#What If? 2 by Randall Munroe by the way!

[fall-in-the-dark]

Has anyone seen these weird text posts on Tumblr that are a few sentences long, but have enough tags to fill an entire book?

[specialagentartemis]

Would you be open to elaborating more on your statement “#Admittedly I fundamentally don’t believe that many forms of ADHD and many of the tumblr-acceptable forms of autism are materially distinct”? I haven’t heard someone else voice this sentiment, but I think I have similar feelings to you around this topic and I am curious how others have come to this conclusion as well.

Sure.

When I was eight years old, I was diagnosed with ADD—Attention Deficit Disorder. This is considered a related but separate and distinct thing from ADHD.

When I was a teenager, a new DSM came out. ADD was no longer considered a distinct thing. My diagnosis changed to ADHD-I: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Inattentive Type.

My brain didn’t change, but the professional perception of what was up with it did.

Is ADD materially different from ADHD? Can you have ADHD without hyperactivity? That used to be no, now it’s yes; answer the first question, that used to be yes, now it’s no.

I see very similar things between ADHD and autism. Lots of people do. Traits like the ability to fixate on an interest to the physical inability to pay attention to anything else; infodumping past the point other people lose interest; penchant for physical clumsiness and poor coordination; emotional dysregulation; proclivity to sensory overload; anxiety over not emoting correctly… they’re ADHD things and autism things. Is bouncing my leg an autism stim or an expression of ADHD hyperactivity? Or is it just fidgeting like people do sometimes? I dunno. Are they in fact materially different things?

Similar to ADD, Asperger’s Syndrome is no longer a thing. It’s subsumed under Autism Spectrum Disorder now. Is “high functioning” autism the same material thing as “low functioning” autism? Is “high functioning” autism the same thing as “ADD”? Idk. In some people I think it is.

Especially in mental disorders and neurodivergences, diagnoses aren't physical, material things. They're names given to commonly occurring collections of traits or symptoms. There's no virus that causes ADHD, no bacteria that can be isolated that causes autism. COVID is caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2; strep throat is caused by Streptococcus bacteria. They have symptoms, but they are primarily defined by their root cause. ADHD, autism, and plenty of other Brain Things do have neurochemical correlates - that is, there is an aspect of physical reality to them, you brain is wired a certain way - but it's not like ADHD is caused by the ADHD Virus and Autism is caused by the Autism Germ. They're names given to observable sets of traits, in order to figure out ways of treating and managing them. And I think drawing a sharp distinction between them - THIS is ADHD, and THIS is autism, and they're NOT THE SAME! - is pointless.

I like to use the xkcd color survey as an analogy for... well, a lot of things about the human experience and the way we classify it.

If you weren't around in 2010, xkcd's Randall Munroe asked the internet to help crowdsource the true names and boundaries of colors. You could sit down at the screen, colors would appear before you by random hexcode, and you typed in the name you'd call it. You could do this as many times with as many colors as you wanted. This was the resultant chart he made:

This shows the entirety of fully saturated RGB color space. Each pixel is a different hex code. Each pixel represents a different individual's brain.

I usually use this chart to talk about sexual orientation/queer identities. But it's also a great analogy for the categorizations being diagnoses.

If "Blue" is, say, ADHD, and "Purple" is Autism, you can image how one person's "purple" experience may be wildly different from another "purple" experience but very similar to a "blue" experience. But they're labelled differently, for various reasons. Maybe the doctor had recently seen a lot of blues, and this one seems more purple in comparison. Maybe the doctor has a really specific idea of what blue is, so this can't be blue, it must be purple. Which is not to say some blues aren't wildly different from some purples, that some purples match the platonic ideal image in your mind of what "purple" is more than others. There's still clearly a lot of overlap in blue and purple experiences.

That's kind of how I think about ADHD and autism.

And who knows, maybe I think this just because I am actually autistic. I've asked myself that, wondered that before. Am I? Or are these just ADHD symptoms that overlap? And honestly at this point the answer isn't super important to me. I know how my brain works and how to deal with it when it gets bad, and there's very little that pursuing a diagnosis would do for me at the point I'm at in my life.

But when I say that I suspect the two aren't as materially distinct as they're sometimes made out to be, this is what I mean.

[greater-than-the-sword]

Rock Computer 2

A variation on Randall Munroe's infinite rock field thought experiment

A Bunch of Rocks

Randall arrives on a vast empty plane. This is where he lives, he cannot die, and he has eternity to spend there and nothing much to do.

As he is walking around he notices that the ground is covered in smallish rocks spaced roughly 2-3 feet apart.

Because he is bored, Randall begins to play with the rocks. He knows everything there is to know about computers, and also an infinite amount of time and space, so he is able to simulate the workings of a small computer using the groupings of rocks to indicate on/off positions of bit switches inside the computer. Every time a bit needs to be flipped, Randall has to walk all the way over to the other side of his simulated computer and move the rocks.

After millions and millions of years, Randall's computer has grown so large that it is thousands of miles wide. But time and space are no object. As a matter of fact, Randall's computer is so large that it can host a program that is a mathematical simulation of all the neurons in a human brain.

So the question is: does the rock computer have consciousness?

Obviously this thought experiment leaves a pure materialist with a problem, since the rock computer is structurally identical to a computer. Believing that a brain is fundamentally like a computer alone, the pure materialist would be forced to conclude that on some level, the rock computer is capable of experiencing consciousness, even though it exists as nothing more than a very large collection of rocks and the set of instructions which Randall uses to move them around.

I do not know what the real Randall Munroe thinks about the nature of consciousness and I don't know what his opinion would be on this thought experiment but to me it seems to make it apparent to the casual observer that the purely materialistic and data/informational view of consciousness cannot be correct.

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 72: What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about absurd, hypothetical linguistics questions. But first, our most recent bonus episode was a chat about the design of IPA charts and how the International Phonetic Alphabet is arranged.

Gretchen: We talked to Lingthusiasm’s resident artist, Lucy Maddox, about designing a different take on the IPA chart that is gonna be available for you on posters and lens cleaning cloths and various other items.

Lauren: Those lens cleaning cloths are a special offer for our patrons, so head to patreon.com/lingthusiasm by October 5th to participate in that special offer.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, I’ve been reading What If? 2 by Randall Munroe, who does xkcd, and I’m delighted there are a couple of linguistics-related chapters in that book.

Gretchen: There’s this fun one about how long it would take to read all of the laws, which it seems like a massive task.

Lauren: Including a fun digression as to whether a Poké Ball is an egg.

Gretchen: This very much reminds me of the is-a-hotdog-a-sandwich type question.

Lauren: Hmm, legal minds will debate, I’m sure. If only there was more linguistics content in that book, though.

Gretchen: Well, you know, Lauren, as it happens, I have Randall Munroe right here. He has some linguistics questions to ask us as if we were starring characters in What If? 2.

Lauren: Amazing. Welcome, Randall!

Randall: Hi! Thanks so much for having me on. I know I’ve met you, Gretchen, in the outside world, but it’s really exciting to meet you here for real inside this podcast.

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm headquarters, as it were.

Lauren: We are delighted to answer your hypothetical linguistics questions.

Randall: There’re a lot of things that’ve confused me about language. English has some weird features. I was wondering, if I’m in a government hearing after this where they’re questioning me, and if they ask me, "Are you now or have you ever been a guest on Lingthusiasm?”–

Gretchen: To which you would have to answer, “Yes,” at this point.

Randall: Right. But my question is why the awkward repetition? Like, why does English make us specify whether the thing happened now or in the past? Why can’t they just say, “Are you/were you a guest on Lingthusiasm”?

Gretchen: I mean, there’re definitely some languages that do things like this. In Chinese, for example, you don’t have to specify the time in a statement. You can say the time, but you don’t have to say it, which is one of the parameters on which language varies, but the specific legal question also has stuff going on in it.

Lauren: It’s partly because legalese is a technical variety of English, but it doesn’t always just use technical vocabulary that makes it seem opaque. It also uses everyday words in a way that have really technical and specific meanings. Some of that is because legalese is about this process of building laws on top of each other and historically layering them. So, a word that has a really common meaning in general develops this really specific meaning in the legal context.

Gretchen: I also think it’s because lawyers have this very pedantic approach to language and looking at every single comma and potential for ambiguity. Because in realistic language we tolerate a lot of ambiguity, and we figure it out from context. But the whole thing with laws and trying to get it exactly on your side is not really allowing space for context and trying to pin everything down really precisely.

Randall: Well, I was thinking about it. If I wanted to create that ambiguity – like, if I wanted to ask, “Are you in Nova Scotia now, or have you been there in the past?” – how would I do that? I couldn’t figure it out.

Gretchen: I think in ordinary English you might just ask one version of the question – “Have you ever been to Nova Scotia?” “Have you ever been on Lingthusiasm?” And then someone would just answer that with a “Yes, in fact, I am there right now.”

Lauren: We’re trying to be helpful to each other in conversation in a way that law doesn’t necessarily start from the same premise of being helpful. It’s starting from the premise of being complete.

Gretchen: And starting from the premise of being, actually, kind of antagonistic.

Lauren: Deliberately unhelpful.

Gretchen: It’s like an adversarial approach to language rather than the cooperative approach we normally have.

Randall: That makes sense – making it clear from context that you are asking about both the past and present even if you’re only specifically referring to one of them.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because if I say like, “Have you ever been interested in linguistics?” “Yes, I still am.” Like, it’s still sort of true, but in this legal sense you might be like, “No, it’s not that I was before, it’s that I am now.” It’s just sort of trying to catch people out in being incredibly pedantic.

Randall: If you wanted to add a way in English to make that explicitly ambiguous – like if I wanted a way to say, “You something something Lingthusiasm guest” – is there a natural structure that you would add if you were in charge of revising English?

Gretchen: Well, I mean, one option you could do – so English technically has only two tenses, past and non-past. Because you can say something like, “Tomorrow I go to the airport, and I fly to this place.” So, you can use what’s often called the “present” to refer to future events. If non-past is the more versatile English tense, you could just make a special rule that’s like, you don’t change it. I think probably the most realistic English way would be to try to add an auxiliary. So, the future in English is often formed with “will” or “gonna.” You could have a new one of those. Like, “Are you sort of Lingthusiasm guest?”

Randall: Or like, “You ever a Lingthusiasm guest?” Yeah.

Gretchen: Yeah. You could maybe use “ever” into – like dropping the verb would help. Entirely. Or making some new version of “would” or “sort of” or something.

Lauren: Just a new, tense-less version of English.

Gretchen: Just delete all the tenses in general.

Lauren: I feel like that would keep the lawyers even busier.

Randall: I’m curious about the sounds of English. I know there’re some sounds that are merging together, like the distinction between “caught” and “cot” in some dialects. Are there any sounds or phonemes that are currently in the process of coming into English or disappearing from it entirely?

