The Strange Dance Language of Bees

From the article:

"Honeybees don’t have much in the way of brains. Their inch-long bodies hold at most a few million neurons. Yet with such meager mental machinery honeybees sustain one of the most intricate and explicit languages in the animal kingdom. In the darkness of the hive, bees manage to communicate the precise direction and distance of a newfound food source, and they do it all in the choreography of a dance. Scientists have known of the bee’s dance language for more than 70 years, and they have assembled a remarkably complete dictionary of its terms, but one fundamental question has stubbornly remained unanswered: How do they do it? How do these simple animals encode so much detailed information in such a varied language? Honeybees may not have much brain, but they do have a secret. "   
Read the rest here.

The Birth of a Word

"MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn."


You can watch the TED talk here: http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html

A Linguist in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll on semantics/syntax:

"Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”

Lost in Translation

If you go here: http://tashian.com/multibabel/  and type in any sentence, it will be translated back and forth between a bunch of different languages. The results are...special:

Original English Text:

I really should be doing homework right now instead of playing with silly internet translation games.

Translated to Chinese:
我应该确实现在做分配虚度光阴与愚蠢互联网转换比赛的变动。

Translated back to English:
I should truly now make the allocation to waste time convert the change of competition with the stupid Internet.

Translated to German:
Ich sollte zur Zulage die Änderung wirklich jetzt machen dem Bekehrten der Rückweisung der Zeit vom Wettbewerb mit dem dummen Internet.

Translated back to English:I should really now make the extra pay the modification for the converted one of the rejection of the time of the competition with the stupid Internet.

Translated to Spanish:
Ahora tendría traer realmente al salario adicional la modificación para aquélla convertida de la denegación del período de la competencia con el Internet opaco.

Translated back to English:
Now it would have to really bring to the additional wage the modification for that one turned of the refusal of the period of the competition with the opaque Internet.

Ancient Alphabet Soup #1

Today's Ancient Alphabet Soup flavour is Cypriot! This particular script originated in Ancient Greece, on the island of Cyprus. It is probably derived from Linear A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A). The alphabet consists of syllabograms and vowels: