HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries in the ' humor ' category
Written May 11, 2008 in creationism-is-stupid, dinosaurs, humor
(found on the net, and this is all I’ll say about creationism for the next few months)
…We have one verb paradigm for this language already, entrusted to us by an ancient linguist who took some notes once when stuck in the wilds of Papua New Guinea due to visa problems.* The verb is “to swim”. We decide to elicit this from our speaker for comparison purposes.
Our speaker insists her language has [...]
In the midst of a crisis that may have reached a breaking, point Tuesday afternoon, linguists, and grammarians, everywhere say they are baffled, by the sudden and seemingly random, appearance of commas, in our nation’s sentences. The epidemic of errant punctuation…
isn’t there anything that Wikipedia does not know? Phylogenetics, is, of course
the worst thing to put on a biology quiz for freshman, Mrs. Smigala
Keep up the good work, Mrs. Smigala! All joking aside, phylogenetics is a hard topic to pick up. Students tend to get swamped pretty quickly with jargon (synapomorphy? homoplasy? polychotomy? apomorphy? [...]
University of Iowa neuroscientists studying spatial learning and the effects of stress on memory announced Tuesday that a little son-of-a-bitch mouse ruined an experiment on cognitive performance by effortlessly navigating a maze that researchers spent nearly a year designing and constructing.
The test subject, a common house mouse, briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under [...]
Written April 12, 2008 in anthropology, austronesian, birds, humor, language, linguistics, people, quotes
William Thurston on the role of humor in language change in his 1987 book “Processes of Change in the languages of North-Western New Britain”:
Many linguistic innovations arise in the context of humor, a common mechanism for mediating interpersonal relationships. For example, in 1978, during my second trip to work with the Anêm, but Goulden’s first, [...]
..has a shock exposé about the truth behind the grand canyon (”it was formed in a couple of days after Noah’s Flood says random wild guess by Bible scholar with no knowledge of geography”), and an exclusive interview with creationist (and jailed fraudster*) Kent Hovind.
Ok. Maybe not - it’s my favorite entry by el Gran [...]
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