Thursday, October 23, 2014

stuff around the net

It's a papist plot!

remembering the British hesitation to use the Gregorian calander. 
Back then, the Puritans and Cromwell were as bad as any Islamic country, at least to Catholics and the Irish, but since winners write history, few modern commentators discuss it.

headsup TeaAtTrianon, who just published a new historical romance...and whose older book is on Scribd, so I will be able to read it.

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MaryBeard discusses learning Latin and gerunds.


essentially she says read the book, and then she'll help you on what you don't get...but don't expect her to spoon feed you in basics of grammar.

actually, I had to look up gerunds myself:
  1. The gerund (/ˈdʒɛrənd/ or /ˈdʒɛrʌnd/) is a non-finite verb form that can function as a noun in Latin and English grammar. The English gerundends in -ing (as in I enjoy playing basketball).
  2. Gerund - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerund
    Wikipedia




In Tagalog it would be "pag play"... for more examples:  link

actually Latin was a bit easier to learn than non Indo European languages like ChiShona or Tagalog. You have to learn grammar, but to speak, you have to learn to translate phrases/ meaning, not words.
My main problem for learning Tagalog is that my brain is no longer nimble, and I am too lazy to keep up the drills that are necessary to learn vocabulary.

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it's a bomb!? Is it terrorism?
SP notices Canadian loggers find a Japanese Balloon bomb from WWII..

This bomb was part of a bizarre and desperate scheme to give the Americans and Canadians a taste of the bombings they were inflicting on Japan and Germany. In November 1944 the Japanese Army's "Special Balloon Regiment" began releasing the first of over 9,000 hydrogen filled balloons. These were expected to float with the prevailing westerly winds all the way from Japan to the west coast of North America. Each carried an 18 kg (40 pound) bomb that would explode on landing, injuring anyone in the vicinity or starting a fire. It was believed that these bombs would cause forest fires in the heavily wooded northeast coast of the United States and across the border in British Colombia. At least 300 (and perhaps as many as a thousand) of the balloons actually did reach North America, but only three are known to have caused any damage. This amounted to six dead civilians and two brush fires. The Japanese apparently missed the fact that most of this area was thinly populated and also a rare “temperate rain forest.” The region is very damp most of the time and not conducive to wild fires.

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Culture wars in Catholicism.

The Africans and the Potawanami answer the PC.

link2

link3
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vodcast of the week from Boingboing.


The second half of the show was hot with talk of western droughts, oil rigs outpacing coral reefs for fish productivity, giant carnivorous kangaroos, a new idea about asymmetry involving the Higgs particle, Ebola updates, and why we dance when we hold our pee.



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