Lauren: There’s one that is disappearing and becoming a ghost before our very ears, which has millennia of history, which is what is known as the “wine/whine” merger.

Gretchen: The /waɪn-hwaɪn/ merger.

Lauren: That W-H /w/ that is pronounced by some older speakers or speakers of very fancy registers like RP as /hw/ – so /hwɪt͡ʃ/, “Having a bit of /hwaɪn/ over my /waɪn/.”

Gretchen: As you can hear from both me and Lauren, we both have the merger.

Lauren: We have absolutely merged these. They are indistinct for us. /wɪt͡ʃ/ and /hwɪt͡ʃ/ is a very forced distinction I have to make. But for maybe, like, grandparent to great-grandparent generations at the moment, you do find it for some speakers which is a form of a sound that goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European.

Randall: Wow. It made it all this time, and now, we’re the ones killing it off.

Lauren: We’re killing it off right now.

Randall: Wow!

Gretchen: It’s kind of neat because in Proto-Indo-European, there was a /kw/ sound – a sort of K-W – which in modern Romance languages has become Q-U but still pronounced /kw/ or /k/. This is like in “quando” or “quoi” or some of these words you might know from French or Spanish or Italian. All these words that have K in it became H in the Germanic set of words. You get things like “cornu-,” as in “cornucopia,” became “horn,” as in “horn of plenty.” There’s all these words that have a K sound – which is sometimes written with a C, sometimes with a Q – and those all became H. This is why we have all these words that begin with W-H – “Who, what, where, when, why” and the exceptional “how.” Those are the same as the /kw/ words in those other languages because that K became an H. Then the H and the W swapped positions at some point because people decided they liked it better. Then, not quite the H stopped getting pronounced, but the H influenced the pronunciation of the W becoming /hw/ rather than – I don’t even know how you’d do it. Now, it’s just sort of merged back with that W that we have – /w/.

Lauren: It’s so widespread that the W-H set of question words in English are all /k/ words even in languages like Hindi and Nepali, which are over in the Indo-Aryan side of that language family. You get “kina”, “ko,” “kahile.”

Randall: Oh, so it’s really old.

Gretchen: That’s why that H is there even though most people don’t pronounce it. I think you’re more likely to get sounds enter one variety of English, or disappear from one variety of English, and then that change spreads for a long time, and it takes a while to get to all of them.

Lauren: You still occasionally find “wine” and “whine” as distinct, or more often, you find it distinct in Scotland, a lot of Ireland, and apparently older speakers in New Zealand have been slower than Australians and Canadians and Brits in dropping this.

Randall: That makes sense. I know a few people who have that distinction, too, but like you said, it does tend to be older people. Although, I always find it funny. I always answered those dialect quizzes saying that I pronounced C-O-T and C-A-U-G-H-T the same. Then I was describing this merger to someone, and they said, “No, you don’t. Say it in a sentence.” I said it out loud, and I realised I am inside me. I didn’t hear how it sounded from the outside.

Gretchen: Okay. Say the words.

Randall: Like, “I /kɑt/ him sleeping on the /kat/.” “I /kɑt/ him sleeping on the /kat/.”

Gretchen: Oh, you absolutely say those differently.

Lauren: They are very different.

Gretchen: I would say, “I /kat/ him sleeping on the /kat/.”

Randall: I was born in that pocket of Pennsylvania where, when I looked on those dialect maps, that area is one of the unmerged areas.

Gretchen: And all of these sorts of splits – like dropped “for whom” or added “for whom.” Indian English has a bunch of retroflex sounds. All their Ts and Ds are produced with the tongue curled back onto the tip of the mouth. That’s entered one variety of English, but it seems probably unlikely it will spread to all of the other varieties, but who knows.

Lauren: One can hope. Because I would love to be able to distinguish between a retroflex and a non-retroflex. Too late for the plasticity of my phonemic inventory, but for future Englishes, it could be exciting.

Gretchen: They’re cool sounds.

Randall: Can you practice the sound enough that you can convincingly convey it to other people who then learn it from you? And then it becomes natural for them?

Lauren: Deliberately raise a family of people who have these distinctions.

Gretchen: I mean, I’ve always thought it would be cool to come up with some sort of, I dunno, conlang or something you could teach a kid or some sort of array of here’s, like, three languages you could teach a kid that would give them the maximal number of phonemic distinctions based on those languages. Because Germanic languages actually have tons of vowels cross-linguistically. A lot of languages have five vowels or three vowels or maybe seven, and English has fourteen-ish, depending on the dialect. German, I think Norwegian, Dutch, also, all the Germanic languages have tons of vowels. It would be like, okay, you wanna include one Germanic language for the vowels, and then you want a language that has tons of consonants like maybe Ubykh.

Lauren: Something around the Caucasus, for sure.

Gretchen: Something around the Caucasus for consonants. And then maybe a language with lots of tones – like Cantonese has more tones than Mandarin, so maybe give them Cantonese so they get tone. Then you have this nice array of this will make it easier for you to learn any other language because you’ve got most of the major sound distinctions.

Lauren: It’s also really good because you also have a really good spread of a language that’s isolating and doesn’t have a lot of morphology through to one with middling – English is very underwhelmingly average – and then those Caucasian languages do tend to have really good morphology, so it would be typologically satisfying on multiple fronts.

Gretchen: Yeah. So, raise your kid to be Cantonese-Ubykh-English trilingual, and they’ll be all set for their future language learning.

Lauren: [Laughs] I think we’ve said everything un-useful to say about that question.

Gretchen: [Laughs]

Randall: Say we’re playing a game. I’m gonna pick a random North American English speaker and ask them a spoken or written usage question. Like, “How would you say this?” “How do you pronounce this?” “How do you write this?” Now, you get to pick someone else to ask them same question to without knowing what it’s gonna be. If your person gives the same answer as my person, then you win. Now, who would you pick if you wanted the best chance of matching a random person? Would you pick, like, a news anchor, a kid, or a nondescript middle-aged person, or like a writer or something?

Lauren: I think I have an answer. Gretchen, who would you pick?

Gretchen: I think this is really complicated because I wanna know what’s the spoken or written usage question that you’re asking them because I think it would depend what are the parameters this varies on. Because if it’s an age-based usage question that I’m asking, then I wanna pick based on age, but if maybe it’s geography that’s more relevant or urban status – I think you’d probably want somebody in a mid-sized city because language change tends to happen faster in urban centres and slower in rural areas. You wanna split the difference. But not one of the mid-sized cities that has distinctive stuff going on. Like, Pittsburgh has got a whole bunch of stuff that’s been documented for it. So, yeah, I’m like, what are you gonna do for gender? I guess you sort of want somebody who’s around the middle for a lot of statistics, sort of middling in age – not too old, not too young – middling in terms of city. I dunno. Lauren, do you have a more specific answer?

Lauren: Oh, yeah, I’d pick a lexicographer. [Laughter]

Randall: And you’d tell them what the game is?

Lauren: Well, I think because of all of the people who have to think about and understand language usage, I always find lexicographers have a really solid appreciation for what is in the mind of the average language user. They’d be the first group of people that come to mind for me. I guess we want someone who’s at the intersection of being a lexicographer and all of those demographic details that Gretchen was suggesting.

Gretchen: I mean, I think that’s probably Kory Stamper, right, because she’s one of the youngest lexicographers. But “young” for lexicographer is like, I dunno, probably 40s. I think she lives in a mid-size American city.

Lauren: Okay, our answer is Kory Stamper. Done.

Gretchen: There we go.

Randall: Nice. You know, Gretchen, I realised as you were answering that, there was a project in a Midwestern newspaper ran a contest to try to find the most average person in the country. They did exactly the procedure you’re describing where they picked a city that was the most mid-size that was in the middle on a whole bunch of variables, and then they had the town vote on who the most representative average person in the town was. They picked this one guy. He owned a hat store, I think. Then they were like, “We found America’s average man.” Then they took him around to show him a bunch of stuff and get the average man’s opinion on this and that.

Gretchen: Sort of proto-Joe-the-plumber experience.

Lauren: It must be really good to track down the most average person because they must be a wealth of marketing insights.

Gretchen: Well, I was also trying to answer the question for gender because you can sort of pick an average age, you can pick an average location, but for gender, I do actually think that there might be benefits in choosing a non-binary person, not necessarily because non-binary is the average of men and women, but there was a really interesting study by Chantal Gratton on how non-binary people talk in different types of circumstances and how they can adopt features that are associated with multiple genders from that axis. I think, again, if we’re looking for versatility, which is a reason for picking a lexicographer.

Lauren: If you’re a non-binary person working in lexicography –

Gretchen: We wanna hear from you.

Lauren: We’ve got a great game to play.

Gretchen: [Laughs]

Randall: So, if I say, “It’s 3:00 p.m. and hot out,” what is “it” in that sentence? Because the more I think about it, the more it hurts my head.

Gretchen: That’s a fun question because this “it” is doing something that’s, as you may have noticed, semantically meaningless. That’s not the same thing as “I ate it,” where “it” refers to maybe some cake, maybe an apple, a physical object that you can point to. The “it” in “It’s 3:00 p.m.,” “It’s hot,” “It’s raining” is just there because English really hates it when sentences don’t have a subject – like a real, physical subject that’s there that you’ve said even if it doesn’t mean anything. English is not okay with that.

Lauren: There’s lots of languages that will happily say something that would translate into English literally as “Is 3:00 p.m. Is hot.” Or “Is 3:00 p.m. and hot.” And therefore, there’s no “it” there. Because it’s not there for its meaning, it’s just there to fill this spot in a sentence, it doesn’t matter that it is filling the role for being 3:00 p.m. and hot. “It” is just there to tick a box. In fact, this is so odd in English and such a quirk of English that it has a name which is “dummy it.”

Randall: So, wait. You could attach that “it” both to the “3:00 p.m.” and to another verb. I could say, “It’s 3:00 p.m. and was eaten.”

Gretchen: I don’t think you can. [Laughter] Do you think that’s grammatical?

Randall: What just got eaten?

Gretchen: “It’s 3:00 p.m. and eaten” is like a Lewis Carroll story or something.

Lauren: The “it” being eaten is suddenly meaningful, and so it can’t coordinate as an empty dummy it and a meaningful-subject it.

Gretchen: I think that’s actually a nice test because you can say, “It’s 3:00 p.m. and hot and raining,” and all of those are doing the same “it.” But when you start combining them – I mean, I guess if you say, “It’s hot and eaten,” now you’re just referring to a specific item and not the general state of affairs. Some people think the “it” in “It’s hot” or “It’s raining” refers to the weather or the sky. But we don’t generally go around saying, “The sky is raining.”

Randall: Well, now I’m gonna start.

Gretchen: I mean, you can change things.

Lauren: “It’s raining” is an interesting construction across languages because a lot of languages require you to say something like, “Rain is raining” or “Water is raining.” They don’t have that dummy construction. They’ve solved it in a different way.

