Muttering into the void.
So I’m re-reading the moderately popular The Name of the Wind now that its sequel The Wise Man’s Fear is out. My opinion is pretty much the same as the last time I read it: it’s entertaining, but the main character is a wee bit too ubercompetent.
I’m just jealous because he supposedly learned a language in a day and a half.
This story pretty much epitomizes the end result of statism. When you allow, and then expect, the government to take care of you, the government will inevitably criminalize taking care of yourself (emphasis mine):
David N. Cox says he was merely exercising his right to petition the government, but a state Department of Transportation official has raised allegations that Cox committed a misdemeanor: practicing engineering without a license.
David N. Cox and his North Raleigh neighbors are lobbying city and state officials to add traffic signals at two intersections as part of a planned widening of Falls of Neuse Road.
After an engineering consultant hired by the city said that the signals were not needed, Cox and the North Raleigh Coalition of Homeowners’ Associations responded with a sophisticated analysis of their own.
…
Cox has not been accused of claiming that he is an engineer. But [chief traffic engineer] Lacy says he filed the complaint because the report “appears to be engineering-level work” by someone who is not licensed as a professional engineer.
We’re from the government, and we know better than you.
Hopefully this will be the final nail in the coffin of the anti-vaxxers. Turns out that the original study linking vaccinations to autism was not merely shoddy or erroneous, but out and out fraud:
An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.
“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”
The question most often asked when people find out you’ve dabbled in linguistics is “How many languages do you speak?” Well, I’ve studied quite a few languages, but there are only a couple I’d be comfortable jumping in blind right now.
James McGrath has started a meme that widens the net a bit:
List every language that [you] have made some sort of concerted effort to learn, even if [you] didn’t get beyond the first lesson or so, or even if [you] are still learning it. No need to specify the degree of fluency in the blog post – if readers are curious how much Swahili you know, they can ask.
Here’s my list, in no order whatsoever: