talking parrots

“One developmental milestone is when infants begin to relate adult sound patterns to specific meanings,” wrote Berg’s team, who described their findings July 13 Proceedings of The Royal Society B. “Among these sounds, an individual’s own name is one of the earliest adult words for which infants show evidence of acoustic pattern recognition. Our study suggests that at least a moderately convergent process may occur in parrots.”

Whales might not be the only wild animals to have individualized names.  Wired reports.

Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh!

Kookaburra has had a rough year. First, the beloved bird's name was dragged through the dirt in the trial against Men at Work. Now, they're trying to un-gay him. Poor Kookaburra.

body consciousness

You say a person is warm and likable, as opposed to cold and standoffish? In one recent study at Yale, researchers divided 41 college students into two groups and casually asked the members of Group A to hold a cup of hot coffee, those in Group B to hold iced coffee. The students were then ushered into a testing room and asked to evaluate the personality of an imaginary individual based on a packet of information.

Students who had recently been cradling the warm beverage were far likelier to judge the fictitious character as warm and friendly than were those who had held the iced coffee.

More on embodied cognition and the way our body "thinks."

Conclusion: write a "weighty" dissertation.

Fake Languages

During my first stay in Nicaragua, I was delighted to hear little kids speaking fake English. I speak all sorts of fake languages, but I don't think it ever occurred to me what it would sound like to be French person hearing me speak fake French. According to the kids in Nicaragua, English sounds like this: "Glock glock glock." It's pretty close to how an American kids might imitate Chinese, I think.

So, imagine my delight when my pal Gerry put up a link to this video of an Italian songwriter's attempt to write a song in fake American English. Awesome.

But then I started to wonder: are there others videos in this genre? It turns out there are, including this challenge from a very good speaker of a multitude of fake languages.

Diacritical Mark of the Beast

Randomly from Wiki, an entry on the "heavy metal umlaut":

The heavy metal umlaut, or "rock dots", is an umlaut over letters in the name of a heavy metal band, such as Mötley Crüe or Motörhead. The use of umlauts and other diacritics with a blackletter style typeface is a form of foreign branding intended to give a band's logo a Teutonic quality. It is a form of marketing that evokes stereotypes of boldness and strength commonly attributed to peoples such as the Vikings; author Reebee Garofalo has attributed its use to a desire for a "Gothic horror" feel.^[1] The heavy metal umlaut is never referred to by the term diaeresis in this usage, nor is it generally intended to affect the pronunciation of the band's name.

What did you ever do?

I saved Latin. And Latin could save politics. Or so Harry Mount at the NYT thinks.

Of course, it's hard to take Mr. Mount seriously. Not with a name like that.