Henry Troup @ #106 (& Epacris @ #108-9):
Thank you! I'd never have recognized that title. It must have been Seven Trips Through Time and Space that I read it in (I was wrong about it being the first story).
Well, that's one more thing I can add to my list of books read.
A request for assistance in identification of a short story, which I can remember in some detail but have been unable to pin down.
The story concerns the inhabitants of an alien planet. There is a human presence on the planet, & two notable indigenous species. One is an intelligent nonhumanoid resembling a big cat with tentacles*. The humans call them "octopussies". The other species closely resemble humans but appear to be no more intelligent than baboons. The humans call them "yahoos"**. A human couple arrive from Earth with the intention of proving the yahoos are intelligent (and therefore have human rights - they're treated as animals) by raising a pair of yahoo infants as human children.
I think it was the first story in an anthology I found in a school library in the early 90s, and probably at least a couple of decades old at that point. The anthology may also have contained Cordwainer Smith's "The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal", but none of the anthologies listed as containing that at isfdb.org really look familiar. (I know I read "Suzdal" in something at about that time, though, so either I'm failing to recognize one or it's unlisted.)
* Something like van Vogt's Coeurl, I guess.
** I didn't get the reference to Gulliver's Travels when I first read this.
I spent several hours working on this once. Never solved it, though I worked out a number of implications. (Of course, this doesn't indicate much beyond the fact that I'm not especially good at logic puzzles.)
This is probably not a very effective piece of campaign advertising, but I think it's pretty cool: Mayanists for Obama.
Alter S. Reiss @ #111:Peanuts, much like coffee beans, are from Africa.Um. No, they aren't, and I'm confused that you'd say that while linking to a Wikipedia article which says "native to South America, Mexico and Central America" in the first sentence. They did come to North America via Africa, though, having been introduced there from Brazil by the Portuguese. And there are some similar species native to Africa, like the Bambara groundnut.
A long blog post detailing the history of the peanut, with a linguistic focus, can be found here: Polyglot Vegetarian: Peanut. Quotes many old texts mentioning peanuts.
David Harmon @ #395:For that matter, when were the first true sign languages developed? The past 100 years or so?
Old French Sign Language goes back at least to the 18th century. The evidence from Nicaraguan Sign Language is that sign languages develop spontaneously whenever you get enough deaf people together. To whatever extent sign languages are a modern phenomenon, it's because better communications & transport technology make it easier for the deaf to join up into persistant communities, not because sign language itself is a recent innovation.
Happy birthday to Xopher et al. And happy new year: today is Meskerem 1, the first day of the year 2001 in the Ethiopian calendar. መáˆáŠ«áˆ አዲስ አመት.
Clifton Royston @ #439:
For the green coconut, I rather liked this video. (Of course, I don't have either of those pieces of equipment, so the one time I opened one it was a lot slower & messier...)
Right, a marrow is a very large zucchini. A small zucchini is a courgette.
Big list of AmE/BrE vegetable names.
Jan Vaněk jr. @ #39
four maxims of relevance etc (I'm never able to find them on Wikipedia when I need them)Gricean maxims.
Lindra @ #17:
The song is identified in the closing credits. For convenience I'll reproduce it below:
Music by Gary Schyman.
Drums and Engineering: Dan Blessinger
Vocals: Palbasha Siddique
Guitars and Bass: Kevin Dukes
Concert Master: Belinda Broughton
Lyrics adapted from the poem "Stream of Life" from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore
The song "Praan" is available on Amazon MP3
Well, you bang the books board-to-board, so the forces are distributed in a way that a book can withstand fairly well (a hardback, anyway). But, yes, probably not advisable for books too valuable or fragile to take a feather duster.
I wouldn't have thought a feather duster would work very well, myself... the upper edge of a row of hardbacks is a fiddly surface with a lot of nooks and crannies. It seems like canned air would be more convenient.
The best method for ridding shelved books of dust is to take them down a pair at a time, take a volume in each hand, and BANG THEM TOGETHER. Then use a soft cloth to dust the shelf before replacing the books. Well, OK, it probably isn't the best method, but it is among the loudest.
This was the technique employed in the library when I was at school, carried out yearly*. Scheduled, of course, such that there wouldn't be too many people trying to study while the banging was going on. A HEPA filter would almost certainly have been a good idea.
* Or termly? I forget.
Xopher @ #387, geekosaur @ #431:
Pharyngeal stop? You're sure you don't mean the uvular stop, [q]? Pharyngeal plosives are incredibly rare, & don't even have their own IPA symbol. (There's a recording here; just sounds like a glottal stop to me.)
(I won't be joining you in trying to pronounce ROT13'd English. It's exactly the kind of thing I'd normally enjoy, but it seems like the first step on the road to reading it without a converter, which would defeat the entire point.)
D. Caruana @ #9, Lee @ #35: People (by which I mean "web pages") disagree over whether puggle is also applicable to young platypuses, but definitely the echidna first & foremost.
Some pictures here (scroll down). I used to know a site with a gallery of echidnas at different ages, but I can't find it now.
Puggle is also applied to a pug/beagle cross, which is what most of the results are on a google image search.
Coleridge's mnemonic poem Metrical Feet might be useful to someone. Well, the first bit, anyway.
Michael I @ #417
I... kind of agree. But just to argue the other way... couldn't you say on similar grounds that mammals and dinosaurs are both types of fish? That doesn't sound so immediately sensible.
#187
One of Neal Stephenson's pseudonymous collaborations involves a presidential campaign in a near-future US. Ah, here we go, "Interface" originally published as by "Stephen Bury".
Which reminds me of Bruce Sterling's similar* Distraction. I don't recall if an election actually takes place in the course of the novel, but the protagonist is a campaign manager or similar.
* I've not read Interface, but I've seen them compared.
Erik @ #46
[Warning: I am not an Anglo-Saxonist]
Certainly the concept of an alphabetical order existed - abecedaria in latin & related alphabets go back to ancient times, & the runic alphabet is known as the Fuþorc from its order. The only contemporary ordering of the Anglo-Saxon alphabet I've been able to find online is that of Byrhtferð in 1011, cited in this document on the status of the Latin letter þorn and of its sorting order:
A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z & ⊠Ƿ Þ à Æ
(The authors do note the existence of other early English alphabets which may differ from this one.)
Discarding "&" & "âŠ", which aren't exactly letters, that gives us a 27-letter alphabet. But if there's an odd number of letters no rotation will be involutary, so I'll arbitrarily & anachronistically split "U" from "V". (Alternatively I could merge "Þ" & "Ã", since they're pretty much interchangeable in Old English, but both are used in the examples so I'd rather preserve that.) & I'll say "W" is the same as "Ç·" & write it as the former. That gives us the rot-14 table:
ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZWÞÃÆ
PQRSTUVXYZWÞÃÆABCDEFGHIKLMNO
& "Hwæt, Hrodulf readnosa hrandeor" becomes (by hand) "Xloe, Xcæsfwu ctpsðædp xlpðstæl".
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