Gretchen: I should say this is the dummy as in a dressmaker’s dummy or like a mannequin in a store window. It’s just propping up the clothes. You can think of this “it” as propping up the rest of the sentence.

Lauren: I also like to think of it as because English is so stressed about not having a subject, like a distressed baby, it needs a pacifier, and that’s why you give it a dummy.

Randall: Then I think “It’s 3:00 p.m. and eaten” is gonna stress out English just a little too much.

Gretchen: Yeah. If you want another piece of technical vocabulary, this construction like, “It’s 3:00 p.m. and eaten,” is known as zeugma. This is something like, “She put out the light and the cat.”

Randall: Oh, I like that.

Lauren: You like it, but the lawyers would be having a meltdown.

Gretchen: Let’s see if there are any other fun examples. “You held your breath and the door for me.” “I took the podium and my second trophy of the evening.” “The boy swallowed milk and kisses.” You can use it for multiple functions. But I think normally when zeugma works, it’s – I mean, you can do it in the abstract like “Put out the light and the cat” because one’s a figurative use and one’s a physical use. But I think, yeah, “It’s 3:00 p.m. and eaten” I have trouble with. It’s definitely deliberately playful. I don’t even know if it’s even ungrammatical. It’s deliberately playful.

Lauren: “What’s afternoon tea?” “It’s 3:00 p.m. and eaten.”

Randall: Yeah, it seems like there’s an omitted “at,” like, “It’s at 3:00 p.m. and ready.”

Lauren: It’s because “ready” is definitely more of an adjective, whereas “eaten” is a more nominalised-but-still-verb.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think “It’s at 3:00 p.m.” – that can refer to, like, the event is at 3:00 p.m. That’s changing it into a literal “it” again.

Randall: Well, and the reason I couldn’t say, “It’s 3:00 p.m., and I’m eating it,” is then you’re like, “It’s a different ‘it’.”

Gretchen: Yeah, each of them has its own subject, so that’s fine.

Randall: Yeah, and it’s like, “Oh, you didn’t say what he’s eating, but he’s eating it,” you know.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Randall: So, as I understand it, you can use the International Phonetic Alphabet to transcribe all the sounds that people use in language.

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Randall: How you do you write a cough in IPA? I was looking through the chart, and I couldn’t figure out, is there a symbol that would go with that sound?

Lauren: A general, full-throated cough is not something that is specifically a speech sound in any human language, so there’s not a –

Gretchen: That we know of yet.

Lauren: That we know of yet or that someone has not created to raise their child to attempt to turn it into normal phonology. So, we don’t have a specific symbol for a cough in the standard International Phonetic Alphabet as set forward by the International Phonetic Association.

Gretchen: However, you have now unlocked – congratulations – the extended IPA.

Randall: I’ve never heard of the extended IPA.

Gretchen: I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it on an episode.

Lauren: Oh, how excellent!

Gretchen: This is yet more IPA for your fun and enjoyment.

Lauren: Also, for useful technical reasons.

Gretchen: Also, useful technical reasons.

Randall: Are you allowed to tell everyone about this? Or is this a secret held among linguists?

Gretchen: The classic IPA is devised for linguists to talk about sounds that are in the regular speech repertoire of spoken languages. The extended IPA is generally used by speech pathologists to transcribe other sounds that people sometimes make when they’re learning to or producing speech differently from how the typical user of their language does it.

Lauren: Speech pathology covers a really wide range. It could be anything from working with children who have lisps and stutters through to helping people post-stroke or with aphasia regain the ability to speak.

Gretchen: Some sounds – the one that’s really memorable for me is that they have gnashing of teeth in extIPA and also smacking lips and other types of whistled version of S, which I’m not gonna demonstrate because a.) I don’t think I can, and b.) it might be kind of painful if you’re on headphones. There’s also some sounds in extIPA that are, I think, very difficult to pronounce unless you have a cleft palate because they’re bringing the air through the palate in your mouth where most people don’t have a hole there or through your nose and mouth at the same time, if you have a cleft palate. That’s where I would look if I was looking for coughing because it seems like the kind of thing they might have done.

Randall: Okay. Do they have a whole new set of symbols, or is it mostly the Latin letters turned upside-down and stuff?

Lauren: There’s a lot of Latin letters turned upside-down or back-to-front. Or sometimes they’ll use something from the IPA with some additional diacritics and decoration.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s a lot of diacritics. Like, things above and below the original letters. Unfortunately, it’s very unglamourous having hyped up the extIPA. There’s a whole section for unidentified or indeterminate sounds, which are a bunch of symbols in a circle. So, if you’re not sure what consonant is said, you can write C in a circle, which is kind of neat. But cough is written as – do you wanna get a pencil and write this down?

Randall: Okay.

Gretchen: Open bracket, open bracket, “cough,” close bracket, close bracket. [Laughter]

Randall: All right. I guess we’ve already got a way to write that.

Gretchen: I wish there was some sort of more interesting symbol. But there is this whole thing. They use music notation for loud speech and soft speech. They have “forte” and “pianissimo” and these sorts of things.

Lauren: This is outside of the extIPA, but if you want a linguist-approved convention for writing laughter in a conversation analysis, they use the @ sign.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s true.

Lauren: I do have a handful of friends who will text me with “@@@” instead of “lol.”

Gretchen: Amazing.

Lauren: It’s handy.

Randall: That reminds me of a comics problem which is, as far as I know, there’s no good written onomatopoeia or sound effect for the sound of applause. So, if you wanna show applause offscreen – off-panel in a comic – if there was an explosion, you would write, “boom,” you know.

Gretchen: Or “bang” or something.

Randall: There’re sounds for splashing – like “psh.” But there’s nothing for the sound of applauding. I don’t even know how to suggest it. Usually what cartoonists do is cheat, and they’ll write, “woo,” to imply people cheering.

Lauren: As someone who studies language and gesture, I don’t think that’s cheating. I think that’s cooping the multimodality of human expression to advantage in a graphic novel format.

Randall: The other thing you’ll sometimes see is people will just write, “clap clap clap clap.” So, it’s not cheating. It’s, you know, one of the many ways you can use language. But I feel like it would be so helpful if there were some way to write that sound. Since you’re both linguists, can you make one? [Gretchen laughs] How would you represent that? Like, okay, if “@@@” is laughing?

Lauren: Representing a sound as a conventionalised spoken form is onomatopoeia. Some languages do this kind of thing far more frequently and more conventionally than English does. We might want to take a look at a language that does that. I think Japanese is one of those languages that has a lot of ideophones and onomatopoeia.

Gretchen: Japanese does this a ton. The Japanese ideophone, onomatopoeia, for clapping is “pachi pachi.”

Randall: “Pachi pachi.” That seems about right.

Gretchen: Yeah, it seems about right. But the fun thing is also that “pachi” can also refer to the number eight in Japanese, which is more commonly “hachi,” but it can also be “pachi.” If you’re texting or you’re on social media, and you wanna indicate applause or clapping, you can also write a bunch of eights. At least Japanese speakers will know what you mean by that. I mean, I guess there’s also the emoji these days. People do that as well.

Lauren: The emoji does have those little action lines. But to get those action lines into English, we just made a big deal about Japanese having this onomatopoeic form, but I think “clap” is also a form of onomatopoeia. We just don’t look at it that way.

Randall: Huh, “clap.”

Gretchen: Oh, no, wait. So, the etymology of “clap.”

Randall: I’ve never been on tenterhooks waiting for an Etymonline definition.

Gretchen: Yeah. So, the Etymonline entry for “clap” has “a common Germanic echoic verb,” which is also found in Old Frisian, Old High German, Old Saxon “klapunga,” and it – yeah, “unknown origin, probably onomatopoeic.”

Lauren: I think the obvious thing to do is to put “clap clap clap,” footnote, down the bottom of the comic, because good comics should have footnotes, you just link to the Etymonline entry. Everyone’s happy. [Laughter]

Randall: Yes, oh man.

Gretchen: The answer was inside you all along.

Randall: It’s like you start saying “clap” so fast that you stumble over the sounds, and there you’ve got it.

Gretchen: From a physical, articulatory perspective, you’re sort of doing a teeny-tiny clap with your tongue, inside your mouth, against the rest of your mouth.

Randall: Yeah. I mean, because, well, the /k/ is the clapping at the back, and then the /p/ is the front, and the /l/ is the labiodental –

Gretchen: It’s a lateral.

Lauren: Your whole mouth is clapping.

Randall: Yeah.

Gretchen: Three or four different parts of your tongue are all doing little taps against the roof of your mouth.

Randall: Your whole mouth is applauding. That is so cool. Okay. Thank you for that.

Gretchen: You’re very welcome.

Randall: This might be almost a question for a singer, but you mentioned these sounds that are outside the speech register. What’s up with the piercing sound of a horror movie scream? Is that falsetto? Is that a normal speech sound but louder? Or is that your throat doing something weird?

Gretchen: There’s a great paper about screaming, which is brilliantly titled, “Human Screams Occupy a Privileged Niche in the Communication Soundscape,” which I think begins to answer your question. It suggests that screams are universal and acoustically unique so that they’ll alert us to danger and ensure, and I quote, “biological and ultimately social efficiency.” I guess the hope being that, like, if someone’s screaming, even if you don’t speak their language, you can still tell this is a human distress signal. We normally write a scream from an onomatopoeia perspective as “Aaahhhhhh!” with a lot of As and maybe Hs because /a/ is the most open of the vowels. The Jaw is just fully dropped. It’s the least restricted. If you tried to scream something like, “Eeeeeee!”, you’d have to have your mouth be a lot more closed.

Randall: Yeah, you never write I-I-I-I-I.

Lauren: I guess that’s why the /i/ in “shriek” is trying to – because it’s closed, but it also then tends to correlate with perceptually higher-pitched things. That’s trying to give you that perception of it being really high-pitched, which /a/ doesn’t necessarily do.

Lauren: Yes. Because some comics will do A-I-E-E-E-E-E, like “Aieeeee!”

Lauren: Trying to get the best of both.

Gretchen: Yeah. Trying to give the high-pitched-ness of it. The other thing about this paper is that it says that screams are “acoustically well segregated from other communication signals,” as in, they’re higher-pitched than other communication signals, and that this is also partly to avoid false alarms. Because, like, imagine if a third of your words just had the scream bit in them, and then you’d kind of be like the “boy who cries wolf” of like, “Oh, well, if you’re screaming all the time, nothing’s ever urgent.”

Randall: You know what. There are a few animals that make sounds that I think are in that scream register because people get freaked out by them. I think foxes and then elk do a weird noise.

Gretchen: There’s some animals that make sounds like crying babies, which I dunno if that’s also in the same range, but the scream cluster is in 30-150 Hz. So, animals – probably some of them are in that range, and you could measure that. And that there’s also a perceptual attribute called “roughness” that screams tend to have. I really don’t wanna demonstrate a scream and really freak people out listening to the podcast, but if you think about your latest horror movie scream style, it’s got this sort of back-and-forth modulation, that sort of roughness.

