Earthquake

This morning, there was an earthquake in Chicago. Chicago?! You may say, but yes, Chicago. I got a call from my mom early this morning all excited about the 3.8 magnitude earthquake that she slept through. :)

Here's the map that shows where the epicenter was - quite close to our house!

Nerd

So the nerd in me was very excited to wake up this morning and see the news about the Hadron Collider in Switzerland sharing its first (or second?) results! The amazing atom-smashing machine (which is much bigger, newer, and more sensitive than FermiLab's, sorry blokes in Batavia), broke an atom into many more pieces than anticipated! This is very exciting seeing as they are currently searching for the Higgs boson, but are finding more levels of sub-particles will make the search that much more exciting (and frustrating, I'm sure).

Check it out!

Blizzard

And here's some pictures from this afternoon of the blizzard that hit the East Coast today. It kept snowing for about 5 more hours after these pictures were taken!

Looking outside my door at the frosting on the trees.

And those little white blobs are actually bushes that are usually a little taller than the fence behind them. Plus you get the added benefit of seeing the huge snowdrift - about 2 ft. deep.

The Linguists

Sweeeeet. Apparently there was a film out two years ago all about linguistics and saving lost languages. After reading about the last speaker of Bo dying yesterday, I was inspired wander more online and found out lots of interesting information about saving dying languages, many of which are found in southeast Asian islands and Native American tongues in the United States.

Here's a great citation from an article called The Tragedy of Dying Languages that describes how important languages are:

We imagine eureka moments taking place in modern laboratories or classical civilizations. But key insights of biology, pharmacology, genetics, and navigation arose and persisted solely by word of mouth, in small, unwritten tongues. Finally, this web of knowledge contains feats of human ingenuity -epics, myths, rituals - that celebrate and interpret our existence.

Pundits argue that linguistic differences are little more than random drift, minor variations in meaning and pronunciation that emerge over time (the British say 'lorry', Americans 'truck'; Tuesday is CHEWS-day, for Brits, TOOZ-day for Americans).

These reveal nothing interestingly different about our souls or minds, some claim. But that's like saying that the Pyramid of Cheops differs from Notre Dame Cathedral only by stone-cutting techniques that evolved randomly in different times and places; revealing nothing unique in the ancient Egyptian or Medieval French imagination.

All cultures encode their genius in verbal monuments, while considerably fewer do so in stone edifices. We might as well proclaim human history banal, and human genius of no value to our survival.

The fate of languages is interlinked with that of species, as they undergo parallel extinctions. Scientific knowledge is comparable for both domains, with an estimated 80% of plant and animal species unknown to science, and 80% of languages yet to be documented.

Sweet! Languages are sooo important. I have often been on the receiving end of looks that scream, "You majored in French? That's not very useful." But the study of languages, how people learn them, how to teach them, and how they integrate into history, literature, and culture is immeasurably important.

On a completely unrelated side note, we are supposed to get 4 inches of snow today, 14 tonight, and 8 tomorrow. I'm guessing I won't be at school for much of next week...

Ancient Times

In ancient times....

- There was a lot of snow. = Ice Ages
- There were cool languages. = Tower of Babel.
- There was no school. = Low level of literacy

In modern times...

- There is a lot of snow. = Southern Maryland has turned into an ice age.
- There are less cool languages. = Click on the link and read, linguists!
- There is lots of school + Lots of snow = I will be teaching until July. Maybe.