Reading A Textbook For Class And I’m Going Insane. Why Is This Just Poetry. What. This Is A STEM Class

How Ponify ruined my life

Possibly the most horrifying thing that has ever happened to me occurred today. So I’m in a creative writing class at university right now and we had to print out twenty-five copies of our first, one page assignment to distribute to the class. I had to print mine at the computer lab as I don’t have a printer, but here are the three crucial facts that made this the worst mistake of my life.

1. Sometimes, when you log into Google on Chrome, it activates all of your extensions, even ones you’ve deactivated.

2. In high school, my friends and I got really into Ponify (a words replacing chrome extension) and switched the preferences so we could read political articles and have congress get into a “rousing snow ball fight” and the like.

3. Ponify reverted to its original My Little Pony lingo when opened on a new computer’s chrome.

So when I distributed my twenty-five copies of this I noticed the word “everypony”, my heart seized up and dropped into my stomach, and with my imminent death approaching, I began furiously correcting all twenty-five of them. My teacher, confusedly, agreed to let me correct them as I was too infuriated and ashamed to say my mistake aloud. 

I just realized, however, that the line “as she watched the binding fall away in her hand” was changed to “as she watched the binding fall away in her hoof”. 

And I just had to send this email:

And basically I’m ready for death how was your day

your honor in my defense i’m not reading all that shit

i love the strange reality of being a human person with a human brain. one time someone said something to me in a foreign language (japanese, which i do not speak) and i automatically responded in a different foreign language (spanish, which i do not speak well) and then we both said “what?” in english, an experience made more surreal by the fact that everyone around us was speaking loudly in canadian french (as this occurred in Quebec)

animals that are poisonous but not venomous are so funny they’re like “you can eat me and I can’t stop you. just know we’re both going to die”

Progress doesn't happen over night, but sometimes if you flip your mindset enough at once it can.

An example:

What if, tomorrow morning, you woke up bright and early. You did skincare and hair care. You made yourself a smoothie, did 20 minutes of yoga, cleaned your house, went to the gym, stretched, made a delicious lunch to take to work, showered, went to work, came home and made a nutritious dinner. Then, you prepped a salad for tomorrow's lunch, slurped downs protein shake, and finished up your laundry. And you soaked your sore feet in Epsom salts and oils and rose petals and you watched your favorite show with a glass of whatever suits you.

Sometimes all it takes, truthfully, is ONE day of saying "I'm doing it" and you actually do it. You actually stick to your lists and your goals and you feel great. And then the next day you feel so great you do it again.

Then the weekend comes, and you look at your to do list going "oh God what didn't I do" and your list was clear. So you go out for coffee with your friends and sit at the park with a book in hand and get excited for tomorrow. Because now you have plans.

Make tomorrow that day.

かぐや姫の物語 (2013)

jackson wang is so fucking cool like he's my language goal he speaks cantonese mandarin korean japanese and english like what the fuck AND hes hot

To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

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