Randall: I’m curious – it was interesting to realise that I learned from you about how emojis, a lot of them represent gestures, and how some of them are things we have words for, but some of them aren’t. What are some gestures that people do without realising this is a type of communication or without having a word for it?

Lauren: I’m gonna tell you the answer. But once I do, you will never unsee this. I just have to prepare you for that fact. There is something that everyone who gestures does all the time. It has a specific technical name. That is the repetition in a gesture to indicate duration or emphasis. This kind of repetition is known as a “beat” gesture. You will absolutely see it in the most clearest manifestation if you watch a politician give a speech because they love to use them to give a sense of coherence to what they’re saying. It’s this magic thing. If you’re giving a speech, here’s a pro tip. You can use beat gestures. If you continue to use the same repetition on your stressed syllables – I’m doing it now, but you can’t see it.

Gretchen: Lauren, I feel like you’re really emphasising the beat gestures in a very auditory way.

Lauren: I’m emphasising the beat gestures auditorily. But if you continue to do this gesture repetition, you can actually give the sense that everything you’re saying alongside those gestures is the same topic or it’s coherent even though it may not actually be so.

Randall: Huh. So, this is like when you’re shaking your hand up and down as you talk, and the up and down motion goes with the syllables, and then suddenly, when you do that, I have this urge to vote for you.

Gretchen: Vote for Lauren. She can’t be beat.

Lauren: [Laughs] There’s my slogan. So, you can combine it with a thumbs up if you wanna be like, “That was a really great job,” or a pointing gesture. It combines with other gestures. That’s part of why you see it everywhere. But sometimes, a person’s hands won’t be indicating, like, a pointing gesture, or they won’t be giving any information about the size or the shape of something. They’re just doing this repetition. The analogy in emoji is that we use a lot of repetition in our emoji to do the same kind of emphasis or duration – so a string of clapping hands to show applause in emoji or a string of hearts to say, “I really love that idea.”

Randall: Is it true that if you make someone hold their hands still when they’re talking, they’re less coherent or have a harder time forming sentences? I feel like I heard that somewhere.

Lauren: The general suggestion is yes. I think we’ve talked about it before, and I’ve said that’s the case. I’ve been returning to this literature and will probably revisit it in an episode, but it turns out that there is a lot of variation in what people mean when they say that they’ve stopped people from gesturing. And so, there’s a lot of variation in just how much it really does change how people speak. Possibly, sometimes it’s just because they come up with these really fantastically bizarre experiments.

Gretchen: There’s some where they tie them down so they can’t gesture, right. Maybe being tied down is a bit distracting.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, there are some fascinating study designs.

Randall: I mean, any time you have to have anyone do anything in an MRI, their circumstances are not gonna be natural. Well, what you really need to do is just raise someone in, like, have all the furniture in their house to be shaped like an MRI.

Gretchen: And then they’d be totally comfortable with it.

Randall: So, they go to sleep, and it’s in an MRI. And their couch where they watch TV is an MRI.

Lauren: Adding it to my long list of study design ideas that are terrible. A lot in this area are fascinatingly bad.

Randall: So, a lot of the time, I’ll read fiction or watch a movie where there’s a fictional language. If I come across a sample of a language, and I’m trying to figure out, “Is this a real, natural human language, or is it something that was created by a language enthusiast to seem real,” if you were hired as detectives to try to figure it out, what do you look for? What would be the hallmarks of an invented language?

Gretchen: This sounds like a great linguist job.

Randall: What would be the hallmarks that give away, you know, it’s someone who’s trying to make it seem like a natural language. If you were trying to figure out if you’re looking at a real language or one by someone who’s trying to fool you, what would you look for?

Lauren: I would go straight to trying to find the irregularities. If there are no irregularities, that’s an immediate sign that you have something that is too neat to have been slowly evolved collectively as a communal agreement by a collection of speakers.

Gretchen: Especially if there’re some people who do this and some people that do that. Because one of the things with artificial languages is they’ll tend to make one language. But as we were talking about with “wine” and “whine,” or trying to find the averagest English speaker, everyone’s slightly different with the language. If you don’t have any of that representation of “Different people are doing this slightly differently, and we don’t fully know exactly how all of this stuff works, but here’s a bunch of ways that it could be” –

Lauren: I think I would go, probably, straight to the pronoun system or how they do copulas – so in English “is, are, be, am” are all copula verbs, but they’re all a bit of a hot mess because, over time, we’ve created this really unbalanced paradigm. Or we’ve taken two different verbs and turned them into the past and the present of the current one. Or with pronouns – we just borrowed “they” from one of the Scandinavian languages, and you can’t actually find a robust explanation for where “she” came from in the English paradigm. “I” and “me” are incredibly ill-balanced. If you have a completely neat, like, “I have all these pronouns, and they’re perfectly clear which one is ‘me’ and which one is ‘you’ and which one’s single and which one’s plural,” I’m like, ugh, that is suspiciously regular. And language is very good at being irregular in these high-use areas.

Gretchen: It’s like a house that no one lives in because it’s suspiciously tidy. I think also the high-use areas, like in a house that you live in, tend to have more irregularity going on. I think it’s the difference between a stair rail or something that’s been polished by generations of people walking by it and having their hand on it. Some areas will be smoother than others. It’s hard to get that patina of use without lots of people doing it.

Lauren: I find the best way to do that when I’m constructing languages for fictional worlds is just to bring a degree of absentmindedness to my work. I might just generate the pronoun paradigm twice, and then take the bits I like of both of them, but then randomly forget sometime and use another form so there’s one completely irregular one in there.

Randall: That makes sense. Now and then I see people complain about like, “Oh, this show is unrealistic because the characters pronounce this one character’s name two different ways.” Like in Star Wars, some of them say /han/ Solo and some of them say /hæn/ Solo. “That’s because they haven’t prepared well enough.”

Lauren: It’s just two different parts of the galaxy.

Randall: Yeah.

Gretchen: As somebody named Lauren /gan/ – or as you say it –

Lauren: Lauren /gɑn/.

Gretchen: Yes. People never pronounce real people’s names differently depending on their accent.

Lauren: People would never have a /gɑn/gan/ merger. That would be completely unrealistic for my co-host to use the incorrect vowel in pronouncing my name.

Gretchen: Because I don’t have your /gɑn/ vowel.

Lauren: So, yeah, that kind of irregularity. I do have to say, sometimes there is implausible irregularity. In Game of Thrones, I found it comedically implausible that every single member of Arya Stark’s family would pronounce her first name differently. But I can totally believe there is an entire galaxy where there are two different ways to pronounce /hɑn/ or /hæn/.

Randall: So, it’s like the difference between there being, oh, a couple of different accents – some people say this name this way, some people say /hɑn/, some people say /hæn/ – versus, like, these people have clearly not met Arya because they all say it differently.

Lauren: Her own family members don’t seem to know.

Gretchen: And the reasons are often motivated in some sort of factor. If you have characters – okay, people who are in this group do this; people who are in that group do this – but like, why do these characters who all grew up together in the same environment, why do they talk so differently if they all grew up together? Maybe there’s some sort of other reason, right? But what sort of factors are influencing how people are talking differently or like, “Oh, we just happened to hire a bunch of actors from different places. Whatever.” Sometimes, you get a show that does that sort of accent neutral casting or accent indifferent casting, but if you wanna create within-world story reasons for people – you know, “Oh, we’re gonna give all the good guys British accents.”

Lauren: Yeah, a bit of randomness and whimsy definitely helps bring a language to life.

Randall: That’s a really clever thing to look for. It’s nice to know that you could just be a little bit less fastidious and actually make it seem more real. Let’s just suppose, optimistically, that this podcast recording survives for 50 or 100 years. I always think it’s funny. We’re sitting here recording this at a specific time and place, but it’s gonna be listened to in the future. And we don’t actually know how far in the future. People will listen when it’s posted, but then it’ll sit around. I thought it would be fun, keeping in mind those people 50 or 100 years in the future that if we try to make guesses about features of English that seem unusual to us but will seem like normal usage to the listeners in 2072 or 2122, we could make our guesses about what we think usage is gonna look like. And then, in 100 years, the listeners can grade us on who got closest to correct. It’s like a contest. We wouldn’t get our scores for 100 years.

Gretchen: Please, if you’re listening to this in 100 years, you know, maybe human life expectancy will have gone up, and we’ll still be around.

Randall: Be sure to post this episode on the “intergalactic hollow-sphere.”

Gretchen: Share it with your friends via your brain implant. Okay.

Randall: Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and merge the podcast with your consciousness at the “galactic core.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: I actually have a suggestion that might even work on a shorter timeframe. We might be around in, say, 20 years or 30 years to hear the answers to some of these, which would be kind of exciting. One of the fastest changing areas of language is that there’s a new word for “cool” about every decade or so – sometimes less. I was writing another article where I had to project the future of English, and I thought, you know, if we go back, and we look at a list of words for “cool,” do they have any sort of features in common so we could predict what the new, cool word for “cool” might be? Some words for “cool” that may not be cool anymore, things like, “sick,” “hot,” “lit,” “rad,” “sweet,” “tight,” “nice,” “neat.” There’s also another subset like –

Randall: “Keen.”

Gretchen: “Keen,” “nifty,” “groovy.” Apart from “nifty” and “groovy,” which both have this /i/ sound at the end, all of these other words are very consonant-vowel-consonant from a pronunciation perspective. Sometimes with an extra consonant at the beginning or end. Sometimes, there’s two. Like, “sick,” “lit,” “rad,” “sweet,” “nice,” “neat,” they’ve all got these bookended consonants on either side. If we can come up with some other words that are monosyllables with consonants on either side, maybe one of these words will eventually turn into the word for “cool.” This would be the first time that I’ve ever been cool in my life. We can come up with some of them. I think the current word that “the kids” are using these days is “based,” which is the opposite of “cringe.” It’s like “based in fact,” sometimes used meta-ironically. Attributed to the rapper Lil B. I’m getting this from Urban Dictionary because, again, I don’t think we’re particularly cool here. I came up with some additional candidates. If you wish to contribute any, you also can, of words that have the right phonetic form that could turn into a word for “cool” maybe. But maybe there are more. They don’t have to mean something that sounds good, right. Because “sick” or something doesn’t sound good.

Lauren: Okay, what have you got?

Gretchen: So, “sop” seems like it’s got potential. “Numb.” I dunno, I just feel like “numb” could mean “cool.” “Left.” I dunno, maybe it’s kind of “out from left field” or sort of bizarre. As a left-handed person, I kind of like this one.

Lauren: I was gonna say, I feel like this is your left-handed affirmation coming through here.

