Today I have made five museum drawings at home. It started because I read that the one and only Energy museum in Denmark has been closed because it has been eradicated from the list of supported museums. Heaven knows why - it has a very relevant topic and 50.000 visitors or so per year, but maybe the ministry needs the money to employ one more academic parasite. Luckily I have a fair number of photos (I last visited it last year), but since my rendering of the responsible minister isn't exactly flattering I shall refrain from showing it here. However I then remembered another museum that was closed down a couple of years ago, the Forest museum of Hampen, which I only visited once, but again -I took enough photos and could supplement with some details from the internet. By the way, "helt ude i Hampen" means "totally out in the bush" or something like that, but I did visit it once - during the winter closure .. and then it got brutally closed down before I could visit it again. Again it would be a political statement to show my drawing so you'll have to guess...
After that I made drawings of an automobile museum in Gjerrn and the rests of a once vibrant museum in Herning, both of which I visited in 2023. But my latest work so far in the genre shows the Fornsalen museum in Visby on the island of Gotland, Sweden, which I also visited in 2023, but didn't draw at the time. In Denmark we see king Valdemar IV Atterdag as a hero, who reestablished the country after his inept predecessors had pawned almost the whole thing to German noblemen to raise money for their pointless wars. On Gotland the opinions might differ since he conquered the whole island in 1361 and slaughtered a large part of its peasant population while the burghers looked on from within the town walls. That being said, the gotlanders don't seem to bear any severe grudge again the king - they have even named a square outside one of the gates after him (and that's also where I bought my groceries during my stay).
And now you may ask: what has this to do with language learning? Well, actually the memory of my excursion to Gotland reminded me of the Guta saga, written in the old Gutnish language, which I read at the museum during my visit there. It is easier to read than you might expect, and I have actually quoted the first lines on the drawing. But I then found the whole thing at archive.org, and in the text there you first get a long explanation and background in English, but from page 61 it's the real deal - the only preserved longer text in the old and largely forgotten Gutnish language.
Right now I'm also thinking about making 'ghost drawings' illustrating the Archeological museum in Irakleion and maybe Knossos on Crete, which I visited - and photograped - in 2023. I still feel that it's a bit like cheating not to make the drawings on site during an actual visit, but if I have enough pictures at my disposal and remember the layout of the places vividly the result could end up being rather OK. I think I got a decent job on seven museums in Sofia and Plovdiv in Bulgaria a couple of days ago, and before that on some of those in Budapest, but pre-corona my memories of the places tend to become less precise, and then I shouldn't make drawings.
Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
- Iversen
- Black Belt - 5th Dan
- Posts: 5148
- Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
- Location: Denmark
- Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more... - Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
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- Iversen
- Black Belt - 5th Dan
- Posts: 5148
- Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
- Location: Denmark
- Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more... - Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
- x 16332
Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
Message: I'm still alive - even though some time has passed since my last update. Tuesday I decided to take a trip to the Northernmost part of Jutland, and I just returned yesterday - and since then I have been busy with my museum drawings and photos. The hotel where I spent most of the nights had Youtube, so there I watched a number of videos in several languages - but that includes a number of videos about physics and cosmology in English, where I stayed in English because the automatic translations can be somewhat off the mark on technical topics (even more than the audio-based English ones are). It started out with some videos about 'spinors' (and please don't ask me to explain what that is!), and from there I proceeded through some math to quantum mechanics and relativity and the problems trying to reconcile those two. The big problems are apparently that relativity assumes time to be relative and quantum theory assumes it to be fixed, and that quantum mechanics seess particles as wawe functions which just somehow have collapsed, and only then there is a particle. In contrast, relativity doesn't operate with wawe functions at all - everything is somewhere precise, and that' point iswhere its gravity field is centered.
One of the videos (I think by Veratasium) discussed Schrödinger's cat and multiverses. The German physicist Schrödinger proposed an experiment with a cat in a closed box where a quantic contraption either killed it or let it live - but only by opening the box would an observer know what had happened (or not). So could it be the observer that provoked the collapse of the probability function attached to the life of the cat? That would be the Copenhagen interpretation, but it could also be that both outcomes happened, but in each its own probabilistic universe - and then the observers would not provoke any outcome (read: collapse), but just discover at one of them had already happened - and THAT would have put the observer in just one of the time lines. And that's my own favorite, but there is a problem: what shall we do with all those branching universes??? The simple answer is that we shouldn't care about them - we can't communicate with them, and for us they are just statistics on paper.
