Interesting stuff #4

Another collection of interesting stuff I’ve learned on the Internet – in this case since about mid September. The previous installment is here.

1. A brief overview of linguistic typology. I’ve known most of this stuff for a long time, but this article filled in a few gaps in my knowledge.
2. Geoff Pullum on the grammar of “once“.
3. Pompeii myth busting.
4. I don’t like beer. Nevertheless, I was interested to read this.
5. News about fossils improves our understanding of very early animal life, very early land life, and where fish fingers come from. Meanwhile, geological discoveries reveal the world’s oldest rocks.
6. I intend to check out ChaosPro sometime. I could use a more modern fractal generation program, and the hook for me is compatibility with FractInt.
7. Some thoughts about milestones in the evolution of humanity.
8. Face recognition in crows.
9. It seems that agriculture has been around longer than we thought. (I don’t understand half the technical genetic stuff, but I got the link here.)
10. In astronomy, gravity from beyond the cosmic horizon. And, closer to home, snow on Mars.

In offline news, I recently visited a bookshop and bought a copy of the 150th anniversary illustrated edition of the first edition Origin of Species. I’ve read bits online, but now I can read it in bed. (If I had an audio edition I could close my eyes, but that might take some compression.)

Illustrating Children’s Picture Books

Every Wednesday evening in September, I went to a class on “Illustrating Children’s Picture Books” at the WEA. This is the fifth WEA course I’ve completed, the others so far being “Wonders of Ancient Egypt“, “Magic For Beginners“, “Singing For Beginners“, and “Great World Thinkers and their Great Ideas“. I won’t be doing any more in the foreseeable future.

There are all sorts of reasons for choosing a particular WEA course. For example, I chose the Singing one because people tell me that I’m a good singer, so I was interested to see what I could learn from professional input. By contrast, I chose the Illustrating course because I have no experience in that area at all, and wanted to try something new.

Interesting stuff #3

Here are some of the most interesting things I’ve learned on the Internet since 21 August. My provisional nominations for the next installment of this series can be previewed here.

1. I remember being fascinated by power series in mathematics class at university. If you know everything about an infinitesimal segment of a function, then using power series you can make the entire function magically materialise, just like resurrecting a vampire from a speck of dust. Now Matt Springer of Built On Facts has recently linked to an old post of his about an unusual function where things aren’t that straightforward.

Past tense in English verbs

This is the second installment in my series about how English verbs are described in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. I’ll assume you’ve already read the first installment, in which I overviewed the forms of lexical verbs. Soon I will explain how the auxiliary verbs fit into the picture, but first I need to lay some groundwork by describing how the English language uses the past tense.

There may be errors herein, but I will correct any that I become aware of as soon as possible.

Coming to the Skeptics’ Convention

I have now registered for the fast-approaching Australian Skeptics national convention, so there’s no stopping me from coming. The next step is to finalise my accommodation arrangements, which I intend to do very soon.

Ever since the convention was officially announced, I have been writing extra skepticism-related articles in this blog. The articles that I’ve written especially for the lead-up to the convention (of which the most recent is here) have mostly been about religion. This is because religion is the one topic for which I have a somewhat different perspective from the typical member of the Australian Skeptics, having been both a believer and a non-believer in my time, and so it is the one topic I can write about without simply preaching to the converted (if you’ll forgive the incongruity of the expression). God, if he existed, would know that I can think of plenty of other things to say on the subject, but I promised that the next article in my series would be non-religious.

Incidentally, it so happens that the Skeptics’ Convention marks, almost exactly, the second anniversary of this blog’s existence. Hmm. Wonder if I can persuade Podblack to bring a cake…

Once more to the stars

This may well be the final in my series of posts utilising the planetarium software Starstrider, which is to say I don’t currently have any ideas for another sequel. To begin, here is a summary of the series so far:

• I began the series by speculating about aliens from nearby planetary systems inventing their own version of astrology, and wondering what constellation our Sun might belong to from their perspective.
• In the second installment I introduced the reader to a particular star that I visited through the Starstrider software and from which I find the night sky particularly pleasing, what with the Pleiades being aligned against the Milky Way and all.
• The third installment described the customisations I have made to my copy of the Starstrider software (many of which I had not made when I wrote the earlier installments).

This is the fourth installment, and in it I will take the reader back to my own adopted star, for one more look at its night sky. I have occasionally referred to this star as Heofonsteorra (Anglo-Saxon for “Heaven star” or “Heaven’s star”), and I will use that name for it in this post. See the second installment for its true designation.