I think I talk good!

My mom cries whenever I (purposely and speciously) use this ungrammatical construction, "I don't got no ...", referring to when I don't have any of something. I guess it is that all that education went to waste. Perhaps it is because of the brand/dialect of American English I speak. Here are the results from the quiz:

Your Linguistic Profile:

45% General American English

35% Yankee

15% Dixie

0% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

I always knew I was a Yankee, in spite of my love of grits. Technically, what I speak is the Philadelphia variation of the Midlands dialect. Here is a very technical map of these dialects that only a linguist could love or understand. Here is an even more detailed linguistic map for Pennsylvania. There are maps of the pop vs. soda controversy, and a whole list of regionalisms (spigot for faucet, crayfish vs. crawfish vs. crawdad, aunt as ant or ahnt, and others) with maps.

Obviously I know that the differences in American English shrink into insignificance when compared with the varied dialects of English spoken in the United Kingdom. Those differences birthed the play, Pygmalion, and the musical, My Fair Lady, based on it. With that rich diversity of accents you can have Professor Henry Higgins (or 'enry 'iggins if you prefer) guessing, with a few spoken words, what particular street in London a poor urchin comes from. Pygmalion is also a leading example of the whole trope of taking a poor kid and training them to be a rich one. My favorite from the movies is Trading Places, set in Philadelphia.

Even in the mass media future, how one speaks often remains a signal of where and what socio-economic background from which they come.

(quiz via Metaphor Voodoo)

tags: dialects, language, American english, linguistics

Decadent chocolate cake

Whirdly has researched a topic of interest to theobromaholics everywhere. (theobromine is the active ingredient, a mild stimulant, in chocolate that makes it so great.).

Often at dessert time after dinner I wonder aloud why every restaurant has a decadent chocolate cake or some other fancy named chocolate cake, when all it really is is chocolate cake (which is not a bad thing, in and of itself). I really love chocolate, and so I am drawn to discussion of the chocolate items on the menu. I also like being decadent yet believing in truth in advertising.

Crack food reporting comes to the rescue, apparently people report "that Black Forest Double-Chocolate Cake tastes better than Chocolate Cake, even when the cakes themselves are identical." So now I know why every restaurant has a Double Decadent Chocolate Cake on its menu, to my dismay.

From the article in The Guardian:

"The industry's mistake, it seems, had been to listen to the market researchers instead of the food psychologists. People tell researchers what they think they want to hear, or what the respondents want to believe about themselves. But the little-trumpeted field of food psychology may be one of the closest things that the corporate world has to a window on its customers' souls. We know, thanks to recent findings, that people drink more than a third more fruit juice when they pour it into a short, wide glass instead of a narrow, tall one, and that people will eat more of a product if it comes in a bigger package. We know that people will report that a breakfast bar tastes worse if the packaging describes it as containing soy, even if it contains no soy, and that Black Forest Double-Chocolate Cake tastes better than Chocolate Cake, even when the cakes themselves are identical. Above all, we know that just because people say they want to eat more healthily, it doesn't mean they really do."

(italics mine)

tags: chocolate, theobromine, chocolate cake, fine dining

John Karr didn't do it, he is too creepy

The way that we know that John Karr didn't kill JonBenet Ramsey is that when they started interviewing his babysitter and family members that knew him they have all said that he was kind of strange and that he did suspicious things such as always locked his computer room, and he married 13 year olds.

Normally when you catch the criminal for a sensational murder case all his friends and family and neighbors say "He seemed like such a nice guy", "never had any problems with him", "He kept to himself".

Nobody is saying that about John Karr, they all think he is creepy, thus he didn't commit the murder. Now he won't be charged for the murder, who is going to pay for his plane flight back from Thailand and for the fancy meal on the flight?

tags: JonBenet Ramsey, John Karr

Alternate Universe Futurama

The post's title refers not to the classic episode, "The Farnsworth Parabox", where the characters really encountered many different alternate universe versions of themselves, but to some fan art floating around the web.

Here are the classic characters from the show at the beach.

Here they are in cutesy anime style.
And here the team fierceness has been punched up a bit.
(via Minimalist Weblog)

tags: futurama

Personalized Ketchup

Ketchup has always been very personal to me. Now you can customize your own.

