(no subject)

[shadowkat]

1. Hmmm...interesting:

North Carolina Republican Calls it Quits with GOP, Joins Democratic Party. Now if everyone else in the country would make the same decision, all would be well.

Can't say I blame him. Just don't understand why more people aren't jumping ship? Because if they did, maybe Trump would slither back under whatever rock he had crawled out from under. I preferred it when he was busy with the Celebrity Apprentice and Miss America. Damn, NBC for canceling. That kept him busy. And easy to ignore. Now he's everwhere - in the book store, on the television, in the newspapers,on the internet, it's getting harder and harder to ignore the idiot.

2. Celiac disease, and, more generally, gluten intolerance, is a growing problem worldwide, but especially in North America and Europe, where an estimated 5% of the population now suffers from it. Symptoms include nausea, diarrhea, skin rashes, macrocytic anemia and depression. It is a multifactorial disease associated with numerous nutritional deficiencies as well as reproductive issues and increased risk to thyroid disease, kidney failure and cancer. Here, we propose that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide, Roundup®, is the most important causal factor in this epidemic.

Weird. Except I think I had this since I was a child, so not really sure what fish have to do with it.

3. The Wonderbag as a Slow Cooker

4. This Tree Beautifully Reveals the Relationships Between Languages



Click at the link above to get a poster of it.

And go here for Nordic Languages Chart

Comments

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

Glyphosate is th major herbicide since 1975 or so + celiac disase was around before, but they are right in that the weird surge of the disease and others (hello thyroid issues, two of the four doctors I saw in preparation for my surgery had it removed).

Fish factor in as an animal were direct effects on the indestinal bacteria have been observed. That's why they mention it. This has not been shown for mamals (although it has been tested many times, but of course the long term is only just starting). There are horrific cancer rates in workers who are directly exposed to glyphosate, so I am very certain that it will eventually blow up. I avoid since the pregancy and am extremely careful not to expose the little guy, allthough that is not completely possible.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Good to know, thank you...my eyes admittedly glazed over halfway through the abstract, didn't quite make it to the article.

I have noticed a rise in these diseases in the last few years. Cancer has now become as common as a cold -- just about every other person I know either has had it or died of it. As had thyroid disorders -- my mother kept bugging me to get tested, after her's got screwed up. She had Graves Disease for a bit, then took Iodine and went the other direction. Didn't require removal, however.

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

Was the same for me when I started my diploma thesis, but these days I'm reading and writing those things for a living.

It's always hard to tell. A huge deal with those first world diseases is a longer life and better diagnosis. But yeah, the cancer surges in some areas and the thyroid issues...I don't know. I mean might be, that I could go on until fifty without treatment. So maybe it is the better diagnosis, but it might also be food additives and also maybe the tschernobyl fallout.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Sundberg's charts are taken from her webcomic Stand Still, Stay Silent (http://www.sssscomic.com/), which is really quite good. Post-apocalypse in which the entire world's population has been wiped out by an epidemic, except for a few pockets of survivors in the far north. Recommended.

And that tree is really impressive, though of course it necessarily leaves out a lot of cross-pollinations between languages - English, for instance, is ostensibly a Germanic language, but its vocabulary is largely borrowed from romance languages and some of its grammar from celtic ones. What's the quote - "English is a language that follows other languages down dark alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle through their pockets for spare vocabulary". All languages do that to some extent. Except Icelandic, but Icelanders live on a live volcano in the middle of the Atlantic so they're kind of special. :)

[paratti.livejournal.com]

We've got the linguistic swag of Empire added to the Romance language. Pukka pajamas for bungalows etc.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Lucky bastards. The only country we ever managed to colonise was Finland. ...Not a whole lot of exotic concepts to import.

[paratti.livejournal.com]

Sauna and Stabbitiness?

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Not to mention IKEA, Swedish meatballs, Swedish furniture, and oh, Girl with the Dragon Tatoo...although not really lingual influences.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Well, we learned to blame the Finns for that, at least. :) In terms of language, though, there's very little influence on Swedish from Finnish - we had them for 700 years, and in all that time borrowed maybe a couple of dozen words. Which should tell you something about how easy Finnish is. (They have 15 noun cases. Fifteen. Saatana perkele. Even the Germans get along with four.)

