Wednesday Wiki: A list of languages by first written accounts
A List of languages by first written accounts.
This is a list of languages by first written accounts which consists of the approximate dates for the first written accounts that are known for various languages.
Because of the way languages change gradually, it is usually impossible to pinpoint when a given language began to be spoken with any precision. In many cases, some form of the language had already been spoken (and even written) considerably earlier than the dates of the earliest extant samples provided here.
Wednesday Wiki: Decipherment of rongorongo
There have been numerous attempts to decipher the rongorongo script of Easter Island since its discovery in the late nineteenth century. As with most undeciphered scripts, many of the proposals have been fanciful. Apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to deal with a lunar calendar, none of the texts are understood, and even the calendar cannot actually be read. There are three serious obstacles to decipherment: the small number of remaining texts, comprising only 15,000 legible glyphs; the lack of context in which to interpret the texts, such as illustrations or parallels to texts which can be read; and the fact that the modern Rapanui language is heavily mixed with Tahitian and is unlikely to closely reflect the language of the tablets—especially if they record a specialized register such as incantations—while the few remaining examples of the old language are heavily restricted in genre and may not correspond well to the tablets either
_edit1.jpg "Tablet B Aruku kurenga, verso. One of four texts which provided the Jaussen list, the first attempt at decipherment. Made of Pacific rosewood, mid-nineteenth century, Easter Island.")
Tablet B Aruku kurenga, verso. One of four texts which provided the Jaussen list, the first attempt at decipherment. Made of Pacific rosewood, mid-nineteenth century, Easter Island.
Wednesday Wiki: The Bone Wars
The Bone Wars occurred during a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to out-compete the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and destruction of bones. Each scientist also attacked the other in scientific publications, seeking to ruin his credibility and have his funding cut off.
Wednesday Wiki: Captain James Cook
Captain James Cook FRS RN (7 November [O.S. 27 October] 1728 – 14 February 1779) was an English explorer, navigator and cartographer, ultimately rising to the rank of Captain in the Royal Navy. Cook was the first to map Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific Ocean during which he achieved the first European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands as well as the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.
Wednesday wiki: Photic Sneeze Reflex
Today's fine wikipedia article for your educational pleasure: the Photic Sneeze Reflex!
...is a medical condition by which people sneeze with sudden exposure to bright light, and possibly also to sneeze many times consecutively. It is also referred to as photic sneeze response, sun sneezing, photogenic sneezing, the photosternutatory reflex, or even whimsically as ACHOO syndrome with its related backronym Autosomal dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst syndrome. The condition occurs in 17% to 35% of humans. The condition is passed along genetically as an autosomal dominant trait.
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Wednesday wiki: Acetylseryltyrosylserylisoleucylthreonylserylprolylserylglutaminyl:
This 1185-letter "word" is the third chemical name for "Coat Protein, Tobacco Mosaic Virus, Dahlemense Strain". It is supposedly the longest word in the English language.
Wednesday Wiki: Mirror Neurons
It’s actually thursday, but I think Mirror Neurons are so cool as to be worth a post on their own:
A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal. Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself performing the action. These neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans and in some birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.
Some scientists consider mirror neurons one of the most important findings of neuroscience in the last decade. Among them V.S. Ramachandran, who believes they might be very important in imitation and language acquisition. However, despite the popularity of this field, to date no plausible neural or computational models have been put forward to describe how mirror neuron activity supports cognitive functions such as imitation.