one of the darkest pieces of spec fic I've ever read:

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social? And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

After spending a long time designing digital radio protocols, working on ethernet interfaces is making me anxious about profligate network protocols are with bits. 14 whole bytes for an ethernet header!? Duplicating MAC addresses ARP messages? What decadence!

I first read this as referring to autism, and was about to be really mad. But it's actually about literal masks on your face.

Today I Learned: If you attach an Android device to an ethernet connection, it will repeatedly perform ARP scans of your entire subnet range.

It's going to be very difficult to convince future generations that the phrase "trumped-up charges" did not, in fact, originate as a reference to Donald. #linguistics #etymology

Mineral Cup has better voting security than some countries!

We also now have more beanbags posted than followers, so spread the word!

I made another video! youtu.be/2eOftbXt4tQ

I made another video: youtu.be/BUOnFfBegXs

I made a video. youtu.be/m1qMoe6QBRI

I think I may have just invented a new routing algorithm....

Pooh Bear is looking a little sad after 30 years.

Now, the waiting begins. Most likely, I will forget about this pre-order, and be pleasantly surprised when it shows up next spring!

One additional fact has now come to light: according to one person's recollection, Mercurian had no consonants, but had a total of 40 phonemes consisting of the vowels /a e i o u/ in 8 contrastive tones. #conlang

"I don't care that he's dead." "He's not a hero." "He's a scumbag." "He shouldn't be celebrated." No, no. I'm not saying that about Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk said that about George Floyd. Just in case anyone's interested in what he thought was fair to say about someone who was killed on camera.

#linguistics / #conlang / #comics Apparently _Dan Dare: Marooned on Mercury_ originally published in Eagle comics in the '50s, featured an alien Mercurian language, which may or may not (probably not) have been an actual worked-out conlang. Anybody know about this?

Me, too!

A certain kind of person would probably have refused to eat this pizza.

Today I saw some code written by a beginning CS student. All of the variables had *people* names. Someone took the idea of "variables name" way too literally.

Did we think they were? I recall being taught that that was a popular misconception.

I just had two more papers added to my to-read list. youtu.be/tfnANe2YUwM #linguistics

#conlang I have now worked out the photetics and part of the phototactics for my #ccc4 submission. (Nope, those are not typos!)

Really wanna build a hexadecatree-based fully raytraced 4D destructible environment game now....

Our latest post on the Drintera #TTRPG Patreon is about the power of legend and how it creates opportunities for the game master's creativity. www.patreon.com/posts/drinte...

an appropriate response to your product killing a child after months of psychological manipulation and torture is to take the product off the market before it kills again and the fact that this isn’t universally accepted right now is incredibly frightening

#Linguistics! zrajm.org/sign-languag... (It's a surprisingly long list of sign writing systems with classifications and references.)

Any chance we can see a list of those hapax legomena? I wonder how many are paraphraseable, and what sort of vocabulary is needed to translate the whole book. Would also be neat to see how the other vocabulary compares to the 5000 most common English words in a general corpus.

I have now finished reading _Proto_.

Something very very weird happened during the Hugos award ceremony... It's been on my mind for days, and so I wrote this blog: "When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident" grigorylukin.com/2025/08/21/w... #Worldcon

Main takeaway from today's nuclear "influencer": The public is dumb. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly dumb it is. I mean, you may think a hamster is pretty stupid, but that's just peanuts to the American public. Thus, scicomm requires *childish* levels of simplification.

Just started watching the Quantum Leap reboot, and seeing Desire of the Endless playing a scientist is really tripping me out.

Unpacking this a bit: for half-open pipes, the first harmonic is thrice the fundamental frequency (a tritave), but for strings under tension, it's twice the fundamental (an octave). Drums/bells have more complex harmonics, so cultures using those instruments construct scales differently.

Part of the problem is English teachers telling students things like "metaphors use 'is' and similes use 'like'", as though that's actually a meaningful distinction. Really, similes are about structural form, and should be used sparingly. Metaphors are this--about accessing meaning.

In case you need help deciding whether or not to buy that book.

We need a Star Trek episode about how the invention of the universal translator caused people to stop valuing actually learning languages, while they fatally overestimated the UT's accuracy and the resulting misunderstandings led to a massive war that tore the quadrant apart

Off-the-cuff #ProjectHailMary thought: due to the structure of his vocal tract, should Rocky actually care about tritave equivalence instead of octave equivalence? We might be able to make conclusions about traditional Eridian musical instruments based on how his language encodes emotion....

New for the Drintera #TTRPG setting: Sipat, the merfolk kingdom by @tgimenezrgm.itch.io www.patreon.com/posts/underw...

Tempted to use it in reference to people who are, in fact, trying to consolidate political power to commit genocide.

Since @projectamaze.com just started following me, perhaps I should publish more of my xenolinguistic thoughts about Project Hail Mary. Once it became clear Iwas not going to hear from the producers, I kinda just let it slide, but I still have the notes! So here's the bit I already put out in 2023:

As a linguist who happens to be male and holds exactly the same opinion, I have to wonder how much of that hate is just pure sexism.

My main takeaway from reading The Light Eaters is that the sapient plants in Semiosis aren't nearly weird enough! (This post brought to you by Facebook memories.)

1. No. 2. Duh. The idea that thought depends on language is a popular illusion arising from the common but non-universal experience of an internal monologue. But I guess we sometimes need to research obvious things just to check...

Possibly unpopular opinion: shared-memory IPC is not only faster than sockets, pipes, and messages, it is also easier to do correctly!

How kids suddenly get so much heavier when they fall asleep?

Today's discussion in church on "Childlike Attributes" has convinced me that none of those people have ever met an actual child.

ln(😅) = 💧ln(😄)

I'm on a podcast that isn't mine! www.linguisticscareercast.com/podcast/epis...

No, because you are the one setting the search terms and evaluating the results. It's not functionally different from using a library card catalog, or consulting an actual reference librarian. Unless, of course you *don't* evaluate the results....

Yes, you are. Figuring out which papers are relevant is part of the research process, and important to getting a well-rounded understanding of the field. And furthermore, you are giving up on figuring out what you actually *are* interested in, delegating to a system whose accuracy you cannot know.