I don't get it. NSFW, here it is

John McWhorter rips into some too-credulous Whorfianism. Hilariously.

Also, check out one of the many little constellations of related posts they've built up, starting with Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence, which was so good that it arguably got plagiarized.

Language is a skin. I rub my language against the other. It is if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

From p73 of A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (ISBN 0099437422) by Roland Barthes. In the book, Barthes analyses the components of love and the relationship of lovers.

(courtesy of ( Read more... )

Thanks to MindHacks for pointing to a recent NPR story on HM, the number-one most famous neuro patient ever. Backstory: he had severe, debilitating epilepsy, and in hopes of getting rid of it, a doctor removed most of his hippocampi and big chunks of his medial temporal lobes (where they thought the seizures were originating). The seizures mostly ( Read more... )

A hilarious video about a love affair with carbs. NSFW.

Now, unrelatedly, here is an account of my blogroll. It is not entirely composed of blogs proper -- just things that are like blogs in that they update frequently and I read their RSS feeds on my Google homepage.

Webcomics:
PhD Comics. I remembered seeing certain of these printed out and posted on refrigerators in the labs/buildings at Stanford ( Read more... )

Bruce Schneier is apparently the Chuck Norris of cryptography.

That is all.

(1) I've had this sore in my mouth, on one side, that just won't go away. It seems to be shrinking, but oh so gradually. In the meantime, it takes painful exception to almost everything I eat. Fruits burn with citric acid. Cerals poke with sharp broken pieces of grain. Water pulls my cheek outward, straining the tissue where the sore is. (It's at ( Read more... )

These apparently "demonstrate the power of manipulating the palette of a gif image on the fly." I think that's fair shiny, and worthy of whelk_of_doom's favorite adjectives: savage and righteous. I'd like to add "legitimate" to that list.


( Read more... )

This video shows a creationist's perspective on vanilla flowers and the certain only species of bee that is able to pollinate them. "Clearly, the flower and the bee were made for each other by God, so we humans can have vanilla, which we enjoy ( Read more... )