Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits

Man, what a shitty day. George Carlin is dead. The motherfucker was THE best american stand-up comedian. Do yourself a favor and go to YouTube and watch some of his clips. You won't regret. One of my favorite quotes:

"Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money." -- George Carlin

Oh, the title? The famous seven dirty words unsuitable for radio or TV.

Sounds like a crackpot idea for sure...

Is the universe actually made of math?

But the guy is a solid scientist. Far fetched, for sure, but it is good that scientists still keep thinking outside the box.

Firefox download day

Finally! It's Firefox download day. Brazil has almost 100 thousando pledges to download the new version 3. Do your part, download it today and be part of a world record (the silly part, but that is ok). Long live Firefox.

It is out there...

You might not agree, but I don't care. This is the truth. Period.

I particularly like no. 4 on the list.

From my favorite webcomic

An insightful comment on Digg:

As a hedonist I say "Thank you sociologists for stereotyping my problems. thank you psychologists for classifying my problems, thank you biologists for rationalizing my problems, and thank you chemists for *causing* my problems. Also a quick shout out to physicists for coming up with new problems and Mathemeticians for not having anything relevant to say about my problems"

If one considers linguistics as a field of psychlogy, I am very impure but not as much as sociolinguists.

Kinda creepy...

The Human Speechome Project

The idea: to record 10 hours a day of audio and video of a single child from birth to age 3. The goal is to gather data on language acquisition in a more natural setting: the child's home. It's tough to be the child of a scientist huh?

The toughest part of the project will sure be the data analysis. Can you imagine how many hours will be spent to make the data meaningful? But the possibilities...

Aramaic going extinct? Say that again...

An article on the Brazilian history magazine called "História Viva", by Graziella Beting, states that Aramaic, the supposed language of Christ, is at risk of extinction. But, isn't it already extinct? Yes, old Aramaic sure is. The article says Aramaic, when one should read Western Neo-Aramaic. Western Neo-Aramaic sure descends from Aramaic, but they are not the same languages. Although it might be inspiring for some that Christ's language (although probably not the only one) is still spoken to this today, that is far from accurate.

The aricle also cites one of these vacuous statistics (my translation):

It is estimated that half of the seven thousand languages spoken around the world is at risk of extinction. That means that one language disappears every 15 days

Well, where did that come from? Of course, a person who is non-naive about statistics will notice that this is probably a rough mean, but it still doesn't say much. If we consider that this rate will remain constant (probably not an accurate assumption), it will take almost 144 years for half the world's languages to go extinct. Is it the way it's gonna go down? I don' think we have enough data to make such estimates. Languages, being mostly a social construct, depend on social interaction, politics, economics of each particular society. Any rate of language extinction is necessarily subject to revision.