Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

TIL the French Republican calendar chimed the month names by season:

• Autumn: Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire
• Winter: Nivôse, Pluviôse,* Ventôse
• Spring: Germinal, Floréal, Prairial
• Summer: Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor

How had I not noticed this before?

* I gather Paris is a bit damp in February.

---L.

Subject quote from Angry Young Man, Billy Joel.

Linkies covering future, present, and past:

Interactive tool for exploring how the climate of 70 global cities will likely change in 45 years. (via)

Updated advice about lightning safety when you’re outdoors. Lying down puts you in even more danger than standing up, and other useful nuggets. (via)

51,000 year old art found in Indonesia, oldest yet found. Over 50 thousand years ago, people. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Sesostris, Lloyd Mifflin.

It’s been a good week for links to share:

Attention sovay and others interested in Sumerian customer complaints: an excellent t-shirt. (via, which is itself an excellent sub)

Kasey Chambers’ spare and shattering country(?) cover of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”. (via YT recs)

Answering the important question “Can I lick it?” for the periodic table of elements. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from The Quiet Singer, Charles Hanson Towne.

Not much of a theme here—just, yanno, some links:

An account of the Darien Scheme, Scotland’s one attempt at colonization (outside of Ireland).

Using reader reviews of All Systems Red as a study of how well people accept using non-gendered pronouns. (via)

Minesweeper Twist, on a non-rectilinear grid. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Venice, John Addington Symons, and the rest is just as … shady, let’s call it.

Linkage, fun stuff edition:

ASL covers of Weird Al’s “White & Nerdy” and “Hardware Store.” The sound on the latter ain’t great, so here’s the awesome lyric video. Bonus: reaction videos to hearing “Hardware Store” for the first time, in which rappers lose their shit over respect Weird Al’s flow.

“Now that my thesis is done and submission is near, it's time to share the more than 90 wildest early Quaker names I've found.” (via)

Designing an unofficial transit map combining Oslo’s tram, metro, and train routes on one diagram. Love the design process. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Hardware Store, Weird Al Yankovic.

I’d call this three random links, but two are about music. Partially random, then.

I think we can all agree “With No Definite Future and No Purpose Other Than to Prevail Somehow” is the best song title ever. (via, which has more surf rock recs)

Vivaldi on Marimbas, a live performance by kids. (via)

A Twitter thread on “favorite historical "discoveries" [that] are ones male anthropologists/historians just *can't* figure out for YEARS that are swiftly answered by a woman when one is finally given access.”

"Why did they keep knives up on the ceiling beams?! Must be about being closer to their gods."
Woman: "To keep the kids from getting them."

CW: mansplaining in responses. (and in the via)

---L.

Subject quote from Superstition, Stevie Wonder.

TIL that "Here Comes the Sun" is a Beatles song.

(I had this vague idea that it was by, if not James Taylor, one of the guys like him. I wasn't entirely wrong -- George Harrison is a guy like Taylor -- but still. I totally am a leading edge GenXer, who ignored the '60s as hard as I could, growing up.)

---L.

Circling back to Chinese pronunciation shifts, an example thanks to the Chinese Text Project’s pretty cool dictionary lookup tools. An example reconstruction using, as always, Wang Wei’s “Deer Enclosure.”

Text in simplified characters:

空山不见人，
但闻人语响。
返景入深林，
复照青苔上。

Modern Mandarin pronunciation (hover or click on characters in previous link):

kōng shān bù jiàn rén
dàn wèn rén yǔ xiǎng
fǎn jǐng rù shēn lín
fù zhào qīng tái shàng

(zh is /dj/, q is /ch/, x is /sh/)

Reconstructed Tang pronunciations (click on characters in previous link) based on T’ang Poetic Vocabulary, Stimson (1976) -- I don’t follow what’s up with the intermittent tone marks and probably won’t without the book in question, but this at least gives an example of the range of changes:

kùng shrɛn biət gèn njin
dhɑ̀n miən njin ngiǔ xiɑ̌ng
biæ̌n giæ̌ng njip shim lim
bhiòu jiɛ̀u tseng dhəi zhiɑ̀ng

Character by character relevant literal meanings:

empty | mountain | no | see | person
but | hear | person | talk | sound/echo
return | bright(ness)/shadow | enter | deep | forest
repeat/again | shine/reflect | green | moss | upon/above/rise

That last, in case you want to join in the fun and make your own version. (Though be careful, as 返景 can be read as an idiom meaning the time just before sunset, and all nouns could be singular or plural.) It is, after all, a popular thing to do.

---L.

Subject quote from All Things to All Men, The Cinematic Orchestra feat. Roots Manuva.

Science, science, science:

Hexagonal cross-stitching wallpaper groups. (via)

Inverting the concept of a laser. (via)

Easter Island maoi locations correlate with fresh water sources. (via)

Mmm, science.

---L.

Subject quote from The Wanderer, John Masefield.

All that, and Moon news too:

Chinese probe sprouts seeds on the Moon for the first time. (via)

The myth of the barter economy. (via?)

“Supposing that the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries, what would happen from the perspective of a person on the surface?” See also What If: a mole of moles. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Jet Pack, Jill Sobule.