infundibulum

To translate weird things into Esperanto.

Should Killing Be Merely a Mouse Click Away?

This is an article about how people hunt over the internet. (Aim the gun with your mouse, kill.)

My opinion: it’s noxious.

And I love how the “traditional” hunter tries to come off as some kind of nature-loving boyscout.

Gary Harpole, an Illinois hunter who figures he has killed 100 deer, most with a bow, said the practice “takes away from what hunting really is all about: getting outdoors, experiencing nature.”

“To me, 90 percent of hunting is the experience, 10 percent is the harvest,” said Harpole, who runs a hunter’s lodge at his rural home. Bagging a buck by computer, he said, “is a lazy way of hunting.”

I will never understand people who try to justify hunting as a sport.

What hunting is all really about: getting outdoors, experiencing nature, and then killing it.

Awesome.

Is it just me, or have the words heh and hehe (or sometimes heheh) acquired different nuances?

Sometimes, I will type “heh” in a chat, and then think “wait, ‘heh’ will come across as sarcastic,” and then I’ll type “hehe” instead.

Dear lazyweb, am I insane?

A while back I happened to meet a couple people who spoke Xhosa (at a Starbucks, heh). So as is my wont I talked them into teaching me a couple phrases… the only one I was able to remember was Hamba kahle, which means something like “au revoir” or “goodbye” or something.

On a lark I stuck “Xhosa” and “Isixhosa” (which is Xhosa for Xhosa, heh) into Youtube’s search engine, and I found a couple of videos that are interesting to compare.

Now, Xhosa is well known for being a click language. If you’ve never heard such a language you will upon watching these videos, it’s neat to hear.

The first is a tourist guide:

The second is a news report, considerably longer:

The thing that stands out for me is how there are far more clicks in the tour guide’s speech than what you hear in the news report. I imagine that he chose something that’s more or less a “tongue twister”, because it’s fun for the tourists to hear all the clicks.

But judging by how many clicks you hear on average in the news report (far fewer), it seems that this gives an incorrect impression of what the language really sounds like.

An additional bit of evidence for this is the fact that a commenter on Youtube says that the tour guide had used just the same phrase on a previous tour — it probably wasn’t just run of the mill speech.

But whatever, cool to hear.

Eh, this week, anyway.

The word in question, of course, being “fora“.

Tlingit, which should be pronounced something like “Klinkit” according to Wikipedia , is a Na-Dené language spoken in what is now Alaska and British Columbia (same family as Navajo, how about that?) .

That’s a long way from Stratford-on-Avon, but you can go see a version of Macbeth in Tlingit this month at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC:

Perseverance to Do ‘Macbeth’ in Tlingit

But this time the 12-member cast, whose ages range from 15 to 42, has agreed to perform most of the play in Tlingit (pronounced klink-it).

“It’s like running a marathon, without training for it,” said actor Ishmael Hope, who plays Malcolm, the son of King Duncan who is killed by Macbeth. “But we’re doing the work to make it happen.

“None of us is going to sound like a fluent speaker, because no matter how meticulous we are, it’s a difficult language. But we’ll still be able to convey meaning.”

Apparently the actors don’t really “understand” their lines, except insofar as they understand their English equivalents:

“It takes 10 times longer to learn just one line,” said Waid, who plays Macbeth and has performed Shakespeare in theaters worldwide with various production groups since he was a teenager. “As far as the structure of the language and the grammar, it’s still a mystery.”

That’s kind of weird… but when you’re dealing with a languages that has very few fluent speakers, the “publicity” aspect of a project like this is arguably at least as important as the “preservation” aspect. I imagine it would be almost impossible to put a big production like this together exclusively with fluent speakers. How many Tlingit speakers are actors, after all.

I wonder if they will be publishing the text in some form for Tlingit learners.

Some rummaging about for stuff about Tlingit turned up TroubledRaven.com, a site by Lance Twitchell, who is the language consultant for the DC performance and mentioned in the article. He has some nice materials on Tlingit: Lingit X’einaxh’.

I love articles that criticize Wikipedia, because they invariably end up resulting in improvements.

Consider the latest article (which is actually fairly well balanced, despite the sensationalist headline):

A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source

The story is pretty predictable—a professor noticed an error repeated in several of his student’s papers, and tracked it down to a Wikipedia article on the subject. Cue academic freakout, and then the university bans citations of Wikipedia.

(Hmm, I seem to remember encyclopedias not being valid resources for citation anyway…)

But that’s a tired old story, we’ve seen it before.

What’s interesting to me is what happens after these articles go up. Publicizing errors just makes them go away.

Let’s take a look. Here’s all we get in the article (I guess the NYT has its own policy of not linking to Wikipedia?)

When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.

He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam.

So presumably the article in question is called “Shimabara Rebellion.” Right? I haven’t actually looked yet, I will right now. It will be at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimabara_Rebellion

The NYT article is datelined yesterday (I’m not sure exactly what time of day). Let’s see how many edits the Wikipedia article has had since then:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shimabara_Rebellion&action=history

20 edits later, the problem is solved. An except from the article’s talk page:

The offending sentence from the article was (now deleted):

..the rebels themselves were backed by the foreign power of the Jesuits and the Roman Catholic Church.

which is in fact accurate, but ambiguous. The students at Middlebury took it to mean physical backing (troops, supplies, money, etc..) which is wrong - when the original author (I assume) meant it to mean the Jesuit’s were “rooting” for the rebels to win (obviously). Just a case of poor writing on Wikipedia, but the facts were not wrong. With that said I support Prof. Neil Waters in not allowing Wikipedia, or any encyclopedia, to be cited by history students - professional historians don’t cite encyclopedias. — Stbalbach 05:19, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Notice that the article in the NYT did not address the nature of the error itself. It did not point out the ambiguity in the statement. It simply jumped on the simplistic ZOMG AN ERROR.

But whatever. Wikipedia has an immune system… apparently Middlebury College doesn’t?

Buh?

via.

(click)