[paratti.livejournal.com]

We're still boggling at the languages which gender objects.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

The English did get around, didn't they? For a small island, they managed to colonize over half the world before WWI and WWII put a damper on things. Let's see how many continents and countries did they colonize? (It should be noted that my ancestors -- as in great great grandad was most likely English on one side...came over in the 1800s, I think, I don't really pay that much attention to genealogy, it tends to give me a headache. But I have a paternal uncle who's an addict.)

1. North America (sort of...that is debatable at times. France and Spain put up a good fight. Let's just say Britain controlled the largest portion of North America)
2. Australia
3. New Zealand
4. India
5. Africa (specifically South Africa)
6. Hong Kong
7. Indonesia

France ? A portion of North America, Africa, Carribean, Vietnam, Belgium, and that's about it, I think?
Spain? South America, Central America, a portion of North America, Africa, (hey they did better than France)
Portugal? South America (although I think Spain got the bigger share)

I don't know about the others...

I think Spain and England are the winners in the colonization/imperialism game.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Well, the English and French pretty much divided all of Africa up between them. But yeah, most western European nations got in on it at one time or another. (It's not that we didn't try. We really wanted to get in on the slave trade and other profitable bits. We were just never very good at it, post-viking times.)

While the Germans, Austrians, Turks, Greeks, Russians, Persians and Arabs concentrated on their neighbours and clambered all over each other for a couple of thousand years.

And you wonder why the world's fucked up.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I wondered the same thing -- why wasn't France and the Romance Languages linked to English? There's a heavy French influence.

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

This chart is about genetic relationships. English borrowed from French wholesale, but in terms of where English came from, it's more closely related to German and Norwegian. Which just goes to show you that language trees can't tell you everything you might want to know.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I thought it was mainly interesting, but not overly informative. Leaving too many things out of the mix.

I remember my mother telling me that German was in some respects easier to learn because of its direct relationship to English than say Spainish, which sort of is counter-intuitive, if you learned English first. She sucked at German, though. But my immediate family sucks at language in general. My father tried Russian (still knows five phrases), my mother tried German, my brother tried Spainish, and I tried French -- I got the furthest and remember the most. But it did throw my English off considerably. For years, I was adding "e"'s to the end of words and screwing up tenses. Also, I could learn to read/write it - but not speak it or understand spoken french. The problem was basically the same one I had learning to speak English...certain sounds I can't make sense of. I hear them, but they don't translate in my head, they are garbled. So I'd hear a sentence, but it would get out of wack somehow. I don't understand it exactly - this is what a specialist told me. (I've been tested, they don't call it dyslexia by the way -- they call it visual and auditory coordination something or other...Psychologists apparently hate the term dyslexia, they feel it isn't definitive or clear enough, like the other long and impossible to remember description is?)

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

Understanding spoken languages takes practice. When I was in grad school taking my Russian proficiency test, we didn't have to speak, but we did have to do a listening test. One of my good friends turned to me as soon as that test was over and exclaimed, "That was so easy!" I replied to her, still shaken a bit from the test, "I didn't think it was so easy!" Turns out I did significantly better than she did on that section of the test. I think she missed some of the subtle things that were going on, on the tape. Still over all we both passed the test (grammar, reading, writing and listening) and only about half the candidates did on that occasion.

Personally I've had quite a bit of practice by now. I can understand most spoken Slavic languages, though I only know Russian grammar reasonably well. I can read Spanish slowly, but the frequent Spanish conversations I hear in my neighborhood grocery, mostly are beyond me. I can understand a good deal of the careful Spanish they speak on Spanish language TV. (That's where I first learned about 9/11!) I can understand carefully spoken Italian though I never studied it. I can read some French, but I can only catch a spoken French word here and there, because it sounds much different from the Spanish, and I never had anything, but a class in reading French. I took German in college, but most of that is gone.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Let's see 6 years of French, 2 months living with a French family in high school, various French poetry contests, and doing a French Cafe where we had to speak it and do a menu, and oh, a French tutor, and a year of French in college.

I don't know, practice doesn't appear to have been the issue here. ;-)

Although it may have been the horrid teachers...