I wrote down some thoughts to send to a friend later, realized I had written something meaningful to me, added a title. Now it's a poem!

Ah, this is the issue I try to describe when well-meaning relatives say things like, “Well, you are bilingual, so you can always find a job as a translator.” But, no! I would be a terrible translator. When I speak in one language, I am thinking in that language -- the gnomes that place words onto the conveyor belt that takes them out of my mouth are rummaging in the dusty “Russian” filing cabinets, doing their best. If a gnome from the Russian filing cabinet department gets suddenly asked to produce an English word, they can’t just say, “Ah, yes, let me look up that word in Russian, and here it is cross-referenced via our modern, translator-trained system to the appropriate English version, here you go.” Instead they have to, startled, traipse down into some foggy, primordial basement where concepts float around, grasp a concept, bring it up via an entirely different staircase to the English words filing cabinet department and ask, “What is this one? Please put this one on the conveyor belt for me,” then have those gnomes look it up. And then it’s a long walk home -- sometimes they get stuck. It’s a very inelegant system. This idea of meaning existing without words blew my mind when I first read Magritte’s ideas behind “The Treachery of Images.” What is the difference between a pipe, a drawing of a pipe, the letters that spell out the word pipe -- and how in the world do we so confidently connect all of these things to the concept of a pipe? It made me want to run up to people and shake them and demand to know how everyone could just keep calmly walking around like nothing is happening, when this idea exists.

One uncanny aspect of translating is when I am grappling with a sentence that would sound particularly wrong if I tried to preserve any part of the original structure or idioms, because nothing about it matches the way one would phrase such an idea in my language, so what I need to do is mentally divorce the sentence from its syntax and vocabulary, to try and find how my language would give form to the same concepts. It always makes me wonder, what am I working with here? What is left when you remove the grammar and specific word choices from a sentence? I don’t know, a shapeless mental porridge of pure meaning, a nebulous feeling of what another brain has tried to express. I find it amazing that your mind knows just what to do with something so unfathomable—that it’s just like “right, right, give me a minute” as it distillates meaning out of words like it’s nothing then lassoes it down from the platonic realm of forms to give it a completely new shape. What is ‘meaning’ and how does it exist in your mind in this liminal moment after you’ve extracted it from a foreign language but haven’t yet found words in your own language that can embody it? I don’t know.

And there are also languages that divide nouns into much more specific genders. The African language Supyire from Mali has five genders: humans, big things, small things, collectives, and liquids. Bantu languages such as Swahili have up to ten genders, and the Australian language Ngan’gityemerri is said to have fifteen different genders, which include, among others, masculine human, feminine human, canines, non-canine animals, vegetables, drinks, and two different genders for spears (depending on size and material).

Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass

This reminds me of Borges’s taxonomy—“Animals are divided into a) those that belong to the Emperor, b) embalmed ones, c) those that are trained, d) suckling pigs, e) mermaids, f) fabulous ones, g) stray dogs, h) those that are included in this classification, i) those that tremble as if they were mad, j) innumerable ones, k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, l) others, m) those that have just broken a flower vase, n) those that resemble flies from a distance.”

(via exhaled-spirals)

Prepared to give up all my beliefs just to understand every person I meet. Prepared to give up language just to really understand. 

sometimes people try to tell me that scientists are paragons of rationality and I have to break it to them that I have yet to work in a lab that didn’t have at least one weird secret shrine in it

The San Francisco Examiner, California, February 25, 1935

y’all ever have a mental health day so weird that your brain feels like the skittish half-wild horse in a horse girl movie and you have to be the tenacious but tender 12 year old girl who patiently earns its trust

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971), dir. Shūji Terayama

I’ve been away but the fox/seagull gryphon crossed my dash and this morning I made some trash gryphons.

the rampage continues

let's open up this pit

this is really what supervising kids is like

TL;DR on the latest round of Wikileaks:

Literally nothing you do is safe from the CIA. There are numerous full-on spyware suites developed by them, mostly for iOS and Windows, but also targeting Android, Linux, OS X, and Solaris. Apps thought to be secure (Telegram with encryption enabled, WhatsApp, Signal) were compromised as well, as were a host of other devices (ie smart TVs).

THIS DOES NOT PERTAIN ONLY TO AMERICANS.

If you live in a Shengen area country, your country likely hosts several CIA backed cyberwar experts. They came in via the US consulate in Frankfurt. If you don’t, you likely do as well, but I can’t find anything without sifting through the files myself.

“I have nothing to hide, why does this matter?”: Because there are now multiple thousand “zero hour”- ie “developers get zero hours to fix”- vulnerabilities floating around that no one had any idea existed. The vulnerabilities themselves weren’t leaked, but it’s the fact that someone knew about these and didn’t say.

I hate to make this kinda clickbait-y thing, but this is honest to God one of the most important leaks in history. Our response to this is pretty much going to be life or death for privacy in the developed world. Be loud about this, be annoying about this, and do not shut up about this. Please reblog this and other posts relating to it.