Month: July 2014

GoT Languages

this is pretty fascinating to think how much effort is being put into this. not just to avoid sounding like dumb gibberish, but to actually have different dialects of the same artificial language for different cities.

Peterson created the grammar and vocabulary for all of the languages in HBO’s Game Of Thrones, using material from George R.R. Martin’s books and filling in the substantial gaps on his own. The A.V. Club sat down with Peterson to ask him about the process of creating Dothraki and Valyrian, as well as Grey Worm’s particularly wonderful Low Valyrian accent

New Monsanto vegetables

and you can bet your ass that scientific illiterates will find something to complain about this.

So it’s not particularly surprising that the company is introducing novel strains of familiar food crops, invented at Monsanto and endowed by their creators with powers and abilities far beyond what you usually see in the produce section. The lettuce is sweeter and crunchier than romaine and has the stay-fresh quality of iceberg. The peppers come in miniature, single-serving sizes to reduce leftovers. The broccoli has 3x the usual amount of glucoraphanin, a compound that helps boost antioxidant levels.

Model home renters

real estate is such a dumb industry. This is straight out of Arrested Development

All surfaces must be regularly cleaned; weeds eradicated, car oil spots removed. Clothes in closets are to be organized by color, and contestable items — heavily religious books, personal photos — must be removed or neutralized. Every item has a rule, and everything must be exact, the rotation of pillows, the fold of towels, the positioning of toothbrushes. Even the stacks of novels casually left on the bookshelf are placed and angled with pinpoint detail.

Gain of Function Research

i’m not one for moral panics, but this pathogen research is troubling:

The scientific benefit of making viruses more pathogenic is debatable: research tends to use old strains (may not be applicable to our current situation), there is a bias towards more spectacular and lethal virulence because it gets published and funded, there is no reason to think evolution will move in the same way (it is highly contingent, and hence what is learned may not help make vaccines or drugs), and the key experiment (doing it with humans) is unethical, and hence unfalsifiable. The ethics is also really problematic, since the rate of lab releases is not negligible and a flu outbreak can easily kill people – it has a skew distribution with a heavy tail.