Other videos were more language orientated, and among those I would mention a channel that illustrated Danish and Swedish dialects with short audio samples with transcriptions. I photographed several screens from that channel, and the one below illustrates the Swedish Älvdal dialect (and the transcription system is probably homemade, but it functions):
The last night I spent in a hotel with just flow TV, but I had luckily carried an old laptop along with me that contained a slightly dated copy of my travel photos and museum drawings - and then I was puzzled by the colours of some of them.
The screen of the laptop is calibrated towards a cold bluish tinge, whereas the old PC where I'm working now is rather more yellowish (akin to the difference between LED white and the light from oldfashioned bulbs), but the difference in colours on some of the drawings was larger than expected - actually too much to be accepted. I had already noticed that some of the older ones had violet tones instead of light brownish ones, and I had narrowed the reasons down to one single culprit: a seemingly lightbrown pencil that gave lines that somehow came out as almost violet in my scanner. OK, I thought I had solved the problem by just using it in combination with orange-reddish shades, but the 'cold' calibration showed that this wasn't sufficient. So now I have revised the colouring in a lot of scanned drawings, and I think I have found a sneaky solution. I use an old defunct graphics program called PhotoImpact that can show tone maps divided into red, green and blue - and If you dimish the amount of blue AND green (!) then the result becomes a stronger visual red (!)
, which you then can make lighter. And the result looks almost like the original colour, but contains less of that sneaky blue component
. There are some supplementary tools that can be used when the lilac tone is visible even on my yellowish-loving screen, but the key seems to be the hidden blue part. And while I was at it I also got changed some other details that have nagged me since I made the drawings, but that is just an added bonus.
And because I had to revise so many scans I am only now ready to add the photos and drawings from my latest trip North, and that will will probably take at least one full day more. After all I have visited four cities with seven museums and one library and several pizzerias and railway stations and other things, and I have returned with hundreds of photos (and scans) that now have to be cooked down to maybe 100 or so .. and edited.
I have of course thrown the brown - violettish pencil out - better late than never. I just wonder how it did its evil deeds - did it contain some ultraviolet component that was visible to the scanner, but not to me? And did the scanner convert that into violet? Ah dunno...
One of the videos (I think by Veratasium) discussed Schrödinger's cat and multiverses. The German physicist Schrödinger proposed an experiment with a cat in a closed box where a quantic contraption either killed it or let it live - but only by opening the box would an observer know what had happened (or not). So could it be the observer that provoked the collapse of the probability function attached to the life of the cat? That would be the Copenhagen interpretation, but it could also be that both outcomes happened, but in each its own probabilistic universe - and then the observers would not provoke any outcome (read: collapse), but just discover at one of them had already happened - and THAT would have put the observer in just one of the time lines. And that's my own favorite, but there is a problem: what shall we do with all those branching universes??? The simple answer is that we shouldn't care about them - we can't communicate with them, and for us they are just statistics on paper.
Other videos were more language orientated, and among those I would mention a channel that illustrated Danish and Swedish dialects with short audio samples with transcriptions. I photographed several screens from that channel, and the one below illustrates the Swedish Älvdal dialect (and the transcription system is probably homemade, but it functions):
The last night I spent in a hotel with just flow TV, but I had luckily carried an old laptop along with me that contained a slightly dated copy of my travel photos and museum drawings - and then I was puzzled by the colours of some of them.



And because I had to revise so many scans I am only now ready to add the photos and drawings from my latest trip North, and that will will probably take at least one full day more. After all I have visited four cities with seven museums and one library and several pizzerias and railway stations and other things, and I have returned with hundreds of photos (and scans) that now have to be cooked down to maybe 100 or so .. and edited.
I have of course thrown the brown - violettish pencil out - better late than never. I just wonder how it did its evil deeds - did it contain some ultraviolet component that was visible to the scanner, but not to me? And did the scanner convert that into violet? Ah dunno...
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5 x
- Iversen
- Black Belt - 5th Dan
- Posts: 5148
- Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
- Location: Denmark
- Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more... - Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
I have spent time at my trusty old computer on two tasks today.
FIrst I wanted to update two lists I keep in Excel over my use of this forum (in addition to a bunch of Word files with the actual things I have written). One tells me which images I have used on which pages, the other which languages I used on those pages. It was last updated at the end of May, and the thing that struck me when I looked at it today was that the page numbers had changed - typically with some 4-5 pages. Then I went back in time and saw that the difference became smaller with time, but only around page 100 in 2018 did the old and the current page numbers match. Ahem, what .... My only guess is that a lot of deleted posts have been removed, and my reason to believe that is that I remember that they earlier were included in my 10 posts per page - now I can't see them and the page breaks have moved correspondingly. And during those six years it's possible that I have deleted, but not totally obliterate something like 40 posts. If they are gone now that would explain the page numbering differences, but not why something similar didn't happened for the first 100 pages. Anyway I have now marked my used languages and used images up till today (on page 222), and later on I'm also going to update my Word files - but not today.
