RB for a bigger sample size please!

my coffin shaped locket is the perfect size to fit one singular ibuprofen

Reminder to all my fellow Americans and my Canadian homies that the northern lights will be visible tonight across most of the continent. If you're in the green zone go outside tonight

I’m really looking forward to the day at work when the CEO comes online and says, “Congrats, that was everything we were gonna do. We’ve done all the work. That’s all the stuff we’ve planned to do. The products are all really good right now and we shouldn’t change them anymore. It’s just cashing checks from here on out.” And we all go outside and play in the river.

I saw this on quora and thought it was cool and wanted to share it on here.  Its a long read but crazy.  Its from Erik Painter

They did try. And they did capture Navajo men. However, they were unsuccessful in using them to decipher the code. The reason was simple. The Navajo Code was a code that used Navajo. It was not spoken Navajo. To a Navajo speaker, who had not learned the code, a Navajo Code talker sending a message sounds like a string of unconnected Navajo words with no grammar. It was incomprehensible. So, when the Japanese captured a Navajo man named Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines, he could not really help them even though they tortured him. It was nonsense to him.

The Navajo Code had to be learned and memorized. It was designed to transmit a word by word or letter by letter exact English message. They did not just chat in Navajo. That could have been understood by a Navajo speaker, but more importantly translation is never, ever exact. It would not transmit precise messages. There were about 400 words in the Code.

The first 31 Navajo Marines created the Code with the help of one non-Navajo speaker officer who knew cryptography. The first part of the Code was made to transmit English letters. For each English letter there were three (or sometimes just two) English words that started with that letter and then they were translated into Navajo words. In this way English words could be spelled out with a substitution code. The alternate words were randomly switched around. So, for English B there were the Navajo words for Badger, Bear and Barrel. In Navajo that is: nahashchʼidí, shash, and tóshjeeh. Or the letter A was Red Ant, Axe, or Apple. In Navajo that is: wóláchííʼ, tsénił , or bilasáana. The English letter D was: bįįh=deer, and łééchąąʼí =dog, and chʼįįdii= bad spiritual substance (devil).

For the letter substitution part of the Code the word “bad” could be spelled out a number of ways. To a regular Navajo speaker it would sound like: “Bear, Apple, Dog”. Or other times it could be “ Barrel, Red Ant, Bad Spirit (devil)”. Other times it could be “Badger, Axe, Deer”. As you can see, for just this short English word, “bad” there are many possibilities and to the combination of words used. To a Navajo speaker, all versions are nonsense. It gets worse for a Navajo speaker because normal Navajo conjugates in complex ways (ways an English or Japanese speaker would never dream of). These lists of words have no indicators of how they are connected. It is utterly non-grammatical.

Then to speed it up, and make it even harder to break, they substituted Navajo words for common military words that were often used in short military messages. None were just translations. A few you could figure out. For example, a Lieutenant was “one silver bar” in Navajo. A Major was “Gold Oak Leaf” n Navajo. Other things were less obvious like a Battleship was the word for Whale in Navajo. A Mine Sweeper was the Navajo word for Beaver.

A note here as it seems hard for some people to get this. Navajo is a modern and living language. There are, and were, perfectly useful Navajo words for submarines and battleships and tanks. They did not “make up words because they had no words for modern things”. This is an incorrect story that gets around in the media. There had been Navajo in the military before WWII. The Navajo language is different and perhaps more flexible than English. It is easy to generate new words. They borrow very few words and have words for any modern thing you can imagine. The words for telephone, or train, or nuclear power are all made from Navajo stem roots.

Because the Navajo Marines had memorized the Code there was no code book to capture. There was no machine to capture either. They could transmit it over open radio waves. They could decode it in a few minutes as opposed to the 30 minutes to two hours that other code systems at the time took. And, no Navajo speaker who had not learned the Code could make any sense out of it.

The Japanese had no published texts on Navajo. There was no internationally available description of the language. The Germans had not studied it at the time. The Japanese did suspect it was Navajo. Linguists thought it was in the Athabaskan language family. That would be pretty clear to a linguist. And Navajo had the biggest group of speakers of any Athabaskan language. That is why they tortured Joe Kieyoomia. But, he could not make sense of it. It was just a list of words with no grammar and no meaning.

For Japanese, even writing the language down from the radio broadcasts would be very hard. It has lots of sounds that are not in Japanese or in English. It is hard to tell where some words end or start because the glottal stop is a common consonant. Frequency analysis would have been hard because they did not use a single word for each letter. And some words stood for words instead of for a letter. The task of breaking it was very hard.

Here is an example of a coded message:

béésh łigai naaki joogii gini dibé tsénił áchį́į́h bee ąą ńdítį́hí joogi béésh łóó’ dóó łóóʼtsoh

When translated directly from Navajo into English it is:

“SILVER TWO BLUE JAY CHICKEN HAWK SHEEP AXE NOSE KEY BLUE JAY IRON FISH AND WHALE. “

You can see why a Navajo who did not know the Code would not be able to do much with that. The message above means: “CAPTAIN, THE DIVE BOMBER SANK THE SUBMARINE AND BATTLESHIP.”

“Two silver bars” =captain. Blue jay= the. Chicken hawk= dive bomber. Iron fish = sub. Whale= battleship. “Sheep, Axe Nose Key”=sank. The only normal use of a Navajo word is the word for “and” which is “dóó ”. For the same message the word “sank” would be spelled out another way on a different day. For example, it could be: “snake, apple, needle, kettle”.

