How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand
The targeted offenses: if you are stolen, call the police at once. please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can. deformed man lavatory. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They’re the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means “handicapped bathroom.”)
But what if these sentences aren’t really bad English? What if they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us?
What We’ll Miss About Bill Gates — a Very Long Good-Bye
June 17, 2008
What We’ll Miss About Bill Gates — a Very Long Good-Bye
Bill Gates, we’ll miss you. Not just because you’re the ultimate geek-villain-pioneer-entrepreneur-monopolist. But because you’ve always been there for us. To love. To hate. To envy. To pick on. So this month, your last as a full-time Microsoft employee, we realized it was only right and proper to look back on your storied career. (Or we just love your mug shot from the Albuquerque arrest.)
Gallery: The World’s Most Impressive Subways
June 2, 2008
Gallery: The World’s Most Impressive Subways
Subways are as much a part of big-city living as high-rises and gridlock, and they get about as much love. For many people, subways are crowded, noisy places only marginally better than being stuck in traffic — and most of them are. But the best of them are not only efficient, they reflect the character of the cities they serve and the people they carry.
Researchers Puzzled by Swedish Chlamydia Mystery
June 2, 2008
Researchers Puzzled by Swedish Chlamydia Mystery | Wired Science from Wired.com
Two years ago, the diagnosed rate of chlamydia in Sweden plummeted 25 percent.
That, in and of itself, was puzzling as there had been public health interventions or sudden changes in the sexual mores of the Swedish populace.
Researchers soon identified a new strain of the bacteria, which was missing the key snippet of DNA that diagnostic tests from Roche and Abbott used to detectChlamydia trachomatis. Effectively invisible to screening methods, the new strain, dubbed nv, was selected for in what researchers called diagnostics driven selective pressure. By the time the researchers figured it out and started using new tests in late 2006, the new strain was responsible for up to 40 percent of Swedish chlamydia infections.
And so the problem was thought to be solved.
Why Are Senior Female Scientists So Heavily Outnumbered by Men? | Wired Science from Wired.com
There is some funny math in the world of academic science.
Take my graduate school for example: My class was made up of eight people — seven women and one man, or 7 to 1. He was Snow White and we were the seven dwarves — each with a remarkably appropriate nickname. I was Grumpy, should you be curious to know.
Snow White and at least four of the dwarves have continued on to postdoctoral research jobs. That is a 4 to 3 ratio of women who went on to do a post-doc to those that chose alternate career paths.
Everything is adding up so far, right? Lots of women are around. Lots of science is being done. All is well.
The next set of numbers is slightly puzzling, however. That is the ratio of female to male professors in our department, at a well-respected academic institution, is 48 to 7 men to women.
Interesting reversal, isn’t it? We go from 7 to 1 in grad school to roughly 1 to 7 in professorships.
Perhaps women are just not interested? Or as this The Economist article points out, women have a greater comparative advantage in other fields, such as the humanities and social sciences, and excel in areas such as law.
Japanese Websites make Suicide a Breeze | Wired Science from Wired.com
Japan is facing an alarming new trend: Websites that explain simple ways to commit suicide with household chemicals have led to several deaths and emergency room nightmares.
By mixing toilet cleaner with pesticide, anyone can make a cloud of deadly hydrogen sulfide gas. If the concentration is too low, it won’t work, so at least one set of instructions includes a web app that can calculate the perfect amount of each ingredient.
Hydrogen sulfide can stick to the metal ions which sit at the core of many important enzymes in our bodies. In small amounts, it can put animals into a state of suspended animation.
That trick may work because H2S simultaneously suffocates the critters and halts the natural dying process: It gums up the proteins that would ordinarily go haywire and destroy their cells when they are deprived of oxygen.
Unfortunately, in large doses, inhaling the gas is a one-way ticket to eternity.
