Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

I don't really count English as a L2 - maybe rather a L1½ since I started learning it while I was 10 years old and have spent thousands of hours reading, listening, writing, speaking and thinking in it. Today I have added about 5 hours to that. There is a Libre Office conference going on here in my town, and it is so close to my job function that I have carte blanche to spend some time at that conference. And the international language of computer nerds is of course English. Even the pauses were spent on English.

In one half hour pause I read the September 2015 issue of New Scientist, which among other things tolds about a cave in South Africa, which has turned out to be brimfull of bones of just one hitherto unknown humanoid species. There is a 12 meter drop down to the part of the cave with all the bones, so with no other bones around the innermost section of the cave (where all the bones are) it is tempting to think that some long gone tribe threw their dead down into the black gully. Human sacrifice isn't mentioned, but the sheer amount of bones makes this little likely. So far there is no datation - which is strange, given all the datation methods available nowadays, but the strange thing is that this species only had brains at half the size of a modern human, so you wouldn't expect them to have a mythological system that drove them to bury their dead in one place - or to kill them as an offer to their gods if that's your preferred hypothesis. The weird thing is that these critters with their small brains had almost modern feet. These wonderfeet have apparently impressed the paleontologists sufficiently to classify the being as a human under the name of Homo naledi.

In another pause I read Scientific American from October, which contained at least two relevant articles. In one it was suggested that early humanoids (long before the Australopithecines) sometimes had good times where they stuffed themselves with fruit, and to other times they starved. Therefore they developed a mechanism that made fructose into a trigger that them stash fat in their bodies when they had the chance, and now that mechanism is claimed to be responsible for the obesity epidemy and for the explosion in the number of diabetes cases. The authors write that fresh fruit might be less dangerous because it also contains C-vitamins among other nice and healthy things, but nevertheless it makes the recommandations of six items of fruit per day by our health authorities sound slightly dubious.

The other article is about sleep, where it is conceded that sleep isn't strictly necessary for any single human function, but it is beneficial for so many things that you almost certainly would die if you totally lost the ability to sleep. But one passage with a concrete research result is of particular interest for language learners:

"Twenty six subjects - half of whom had been sleep-deprived the night before - were shown positive, negative and neutral words (for example "calm", "grief" or "willow") and asked to rate their emotionality. Then after two nights of recovery sleep they were given a surprise memory tests. Compared with the subjects who had slept normally, those who were sleep-deprived before seeing the words for the first time showed a 40% percent reduction deterioration in their ability to recognize them.

And if that wasn't enough they remembered the negative words twice as well as the positive and neutral words - so not only does sleep deprivation spoil your memory, it also makes you depressed because you remember the bad and negative things better than the nice ones. So with these words: goodnight and sleep well!

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[Iversen]

EN: One more day spent partly on my normal job, partly on the Libre Office conference in our local Municipal library, which is a fancy new thing called Dokk1, which has cost an awful lot of money - so we can just as well be proud of it. In the bus they pronounce its name /dokkön/, which is weird since "1" isn't an "éntal" in Danish - it's an "ét-tal"- so according to the normal rules that Dokk1 thing should be pronounced /dok-ét/. I guess some pseudosmart publicity agency invented not only the bane, but also its aberrant pronunciation.

IT: Tra i partecipanti della conferenza vi era un gruppo della Municipalità di Bari in Italia, e uno di loro ha fatto una buona lettura a proposito dell'attuazione di programmi Open Standard (incl. Libre Office) nella sua municipalità. Dopo la lettura ho posato una questione in italiano alla conferenziera, ciò che ha portato ad una conversazione di quasi mezz'ora con lei e altri membri del suo gruppo sui problemi coinvolti nel tentativo di adescare gli usatori a utillizzare un programma diverso di quello al quale ciascuno si è abituato. E anche sui problemi involti nel tentativo di costringere o escare diversi fornitori di software a supportare altri prodotti di quelli forniti da un certo colosso internazionale - non direi il nome qui...

EN: I made the vignette below some thirty years ago for my employer at the time, an evening school which also offered computer courses

EDB (fo).jpg

[Jar-Ptitsa]

Why have the parents got such spooky noses in your picture? And the father has got a stomach like a crocodile, and his left arm as well. But the computer looks friendly It seems like Jip en Janneke

[Iversen]

Considering what other horrors and strange features I've put into my pictures it surprises me that you have noticed those noses. If I had given each parent an elephant trunk or a trumpet instead of a nose it might have been more typical for my style, but this vignet (and its companions) was meant for the brochure of a serious business.

I have been on weekend with my family. We made an excursion which took up much of Sunday, but I did manage to get a couple of hours for my studies, and I spent them on a quick wordlist review of Serbian. I write 'review' because I went through many of the words last year, but it doesn't harm having a look at them again. After all, I may have written a fair amount of messages in Servian since then, but I have not used most of the words on last year's wordlists since then so now I have refreshed a few hundred hundred words. At least I remember them easier now than last time.

Besides I have read most of the guide book to Antwerpen I got with my Antwerpen card in the train back to Århus.