From around noon until half an hour ago I spent my time on another registration task, As you may have noticed I make museum drawings, and from around May-June I have sent scanned copies to the museums in question. But with more than 300 drawings on the list as per today I began to lose my eagle eye overview, so I decided to run through my e-mail out to se what I had sent when - and after that through my inbox so see who had answered me. And actually it was a rather pleasant experience: I got answers from most of the institutions, and they were generally positive. Some have even shared my drawings on Facebook (with my permission, but I don't have an account there myself so I can't check whether there were any reactions), others have placed a printout on a bulletin board, a few have offered me free entrance and the rest just write that they are happy. So with that kind of reception I intend to continue making and mailing those drawings.
The only problem is that I have had to look through all my mail from the last half year, and that has prevented me from doing any study of any kind (except to check my messages from the public assessment board that after endless fuzz has come up with estimated real estate values for ... yeah, guess what: 2020 !! And the flat I sold in 2022 has risen in value, while my house in the country side apparently has become cheaper. As if I cared - that just means that I have to pay less tax, and I don't intend to sell the place anytime soon - not after all the time I have spent on the garden!
And now I'll shut the 'puter down and study some texts in Czech and maybe a few other languages - it's about time to do something about those things too. Since yesterday I have only worked on a bit of a text about the ...
CZ: ... část Národního muzea v Praze, která se zabývá přírodopisem. Ve skutečnosti muzeum obsahuje čtyři části: v samostatné budově je muzeum nedávné historie a dětské muzeum, zatímco historická budova obsahuje starší historii a přírodopis. Navštívil jsem ho během poledních přestávek při posledním "gathering"'.
PS:I haven't written to any of the museums in Praha - back in May I knew even less Czech than I do now, and it would be too humiliating to have to write a message in English or some other irrelevant language.
FIrst I wanted to update two lists I keep in Excel over my use of this forum (in addition to a bunch of Word files with the actual things I have written). One tells me which images I have used on which pages, the other which languages I used on those pages. It was last updated at the end of May, and the thing that struck me when I looked at it today was that the page numbers had changed - typically with some 4-5 pages. Then I went back in time and saw that the difference became smaller with time, but only around page 100 in 2018 did the old and the current page numbers match. Ahem, what .... My only guess is that a lot of deleted posts have been removed, and my reason to believe that is that I remember that they earlier were included in my 10 posts per page - now I can't see them and the page breaks have moved correspondingly. And during those six years it's possible that I have deleted, but not totally obliterate something like 40 posts. If they are gone now that would explain the page numbering differences, but not why something similar didn't happened for the first 100 pages. Anyway I have now marked my used languages and used images up till today (on page 222), and later on I'm also going to update my Word files - but not today.
From around noon until half an hour ago I spent my time on another registration task, As you may have noticed I make museum drawings, and from around May-June I have sent scanned copies to the museums in question. But with more than 300 drawings on the list as per today I began to lose my eagle eye overview, so I decided to run through my e-mail out to se what I had sent when - and after that through my inbox so see who had answered me. And actually it was a rather pleasant experience: I got answers from most of the institutions, and they were generally positive. Some have even shared my drawings on Facebook (with my permission, but I don't have an account there myself so I can't check whether there were any reactions), others have placed a printout on a bulletin board, a few have offered me free entrance and the rest just write that they are happy. So with that kind of reception I intend to continue making and mailing those drawings.
The only problem is that I have had to look through all my mail from the last half year, and that has prevented me from doing any study of any kind (except to check my messages from the public assessment board that after endless fuzz has come up with estimated real estate values for ... yeah, guess what: 2020 !! And the flat I sold in 2022 has risen in value, while my house in the country side apparently has become cheaper. As if I cared - that just means that I have to pay less tax, and I don't intend to sell the place anytime soon - not after all the time I have spent on the garden!
And now I'll shut the 'puter down and study some texts in Czech and maybe a few other languages - it's about time to do something about those things too. Since yesterday I have only worked on a bit of a text about the ...
