In most world languages, babies call their mother “mama” and their father “papa” or “baba”. This would seem to be the most obvious evidence that there was an ancient ancestor language from which modern languages descended. Indeed, I’ve written before about this theory of a common root language in the context of Chinese [...]
Check out the new comment form on my blog. Feel like being Oprah today? No problem! Feel like using the Avatar of Neytiri, princess of the Na’vi? No problem!
When entering comments, you just use your handle (or the handle of your favorite celebrity) from Facebook, Twitter, or whatever else, and the site automatically finds [...]
A couple of years ago, much derision met the movie studios’ choice of the name “Hulu” for their video portal, which has since become one of the top sites on the Internet.
At that time, I immediately defended the name Hulu, calling it a “great name”, based on it’s close auditory association with the candy known [...]
Today my old colleague, Cliff Schmidt, came to Microsoft Research to talk about his current role as director of the Talking Book project. He recently returned from Ghana, where they have been field-testing the first version of their hardware, which allows rural villagers to share audio versions of educational materials about health, agricultural techniques, and [...]
Here is the conclusive proof, from Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther”.
On his condition in the world, Werther sounds exactly like Marcus Fenix (And no, I am not paraphrasing – this is verbatim from Hulse’s classic translation of Goethe)”:
“There is not one moment that does not wear you away, and those who are close to [...]