katexic, Author at Katexic Clippings (ARCHIVE)

MRI of Tongue and Mouth Singing

still from real time MRI of tongue while singing and speaking

From the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, ► Real-time MRI imagery of what the tongue and mouth look like when singing (and speaking) ※ Tangentially related: you don’t need an MRI machine to see ► this man lick his own forehead.

Teen-age Gangs Speak Strange Tongue

from “Teen-age Gangs Speak Strange Tongue; Here’s a Glossary of Common Expressions”

Bop—To fight.
Bopping Club—A fighting gang.
Cheesy—Traitorous.
Diddly bop—First-class gang fighter.
Gig—A party.
Jitterbug—To fight.
Rank—To insult (usually profanity concerning a boy’s mother).
Shin battle—Intra-gang practice or test-of-mettle fight among gang members.
Snag—To attack an individual.
Sneaky Pete—Cheap wine.
To sound—To joke or needle.

—found in The New York Times (March 24, 1958)
—full article

amanuensis

amanuensis /ə-MAN-yoo-EN-sis/ /əˌmænjʊˈɛnsɪs/. noun. A literary assistant or factotum. A typist or stenographer. From Latin āmanuensis; from the phrase servus ā manū (slave at hand, aka handwriting); from ā (from) + manū (hand).

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Web: March 24, 2019

Wave reviews: Under — Norway’s new underwater restaurant.
“Softer foods from agricultural lifestyles may have changed the human bite, making it easier to form certain sounds.” → Did Dietary Changes Bring Us ‘F’ Words? Study Tackles Complexities of Language’s Origins
“Depression Quest is an interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression.”
Julie Phillips on The dangerous shifting cultural narratives around suicide
The “Mandela Effect” is a collective misremembering, named after the phenomenon of people around the world falsely remembering, in often vivid detail, Nelson Mandela’s death in the 1980s, though he was alive at the time. Other common examples of this kind of group false memory, both of which I’ve been victim of, include the name of the “Berenstein” Bears and Sinbad’s non-existent genie movie. Thanks to the web and social media, examples of the effect are easier and easier to discover. My latest: the “flesh” colored crayons of my childhood which, thanks to this exhaustive history of Crayola Crayon colors, I am highly unlikely to have experienced for myself since the name was changed many years before I was born. Indian Red? Not so much…those were around until 1999.
I’ve tried listening Joe Rogan’s show. I just don’t get it. But…can his weird influence be ignored? → “So how did Rogan—the Fear Factor guy!—become the Larry King of the Intellectual Dark Web?”.
Not into college basketball’s March Madness? How about a bracket of 100 new(ish) English words duking it out for domination? That’s what Daniel Donoghue does in his “History and Structure of the English Language” course. ※ See the live bracket (I’m betting on snerfle or salty).
“The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching.”
For yr eyeholes: Alia Bright’s paper sculpture typography pieces & Bian Xiaodong’s anti-gravity ceramics & Winners of the 2018 Skypixel Aerial Photo and Video Contest & Pippa Dyrlaga’s exquisite paper cuttings ※ Related: Munch’s iconic work “The Scream” might not be screaming.
Today in 1853, the first issue of The Provincial Freeman is published in Windsor, Ontario. Co-edited by Mary Ann Shadd Cary (the first black woman publisher in North America and one of the first black lawyers in the U.S.) and the Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward, the fiery, anti-slavery paper (its masthead declared it to be “Devoted to anti-slavery, temperance and general literature”) documented the activities of African-Canadians, many of whom were recent arrivals fleeing slavery in the States. Its run would last nearly five years. ※ Read some notices from the paper.

Bliss

On day 86 of a walking trek to the South Pole, a very hungry ► Aleksander Gamme digs up his final food cache and the result is…one of the clearest moments of joy you’ll ever see on video. You don’t need the subtitles to get this one. ※ Via the very appropriately titled ► “Bliss” episode of Radiolab, where you can learn more about Gamme and the video.

Mechanical Gripper

Inspired by the ► Origami Magic Ball, scientists investigating “soft robotics” have created ► a mechanical gripper that can grasp and lift irregularly shaped objects up to 100x its own weight. And it does so with (slightly-creepy) style.

“Separation” (W. S. Merwin)

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

—W. S. Merwin
—from The Second Four Books of Poems