toucana

I spotted this inspired caption created by auto-generate on a LegalEagle YT feed about Harvard. It rather suits her don’t you think ?

One traditional way of introducing alien concepts into Mandarin Chinese is called a calque, which comes from the French word calquer meaning ‘to trace’ - i.e. a loan translation that imitates the structure and/or literal meaning of the original. One good example of this in Mandarin is the word 铅笔 qiān bǐ - ‘pencil’ The individual Chinese characters literally mean “lead writing-brush” because it is a calque on the English expression “lead pencil” - which is even funnier because pencils have never been made from lead ! https://www.pensunlimited.co.uk/blog/industry-news/pencils-a-little-tale/ Pencils have always been made with graphite cores (the word graphite comes from the Greek word γραφειν meaning ‘to write’.) The confusion seems to have arisen in part because the Romans used lead styli for writing, and some people once thought that graphite was a form of lead ore. There are numerous other mirthful examples of calques in Mandarin e.g. 火车 huǒ chē - train (lit. ‘fire chariot’) 电脑 diàn nǎo - computer (lit. ‘electric brain’) 外星人 wài xīng rén - space alien (lit. ‘outside star person’) 彗星, hùi xīng - comet (lit. ‘broomstick star) 犀牛 xīn niú - rhinoceros (lit. ‘sharp ox’) I’m not quite sure what a Mandarin speaker would make of a ‘gruntbuggly” though I suspect the characters chosen might include: 水 shuǐ - the water radical (in honour of its beautiful micturitions) 咕噜声 gulu sheng - grunt or gurgle 虫子 chóngzǐ - bug or insect

Another striking example of an ideogram-based writing system that decayed into a syllabary is the development of hiragana in Japanese from the middle of the Heian period (794-1185 AD). Japanese scholars had first begun borrowing Chinese characters intensively to study and translate Buddhist scriptures from the 5th century AD onwards, and adapted them in a number of quite ingenious ways: https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=honorscollege_anthro From the 9th century AD onwards, two different cursive syllabary systems had begun to develop out of simplified Chinese characters to cope with the awkwardness of writing certain Japanese grammatical particles. One of them called hiragana was referred to as onnade or ‘woman’s hand”, and the other known as katakana was called otoko moji or “mens script”. It was hiragana that came to be favoured for aesthetic uses in poetry and story telling at court, and two of the most famous works of classical Japanese literature were written at this time by female authors who made extensive use of hiragana - “The Pillow Book” (枕草子, Makura no Sōshi) by Shei Shōnagon, and “The Tale of Genji” (源氏物語 , Genji Monogatari) by Murasaki Shikibu. This fragment of an early 12th century illustrated handwritten scroll version of “The Tale of Genji” shows just how cursive and far removed from Chinese characters the hiragana script had become.

There does seem to be a form of linguistic entropy at work whereby proto-languages progressively lose their ideogrammatic and pictorial features over time, and decay into syllabary systems and alphabets. The most obvious example that comes to mind is Hieroglyphic Egyptian. The earliest decipherable forms of this date back to the 28th century BCE (Second Dynasty). As the Greek name ἱερογλυφικός (“Sacred Carvings’ ) might suggest, it was written with a mixture of ideogram pictures, phonetic syllable elements, and determinatives, and is found in ancient Egyptian monumental carvings and stone inscriptions Two more cursive forms of written hieroglyphic developed over time that were better suited to writing the Egyptian language on papyrus - as opposed to carving symbols into stone. The first became known as Hieratic (Greek: ‘Priestly’, ‘Sacerdotal’) which was followed by the development of the Demotic script from about 650 BCE which was an even more heavily stylised and simplified form of cursive writing. Ideogram symbols continued to be used only in some special religious texts such as The Book of The Dead. Demotic was then displaced by a new form of Egyptian writing known as Coptic in which the older Egyptian glyphs were replaced almost entirely by the letters of the Greek alphabet. This process began with the reign of the Greek speaking Ptolemaic pharaohs in 305 BC. Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic ruler who died in 30 BC and spoke Koine Greek as her first language was said to have been the only Ptolemaic ruler who could speak and read ancient Egyptian. Thereafter Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire, and with the growing spread of Christianity in the 3rd century AD, Coptic became the official liturgical language of the Egyptian church (and still is) - and it remains the language of the ancient pharaohs now spelled out in Greek letters. The famous Rosetta Stone found in 1799 which enabled modern scholars to decipher ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs is a stele dating from 196 BC which contains three versions of the same decree by Ptolemy V Epiphanes written in Hieroglyphic and Demotic Egyptian, with a translation in ancient Greek at the bottom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

Just to make things even harder, when I first began learning Chinese at university back in the early 1970s, there was only one bi-language Chinese magazine widely available in the west which was called ‘China Pictorial’ (Ren Min Hua Bao - 人民画报). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Pictorial For ideological reasons, this was only printed in Chinese and Albanian at that time ! Because after the Sino-Soviet split and the start of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Albania was practically the only foreign country recognised by the PRC, and Albanian was the only officially sanctioned foreign language that could be taught in China - up until 1976 when Albanian leader Enver Hoxha split with Maoism. Which meant that budding sinologists like myself had to learn to read Albanian as well, just to read Ren Min Hua Bao in translation. I originally posted this thread in The Lounge because it wasn’t clear quite where it belonged. On reflection the topic seems to involve, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cultural anthropology. A speculative discussion of brain-area specialism in language learning seems to relate to what psychologists call procedural or implicit memory - the ‘how to’ type of memory that enables us to perform learned tasks, skills and habits without conscious thought. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/procedural-memory

Both the Chinese and Japanese authorities pondered the idea of switching to using romanized scripts quite deeply at various periods. In China reformers such as Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen recommended such a move in the 1920s after the founding of the Kuomintang Republic. The Communist leader Mao Zedong did much the same after the PRC took control of China in 1949, but settled in the end on a scheme of script simplification and the creation of yet another homebrew system or romanization called Pinyin in the 1950s. The problem was always one of scale, along with the expense, and a sense of cultural loss. Another problem with Romanization confronting western students like myself who embarked on a degree in Far Eastern studies in the 1970s was the sheer number of competing romanization systems. There used to be a joke that whenever a new professor was appointed to a chair in Chinese, they were expected to spend their first year inventing a new method of romanizing Chinese, and the rest of their career campaigning for its adoption. In my first year alone, I had to learn legacy systems of romanization like the archaic Wade-Giles (which gave us ‘Peking’ for ‘Beijing’), then the more modern Yale University system, along with the bizarre Gwoyeu Romatzyh from 1926 (which indicates tones by internal spelling changes), the 1918 Juhin Fuhao phonetic syllabary (used in some Taiwanese dictionaries), together with the 1958 Pinyin system used in all PRC material. The latter is now the de facto standard for modern Chinese internet use and keyboard input systems. The difference between learning to how read Chinese characters, as opposed to learning how to write them (in a pre-internet age) was so pronounced that I used to wonder if two different forms of brain-hemisphere access were involved - left hemisphere for semantic recognition, and right-hemisphere for spatial reconstruction ? I spent a lot of time practising character tracing, and learning stroke orders and stroke counts back then, and part of the fun of doing the calligraphic exercises in Duolingo nowadays lies in rediscovering it all. The cursive writing issue has a lot of resonance with problems in Chinese relating to Cǎoshu (草书 - ‘grass script’) a form of impressionistic ‘speed calligraphy’ that can be almost unreadable even to people familiar with normal Hanyu because of its level of abstraction - e.g the word Cǎoshu itself written in the two forms:

Character amnesia is a recently coined term for an interesting problem that is troubling Chinese and Japanese speakers, namely a growing inability to reproduce and write out complex characters by hand from memory. https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/ In Chinese the phenomenon has been dubbed tíbǐwàngzì (提笔忘字) which means “lift the brush, forget the character”. The problem has become progressively more acute ever since the advent of the modern internet and smart phone usage in China after the turn of the millenium. Chinese speakers typically use either a physical QWERTY keyboard, or a virtual equivalent (on pads and smartphones) to generate a Pinyin romanisation of what they want to say. The system software then generates a list of characters known as a ‘candidate gallery’ of hanzi that match the romanised input string. Users highlight/select the characters they want to use, and hit return to transfer the entire string to a document or email. With look-ahead style auto-correct and modern AI software at work under the hood, the process is fast and almost effortless. The only problem is that users no longer experience the kinaesthetic reinforcement of writing out the characters they are using by hand - stroke by stroke, and they progressively forget how to do so. Within the last week or so I have noticed that the Chinese language course on Duolingo has now for the first time introduced calligraphic exercises where students have to memorise and reproduce the exact stroke order, brush direction and stroke count of a complex character in order to score points. The really interesting aspect of this is that conventionally literate Chinese speakers (those who can recognise 4000 to 5000 characters) have not the slightest difficulty in reading Chinese characters, they simply can’t remember exactly how to write them. There is a growing fad on Chinese TV for National Spelling Bee type competitions such as ‘Chinese Character Heroes’ where young contestants have to write out the character forms correctly by hand. A recent Duolingo calligraphy exercise:

Solar panels or photovoltaic modules usually consist of a large number of individual PV cells which are interconnected both in series (to raise the voltage), and in parallel (to raise the current). The power output of the panel is then given by W = V x I . When multiple panels are connected together to form an array, they are usually connected in series, ahead of an inverter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel The diodes built into solar panels are blocking diodes that are intended to isolate defective or ‘shaded’ PV cells, and prevent unwanted reverse DC current flow into these cells which can produce localised overheating. This article explains the role of diodes in solar panels, and mentions that thermal imaging via drone cameras is an increasingly important part of maintaining solar panel arrays: The importance of this type of maintenance was demonstrated quite vividly only yesterday afternoon when the main St Michaels maternity hospital in our city had to be evacuated after an array of solar panels on the roof caught fire. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5ew654g32o

I found this video about framing doors and windows in a 3D printed house construction project. They refer at one point to “cutting gaps”, which are then retro-fitted with with pressure-treated wood ready to receive window casements and hinged door fittings, and the crew then fit rebar over the lintels for structural support - or so it seems.