Gretchen: Thank you. “Sunk.” I dunno, “sunk” could mean “cool.” These have got some good acoustics to them.

Randall: Oh, getting a new meaning for, like, the sunk cost fallacy becomes the sunk cost positive thing.

Gretchen: Yeah. Like, “Wow! That’s so sunk, man. I can’t believe it.”

Lauren: I have a very long bow to draw here. I don’t think I’m gonna win with this. But I would like to propose “whale,” as in the ocean-going mammal, because there are some people who still pronounce that as /hwɛɪl/, and then I’ll have a really obvious token to check if we fully reduce the wine/whine merger.

Gretchen: “/hwaʊ/ that’s so /hwɛɪl/ of you!”

Lauren: I just wanna make sure we have a lot of tokens for something that has a W-H pronunciation for some people to make sure that we’ve definitely closed that merger. Or it’s been de-merged.

Gretchen: Hmm. I mean, some people are using the Beowulf “hwaet” ironically now.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, maybe we could get that going.

Gretchen: Bring some of this stuff back.

Randall: Or, hey, this can be my opening. If America has finished merging “caught” and “cot,” then we could bring back “caught” to mean “cool.”

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, “That’s so cot of you.”

Randall: No, no, no, you got to unmerge it.

Gretchen: “That’s so /kɑt/ of you.”

Randall: You know, the weird thing is when you’re describing this, you’re using the word “cool” a lot. It strikes me that that word has hung on for a weirdly long time and means the same thing. There’re all these other synonyms that come and go, but that one – like, when I read old newspapers going back at least five or six decades – has basically the same connotation.

Gretchen: It’s interesting that “cool” retains its meaning as the meta-term for this category, whereas if I say something’s “groovy” now, I’m implying it’s dated. I’m not saying it’s still cool. I mean, like, I dunno if there’re gonna be more temperature words. I think that mine has been pretty much exhausted. I mean, unless you’re gonna start saying something’s “warm.” Like, “cool,” “chill,” “hot.”

Randall: “Tepid, man.”

Gretchen: I think that’s the wrong phonetic profile.

Lauren: Actually, “luke” fits. And it’s now only in the context of “lukewarm.”

Gretchen: Yeah, “That’s so luke.”

Lauren: Sorry Lukes out there.

Randall: I mean, if you’re going for the phonetic profile, I think “damp” fits.

Gretchen: “That’s so damp, man.”

Randall: No, wait, no, because, I mean, that’s very similar to “dank.”

Gretchen: That’s very similar to “dank,” yeah. “Dank” is already there.

Lauren: The things people can semantically shift when they set their minds to it are truly astounding.

Gretchen: You really can’t predict what’s gonna be in cool, but they do seem to have some sort of phonetic signature. If any of these words that we’ve mentioned turn into a word for “cool,” I definitely didn’t see “based” coming, so who knows.

Lauren: That would be very “whale.”

Gretchen: We get bragging rights. That would be very “whale.”

Randall: That was real “tepid” of you. Well, to put my stake in the ground, my prediction – when I was a little kid, you could tell if someone learned from reading because they would pronounce certain words ways that – like they’d say /dɛbɹɪs/ instead of /dɛbɹi/ because they hadn’t heard someone say it. They had read it. I feel like we’re conducting so much written communication now, I wonder if more of those will just become alternate, accepted pronunciations. So, like /dɛbɹɪs/, /fəkɛɪd/ instead of “façade.”

Gretchen: If you were me when I was a kid saying /sɛntɹɪfjʊgl̩/ instead of /sɛntɹɪfɪkl̩/.

Randall: Exactly. “Grand /fɪnal/.”

Gretchen: There’s one that’s already there which is “forte.”

Randall: Oh, yeah, I only just learned that I’ve been saying that one wrong.

Lauren: What would be a “non-forte” pronunciation of “forte”?

Gretchen: /foɹt/, I think, right, because it’s originally Italian. In Italian, it’s both spelled “forte” and pronounced “forte,” but a lot of people write it with an accent mark as if it was French, like “café” – or “resumé,” which gets written with the accent mark. You can understand why you’d wanna do this because the E there isn’t silent, but it’s not actually originally a French word.

Randall: Yes.

Gretchen: Yeah, I like that we had this pronunciation argument. This makes me feel much cooler than coming up with for words for “cool.”

Randall: Mispronunciation is my “forté.”

Lauren: I guess if you’re listening to this in 100 years from when it was released, email/contact @lingthusiasm to let us know which of us is closest. [Laughter]

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get tree structure scarves, “Not Judging Your Grammar” notebooks, and kiki-bouba mugs, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. You can follow our guest, Randall Munroe, @xkcd on various social media sites. His new book is called What If? 2. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month plus our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Have you gotten really into linguistics, and you wish you had more people to talk to about it? Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans. Plus, all patrons help keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include a chat about the design of the IPA chat and what it’s like to be in an MRI machine. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Production Manager is Liz McCullough. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Randall: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[theintelligentfool]

WEBCOMICS FOR THE DISCERNING READER

aka one nerds list of recommendations

- Order of The Stick (ongoing)

the order of the stick is one of my all-time favorites! it began as a gag-a-day parody of d&d and the fantasy genre in general, but has evolved into a genuine epic with a fascinating story, a memorable cast of characters, and still plenty of comedy. if you've ever enjoyed fantasy or dnd: you'll enjoy this. i suggest reading to about 100 pages before you decide whether or not you like it!

- Sleepless Domain (ongoing)

sleepless domain is a thrilling tale of magical girls in a society threatened by monsters. it's full of dark twists, charming characters, and exciting action! this is no madoka magicka ripoff, though: instead of angst centering around corruption, sleepless domain offers a fascinating and nuanced take on magical girls as child soldiers - with all the sparkles the genre requires. for this one i'd suggest reading up to chapter 2 or so before deciding what you think of it!

- The Glass Scientists (ongoing)

the glass scientists is a charming, gaslamp-fantasy take on assorted victorian mad scientists - as well as the concept of a mad scientist - in a series full of wit and drama. especially fascinating is the look at jekyll and hyde, not as good and evil halves of a person, but as a metaphor for repression (and even staying in the closet)!

- xkcd (ongoing)

xkcd is a fun, nerdy comic that, unlike the others of this list, is purely comedic rather than story-based! penned by former nasa engineer and bestselling author randall munroe, xkcd is a delightful romp through all things geeky- and i can guarantee you've almost certainly seen an xkcd strip floating around the internet before, recognizable by its distinctly stylized stick figures or silly graphs. simply hitting "random" and reading through one comic after another is an excellent way to kill time!

(there exists a wiki called "explain xkcd" that exists purely to clarify any especially obscure references or explain whatever scientific concept a given strip alludes to - i think that really says something about the sort of comic that xkcd is!)

- Val and Isaac (ongoing)

val and isaac, from tumblr's very own @/tredlocity, is a wonderful sci-fi series that's often simple one-off gags but occasionally has more intense story arcs! the characters (mostly bounty hunters) are charming and unique, the jokes are hilarious, and isaac specifically is one of my favorite ever interpretations of a wizard.

- Cocksley & Catapult (ongoing)

C&C, the sitcom-style gag-a-day comic about two besties with an impossible to describe dynamic, never fails to entertain. it's perhaps the most distinctly tumblr webcomic you'll find anywhere, whatever that means to you. perhaps the easiest way to describe it - the truest to the comic way to describe it - is "really funny in a mental illness kind of way." i love it.

hope this list is helpful to someone! let me know if you check out any of these comics, and what you think of them :D

and ESPECIALLY get in touch if you already like any of these comics.... i need someone to yell with about them

[rickmoya]

the books I read in 2023

Welp, time to finally face this post and submit it. I'm kind of embarrassed because I am so bad at reading anymore. No explanation, no excuses. I used to read twice this many books as a matter of course, and now I ... like, don't. My TBR barely budged ... I cleared some stuff out thanks to summer camp, but then I got new stuff to fill it back up.

I don't know. Maybe one day I'll start reading again. Not today, though, probably. This year's list has two books on it so far, both of which I'm maybe a quarter into. Ugh.

Wired Style, Constance Hale & Jessie Scanlon

Once Upon Atari, Howard Scott Warshaw

Dragonwatch: Master of the Phantom Isle, Brandon Mull

The Illustrated Al, ed. Josh Bernstein

Fucking Apostrophes, Simon Griffin

Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life, Wynton Marsalis and Carl Vigeland

The Kitchen Detective, Christopher Kimball

Decoding Boys, Cara Natterson

The Maxx (1-35, complete), Sam Kieth (1)

Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s, Tiffany Midge

Barely Functional Adult, Meichi Ng

What If? 2, Randall Munroe

8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, W. Bruce Cameron (2)

Over Sea, Under Stone, Susan Cooper

This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

The Rapture of the Nerds, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross

The New Hacker’s Dictionary, ed. Eric S. Raymond (3)

All You Need is Kill, Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Wind/Pinball, Haruki Murakami

Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips

Where Nobody Knows Your Name, John Feinstein

We Should Hang Out Sometime, Josh Sundquist

Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan

Guardians of the Galaxy: The Complete Collection, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, et al.

The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper (4)

Banana Ball, Jesse Cole

A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, Ashley Kahn

Free Lunch, Rex Ogle (5)

Greenwitch, Susan Cooper (6)

The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, Dave Barry

italics: read it before bold: read it to my kid in bed struck: unfinished

I’d read the first ten or so issues of this before, out of interest because I watched the animated series on MTV. This is the first time all the way through and I didn’t realize it was so dark and triggering.

I read this one when mine was a toddler, and remembered it being pretty patriarchal and victorian. Thought maybe it would hit different now that she’s actually teenaged, and ... like, it did! it’s even worse! Absolutely zero of this shit fits a kid who is not 100% straight and searching. I got through four essays and took it back to the library.

I got up through the Bs and then I LOST MY COPY.

The more I read of this, the more I realized I maybe only read the first couple chapters. Still keeping the italics (making up for claiming I never previously read The Maxx).

I subbed a middle school reading class where this was the text. Ended up reading the whole thing across the day.

This could be the last new book I ever read to my own children. We generally don't read to sleep during holiday breaks, instead allowing them to fall asleep in front of a TV. But when school restarted, my youngest (officially a teenager) didn't want me to read to him at bedtime anymore. The end of an era. I may have cried a little bit. I expect the Dave Barry on Christmas Eve tradition to continue at least another year (my oldest likes it and specifically requested it again), but maybe no more new ones.

[askthebests]

Top Books That Will Teach You Something

Books are perhaps the best of advisors, friends, consultants and confidants, if you may. You can find a book for any topic you wish to get your hands on. The best part about books is that they can speak to you without letting out your innermost feelings, desires or aspirations. Just like people, some books can transform your life forever, as they teach you something that is life-altering. So, here is a list of top books that will teach your something:

1- What If? By Randall Munroe 

This is one of the best books you can grab that will answer some of the toughest questions asked by people. The book covers some of the simplest to the more complex questions that can leave your perception of the way things are changed forever. 

2- Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard 

This is an interesting read about how people view the trees. It explores their connection with one another, and also to the other living creatures in the forest. This is a story of self-discovery, which is inspiring and illuminating something that most readers will find life-altering. 

3- Facing The Mountain by Daniel James Brown

An inspiring book that takes you through the lives of the World War II saga of patriotism, contributions and sacrifices of the Japanese immigrants and their American-born kids. A must-read if you wish to get your hands on a plot that has been inspired by real-life incidents. 

4- The Power Of Unwavering Focus by Dandapani 

A must-read if you wish to take charge of your life by enhancing your inner focus. This can help you into a better business, partnerships, and relationships both with yourself and the others around you. Also, it helps the individual to better happiness, mental health, productivity and self-awareness in reaching their goals. 

5- All That She Carried by Tiya Miles 

At the age of ‘Black Lives Matter’, this is a gripping read about the ‘thing’ that Black women across three generations have had to carry. This is a wonderful book that holds the testament of people who have been forgotten, yet immortalized by the tale. 

6- Run For Your Life by Mark Cucuzella 

This is one of the easiest and the best books to read for a healthy Run-plan. The book guides you to better health, nutrition and the biomechanics of running. 

CONCLUSION

So, there you have it people, this is a tiny list of some of the best books you can read to get inspired. 

[steampoweredshow]

Compassion in healthcare is about operating with respect in more ways than one. We've spoken previously about the cultural side of medicine and the program Operating With Respect, but today I speak with Leah Elson about developing technology and procedures that can create psychologically and physiologically better patient outcomes, and also about getting people excited about science again.

About Leah Elson

Leah Elson is an academically-published clinical development scientist, public science communicator, and non-fiction author. Her research career in human medicine has included the fields of orthopedics, oncology, and neuroscience.

Instagram: @gnarlybygnature TikTok: @gnarlybygnature Twitter: @gnarlybygnature

Watch this episode on YouTube. Listen to it on Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Breaker, Castbox, Overcast, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, or RSS.

Show Notes

(00:01:06) Sportscasting in college. (00:02:24) Adventures in pre-med. (00:03:01) Leah's early interest in surgery, but realising she could do more upstream. (00:04:43) Research is playing the long game. (00:05:44) Leah's current work with peripheral nerve repair and its compassionate applications. (00:08:43) Taking a more holistic view of patient outcomes. (00:10:28) Allowing researchers to actually see the impact of their work. (00:11:18) STEMM can be a social equaliser because you're working towards the same goal of humanity. (00:12:30) How Leah determines the direction of her research focus. (00:14:59) The beauty of research rabbitholes. The best discoveries are accidental. (00:15:51) The importance of maintaining connections and networks. You never know where you'll find convergence across fields. (00:18:15) Hyperspecialisation and the globaliser that was COVID. (00:20:45) The future is in unpacking genetics. (00:24:58) The science that divides advances us. (00:26:01) The impact of market (and climate) forces and the reminder that humans are creative and resilient. (00:29:27) '60 Seconds of Science' and the importance of supporting the voices that inform. (00:32:35) Science doesn't have an alignment, it's what we do with it. (00:35:01) Science is fluid and has so much scope. (00:36:43) Fake science and the narrative around it is evocative. (00:38:13) Science fiction into science fact. (00:39:05) Writing 'There Are (No) Stupid Questions … in Science'. (00:42:05) Making people excited about science again. (00:45:39) The accessible nature of a book like this. (00:47:10) Being selective about what community questions to answer. (00:48:11) Randall Munroe (xkcd). (00:49:35) Bonus Question 1: What hobby or interest do you have that is most unrelated to your field of work? (00:50:18) Powerlifting is complementary to Leah's optimal workflow. (00:51:35) Bonus Question 2: Which childhood book holds the strongest memories for you? (00:52:51) Michele's favourite childhood book. (00:54:10) 'Where's Waldo?' (00:55:18) Bonus Question 3: What advice you would give someone who wants to do what you do? Or what advice should they ignore? (00:58:54) Finding out more about Leah and their work.

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[random-bookquotes]

Laws give people power. If a law is complicated, it empowers people who can afford lawyers to interpret it. “Laws that are complicated, arbitrary, and unintuitive empower the state,” says Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law and the Harvard Law Library’s director, “since prosecutorial discretion means they can pick whom to enforce against and be selective in discriminatory ways.” But making laws simpler and vaguer doesn’t necessarily move that power from the state to the people. You could get rid of a lot of laws and replace them with “everyone just needs to behave properly.” But that leaves it up to law enforcement to decide the meaning of “properly.”

Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

[tigger8900]

What If? 2, by Randall Munroe

⭐⭐⭐ 1/2

What would happen if everybody tried to cool the earth by opening their fridge doors? What would you see if you traveled back in time for each step you took between TX and NY? What if all the raindrops were lemon drops and gum drops? You've got weird questions, and Randall Munroe, the cartoonist behind XKCD, has equally-bizarre answers, backed up by math and science. This book is the follow-up to 2014's What If? and an extension of the What If? blog.

I've been a long-time XKCD reader, and devoured the original What If? with glee. So naturally I put this book on hold at the library as soon as the banner popped up on xkcd.com, and waited eagerly as my position in the holds queue drew closer to the front of the line. But ultimately, having read it, I can report that it's okay. Being generous, it's slightly better than okay. So what's wrong with it? I don't really know. The humor just didn't hit the same way as it did when I read the original. Maybe I've outgrown it. After all, What If? came out 8 years ago.  I don't remember the explanations being so repetitive(so many of them ended in a variation on "everything will be destroyed") or there being so many dismissive short answers, but it's possible it was always there and it just didn't bother me as much back then. This isn't to say that there aren't some incredibly interesting chapters("what if you put real lava in a lava lamp?" immediately comes to mind), but when you're looking at 15-20 out of 60+, that's a lot of stuff that's just...fine.

(The picture in this post should be 400 pixels tall like all the others. I have no idea why it's blown out and tumblr's editor doesn't give me any tools to adjust it.)

[ask-megamind-blue-defender]

Ollo Megamind!

I'm big fan of both you and baseball so I'm curious about something. What would happen if someone could pitch a fastball at the speed of light? As an alien genius, I'm betting you have an answer?

Ollo back!

Let me start off with a little shout-out. Believe it or not, I’m not the first scientific mind to be asked such a thing. (Sometimes I worry about humans.) Randall Munroe has an extremely entertaining book called What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Lots of fun and physics; great for a little light reading. Especially when you’ve had a hard day because the Doom Syndicate is being spectacularly annoying and the teleportation device you’ve been working on simply won’t function like the math says it should.

And you’ve just discovered that all the apples you’ve been throwing through it have been hurtling out of (seemingly) midair into your fishy sidekick’s sewing room with enough force to turn them into applesauce explosions.

So now he’s threatening to change the wifi password again. (Honestly, Minion! Be reasonable!)

Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you swam in a nuclear reactor pool (surprisingly little) or if you launched a mole of moles into space (it’s not good) then… well, firstly, I have some questions. But secondly, you might enjoy that book, (and it might save you from performing some unwise experiments yourself.) So purchase it from your favorite independent bookstore (support small businesses!) or check it out from your local library (support those, too!)

Moving on…

Whoever you're betting against, tell them to pay up, because your favorite Heroic Genius and Master of All Sciences does, indeed, have an answer!

A lightspeed fastball might sound pretty amazing, but it would absolutely ruin the day for more people than the batter. Oh, the batter would certainly hate it. But so would the catcher. And all the rest of the players. And the fans. And SO many others.

It would be just plain bad.

How bad is bad? Even if the ball isn’t quite traveling at the speed of light, (let’s say it’s going 99 percent of that speed, much like the Helical Engine NASA recently designed,) the results would be catastrophic. And the problem starts with a seemingly unassuming culprit: the air we breathe.

You see, air molecules are fast, vibrating at hundreds of miles per second, but they’re nowhere near lightspeed fast. And that’s an issue. Because the ball, which is now traveling at over 180,000 miles per second, or 600 million miles per hour, breaks the laws of aerodynamics. Like Sunday afternoon drivers on US Highway 2 when I’m called to duty, the poor air molecules are simply too slow to get out of the way in time. (I’m just kidding. About the drivers. Not about the molecules.) That means that the atoms of those molecules hit the ball so hard they become one with the atoms of the ball. Which is not nearly as romantic as it sounds. Basically, they create constant fusion in front of the hurdling object. And if you know anything about how A-bombs work, you know that uncontrolled atom fusion fits quite nicely into the Nope Not Good category.

The force of that fusion would slow the ball down very slightly, but not nearly enough. What it would do is cause bits of the ball to fly off in every direction, also at near-lightspeed, like tiny little fragments of destructive doom. These would also create fusion. Three or four reactions in all. Meaning that everyone’s life just got A LOT worse. And a lot shorter.

Because one thing is certain: sudden, uncontrolled fusion in a crowded baseball stadium would make a lot of people very, very unhappy.

It pretty much goes downhill from there.

A fraction of a second after the ball is thrown—a little less than 0.7 seconds, to be more accurate—the catcher will still see the pitcher holding the ball. But he’s not. It’s just that the light carrying the information “ball incoming” will arrive at almost the same time as the ball itself.

Except it’s NOT a ball anymore. Interactions with air molecules will have transformed it into a bullet-shaped mass of plasma hurtling through the air with extremely deadly speed. So don’t worry. The catcher doesn’t need to worry about being hit by a stray super-fastball. Nor does anyone else.

They just need to worry about the explosion.

Remember when I said the ball is plasma now? Yes, well, uncontrolled plasma rapidly expands. Which is a nice way of saying it pretty much goes boom. (You would not BELIEVE the years of calculations and extremely precise engineering necessary to safely create the plasma laser Death setting on my De-Gun.) Anyway, the plasma cloud bullet, made mainly of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and, of course, carbon left over from the destroyed matter, is expanding so fast that it creates (guess what?!) more fusion!

Houston, we have a chain reaction!

Now, the pitcher doesn’t know about the horror they’ve unleashed on the world; they’ve already disintegrated. The batter and the catcher aren’t far behind. Gamma rays, x-rays, and white-hot plasma will reach them in milliseconds and they’ll vanish into dust at about the same time they’re hurled backward at incredible speeds.

Basically, the same thing will happen to the other players, the fans, and the ballpark itself. With a flash of light so blinding it outshines the sun, a skyward fireball, and a pretty impressive mushroom cloud, it will be Game Over for everyone involved.

That’s when things will get really messy.