CZ: ... část Národního muzea v Praze, která se zabývá přírodopisem. Ve skutečnosti muzeum obsahuje čtyři části: v samostatné budově je muzeum nedávné historie a dětské muzeum, zatímco historická budova obsahuje starší historii a přírodopis. Navštívil jsem ho během poledních přestávek při posledním "gathering"'.
PS:I haven't written to any of the museums in Praha - back in May I knew even less Czech than I do now, and it would be too humiliating to have to write a message in English or some other irrelevant language.
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3 x
- Iversen
- Black Belt - 5th Dan
- Posts: 5148
- Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
- Location: Denmark
- Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more... - Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
- x 16332
Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
When I updated my list of languages used recently it was lamentably obvious that I hadn't written anything in several of my supposed target languages lately - including Icelandic. OK, on the chair which I use instead of a nighttable I have an alarm clock (which never has been used as such), and it's standing on "Oldnordisk Læsebog" by the venerable scholar Wimmer, originally written in 1916 when people still appreciated good oldfashioned nerdish scholarship. So when I woke up in the middle of the night I decided to have a go at it, and I first read a chapter from the Knytlingesaga about Knud Lavard, and after that a chapter from the Jomsviking saga about Palnatoke and the 'gravøl' for the dead king Harald Bluetooth ('gravøl' is funeral ceremony involving the consumption of a large quantity of mead or - these days - beer). I ought to have written the following rant in Old Norse, but my Old Norse is purely passive so you'll get it in modern Icelandic:
IC: Svend Estridsen konungur var versti hórkarlinn og hórdómsmaðurinn í danska konungsættinni,og meðal ótal barna hans urðu fimm konungar eftir dauða hans. Sá fjórði hét Erik, kallaður Ejegod vegna þess að hann var ómæld guðrækinn. Hann dó reyndar á Kýpur á ferðalagi til Jerúsalem, en honum tókst áður en þá að eignast son, Knud Lavard, sem fékk Slésvík sem hertogadæmi. Sá síðasti af þeim fimm hét Nicholas (eða "Niels" á nútímadönsku - stórkostlegt nafn!), og hann átti son sem hét Magnús. Knud Lavard var aðeins of góður vinur hins rómverska keisara og sonar hans, og Níels og Magnús voru að sjálfsögðu ekki áhugasamir við þetta. Svo þegar Knútur Lavard var á leið heim úr jólaboðinu með konungi og syni hans, þá birtast nokkrir menn úr skóginum og drepa hann. Að því loknu urðu fólk í Danmörku reiðir við Magnús og föður hans og endaði það með því að þeir voru drepnir. Síðan fylgdi tímabil með þremur konungum og endaði það með því að Valdemar, sonur Knud Lavards, varð einkonungur. Og svo var auðvitað síðar bara talað um Knud Lavard sem elskulegan og velviljaðan einstakling með engar tilhneigingar til landráða.
Önnur sagan fjallar um Pálnatóka, sem seggðisk vera konungur í Wales (kallaður Bretland í sögunni) - þó Wikipedia segi að hann var frá Fynjum - en heimsótti einnig Danmörku oft. Þegar Haraldur Blátönn hafði verið myrtur vildi sonur hans Sveinn Tjúguskeggur halda erfidrykkja - jafnvel þó hann hefði háð borgarastyrjöld gegn föður sínum um árabil. En Pálnatóki vildi ekki taka þátt. Þegar hann kom loks, sýndi maður Arnoddri ör og spurði hver vissi hana. Og sagði þa Pálnatóki stoltur það væri örinn hans, og "ek skuldumk við hana á bogastrengnum, konungr, þá er ek skaut i rassinn fǫður þinum ok eptir honum endilǫngum, svá at út kom i munnin". Enn þótti Svend þetta of mikit, ok kom til slagsmála, en eptir söguna snýr Palnatoki lifandi til Bretlands." Eftir þetta drukku þeir konungur og mönnum hans það sem eftir var af áfenginu og fóru heim.
EN: Wimmer's book has a splendid wordlist at the end which helped me over a few moot points (like the location of 'Bretland', which apparently indicated Wales, not Britain), but I didn't have a translation, so it seems that my level in passive Icelandic and Old Norse hasn't deteriorated too much during the dry spell since spring - which actually is slightly surprising. As for the two tales many Danes have heard about them. The history of the three warring kings "Svend, Knud og Valdemar" was immortalized through a hilarious TV dramatization in 1970, and the death of king Harald has also become rather wellknown - as the quote above says, Palnatoke freely admitted that he shot the king through the arse while he was shitting in the bush so that the arrow went through him and came straight out through the mouth. And then Harald's son Svend Forkbeard became king, first over Denmark and later also over most of England. Palnatoke was also famous for accomplishing the same feat as the Swiss national hero Wilhelm Tell, namely shooting an apple off the head of his own son. Whether this is true or a myth is anyone's guess (for both Palnatoke and Wilhelm). It's Wilhelm who is depicted below ... on another timeline in the multiverse than the usually accepted one.