(via Neatorama)

tags: ketchup

Are you teachers?

Something in our pedantic manner must have prompted someone to ask if we were teachers at dinner tonight.

Our answer: We feel that most people we meet have a lot to learn, but that doesn't make us teachers.

Zombies can't write...

...but they make a great alphabet if you can get them to hold still.
Zombie Letters from e-zombie.com (via Drawn!)

Charles Stross charitably gives away a great zombie movie idea. What if a zombie movie portrayed the soldiers accurately. Take a special forces type of group of soldiers, highly trained, professional, and deadly, and throw wave after wave of zombies at them. His working title is "Zulu with Zombies". I guess he shares the common frustration with characters in a monster movie doing stupid things.

tags: zombies, movies, alphabet

Taro plant, ancestor of Hawaiians, not for patenting or genetic modification

After a fight led by Hawaiian activist Walter Ritte, Jr., the University of Hawaii has given up all rights and royalties on patents of three disease-resistant varieties of taro. Controversy arose when it was discovered that researchers at the university were doing genetic modification to produce a better taro plant. The taro is considered sacred by some Hawaiians because they believe that the taro is the ancestor of the Hawaiian people. There doesn't seem to be objection to breeding new varieties of taro, but genetic engineering is upsetting:

Kahakalau and Ritte said that using genetic-engineering techniques to insert foreign genes into the taro plant is wrong. "You can't change our ancestors without our permission," Ritte said.

They also objected to the possibility that farmers might have to pay a royalty to use the patented breeds of taro. The three patents in question are plant patents PP12,772, PP12,361, PP12,342 obtained by Eduardo Trujillo throughout 2002 for taro plant varieties named Pa'akala, Pa'lehua, and Pauakea. His intention was to produce disease resistant higher yielding taro as a food plant for Pacific islanders who grow it natively.

You can decide for yourself the ethics of patenting and owning a plant variety and then licensing and requiring royalties for its use. There seems to be a sharp distinction drawn by the parties in the conflict between cross-breeding and genetic engineering. I wonder if technique is everything in this conflict. My knowledge of plant patent law is weak, but I think you can patent a plant variety that was just bred for specific characteristics and not genetically engineered. Would the activists have objected to a patented plant produced by breeding? The excuse given pits science and economics against a religious belief, and muddies the issue of genetically engineering or even asking for a royalty for a "sacred" plant.

Patents serve a useful purpose. Patents provide a limited monopoly so that there is an incentive to produce new products such as disease resistant taro. It cost the university $300,000 to develop the variety. Patents are limited and published so that before they expire others are forced to innovate around them to produce new inventions and that benefits society, and that after they expire the knowledge is available to all.

tags: taro, patents, plant patents, University of Hawaii

DNDELYN is a dandelion is a dandy lion

Serendipity happens all the time. After my tirades about weeds, suddenly there appears DNDELYN, a dandelion license plate. One must always be prepared to take advantage of serendipitous events, so I whipped out my trusty ( but crappy) Treo camera to immortalize the event.

I can only imagine that the owner of the personalized license plate likes dandelions or maybe ...

weeds

salad

tea

wine

Ray Bradbury

or couldn't fit DNDEWHLS and they're a Dandy Warhols fan.

tags: license plates, dandelions

Roundup Ready Weeds!

After this gardening season of heavy rain followed by bright sunshine I have had it with the weeds in my garden. Some of them are my own fault, the rain washed newly spread grass seed into the vegetable garden where it grew well until I pulled it out. The other weapon in my arsenal, but not for the vegetable garden, is Roundup. Weeds in cracks, weeds in the mulch are dealt with mercilessly and chemically.

The active ingredient in Roundup is glyphosate. Now, there are reports that a grass, genetically modified to be glyphosate-resistant, has escaped from its testing area in Oregon. Keeping in mind that a weed is a plant growing where you don't want it, we don't need Scotts creating weedy grasses resistant to the most popular weed killer on the market. The concern is that not only will the grass escape and become an unkillable weed but that it will fertilize its wild relatives or that gene transfer to other plants will occur and pass on the resistance to actual weeds. I guess I have time before it gets here from Oregon.

(via Exploding Aardvark)

tags: GM plants, Roundup, glyphosate, grass