Here, below on the video, is a verbal example of how the code sounded. The code sent below sounded to a Navajo speaker who did not know the Code like this: “sheep eyes nose deer destroy tea mouse turkey onion sick horse 362 bear”. To a trained Code Talker, he would write down: “Send demolition team to hill 362 B”. The Navajo Marine Coder Talker then would give it to someone to take the message to the proper person. It only takes a minute or so to code and decode.

when the story is just not working, but you keep writing anyway

REBLOG if you are old enough to remember what a VCR is.

So recently I went camping with my sister and I had a Linguistic expirience.

We were in Yellowstone being excited about geothermal features and generally enjoying ourselves becuae turns out Late September is the best time to hit up the Colder national parks- the only other people there was a family with matching windbreakers speaking german with Swiss accents and the Park Ranger patrolling around to make sure we weren’t planning on skinny dipping or the other bonehaded things tourists do.

As we’re on the way back to the car we see a woman in Bright Red Pants in the parking lot looking both lost and near tears.  She sees us and practically sprints over to ask us

“Parlez-vous français?”

Now, my sister is fluent in spanish, ok at pourtugese and italian and even has a good chunk of Japanese under her belt.  “yo hablo español!”  She offers.  Then offers the other three languages.  Madame Red pants shakes her head at all of them.

I have a dubious grasp of English, but I know enough German to navigate a major metropolitan area if everyone is real patient and repeats things three times for me. “Sprechen Sie Deustch?” I try.

Madame Red Pants (I can see her husband in the car looking equally bewildered. I cannot see the color of his pants. I assume they are equally Rhodacious.) looks crestfallen but tries anyway.  She takes out the park map and indicates the Norris Junction, while speaking French faster than I understand English, but it’s apparent she doesn’t know where she is currently, and needs to get to Norris Junction.

We know where she is and how to get to Norris but can’t convey this via pointing at the map and waving our arms. I feel genuinely bad, and she looks near tears with frustration. 

Then I remember. The matching Swiss Family.

I jog back into the geyser complex and find them excitedly taking pictures of a chipmunk while the Ranger watches them suspiciously from behind a pine tree.  

“Sprechen Sie Französisch?” I ask, and they collectively turn towards me, freeing the chipmunk from thier gaze as it sprints off into the underbrush.

“Ja, bitte.” Says thier Matriarch and leader.

“Eine Frau is Veeeeerlos- no, Verloren! Kann Sie- aw crap what’s the word? Translate?”

“Oh, Ja!” Frau Windbreaker speaks Idiot Tourist too, apparently.  The Swiss collective follows me back to the parking lot and and Frau Windbreaker and Madame Red Pants have a very animated conversation in French that I understand exactly none of.  My sister, feeling left out, offers various memebers of the Swiss Collective trail mix.  some of them even take it. Frau Windbreaker turns to me.

“Wo ist Norris?” She asks, looking mildly embarassed.

I end up having to convey the directions to Norris in German, which Frau Windbreaker translates to French, hindered slightly by the fact that neither of these women know how to read a map, but eventually Madame Red Pants comprehends, thanks us profusely, gets in her car, and manages to turn the correct direction out of the parking lot.  Frau Windbreaker and I shake hands and all of us part ways with the feeling of a job well done.

Before my sister and I can get in the car, the Ranger appraoches us.

“Thanks for that. I’ve felt bad all summer that all I’ve been able to do is turn on google translate for people.”  he said, shyly.

At that moment my sister and I both realized that Madme Red Pants had both a GPS in her car and an Android phone in her hand.

Hopefully the next person to help her was more technologically literate or generally observant than we are.

it makes me physically ill thinking about what we could've had *ugly crying*

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

Eurovision is trending so just a reminder to everyone that the reason Palestinian flags are banned is because Palestine is not contending, and not because the event hates Palestinians. you know what other flags you can't wave at the event? USA, Canada, Japan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Jordan, Brazil, Mexico, and every other country that isn't competing.

you can argue all you want about Israel competing, but "banning Palestinian flags" is not a deliberate attack to show allyship with Israel.

“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”

— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“ (via gothhabiba)

Yes.

“By the usual measures, Biden should be cruising to reëlection. Violent crime has dropped to nearly a fifty-year low, unemployment is below four per cent, and in January the S. & P. 500 and the Dow hit record highs. More Americans than ever have health insurance, and the country is producing more energy than at any previous moment in its history. His opponent, who is facing ninety-one criminal counts, has suggested that if he is elected he will fire as many as fifty thousand civil servants and replace them with loyalists, deputize the National Guard as a mass-deportation force, and root out what he calls “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.””

— Joe Biden’s Last Campaign

What's Dracula daily?

Dracula Daily became Tumblr's favorite book club during the pandemic. If you're unfamiliar with how the original novel is structured, it is an epistolary novel, meaning it's made up of documents, letters, diary entries, and telegrams all of which have a date on them.

Dracula Daily takes those dates and sends out the passages from the book on the dates they happen. So some days, you'll get a lovely email from your good friend Johnathan Harker about the hearty chicken dish he's enjoying on his travels, and the next email might be from Mina detailing a letter from her good friend Lucy and all her would-be suitors vying for her and in marriage.

It's a fun way to digest the novel.

There's also the podcast version hosted by @re-dracula, which is a real blast. You haven't lived until you've heard a vampire getting hit in the head with a shovel, complete with sound effects.

vampirism poses the question "what if there was a fundamental, horrible, unending well of want in your soul that, if truly satisfied, would lead to great pain for all those you hold closest and, in turn, their absolute and total revilement of you?" and naturally as a person with no problems I don't relate to this in any way at all.

The most popular browsers in different countries in 2012 and 2022.

by @theworldmaps_