Interesting Links for 23-05-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Bakhmut before-and-after: Satellite images of the city destroyed in the Russia-Ukraine war

(tags:ukraine cities war russia OhForFucksSake )

2. Post-Brexit boom in UK companies setting up in Germany

(tags:uk europe trade OhForFucksSake )

3. Damning Video Proves Greece Abandons Migrants at Sea

(tags:greece migration asylum OhForFucksSake )

4. Weapons expert cut from government event because he's against other government policies

(tags:uk censorship government OhForFucksSake )

5. Royal Navy divers help autonomous underwater vehicles clear the Baltic Sea of unexploded ordnance

(tags:navy weaponry europe drone )

6. How silverback gorillas solved an argument with cold air

(tags:gorillas society argument )

7. AI writers and seawater gold extraction have something in common

(tags:gold sea ai writing money )

8. Turning cats into kittens

(tags:cats cute )

9. Brain signals can predict how much pain a person is in

(tags:pain nerves )

10. Number of Scottish people who can speak some Gaelic doubles from 15% to 30%

(tags:Scotland language Gaelic )

Comments

[cmcmck]

3. The Scot has no Gaelic being from the middle, but the irony is that given where we now live, we are both picking up a few words of Welsh as there's so much bilingual labelling (and bilingual place names) here in the borders.

[andrewducker]

I'm curious how much more common Gaelic will get, and whether it will end up being a common second language in a generation or two.

[danieldwilliam]

I think it's a bit of fad to be honest. I doubt many of those new Gaelic speakers use it much. How many of them are going to a pub and ordering a pint in Gaelic? Not many I reckon.

[cmcmck]

Whereas Welsh is a used and growing language.

[danieldwilliam]

I get the impriession that usage of Welsh is growing in areas that traditionally spoke Welsh. So if you learn to speak Welsh you are already in a community where, if you started speaking Welsh in the shops or the pub or the office, there's a good chance you will find someone who is fluent in it.

Gaelic is being taught in schools in Edinburgh, which I don't think has ever spoken Gaelic. It's part of Northumbria more than it's part of the Gaelicophone sphere. I don't think there's a big natural community of speakers in many of the places where the familiarity of "speaking some Gaelic". So I think in order to use it you need to seek out other individuals and then have a deliberate and probably halting conversation in what in many ways is a foreign langauge in parts of Scotland.

[cmcmck]

We live opposite north wales (Gwynedd and Powys) which is the heartland of spoken and written Welsh in modern times and it's been around historically to the extent that towns this side of the border in Shropshire have dual names- Shrewsbury/Amwythig or Oswestry/Croesoswallt for example.

[dewline]

Living where I do, English and French are both "standard" here. With the Reconciliation work ongoing re: Indigenous nations as well, we're slowly seeing more Anishnaabemowin/Algonquin language sneaking back into more regular usage. Also, with medical flights back and forth between Ottawa and Iqaluit, some Inuktut as well...and then there's all the other languages from everywhere else.

[nancylebov]

#7: Reminds me of Borges' "The Library of Babel".

[armiphlage]

With respect to #9, maybe this will address the tendency of medical professionals to under-prescribe pain medication to groups they feel are "drug seeking", while giving others enough pain meds to overdose.

In the future, emergency room doctors might say "Here, put this helmet on ... wow, that's a lot of pain, here's your prescription".

[andrewducker]

If they can do it without invasive surgery that will be awesome. It would be nice if people didn't have to fight for medication!