Here in my home town in UK, all 188 residents living in a city centre tower block had to be moved to emergency accomodation following a large fire on Tuesday. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpd440yee07o Two years ago, London Fire Brigade released dramatic video footage of a similar incident where the lithium battery of an E-scooter exploded while left on charge in a kitchen. The lesson that comes to mind is a piece of safety advice my father was once given on handling radioactive isotopes at Harewell - "Presence of mind , and absence of body ! "

The link I gave also mentions that smaller scale prototype 3D printed houses were created In Europe and in China back in 2015, using a sustainable and environmentally friendly plastic based on plant-oil.

This is a story by the Indian WION News service from 2 years ago, which is about the construction of what was then Europe’s largest 3D printed building. It was built by by Kraus Gruppe at Heidelberg in southern Germany. According to the report, it took just 140 hours to create this building which was 55 meters long,11 meters wide and 9 meters high. According to the report, only two workmen were kept on site to supervise the construction process.

Yes - strictly speaking the word 'tea' should refer to infusions made with camellia sinensis, and those made with any other plant should be called 'herbal teas' or 'tisanes' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea Many of those I mentioned are however sold in teabag form in our local supermarkets here in UK.

Just a thought - not all teabag teas are leaf teas. Some are made from ground seeds e.g.—> anise, fennel, fenugreek. Quite a few are made from rhizomes/roots such as —> burdock, dandelion, ginger, ginseng, licorice, marshmallow, turmeric and valerian. While other are made from tree-barks e.g.—> birch, cinammon, pine. A few are made from both the bark and roots of a particular plant —> e.g sassafras. My wife told me that she recently went out for a coffee with a friend who got herself a Turmeric Latte - It’s a brave new world out there !

Tea bags were an accidental invention, and were originally made from a silk material according to this site. https://www.tea.co.uk/the-history-of-the-tea-bag

American friends living in the Chicago/Illinois area tell me that they are receiving emergency telephone warnings about a large incoming dust storm in their area. Dust storms known as haboobs (arabic: هَبوب habub - “blasting/drifting”) more normally occur in semi-arid areas of the south-western states of USA, and are caused by the collapse of thunderstorm systems, leading to a reversal of winds, and downdraft of cold descending air picking up dust and debris from the ground as it advances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haboob The last major haboob in the Illinois area on 1 May 2023 caused an 84 car pile-up on Interstate 55 that killed eight people and injured dozens more. https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2025/04/research-conservation-reviewing-the-illinois-dust-storm-of-2023.html From an IRC chat just a few minutes ago —> [00:28:33] <e******l> We just got an emergency notification on our phones for a dust storm coming our way. That's the first I've ever seen in this area. [00:29:19] <toucana> they call them haboobs in some parts of USA ? [00:30:51] <e*****l> Looks like. I just searched Google for "haboob", and instead of getting boob jokes, I got the definition and a map of our warning area. [00:33:41] <toucana> It's from the arabic word هَبوب, haboob meaning "blasting/drifting" [00:34:44] <toucana> Normally happen in places like Arizona, but they also happen sometimes in midwest areas like Iowa [00:35:02] <e****l> Also, that explains why when I've been outside today I have felt like I had stuff getting in my eyes. I actually did! [00:50:06] <e****l> I'm in Chicago, Illinois [01:02:44] <e****l> It is getting dark here from the dust. [01:02:54] <e****l> The wind has started to really pick up. <—

Leeches are still used in modern medicine. Back in 2004 the U.S Food and Drug Administration approved the use of leeches for the treatment of localised post-operative venous congestion. https://www.uhhospitals.org/blog/articles/2020/03/how-leeches-can-save-lives-and-limbs-for-some-patients They are of particular value in skin graft and reconstructive plastic surgeries for cancer and trauma that often require microsurgical techniques. In a small number of cases, the affected body part may develop a dangerous complication called venous congestion. Leech saliva contains hirudin, an anticoagulant agent that works to prevent blood clots and reduce the amount of congested blood in the tissues, as well as promoting blood flow and healing. The treatment is also painless because leech bites release a natural anaesthetic that numbs the bite area. In Scottish Gaelic léich or ‘leech is a word for a physician or doctor - reflecting the 17th century use of that term in English.

