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The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits that the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks affects how he or she perceives the world. It has been a lightning rod of controversy ever since it was proposed. A new paper suggests that it's half true—sort of.
I love these re-imaginings of film trailers. What if the ultimate two-hankie movie was much, much creepier?
A good read from The New Yorker. I saw a special on the Enigma Project once and they interviewed a woman who had worked with Turing at Bletchley Park. She basically said that everybody at BP was phenomenally bright, but that Turing was a genius and that the difference between being intelligent and being a genius was the difference between going from A to G and from A to Zed. Genius didn't need the intermediate steps that even the very brightest of us require.
That sounds lonely to me.
Here, Mark Levinson (left) speaks about love. I'm digging it; Home Theater's convergence editor, Chris Chiarella (center) takes notes.
Admiring the fluttering hand.
Those enormous, many-drivered speakers did an incredible job of "disappearing." Behind them, you see a few very special instruments and some of the softest, warmest light.
Here, I'm holding a prototype of the Daniel Hertz-designed "Genius," an integrated amplifier-D/A converter, to be used with the Burwen Bobcat. The Genius should be available in about 60 days, and will…
Hilarious rant by anthropologist Roger Sandall over Lynn Truss' Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life. I have to confess I haven't read TTTH, not least because I didn't enjoy her hectoring Eats Shoots and Leaves. Geeze, if you're going to write a book about the failure of everybody to observe proper grammar, wouldn't you want it to be copyedited to a fair thee well? Ms. Truss didn't proof her proofer—and all I could think as she wagged her finger was that she should have washed it first.
So what got Sandall's dander up? Was it the utter bloody rudeness of accusing…
Ampulex compressa is a wasp that uses its stinger to temporarily paralyze and then hot-wire a cockroach so that the wasp can "drive" the larger critter home, where it can lay its egg on the roach host and seal it into a nursery. When the egg hatches, the larva chews its way into the host, where it feeds itself and then spins a cocoon.
Carl Zimmer writes about how complex all of this really is.