Today I learned that words that have different, opposite meanings are called contronyms (thanks Merriam-Webster). The example that MW give is sanction; other examples, from Wikipedia, include to clip (which can indicate both removal and fastening) and oversight. (Wikipedia actually lists a bunch more, several of which I find questionable, or even ( Read more... )

Here's another brief thought. It's sometimes asked why it's so difficult to learn a new language (even though children, all children, are really good at it ( Read more... )

A while ago I met a flying fox who had raised by humans after being rejected by both her mother and by the group of flying foxes at the zoo where she was born ( Read more... )

As seen/discussed on one of the several R mailing lists:

R version 4.4.1 (2024-06-14 ucrt) -- "Race for Your Life"
Copyright (C) 2024 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
[...]

> atan(1i)
[1] 0+Infi
> atan(1i)*2
[1] NaN+Infi

Oops. The reason for this is that apparently, when multiplying (or dividing) a complex number by a real number ( Read more... )

I was just looking at Albert's The World’s Most Difficult Constitution to Amend? (published in the California Law Review in 2005, and available in a more convenient form here). This states, at the very beginning of section I:

There have been roughly 12,000 attempts to amend the United States Constitution since its creation 235 years ago ( Read more... )

If you, like me, are sometimes using R in the salt mines, and if you're stuck with a work computer that's got a localized copy of Windows installed where changing the system language is no an option, and if you're annoyed that R then translates every fucking thing including error messages …

… then set an environment variable called LANGUAGE to ( Read more... )

While reading the coverage of the newest eruption in Morgunblaðið yesterday, I noticed something that you see in Icelandic on occasion: V1 word order, where the (finite) verb of an otherwise ordinary sentence precedes the subject. Consider the following paragraph:

Gosið kom upp á svipuðum slóðum og í síðustu jarðeldum í maí sl. eða austan ( Read more... )

I just learned that Benji Gregory, who played Brian Tanner on ALF, died last month, possibly as a result of heatstroke after falling asleep in his car. He was 46 years old ( Read more... )

It just occurred to me that next Saturday, it'll be exactly 200 years since Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de la Fayette, better known as Lafayette, at the time one of the last surviving major-generals of the Revolutionary War, embarked on his 16-month grand tour of the United States. Here is what New York's Woodstock Observer wrote to announce his ( Read more... )

After about 199,088 of 266,935 votes have been counted, it looks like Halla Tómasdóttir was elected as the new president of Iceland. Congratulations, Halla!

It's a pity that Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, who's been president for the last eight years, did not stand for election again; I was actually sad when I heard his announcement to this effect in his ( Read more... )