Because we’ve still got the blast wave and the firestorm to deal with. All that displaced air will have to go somewhere, and it will be under a lot of pressure. I mean A LOT of pressure. It will roar across the landscape for about a mile in every direction at speeds nearly twice as fast as the most powerful hurricane winds ever recorded. (More specifically, the shock wave will travel at about 440 miles per hour, faster than the speed of sound.) Trees and buildings will be ripped into kindling as it goes. And the people caught in the path of all that super-fast debris? Well, like I said… It will get messy.

Even beyond that point, the sonic boom will shatter glass for an impressive distance, making this the most epic example of breaking windows with a baseball in human history. Homeowners will be livid. But not for long because soon afterward most of the city will be a flambé. So, in the end, the baseball stadium is a crater, an entire mile-wide radius around it is as flat as a pancake, and everybody else is on fire. A bad day all around.

In short, if you’re thinking about asking my predecessor, Metroman, to join your baseball team, I would VERY strongly advise against it.

—Megamind, Defender of Metrocity

[youcouldmakealife]

My Top Books (2020)

Again late, but we gotta have some consistency here. 

I read a ton this year, since, you know, homebound. Not that I wasn’t working from home before this year, but I haven’t spent much time out of it since March. Also they cancelled hockey. Sure they had a bubble, and I had hockey coming out of my ears for a bit, but I had net less hockey, which made time for net more reading. 

Some binge Netflix series, some learn to make banana bread, others tear through books at a frankly concerning pace. I can’t bake and I can somehow only maintain an attention span for the written word right now. But it gave me the time to tackle a lot of classics I’ve been meaning to read for ages, and hey! Lotta them are pretty great. 

Top ten novels of the year, in no order (and four were actually published this year, which is neat!)

1. Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese 2. Washington Black - Esi Edugyan 3. Migrations - Charlotte McConaghy 4. A Deadly Education - Naomi Novik 5. A Room of One’s Own - Virgina Woolf 6. Suite Française - Irene Nemerinsky 7. The Hollow Places - T Kingfisher 8. Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood 9. The Pull of the Stars - Emma Donaghue 10. Nothing to See Here - Kevin Wilson

Top five non-novel fiction, because they were being v rude to the novels by ranking so highly in my top overall despite being underrepresented in my reading percentage, again in no order (honestly this would usually just be short story collections because me and good short story collections are best buds — brevity is an art I am increasingly forgetting, I’m full on Polonius at this point, but I kept the admiration of it! — but Anne Carson’s a fucking genius.)

1. Fair Play - Tove Jansson 2. Antigonick - Anne Carson 3. Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges 4. The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 5. Night at the Fiestas - Kirstin Valdez Quade

Other stuff I liked, again in no order, and alllllllll over the place genre wise (I am a literary omnivore.):

Raybearer - Jordan Ifueko; The Daughter of Time - Josephine Tey; Topics of Conversation - Miranda Popkey; Real Life - Brandon Taylor; Code Name Verity - Elizabeth Wein; The Hidden Girl and Other Stories - Ken Liu; The Butterfly Garden - Dot Hutchinson; The Last Emperox - John Scalzi; Daughter of the Forest - Juliet Marillier; The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk (too…timely. TOO TIMELY); Shorefall - Robert Jackson Bennett; Appointment in Samarra - John O’Hara; Stray City - Chelsey Johnson; Three Comrades - Erich Maria Remarque; Long Way Down - Jason Reynolds; Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir; The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut; The Iron Will of Genie Lo - F.C. Yee; The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett; The Death of Vivek Oji - Akwaeke Emezi,  Darius the Great Deserves Better - Adib Khorram; City of the Lost - Kelley Armstrong; Grown - Tiffany Jackson; Boyfriend Material - Alexis Hall

I read a ton of fantastic, important non-fiction this year, so I’m going to separate that from fiction:

Top ten of the year, in no order (no I’m lying. Just Mercy was one of the first books I read in 2020 and immediately cemented the #1 spot. But in no order after that)

1. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption - Bryan Stevenson 2. What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions - Randall Munroe 3. The New Jim Crow - Michelle Robinson 4. Steal Like an Artist - Austin Kleon 5. Solutions and Other Problems - Allie Brosh 6. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide - Carol Anderson 7. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism - Naomi Klein (Read this as COVID became very real. Can’t say that was fun, but it was instructive) 8. The Hilarious World of Depression - John Moe 9. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - Isabel Wilkerson 10. How to Be an Antiracist - Ibram X Kendi

Other good stuff: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century; Why We Can't Wait; In the Dream House; Another Day in the Death of America; Breath: a New Science of a Lost Art; The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power; Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

[howtosurviveaphysicsdegree]

Tag Game!

-I don’t think I’ve actually done one of these before! Tagged by @izobee-studies

how tall are you? 5′5″

what colour and style is your hair? ginger and a pixie cut!

what colour are your eyes? blue/grey

do you wear glasses? I used to, not anymore!

do you wear braces? never have

what’s your fashion sense? don’t have one hahahha, i wear jeans and t shirt most of the time, when I’m feeling fancy i go quite androgynous, stereotypical lesbian look.

full name? Rebecca 

where were you born? Buckinghamshire

where are you from and where do you live now? From Buckinghamshire, but I now live in Edinburgh.

what school do you go to? the university of Edinburgh

what kind of student are you? I am not in any way aesthetic, I wish I was but I’m messy lol. I drink too much coffee, I’m a textbook overachiever who studies too much.

do you like school? yeah, I didn’t like sixth form but I love uni as I’m studying what i love

favourite subject? Physics

favourite tv shows? I’m not entirely sure, i love Silent Witness at the mo but I tend to go through a lot of phases of liking different shows. Love the classic BBC stuff like Doctor Who and Sherlock

favourite films? Lord of the Rings!!!

favourite book? Hm, that’s pretty hard! The most recent book i’ve read and enjoyed was called “How To” by Randall Munroe, it’s sort out about scientific thinking but it’s pretty funny as well.

favourite pastime? probably running if I didn’t have a fracture at the moment :’)

do you have any regrets? not recovering from my eating disorder sooner and spending so much time so very unhappy i didn’t think my life was worth living. to anyone out there, it will get better but you have to work for it.

what’s your dream job? I want to work in academia as a theoretical / mathematical physicist 

would you like to get married? yes but to a girl lol 

do you want kids? I think so

how many? not more than 2, I couldn’t cope with more than 2.

do you like shopping? online, yes, I find it very anxiety-provoking going to shopping centres and stuff because I don’t like crowds.

what countries have you visited? so England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, France, Belgium, Italy, USA, Canada, India, (I’ve had a flight switch in Oman before but never been outside the airport!), Sweden, Switzerland. I’ve been very very lucky.

scares nightmare you ever had? I don’t want to share this sorry!!

any enemies? couple of people from sixth form but i’d be polite with them tbh so I dunno if you’d still call that enemies.

self doubt? too much. probably linked to my often poor mental health.

any significant other? no significant other but I am starting to date someone atm

do you believe in miracles? not in the spiritual sense but I know sometimes that good thinks happen and there isn’t any obvious reasons why.

how are you? I feel ok right now. But I’m struggling a lot at the moment with my mental health to the point it has come to the attention of the university and I am “signed off” sick at the moment because I’m not well enough to be in classes.

I tag: @sapphic-nd @juliamdasilva @fallingthroughthefloor and anyone else who wants to do it! <3

[needsmoresarcasm]

Favorite Books of 2019

I read a bunch of books in 2019. I loved a lot of them. Here are my ten favorites.

10. Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, Gretchen McCulloch

Most books about internet culture are garbage because they are written from the perspective of someone who is outside internet culture. Gretchen McCulloch, I am positive, is a part of internet culture. She was on fandom mailing lists and had a LiveJournal, I’m sure. She had to be to write Because Internet, which is an incredibly well written book about how language has evolved to fit online discourse. Because Internet is so fascinating, as it is able to explain thoughtfully (and compellingly) many things that internet people understand inherently. It parses through the evolution of a keysmash or an emoji. And it really helps show how language on the internet is not somehow the deterioration of language, but just another natural step forward.  9. HHhH, Laurent Binet

Originally written in French, HHhH deals with the entire genre of historical fiction. The narrator in HHhH is writing a novel about the murder of Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi official. That novel-within-the-novel is the bulk of the actual HHhH. But the narrator, who has spent years researching the actual facts, struggles with how much history and how much fiction he should be putting into the book. And so the book explicitly plays with the reader’s expectations, and comments at times on paths the story could take. The book works without the metatextual commentary, it’s propulsive and a little wry. But the added layer really just adds to the intrigue: what’s historical fiction supposed to do? And does any of it even matter? 8. Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer, John Glynn

Out East is a coming out memoir that deals with entirely internal struggles and not external hardships. Of course, there is an incredible amount of privilege at play for a coming out to be devoid of external hardships. And yes, the memoir, about a group of (mostly white) friends who rent a beach house in Montauk for a summer, is steeped in privilege, which John Glynn is acutely aware of. But John Glynn is not asking for your sympathy, he is instead telling a deeply personal story about self discovery and sexuality in the 2010s. He captures the world-shattering confusion and fear of learning that you don’t know yourself in a visceral way that still somehow maintains perspective. I cannot say that this book is for everyone, but man, was it for me.

7. Red, White & Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston The year was 2019, and everything was awful. Enter Red, White & Royal Blue, a wildly escapist fantasy that dared to dream: what if the world wasn’t on fire? So Red, White & Royal Blue is truly the most escapist novel out there, a fun romp of a romantic comedy that is entirely unconcerned with the disasters of reality. No, we’re just going to take the biracial son of the first female President of the United States and the charming, responsible prince of England and let them fall in love. Let hijinks ensue. Let this wonderful, bubblegum, fizzy drink of a novel enter your brain and wipe away all your worries. God, I had a blast reading this novel. Make everything gay 2020.

6. Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Ruin and/or Improve Everything, Kelly & Zach Weinersmith

Soonish is the exact kind of nonfiction that I want. It made me feel smarter and also made me laugh. Soonish takes on exactly what its subhead describes: ten emerging technologies (robotics, fusion power, asteroid mining, bioprinting!) that may or may not prove disastrous. It walks through the current science and then the possibilities, and how far off those possibilities are. And then it walks through the potential benefits and consequences. It’s an incredibly accessible read, written with the right balance of information and levity, striking that xkcd Randall Munroe balance. And it also has very funny comics and illustrations interspersed throughout, which will just bring your life so much joy.

5. Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson

Too real. Just Mercy is too real. This is not the right space to get into all that this book says about racial injustice and the flaws of the American justice system. It says a lot, and it says it extremely powerfully. But Just Mercy is Bryan Stevenson’s memoir, too. And it’s equally powerful for what it reveals about Stevenson. It’s so incredibly intimate, and Stevenson really lets the reader into his mind. And I think that openness really makes the whole thing land. Because Stevenson is hopeful and dedicated, and being that close to his inner thoughts ends up turning his story into something inspiring, not enervating. There’s an anecdote about an old woman on a bench outside the courthouse that Stevenson describes, and Stevenson’s retelling is so sure of the overwhelming, indomitable potential goodness of the human spirit that I may have shed a tear. Or two. Or a hundred.

