We live in a country where billionaires make the decision to pay their workers less than minimum wage & then when they donate the most infinitesimal amount of their relative wealth to a decent cause they get buildings named after them & endlessly praised.
It’s all so backwards.
— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) June 18, 2018
When bilingualism isn’t obviously valuable, you have to decide what you think of the language.
A nice essay that focuses on the personal side of raising bilingual children. In my experience needing to have a reason to speak a language is very important. Often around the age of three (or the beginning of daycare and/or school) children who realize they don’t have to speak a language will give it up (and often flatly refuse) as they begin to become more broadly socialized. It definitely helps if they’ve got a peer group who primarily speaks the language as well.
I quite liked the parts about a language “filling one up” or the ways in which language was implicated with attention. These are intriguing observations.
It’s been a while since I’ve actively read Om Malik‘s blog, but I noticed that he’s using graphical indicators that add some semantic detail about what each post is. It’s a design element I’ve only seen lately out of the IndieWeb community with plugins like the Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress or done manually with emoji in post titles the way Aaron Davis has done relatively religiously, particularly on his “Collect” site.
Om Malik is using some graphical indicators to give quick additional semantic meaning to what he’s posting.
I highly suspect that he’s using the Post Formats functionality from WordPress core to do some of this using a custom theme. Sadly it’s generally fallen out of fashion and one doesn’t see it very often any more. I suspect that it’s because WordPress didn’t take the functionality to its logical conclusion in the same way that the Post Kinds Plugin does.
The way Aaron Davis uses emoji in his posts helps to provide additional context about what is being written about to indicate what is going on in a link before it’s clicked.
I think some of my first experience with its resurgence was as helpful UI I saw suggested by Tantek Çelik on the Read page of the IndieWeb wiki. I’ve been doing it a lot myself, primarily for posts that I syndicate out to micro.blog, where it’s become a discovery function using so-called tagmoji (see books, for example), or Twitter (reads, bookmarks, watches, listens, likes). In those places, they particularly allow me to add a lot more semantic meaning to short notes/microblog posts than others do.
I do wish that having emoji for read posts was more common in Twitter to indicate that people actually bothered to read those articles they’re sharing to Twitter, the extra context would be incredibly useful. I generally suspect that article links people are sharing have more of a bookmark sentiment based on their click-bait headlines. Perhaps this is why I like Reading.am so much for finding content — it’s material people have actually bothered to read before they shared it out. Twitter adding some additional semantic tidbits like these would make it much more valuable in my mind.
It doesn’t appear that Om has taken this functionality that far himself though (at least on Twitter). Perhaps if WordPress made it easier to syndicate out content to Twitter with this sort of data attached it would help things take off?
University of Florida mathematician Kevin Knudson and I are excited to announce our new math podcast: My Favorite Theorem. In each episode, logically enough, we invite a mathematician on to tell us about their favorite theorem. Because the best things in life are better together, we also ask our guests to pair their theorem with, well, anything: wine, beer, coffee, tea, ice cream flavors, cheese, favorite pieces of music, you name it. We hope you’ll enjoy learning the perfect pairings for some beautiful pieces of math.
We’re very excited about the podcast and hope you will listen here, on the site’s page, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will be published approximately every three weeks. We have a great lineup of guests so far and think you’ll enjoy hearing from mathematicians from different mathematical areas, geographic locations, and mathematical careers.
Directed by Lawrence Trilling. With Billy Bob Thornton, William Hurt, Maria Bello, Olivia Thirlby. A burned-out attorney gets a second chance for redemption when he agrees to pursue a wrongful death lawsuit against the biggest client of his former law firm.
Clint Smith on Twitter (Twitter)
Devon Zuegel