The sequel ...

I never imagined that this Tracey Ullman comedy clip would become topical again - but here it is:

Umm... this is the Politics sub-forum. As a matter of interest, my OP originally appeared in the 'Political Humour' sub-forum, but the forum moderators felt it belonged here instead, and moved it.

Interesting article by BBC News about Charlie Hopkins who at 93 is said to be the last surviving former inmate of Alcatraz - according to the San Francisco National Archives. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yep08r9vjo He was transferred to Alcatraz in 1955 aged 23 to serve a 17 year sentence for kidnapping and robbery after causing trouble in other penitentiaries, and spent three years on the ‘Rock’ before being moved to Missouri. Hopkins who is an avid Trump supporter said that he does not believe the president’s proposal is serious:

I suspect the most succinct explanation can be found the final paragraph of the NPR link in the OP: The same article also makes another point: Donald Trump who was born in June 1946 would have been an impressionable 16 y/o at the time when John Frankenheimer’s film came out, and when Alcatraz was shut down. The name Alcatraz simply doesn’t have the same notoriety and resonance for anyone significantly younger.

As a child back in the 1960s I used to watch popular American films shown as Sunday matinee programmes on the BBC service. One of them was a 1962 John Frankenheimer film called Birdman of Alcatraz starring Burt Lancaster. The film was adapted from a novel by Thomas E. Gaddis that was based on the real-life story of Robert Stroud - a double murderer who became an expert ornithologist and authority on avian diseases while serving time at Leavenworth. In 1942 Stroud who was regarded as one of the most dangerous convicts in the US prison system was transferred to the penitentiary on Alcatraz Island where he remained until 1959 - (spoiler alert - he was no longer allowed to keep birds in his cell on Alcatraz). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdman_of_Alcatraz_(film) John Frankenheimer’s film which was released in July 1962 proved to be an epilogue for both Alcatraz, and Robert Stroud himself. The penitentiary was closed down in March 1963, and the Bird Man himself died in November of the same year, having spent 42 of his 52 years in prison in solitary confinement. Alcatraz (Island of Pelicans) is a bare rock located about 1.25 miles off the coast of San Francisco. Originally the site of a lighthouse and a military prison dating from the 1850s, it was taken over by the Federal Bureau of Prisons and reopened as a maximum security facility in 1934. It was believed that the cold waters and strong currents of San Francisco Bay would render the prison escape-proof. Alcatraz was a very expensive facility to run, it could only ever house about 260 prisoners at maximum capacity, and it cost three times as much per inmate to run as any other comparable US prison facility. With no available supply of fresh water on the island, everything including drinking water had to be brought in by boats. Salt spray caused extensive damage to the sub-standard concrete and steel rebar construction of the prison. By 1961 engineers responsible for a 3 year program of major repairs had written the prison off as a lost cause, and Attorney General RFK submitted plans to build a replacement in Illinois. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/07/nx-s1-5388377/alcatraz-prison-island-trump-pelicans The final nail in the coffin was the successful escape of three inmates in June 1962. The FBI concluded that the men had drowned in the attempt, but other evidence which came to light years later suggests they reached shore and remained free for the rest of their lives. The abandoned facility was occupied by a native American Indian protest group between 1969-71, and was subsequently turned into a highly popular tourist attraction, now operated by the National Park Service. So why in the world does Donald Trump say he wants to reopen it as a prison ? Short answer - he doesn’t. It’s a completely impractical and pointless suggestion. It’s yet another piece of bombastic and symbolic narcissism - on a par with Trump’s long cherished desire to have his presidential sculpture added to those on the Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

The planning department in the city of Stockholm - the capital city of Sweden - has received a letter from the US government demanding that it end its diversity, inclusivity and equality (DEI) programs within 10 days. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/us-demand-stockholm-antidei-embassy-b2746859.html France has also been hit with a similar demand according to other sources. The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reports that the letter came from the US embassy, and it said that every organisation doing business with the US government must sign a contract within a few days and agree to end their DEI programmes. Jans Valsekog, Stockholms vice mayor for City Planning and Sports calls the letter completely bizarre, and says that it will be ignored. He points out that it is in fact the US embassy in Stockholm that needs the city planning office, not the other way round “If the US terminates its relationship with the city planning office, the embassy will have difficulty obtaining a building permit if they want to rebuild for example. That’s their headache, not ours”. If the US state department still has any staff left who can understand Swedish, then they may shortly become better acquainted with some of the more colourful and pithy idioms of that language e.g —> "Du har inte alla hästar hemma" - (you don’t have all the horses at home) “Dummare än tåget — (dumber than a train) “Fan ta dig” - (go f**k yourself).