--did not read--of a study by the major U.S. sports organizations. There is concern about the downward trend in attendance. The assumption was that people were reacting to the cost of tickets, parking and food. But that was not what the study showed. People are finding the accessories of video broadcasts were much more entertaining than simple attendance. And that competition offered by technology is only going to improve.
A clever fraud was created to give the appearance of internet ad views--ad views that could be billed for. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads. In a larger view, studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot.
For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.) disclosed this week that his wife Ann Scott bought millions of dollars in municipal bonds in April.
Rick Scott disclosed in a regulatory form that Ann Scott purchased $10.6 million to $33.5 million in 10 different issues of muni bonds from April 9 through 30.
These politicians are just like us---only better.
We must be the most tolerant of peoples. Cue the mayor of San Francisco: “Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States. Tobacco kills more than 480,000 people a year in this country. That’s more than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders, and suicides combined.” Therefore, he goes on — in one of the great non-sequiturs of history — he is going to ban ecigarettes, which have caused none of those deaths and could prevent them, but not ban real cigarettes, which caused nearly all of those deaths. This makes sense to him , presumably, because e-cigarettes has the word "cigarette" in it; he could as easily and logically banned the "cigarette power boat."
These people just say these crazy things, but the average guy is too busy--or too inured to the stupidity--to object. And attacking Trump will not make a difference. Trump is a caricature of the modern politician. The cat is out of the bag. The damage is done. We are ruled by morons.
Valar Morghulis
Klingon and Elvish were the first two constructed fictional languages I encountered. Now there are the languages of GoT and Avatar. CNN, believe it or not, has an interesting story on such creations:
All the lines spoken in Valyrian -- a language split into many dialects and across various regions of the "Game of Thrones" world -- are linguistically correct. They were written by linguist David J. Peterson, who has created over 50 fictional languages, mostly for movies and TV shows. He constructed Valyrian like a real language nearly from scratch, complete with grammar and rules. All he had to build upon was a handful of words and sentences that author George R. R. Martin included in his "A Song of Ice and Fire" books, from which the series is adapted, such as "Valar morghulis" ("All men must die") and "Valar dohaeris" ("All men must serve").
Peterson also designed another of the fictional languages heard throughout "Game of Thrones": Dothraki, which is spoken by Jason Momoa's character Khal Drogo and his tribe. The linguist developed this language first, in response to an online competition launched by the show's producers before the series first aired.
"I applied, with many other very good language creators," Peterson said in a phone interview. "The competition had no upper limit on the amount of material you could provide. When I learned that, I spent every single minute of every day working on my proposal -- up to 18 hours a day sometimes. In about a month, I created over 300 pages of material, including grammar, translations and cultural phrases."
He won the competition, and was later asked to create Valyrian too. Today, Dothraki has about 4,000 official words, and Valyrian about 2,000. Popular online learning platform Duolingo has even included High Valyrian -- the noblest of Valyrian dialects, as spoken by Daenerys -- in its offerings, and to date 1.2 million learners have started the course. It is particularly popular in the UK, where 100,000 people have signed up to study it -- more than can speak traditional languages like Irish and Scottish Gaelic, according to Duolingo.
Among the best-known fictional languages, Klingon from "Star Trek" has enjoyed a cult following since the 1990s and its creator, Mark Okrand, regularly releases new words.
It, too, is available on Duolingo, and is one of several conlangs for which ample online resources are available, along with Na'vi from the 2009 blockbuster "Avatar" and Elvish from J. R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" saga. (CNN)
Thomas graduated yesterday. we plan a picnic today but it is really cold.
I heard--did not read--of a study by the major U.S. sports organizations. There is concern about the downward trend in attendance. The assumption was that people were reacting to the cost of tickets, parking and food. But that was not what the study showed. People are finding the accessories of video broadcasts were much more entertaining than simple attendance. And that competition offered by technology is only going to improve.
A clever fraud was created to give the appearance of internet ad views--ad views that could be billed for. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads. In a larger view, studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot.
For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.) disclosed this week that his wife Ann Scott bought millions of dollars in municipal bonds in April.
Rick Scott disclosed in a regulatory form that Ann Scott purchased $10.6 million to $33.5 million in 10 different issues of muni bonds from April 9 through 30.
These politicians are just like us---only better.
We must be the most tolerant of peoples. Cue the mayor of San Francisco: “Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States. Tobacco kills more than 480,000 people a year in this country. That’s more than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders, and suicides combined.” Therefore, he goes on — in one of the great non-sequiturs of history — he is going to ban ecigarettes, which have caused none of those deaths and could prevent them, but not ban real cigarettes, which caused nearly all of those deaths. This makes sense to him , presumably, because e-cigarettes has the word "cigarette" in it; he could as easily and logically banned the "cigarette power boat."
These people just say these crazy things, but the average guy is too busy--or too inured to the stupidity--to object. And attacking Trump will not make a difference. Trump is a caricature of the modern politician. The cat is out of the bag. The damage is done. We are ruled by morons.
On May 11, 1997, chess grand-master Garry Kasparov resigned after 19 moves in a game against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by scientists at IBM. This was the sixth and final game of their match, which Kasparov lost two games to one, with three draws.
Valar Morghulis
Klingon and Elvish were the first two constructed fictional languages I encountered. Now there are the languages of GoT and Avatar. CNN, believe it or not, has an interesting story on such creations:
All the lines spoken in Valyrian -- a language split into many dialects and across various regions of the "Game of Thrones" world -- are linguistically correct. They were written by linguist David J. Peterson, who has created over 50 fictional languages, mostly for movies and TV shows. He constructed Valyrian like a real language nearly from scratch, complete with grammar and rules. All he had to build upon was a handful of words and sentences that author George R. R. Martin included in his "A Song of Ice and Fire" books, from which the series is adapted, such as "Valar morghulis" ("All men must die") and "Valar dohaeris" ("All men must serve").
Peterson also designed another of the fictional languages heard throughout "Game of Thrones": Dothraki, which is spoken by Jason Momoa's character Khal Drogo and his tribe. The linguist developed this language first, in response to an online competition launched by the show's producers before the series first aired.
"I applied, with many other very good language creators," Peterson said in a phone interview. "The competition had no upper limit on the amount of material you could provide. When I learned that, I spent every single minute of every day working on my proposal -- up to 18 hours a day sometimes. In about a month, I created over 300 pages of material, including grammar, translations and cultural phrases."
He won the competition, and was later asked to create Valyrian too. Today, Dothraki has about 4,000 official words, and Valyrian about 2,000. Popular online learning platform Duolingo has even included High Valyrian -- the noblest of Valyrian dialects, as spoken by Daenerys -- in its offerings, and to date 1.2 million learners have started the course. It is particularly popular in the UK, where 100,000 people have signed up to study it -- more than can speak traditional languages like Irish and Scottish Gaelic, according to Duolingo.
Among the best-known fictional languages, Klingon from "Star Trek" has enjoyed a cult following since the 1990s and its creator, Mark Okrand, regularly releases new words.
It, too, is available on Duolingo, and is one of several conlangs for which ample online resources are available, along with Na'vi from the 2009 blockbuster "Avatar" and Elvish from J. R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" saga. (CNN)
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