This page describes Linguary, an application to support two major activities in language analysis: (1) storing source material which has caught the user's interest, and (2) grouping and commenting on source material to attack or defend a hypothesis. This page, like Linguary, is a work in progress.
Linguary was born to serve my own needs in translation, linguistics, and recreational language learning, but I intend to make it useful for others (though there are no plans to make it applicable to non-Chinese languages.) The application was first mentioned on this site under the earlier name "Linguist's Working Environment," in my June letter to h0p3.
I had eye surgery on Wednesday the 12th. I am making a healthy recovery.
The healing period will run until roughly the beginning of September, so until that time, I'm on doctor's orders. One of my rules is to maximize time spent with my eyes closed, so my computer time will be extremely limited through the end of this month.
His own character being light, profligate, and perfidious, John easily attached to his person and faction, not only all who had reason to dread the resentment of Richard for criminal proceedings during his absence, but also the numerous class of “lawless resolutes,” whom the crusades had turned back on their country, accomplished in the vices of the East, impoverished in substance, and hardened in character, and who placed their hopes of harvest in civil commotion. To these causes of public distress and apprehension, must be added, the multitude of outlaws, who, driven to despair by the oppression of the feudal nobility, and the severe exercise of the forest laws, banded together in large gangs, and, keeping possession of the forests and the wastes, set at defiance the justice and magistracy of the country. The nobles themselves, each fortified within his own castle, and playing the petty sovereign over his own dominions, were the leaders of bands scarce less lawless and oppressive than those of the avowed depredators. To maintain these retainers, and to support the extravagance and magnificence which their pride induced them to affect, the nobility borrowed sums of money from the Jews at the most usurious interest, which gnawed into their estates like consuming cankers, scarce to be cured unless when circumstances gave them an opportunity of getting free, by exercising upon their creditors some act of unprincipled violence.
The crouds of Coaches and Chairs for that Reason is not so great; Men as well as Women carry Umbrellas in their Hands, which they extend in case of Rain or two much Sun; and a Man with an Umbrella not taking up more than 3 foot square or 9 square feet of the Street, when if in a Coach he would take up 240 square feet, you can easily conceive that tho' the Streets here are narrower they may be much less encumber'd. They are extreamly well pav'd, and the Stones being generally Cubes, when worn on one Side may be turn'd and become new.
Letter to Polly Stevenson, Paris, Sep 1767. Franklin Papers 14:250
I've long had the habit of emailing people I find on the Web to notify them of typos, or dead webpages, but only recently have I realized:
how little time and energy companies typically devote to writing documentation (relative to resources spent on the systems being documented)
how many projects have software docs and similar written resources in public version control repos
how easy it is to fix written documents when they're hosted on version control platforms like GitHub
I hope to continue helping out with FOSS projects' technical-writing needs, especially when there's an opportunity to help Chinese-speaking teams translate material into native English.
Ubasute (姥捨て, "abandoning an old woman", also called obasute and sometimes oyasute 親捨て "abandoning a parent") is the rare, old[1] practice of senicide in Japan, whereby an infirm or elderly relative was carried to a mountain, or some other remote, desolate place, and left there to die.[2] According to the Kodansha Illustrated Encyclopedia of Japan, ubasute "is the subject of legend, but… does not seem ever to have been a common custom".[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubasute
Ha. I notice that "姥捨て" begins with kanji whch, when read in Mandarin, are homophonous to 老舍. The meaning is not similar in the first character ("lao" in the author's name means "forever, always, eternally") but it could be (as "lao" can, in sufficiently compressed contexts, directly indicate an old person). As for the second character, 捨, it's a variant of 舍; they have the same meaning of "giving up, relinquishing".
Software, tools, and services that I use. Search keyword: "uses this."
writing and editing: GNU Emacs Neovim
operating system: macOS (laptop); Debian (server - but I'm not picky about my GNU/Linux)
memory training: Anki (with several extensions, including AnkiConnect for programmatic interaction, and Low Key Anki to present just two choices on each review and adjust easing factors, and True Retention by Card Maturity to ensure my reviews are having an effect.)
But, if you take 1/3rd from 12 (= 4) and add it to 12, you get 16, which can't evenly divide into 3rds (but can into 4ths.) If you take 1/4th of 12 (= 3) and add it to 12, you get 15, which can't evenly divide into 4ths (but can into 3rds.)
Does this point at anything interesting, or am I just a dingus?
I quit reading this after ~100 pages, because I felt it could be summed up as "The Bonfire of the Vanities, but in Atlanta." I'd rather read something totally new than something which feels like a retread. I don't care if that's actually an unfair characterization; with so many other things to read, this didn't make the cut.
