Interesting Links for 29-11-2012

[andrewducker]

• On the origins of 'Lost'
  (tags: TV )
• Toys for children - a simple flowchart
  (tags: toys children gender funny )
• Ten weird Chinese mobile phones - turns out not all phones are mini-monoliths!
  (tags: phones design china )
• How feasible are solar-powered farms around the Australian coast?
  (tags: farming solar )
• Linguist makes sensational claim:

Comments

[andrewducker]

Isn't it just!

I am somewhat amazed how fast things have moved on this. Two years ago I heard _nothing_ negative about gender segregation of toys, this year there seems to be amazement that such a thing could still exist in the 21st century.

[fanf]

On the linguistics story, John McWhorter's book "Our magnificent bastard tongue" has interesting things to say about the development of English between Old English and middle/modern English. He argues that trad linguistics has relied too much on written evidence of the history of English, and that this is misleading because the scribal tradition tends to fossilize the language and hides changes to the spoken word. He empasises the importance of high/low registers and diglossia. He also argues that there are some surprising celtic grammatical fossils in English which aren't explained by the usual story. He uses his research into creole languages to explain what happens when you have mixing populations like in England a thousand years ago.

It's a very easy-reading book, so take a look if you haven't already.

[andrewducker]

Thanks, I'll take a look. Doesn't seem to be available in ePub, so I'll try and track down a paper version.

[bohemiancoast]

I was hugely distressed by Diablo III as you know. I'm glad people like it. My son is obsessed with Minecraft (which is just a sort of slightly more accessible Dwarf Fortress): my problem is that I played it for about 20 minutes which is simply not long enough to get the point I think

[andrewducker]

I didn't play Diablo III for the same reasons you were distressed. Torchlight 2 filled that gap quite nicely.

I don't know what the market size is for iOS games versus PC ones. I'd love to have some data on that.

[erratio]

For those of us who no longer have a gaming PC, I don't suppose you want to elaborate on why D3 was distressing?

[bohemiancoast]

Because it cost an absolute fortune, and you sink something like 25 hours into it on Easy, and then discover that you're playing exactly the same game again, same plot, everything, and in order to get everything out of the game you have to do this 20 times; four levels, five character classes. So not going to happen.

And I played it on a five year old Mac, so that's not exactly a 'gaming PC'.

[bohemiancoast]

Also (2) I have now watched Zero Punctuation on Minecraft, can't think why I hadn't done that before, and the first part of this was *exactly* *exactly* like my experience of Minecraft and the second part is just electronic lego in the same way that the Sims is just electronic dolls' houses.

Fascinating question for our times; why, despite decades of trying, has Lego never managed to produce an open-ended interactive crafting toy? And also Lego has all the art assets that Minecraft so desperately needs. Hrrm.

[andrewducker]

I am baffled why Lego haven't made something like that. Maybe they didn't think there was a market for it. You'd think that they could sell an open world and then 70 zillion addon packs for space/medieval/cowboys/etc.

[steer]

See reply below -- they did -- Lego Creator (1998) with two add on packs Harry Potter (not to be confused with the later Lego Harry Potter game which was quite fun) and Knight's Kingdoms.

[andrewducker]

Which shows that the fun of games is overcoming limitations, and making you go on 10 mile hikes to find a brick of the right colour makes it more fun!

[la_marquise_de_]

Old English and Old Norse were mutually comprehensible, and there is a great deal of Norse in modern English -- they have both borrowed from each other. Additionally, they're both part of the North Germanic language group -- very closely related.
So, not sensational at all, real (in my head, this comes under 'but everyone knows this', which goes to show....) Sensible linguist, daft newspaper write-up.

[erratio]

Agreed. The write-up is one of the most ridiculous linguistics pieces I've ever read. All it really amounts to is "Modern English is a creole of Old Norse and Old English", which is hardly an extraordinary claim. (and, of course, a bunch of Old/Middle French also thrown in for extra flavour)

[andrewducker]

Which makes it odd that an awful lot of the discussion I've seen elsewhere says "Nonsense, that's a massive stretch, it's East Germanic languages, not North Germanic ones."

[philmophlegm]

If you want a sensationalist angle on this, I read a book a few years ago that argued that middle and modern English were descendants of a non-written language spoken by British natives while Old English was the language of the invading (Anglo-Saxon) ruling class