4. The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller

I’m not usually one for deeply tragic stories, but The Song of Achilles I guess is the exception that proves the rule. Locked into the Iliad’s telling of Achilles and Patroclus’ fate, The Song of Achilles feels tragic from the first line. But every sentence builds their relationship and makes you invested, even as tragedy looms. The writing is gorgeous and almost musical; the passion swells and crashes like an orchestra. The book smartly focuses on Patroclus’s humanity to ground Achilles. It’s through Patroclus that we see and understand Achilles, which makes the sharp turns, where we see through Achilles, cut even deeper. In any event, the whole affair is horrifyingly romantic, and I loved it.

3. Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

Everything about Homegoing is spectacularly audacious. It is an economical 300 page book with the weight, scope, and ambition of a thousand page page epic fantasy series. Homegoing begins by telling the story of two sisters who, by the whims of circumstance or luck or fate, end up on wildly divergent paths. In Ghana in the 18th century, one is sold into slavery and the other marries an Englishman. Homegoing then follows the parallel paths of their descendants through eight generations. Though Homegoing only devotes a single chapter to each character, it manages to develop those characters and their specific settings in more detail than some entire books can. And these chapters are great not only because of what they say about the larger themes of racism and colonialism and family and history, but because of the nuanced, particularized stories they’re able to tell about the individuals.

2. Picture Us in the Light, Kelly Loy Gilbert

Contemporary Young Adult books can feel hit or miss for me. Many of them end up feeling a little shallow or juvenile. And this isn’t a criticism of the books, but a necessary side effect of the fact that I’m not the intended audience. But Picture Us in the Light knocked me over with more force than any “adult” book I read.

Picture Us in the Light, at first blush, is a typical story about Danny Cheng, a Chinese American high school student worrying about getting into college, swirls with weighty plot elements--suicide, citizenship, poverty, familial sacrifice--but never resorts to melodrama. Each issue is treated with a deft, steady hand. But more than anything, it is just the story of Danny Cheng trying to figure out his life. His voice is specifically crafted to reflect everything he is: an aspiring artist, the child of immigrants, Asian American, maybe queer, a Californian, and, maybe most importantly, a teenager. Because Picture Us in the Light turns the youth of its genre, its audience, and its main character into an asset; it channels that unformed teenage energy of wonder, uncertainty, and anxiety to heighten every emotional beat. And mostly, it brims with empathy and optimism for Danny and, really, for everyone.

1. The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern

The Starless Sea is the reason I read books. As a kid, I fell in love with reading by devouring entire series, getting lost in a fictional world for days or weeks or months at a time. What made reading so addicting was the feeling of being entirely immersed in the currents of a story. It’s a feeling I don’t get from books much any more. I read too fast, I think too much, and, mostly, I’m too easily distracted. But The Starless Sea brought that feeling of having just spent two weeks reading every Redwall or Lord of the Rings or Ender’s Game book and no longer being able to discern reality from fiction. And for that blissful literary hangover, it was the best book I read in 2019.

The Starless Sea is about Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a video game design graduate student, who comes across an old, unmarked book in his school library. In that book, he comes across a story that impossibly contains a moment from his past, and the book proceeds to unravel that mystery. However, this plot summary is misleading in its linearity; The Starless Sea is structured as books within a book, chapters will switch from the story of Zachary to the story Zachary is reading to maybe a different story altogether. And in this way, it unfolds as a puzzle box, or maybe as nesting dolls, or maybe a Mobius strip (or maybe all three), where figuring out exactly what stories are being told only adds to the experience. 

You won’t find a review of this book that doesn’t call Erin Morgenstern’s writing beautiful or atmospheric or dreamlike, which is appropriate because Erin Morgenstern’s writing is beautiful and atmospheric and dreamlike. Between the whimsical descriptive flourishes and the outward spiraling fantastical plot, the book is always on the verge of floating away or spinning out. But Zachary Ezra Rawlins grounds the story; he’s real and genuine and good, and never have I rooted more for a character. He believes in the power of a great story, and that’s ultimately what this book is about: the ways in which a story can sweep you away. And, truly, The Starless Sea just washed over me, lifted me up, and swept me away.

[theintelligentfool]

I posted 50,094 times in 2022

81 posts created (0%)

50,013 posts reblogged (100%)

I tagged 2,410 of my posts in 2022

#just for queue! - 307 posts

#discworld - 155 posts

#gnu terry prachett - 99 posts

#gnu terry pratchett - 72 posts

#spam reblog - 71 posts

#hatsune miku tag - 49 posts

#facejame - 24 posts

#prev - 20 posts

#ai generated - 20 posts

#hehe - 19 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#ok whatever we get it you're a girlboss. can we fucking talk about america chÁvez instead she's the most interesting character in the movie

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

CRASH

7 notes - Posted March 31, 2022

#4

do u want to sit in a deep fryer together and lean on the sides like were in a jacuzzi

Yes

9 notes - Posted March 25, 2022

#3

whats wrong with you is that you have an oxymoron in your username(evilest sin of all)

it's not an oxymoron if u Understand.....

12 notes - Posted March 9, 2022

#2

wilkins and wontkins are kismeses

Hey why don't you say that to the op's face. To the face of my good friend rena of @kirbyofthestars. the person who made the post about being shocked to discover unironic wilkins/wontkins shippers on tumblr. Y'know. Her. say it to his face. and ask someone for forgiveness while you're at it

17 notes - Posted August 11, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

WEBCOMICS FOR THE DISCERNING READER

aka one nerds list of recommendations

- Order of The Stick (ongoing)

the order of the stick is one of my all-time favorites! it began as a gag-a-day parody of d&d and the fantasy genre in general, but has evolved into a genuine epic with a fascinating story, a memorable cast of characters, and still plenty of comedy. if you've ever enjoyed fantasy or dnd: you'll enjoy this. i suggest reading to about 100 pages before you decide whether or not you like it!

- Sleepless Domain (ongoing)

sleepless domain is a thrilling tale of magical girls in a society threatened by monsters. it's full of dark twists, charming characters, and exciting action! this is no madoka magicka ripoff, though: instead of angst centering around corruption, sleepless domain offers a fascinating and nuanced take on magical girls as child soldiers - with all the sparkles the genre requires. for this one i'd suggest reading up to chapter 2 or so before deciding what you think of it!

- The Glass Scientists (ongoing)

the glass scientists is a charming, gaslamp-fantasy take on assorted victorian mad scientists - as well as the concept of a mad scientist - in a series full of wit and drama. especially fascinating is the look at jekyll and hyde, not as good and evil halves of a person, but as a metaphor for repression (and even staying in the closet)!

- xkcd (ongoing)

xkcd is a fun, nerdy comic that, unlike the others of this list, is purely comedic rather than story-based! penned by former nasa engineer and bestselling author randall munroe, xkcd is a delightful romp through all things geeky- and i can guarantee you've almost certainly seen an xkcd strip floating around the internet before, recognizable by its distinctly stylized stick figures or silly graphs. simply hitting "random" and reading through one comic after another is an excellent way to kill time!

(there exists a wiki called "explain xkcd" that exists purely to clarify any especially obscure references or explain whatever scientific concept a given strip alludes to - i think that really says something about the sort of comic that xkcd is!)

- Val and Isaac (ongoing)

val and isaac, from tumblr's very own @/tredlocity, is a wonderful sci-fi series that's often simple one-off gags but occasionally has more intense story arcs! the characters (mostly bounty hunters) are charming and unique, the jokes are hilarious, and isaac specifically is one of my favorite ever interpretations of a wizard.

- Cocksley & Catapult (ongoing)

C&C, the sitcom-style gag-a-day comic about two besties with an impossible to describe dynamic, never fails to entertain. it's perhaps the most distinctly tumblr webcomic you'll find anywhere, whatever that means to you. perhaps the easiest way to describe it - the truest to the comic way to describe it - is "really funny in a mental illness kind of way." i love it.

hope this list is helpful to someone! let me know if you check out any of these comics, and what you think of them :D

and ESPECIALLY get in touch if you already like any of these comics.... i need someone to yell with about them

19 notes - Posted June 11, 2022

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[scotsmanandsassenach]

Fan’s Choice Outlander Challenge: June 2019

Join us for the Fan’s Choice Outlander Challenge, where each day in June we propose an either/or scenario and challenge you to make a choice. The details are as follows:

The list of daily scenarios is attached below and how you make your decision is up to you. You might choose the character that makes you laugh the most, the scene that’s guaranteed to leave you nauseous or the location that you dislike the least... there‘s no wrong way to do this!

Share your choice in any way, shape or form that you like. Suggestions include personal stories, book quotes, visual edits, fan fiction, stick figure drawings, sculptures made out of candy and pet cosplay.

Days are relevant to your personal time zone. Simply try to post your response between midnight and midnight!

Use the hashtag #Fan’s Choice Outlander Challenge with each daily post so we can see and share the  choices you’ve made!

We are so excited for you to join us and see what choices you make!

1. Jamie Fraser or Claire Fraser

2. Outlander Books or Television Series

3. Lallybroch or Fraser’s Ridge

4. Joe Abernathy or Geillis Duncan

5. Jamie Fraser’s Sawny Snake or Faith Fraser’s Apostle Spoon

6. Roger Mackenzie or Fergus Fraser

7. The Wedding or Print Shop Reunion

8. ‘Black Jack’ Randall or Stephen Bonnet

9. Collecting Rent (S1) or Raising an Army (S2)

10. Mother Hildegarde or Adawehi 

11. Ellen Fraser’s Pearl Necklace or Claire Fraser’s Silver Wedding Ring

12. Laoghaire Mackenzie or Frank Randall

13. Cranesmuir Witch Trial (S1) or Comte St. Germain & Master Raymond’s Trial for Sorcery (S2)

14. Red Jamie or A. Malcolm

15. Boston General Hospital or L'Hôpital des Anges

16. Jocasta Cameron or Letitia MacKenzie

17. The Red Dress (S2) or The Batsuit (S3)

18. Murtagh & Claire or Murtagh & Fergus

19. River Run or Castle Leoch

20. Lord John Grey or Isobel Dunsany 

21. Wentworth Prison or Ardsmuir Prison

22. Claire Meeting Brianna or Jamie Meeting Brianna

23. Ned Gowan or Hugh Munro

24. Highlands on Horseback or Sailing the Caribbean

25. Angus & Rupert or Young Ian & Rollo 

26. Jamie vs. Black Jack Duel (S2) or Jamie vs. Bear (S4)

27. Mrs Graham or Mrs Fitz.

28. Mackenzie Gathering (S1) or The Scottish Festival (S4)

29. Jenny & Ian Murray or Fergus & Marsali Fraser 

30. Design Your Own (and drop it into your friends Ask Box!)