Unpopular opinion

I feel like we should do something about this situation here

If you're bored to the point that you want to play a Choose Your Own Adventure that teaches you the 12 times table: guineapigmultiplication.streamlit.app It does involve sword-wielding guinea pigs

An interesting linguistic thing with Egypt in the last ten years is you'll hear people refer to "Egypt" and "Masr" as a dichotomy when speaking Arabic. "Egypt" is the Egypt of the Anglophone elite, while "Masr" is the actual country. I saw this on Wish fi Wish, for example, which is on Netflix

So I'm trying to piece this together with some help from @rachelschine.bsky.social but I think Ge'ez is actually an example of an RTL language that transitioned to LTR, evidently under Greek influence in like the 4th c. Is that the case? Have other scripts done this?

Quranic verse of the day: "You may hate a thing that's good for you and you may love something that's bad for you. God knows and you do not know." وَعَسَىٰ أَن تَكْرَهُوا شَيْئًا وَهُوَ خَيْرٌ لَّكُمْ وَعَسَىٰ أَن تُحِبُّوا شَيْئًا وَهُوَ شَرٌّ لَّكُمْ وَاللَّهُ يَعْلَمُ وَأَنتُمْ لَا تَعْلَمُونَ

"Iterative" is such a nice way to say "repetitive, frustrating, and boring."

Another day another battle with another RTL language

Sorry to keep harping on this. I know a lot of shit happened today, but I still think it should be bigger news that the FAA shut down the airspace over El Paso because the Air Force was accidentally shooting lasers at party balloons. We're living in the future!

I kind of called it

asking jurors in a city occupied for months by the national guard to indict members of congress for telling servicemembers they don't need to obey unlawful orders, under a statute likely unconstitutional under the first amendment. masterful gambit sir

👽🛸👽

America's academics?

"Whoever closes his eyes to evil men sleeps with adders and vipers within his shirt." — Abū l-Fatḥ al-Bustī (Afghanistan, d. 1010)

All things change and pass away except strings. Strings are immutable.

I've been watching an Egyptian serial from 2013 called Jujube Man (الرجل العناب). It's about a failed doctoral student who accidentally gives a lower class Cairene guy super powers. A highlight is when Jujube Man, who was stuck to a toilet, rescues the scientist who'd fallen from Burg el-Qahira.

Oh well at least I have automatic speech recognition to look forward to tomorrow.

😭

These Superbowl commercials with famous actors are like academic workshops. There used to be a space in the margins for grunt work and now it's just rock stars all the way down like the proverbial turtle.

The calories I've consumed in nachos and chips are going to naught

My beloved parable of human fallibility is now an Xfinity commercial

These guys just look defeated

They're gonna get hung up on how he didn't mention the Falklands

Oh well. Bad Bunny time

I'll be honest the Rhode Islander in me is dying a little

Astronomy fact: The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Milky Way at about 110km (68 miles) per second. Pic by me. 🔭 🧪 🎨 #astrophotography #SciArt #photography #StormHour #ThePhotoHour

I like all the magic bowls and stuff but I'm not seeing as many weed-related super bowl puns as I'd hoped for.

We're born of and dwell on the earth, from it we're created, to it we return. Joy remains not with the happy and nights of bliss wipe misery away. —Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (Syria, d. 1057)

There was once an American man among us who had learned some Arabic. One winter day, he wanted to convey to us his feeling of cold ... so he said: "I am cold" (ʾanā bārid). We laughed. He should have said: "I feel cold" (ʾanā bardān). —ʿUmar Farrūkh's intro to تاريخ الادب العربي من القرن الخامس

Today's read: Abraham Mylius: Lingua Belgica. Apparently he knew the difference between linguistic inheritance and borrowing already back in 1612 🤷🏼‍♂️

Are any of y'all going to watch the Superbowl?

This is not what is happening at all. The amount of misinformation on BlueSky about AI is insane, and it keeps promising that AI is all hype that is going away soon. A really dangerous position that cedes all AI policy and decisions about how it will be used to others. Also Futurism is clickbait

Repost with a photo of yours that would make a good album cover. The Guinea Pigs' first self-titled album

If you could visit any planet or moon in the solar system, which one would it be?

Pretty much everything on the Internet just drains me. It's not even the rage bait I'm just disappointed and tired. The world is full of spoiled children who've grown up and run everything and there's no place for a complete line of thought anywhere.

LinkedIn is an advertisement for communism

Egyptian Arabic proverb of the day: "It's tiring to look up." اللي يبص لفوق يتعب illī yibuṣṣ li-fōʾ yitʿab If you constantly compare your life to those who have more than you, you will live in a state of perpetual exhaustion and dissatisfaction.

This proverb, "how close together are his mouth and his anus" = "how short is he" actually makes use of a number of interesting syntactical and morphological features. Let's start with ​mā al-taʿajjubiyya, the "mā of astonishment", used here in mā aqraba, "how close together ..."

The classical/modern Arabic word for a "critic," as in a literary critic, derives originally from this word nāqid, an expert assayer of coinage.

We spent so many nights, so many times that intimacy made us forget the pleasure of sleep. Words sweeter in our hearts than attained dreams and tenderer than the passing breeze. — Bahāʾ ad-Dīn Zuhayr (Iraq, Syria, Egypt, d. 1258)

I need to reread "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

🎶 I'm trying to make a living I can't save a cent It takes all of my money Just to eat and pay my rent I got the blues Got those inflation blues

Egyptian Arabic loan word of the day: شيت shayyit "to chat" (e.g. على فيسبوك، على النت on Facebook, on the Internet)

Python is British because it makes you put the comma outside the quotes

The people who entertained all of these insipid-to-evil exchanges have the positions that so many PhDs deserve and if you think about it too hard you can feel your head starting to collapse like a dying star…

Alright, time to stop doomscrolling and weaponize my laptop to clean some data.