During the period where I painted my pictures I didn't travel much in the countries behind the iron curtain. Jugoslavia was however strictly speaking a neutral country, but I only went there once - in 1986 I visited Montenegro, just before the civil war broke out, but I didn't make any painting specifically with motives frem that area. However the one below wouldn't be quite out of place as a reference to the situation in the rapidly disintegrating Yugoslavia during the civil war - however the one and only nose in the picture is comparatively normal:

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SER: Године 1986 сам живео у хотелу у Херцег Новом у близини ушћа у Бококоторски залив, и Ходао сам око већина залива. Будвар је још увек био уништен град након земљотреса, али све је тако мирно. Затим, било је потребно 14 година пре него што сам се вратио, и када сам путовао около у Словенији и Хрватској - али то време ни сам бил заинтересован за језицима.

GER: Gerade jetzt höre ich die Musik von Adolf von Henselt, der unter anderem einige sehr schwierige, aber wohlklingende Etüden mit poetische Sprüche auf Französisch schrieb - wie zum Beispiel op.2 n.1 "Orage, tu ne saurais m'abattre!" Dies ist ein gutes Beispiel für die ausgezeichnete Musik, die fast nie gespielt wird weil die meisten Pianisten sich nur mit den bereits meist gespielten Komponisten sich beschäftigen.

[Iversen]

POR: Quando pesquisei para algo que ler em Português, eu encontrei um artigo do Globo sobre um ginecologista brasileiro que tem um pomar com quase dois mil tipos de frutas exóticas de todo o mundo. No pomar "o pomar de citros é o mais vistoso, com 180 variedades. As terras ainda têm 110 tipos de manga, 90 de banana, 30 jabuticabeiras, 20 pessegueiros, 20 goiabeiras, 10 pitangueiras, entre outros". Não entendo como ele pode ter tempo para cuidar de uma instalação desse tipo - eu pensei que os médicos sejam pessoas muito ocupadas! Mangas y bananas podemos comprar no meu país, as outras nunca tenho visto. Tenho apenas visitado o Brasil uma vez, mas quando eu estava no Rio de Janeiro, eu decidi de nunca beber o mesmo tipo de suco mais de uma vez - havia apenas tantos para escolher!

Este artigo inspirou-me fazer uma coleção de artigos no português sobre as frutas, e então eu consultei naturalmente Wikipedia. O engraçado é que os botânicos tem suas próprias idéias sobre o assunto. Para eles, um tomate e uma banana são frutxs, mas morangos e framboesas não são frutxs. No Português felizmente pode ver a diferença: Uma baga reconhecida por los botanicos é um fruto, mas a coisa que o resto de nós consideramos como frutxs se chama fruta com uma 'a'. A distinção infelizmente não se pode transferir no dinamarquês.

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EN: There are two problems involved in reading about fruits in Portuguese (especially from Brazilian sources) - I don't know most of the fruits, and it is hard to learn names for something you don't know what is. There are a number of homepages in Portugues with both text and photos - and I have made a mini-anthology with articles about exotic fruits and vegetables. The third problem with this (which I didn't mention before) is that you get hungry. For instance you can see at the e-jardim.com homepage that a 'feijoa' (Acca sellowiana) is a "Fruto de dimensões semelhantes a uma goiaba grande, com polpa extremamente suculenta e perfumadíssima. Seu sabor se assemelha ao dos melhores abacaxis(...). Sorver esta polpa causa uma agradabilíssima sensação, trazendo ao degustador a impressão de que a mesma se "derrete" na boca." ("fruit of similar dimensions as a large guava, with extremely juicy and fragrant pulp. Its flavor is similar to that of the best pineapples (..). Slurping this pulp causes a very pleasant sensation, which gives the taster the impression that it even is 'melting' in your mouth.")

But you can't buy this fruit here in Denmark, and even if you could it would not necessarily be nearly as good. I have bought mangostans, rambutans and lychées from South-East Asia at home, but they are simply not the same thing here as the treats I remember from my travels.

[Jar-Ptitsa]

Considering what other horrors and strange features I've put into my pictures it surprises me that you have noticed those noses. If I had given each parent an elephant trunk or a trumpet instead of a nose it might have been more typical for my style, but this vignet (and its companions) was meant for the brochure of a serious business.

haha, but your pictures are abstract and the computer one was not. Have you seen Jip en Janneke? Your picture is veyr similar!!



I find them very ugly, but the birds are nice in this picture.

[Iversen]

My paintings are NOT abstract - you can see what the motives are. With abstract motives you can't.

Let's take one vignette more - music for children

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[Jar-Ptitsa]

My paintings are NOT abstract - you can see what the motives are. With abstract motives you can't.

Let's take one vignette more - music for children

Børnemusik.JPG

Ok, sorry!!!! not abstract but not like the reality as well.

I don't like the black on white pictures. I prefer it with some colours, but maybe it's fun to make it.

[Iversen]

It is also great fun to paint silhouette people surrounded by colours, like in the following picture - however even I have to admit that Jip and Janneke with a bit of good will could be characterized as marginally cuddlier than my models:

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POL: W autobusie do domu z pracy, czytałem dzisiaj o muzeach polskich miast. Odwiedziłem pięciu miastach Polski po zebraniu poliglot w Berlinie na sierpień 2015 roku i widziałem muzeów w każdym z nich.

[daegga]

Is that a pun on "Sigurðr ormr í auga"?