"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three"

[larryhammer]

Three links:

Multiday lightning storms seen from space.

Timelapse of the Grand Canyon with clouds, as in filling it. (via)

The greening of Antarctica is happening. Now. (via all over)

---L.

Subject quote from Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov.

Comments

[sovay]

"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three"

I keep thinking that's a mnemonic.

[larryhammer]

MVPMDIAFAPLWIWT is a pretty long string to memorize.

[thistleingrey]

À la "My very excellent mother just sat under new pines"? I was given it in third grade, I think.

[larryhammer]

My favorite mnemonic is "A kind samurai told Naomi how my yak ran wild."

[sovay]

My favorite mnemonic is "A kind samurai told Naomi how my yak ran wild."

That is a pretty great mnemonic. What's it for?

[larryhammer]

The order of Japanese kana -- or rather, of the initial consonants. (It amuses me to no end that this ordering is ultimately inherited from Sanskrit. Buddhist-powered diffusion for the win.)

[thistleingrey]

With what does it go? ETA ah, upthread. Cool!

ETA2 Korean hangeul dictionaries use a somewhat different order, but the first few are the same. Makes sense given etiology.

[larryhammer]

What's the hangeul order?

[thistleingrey]

www.indiana.edu/~korean/K101/dictionary_order.html

Without the tense ones, ㄱㄴㄷㄹㅁㅂㅅㅇㅈㅊㅋㅌㅍㅎ, which comes to this in kiddie form: ga na da la ma ba sa [ng] ja cha ka ta pa ha. The last five are the aspirates, most with a non-aspirate sib earlier in the sequence; the tense ones accompany their normal sibs. Thus the full set is ㄱㄲㄴㄷㄸㄹㅁㅂㅃㅅㅆㅇㅈㅉㅊㅋㅌㅍㅎ

Footnotes:
1. There used to be two graphs that looked like ㅇ. Now there is one. The surviving one is syllable-final only: 방 is b-a-ng, a room.
2. The letters have sort of reduplicative names that I tend to forget--ㅁ is mieum (two syllables, miŭm)--but "a" is the first vowel and ga na da is how little kids learn to read.

[larryhammer]

Coo.

Kana, the voiced consonants, which are written as their unvoiced counterpart with a diacritic mark,* get folded into counterparts for ordering purposes (these being k/g, s/z, t/d, h/b/p).

* Because Classical Japanese, when kana were developed, didn't distinguish the sounds.

[sovay]

À la "My very excellent mother just sat under new pines"? I was given it in third grade, I think.

Exactly! It's such a vivid sentence and yet it feels as though it means something else.

[asakiyume]

I enjoyed the frantic clouds roiling around in that Grand Canyon-shaped cup; that was excellent.

[larryhammer]

Innit? Doesn't happen often, apparently, though clouds tearing over a ridge does.