The Proposal
Thirteen years ago I asked my wife to pick a card out of a deck and after she picked the Queen of Hearts, I asked her to marry me. I wrote a blog post about it back then, I've brought it over to the archives now.
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A historic look at Esperanto
I've known about Esperanto for years, though I've never given it any serious investigation or study. This post was a nice primer on its history, its creator and his vision for it.
Having grown up in the multicultural but distrusting environment of Bia?ystok, Zamenhof dedicated his life to constructing a language that he hoped could help foster harmony between groups. The goal wasn’t to replace anyone’s first language. Rather, Esperanto would serve as a universal second language that would help promote international understanding – and hopefully peace.
Esperanto is easy to learn. Nouns do not have grammatical gender, so you never have to wonder whether a table is masculine or feminine. There are no irregular verbs, so you don’t have to memorize complex conjugation tables. Also, the spelling is entirely phonetic, so you’ll never be confused by silent letters or letters that make different sounds in different contexts.
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This incredible Japanese high school batter makes life hell for pitchers
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— ????????? (@asahi_koshien) July 23, 2022
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Found via Boing Boing watch as Ko Yamaguchi puts this pitcher through the ringer.
Boing Boing also quotes from Larry Brown as he discusses Yamaguchi. It's fair to say that Larry Brown was also annoyed by the antics. Me? I'm entertained. Keep at it Yamaguchi.
I am also reminded of a TikTok I saw recently. The Tiktoker was telling the story of an interaction with a reclusive coworker who had been labeled "brilliant." In an effort to determine his opinions of his coworker, he decided to ask the other guy what the best sports were. After a pause the answer was, "Baseball and horse racing. Baseball starts as pitcher vs batter, then batter vs fielder, then fielder vs runner. And horse racing is the only sport to include animals."
I think this excellently highlights that first competition and that batters should strive to take every advantage afforded to them.
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A fascinating summary and overview of the fast and furious science being done with JWST's new data and images
One of JWST’s much-touted abilities is the power to look back in time to the early universe and see some of the first galaxies and stars. Already, the telescope — which launched on Christmas Day 2021 and now sits 1.5 million kilometers from Earth — has spotted the most distant, earliest galaxy known.
Two teams found the galaxy when they separately analyzed JWST observations for the GLASS survey, one of more than 200 science programs scheduled for the telescope’s first year in space. Both teams, one led by Rohan Naidu at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and the other by Marco Castellano at the Astronomical Observatory of Rome, identified two especially remote galaxies in the data: one so far away that JWST detects the light it emitted 400 million years after the Big Bang (a tie with the oldest galaxy ever seen by the Hubble Space Telescope), and the other, dubbed GLASS-z13, seen as it appeared 300 million years after the Big Bang. “It would be the most distant galaxy ever found,” said Castellano.
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"What is a Fleeting Note?"
Zettlekasten is an extreme note-taking method, fantastic for researchers etc. I've written about it before. However, what I do here is not anything close to Zettlekasten. I'm not making notes on these links with the direct intent of going back and researching and digging through them. Sure, I can do that, but it is a byproduct and not the goal.
My blog and its entries are much closer to "Fleeting Notes":
The term "fleeting note" comes from Sonke Ahrens' book, How to Take Smart Notes, and describes a note which is impermanent or, to use Ahrens' language, not permanently stored in your zettelkasten.
A fleeting note is a note that is typically taken when you think of or want to remember something. Contrary to a literature note, a fleeting note is usually comprised of your own thoughts, things you'd like to remember, a passing bead of "brilliance." While these jots may sometimes refer to media you've engaged with, because they are not taken in any formal or intentional setting, they are not considered literature notes. They are simply quick captures, some of which may become permanent zettels.
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Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R, IL) gives some very frank insight into the progress of Jan. 6 Subcommittee and calls out the sudden resistance to testify by some individuals
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"‘Parentese’ Is Truly a Lingua Franca, Global Study Finds"
[R]esearchers recently determined that this sing-songy baby talk — more technically known as “parentese” — seems to be nearly universal to humans around the world. In the most wide-ranging study of its kind, more than 40 scientists helped to gather and analyze 1,615 voice recordings from 410 parents on six continents, in 18 languages from diverse communities: rural and urban, isolated and cosmopolitan, internet savvy and off the grid, from hunter gatherers in Tanzania to urban dwellers in Beijing.
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