IC: Svend Estridsen konungur var versti hórkarlinn og hórdómsmaðurinn í danska konungsættinni,og meðal ótal barna hans urðu fimm konungar eftir dauða hans. Sá fjórði hét Erik, kallaður Ejegod vegna þess að hann var ómæld guðrækinn. Hann dó reyndar á Kýpur á ferðalagi til Jerúsalem, en honum tókst áður en þá að eignast son, Knud Lavard, sem fékk Slésvík sem hertogadæmi. Sá síðasti af þeim fimm hét Nicholas (eða "Niels" á nútímadönsku - stórkostlegt nafn!), og hann átti son sem hét Magnús. Knud Lavard var aðeins of góður vinur hins rómverska keisara og sonar hans, og Níels og Magnús voru að sjálfsögðu ekki áhugasamir við þetta. Svo þegar Knútur Lavard var á leið heim úr jólaboðinu með konungi og syni hans, þá birtast nokkrir menn úr skóginum og drepa hann. Að því loknu urðu fólk í Danmörku reiðir við Magnús og föður hans og endaði það með því að þeir voru drepnir. Síðan fylgdi tímabil með þremur konungum og endaði það með því að Valdemar, sonur Knud Lavards, varð einkonungur. Og svo var auðvitað síðar bara talað um Knud Lavard sem elskulegan og velviljaðan einstakling með engar tilhneigingar til landráða.
Önnur sagan fjallar um Pálnatóka, sem seggðisk vera konungur í Wales (kallaður Bretland í sögunni) - þó Wikipedia segi að hann var frá Fynjum - en heimsótti einnig Danmörku oft. Þegar Haraldur Blátönn hafði verið myrtur vildi sonur hans Sveinn Tjúguskeggur halda erfidrykkja - jafnvel þó hann hefði háð borgarastyrjöld gegn föður sínum um árabil. En Pálnatóki vildi ekki taka þátt. Þegar hann kom loks, sýndi maður Arnoddri ör og spurði hver vissi hana. Og sagði þa Pálnatóki stoltur það væri örinn hans, og "ek skuldumk við hana á bogastrengnum, konungr, þá er ek skaut i rassinn fǫður þinum ok eptir honum endilǫngum, svá at út kom i munnin". Enn þótti Svend þetta of mikit, ok kom til slagsmála, en eptir söguna snýr Palnatoki lifandi til Bretlands." Eftir þetta drukku þeir konungur og mönnum hans það sem eftir var af áfenginu og fóru heim.
EN: Wimmer's book has a splendid wordlist at the end which helped me over a few moot points (like the location of 'Bretland', which apparently indicated Wales, not Britain), but I didn't have a translation, so it seems that my level in passive Icelandic and Old Norse hasn't deteriorated too much during the dry spell since spring - which actually is slightly surprising. As for the two tales many Danes have heard about them. The history of the three warring kings "Svend, Knud og Valdemar" was immortalized through a hilarious TV dramatization in 1970, and the death of king Harald has also become rather wellknown - as the quote above says, Palnatoke freely admitted that he shot the king through the arse while he was shitting in the bush so that the arrow went through him and came straight out through the mouth. And then Harald's son Svend Forkbeard became king, first over Denmark and later also over most of England. Palnatoke was also famous for accomplishing the same feat as the Swiss national hero Wilhelm Tell, namely shooting an apple off the head of his own son. Whether this is true or a myth is anyone's guess (for both Palnatoke and Wilhelm). It's Wilhelm who is depicted below ... on another timeline in the multiverse than the usually accepted one.
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7 x
- Iversen
- Black Belt - 5th Dan
- Posts: 5148
- Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
- Location: Denmark
- Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more... - Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
- x 16332
Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
Yesterday I visited four museums, so in the evening I was busy organizing photos - and I also added a couple of drawings based on photos. One of the drawings I made in the evening was a supplement to one I did at the museum, the other one I did in the evening because they had an insane amount of things and no convenient chairs in the exhibition rooms at the Christmas museum. It follows here:
By the way I don't like Christimas and I'm sick and tired of having Christmas symbols and paraphernalia popping up all over the place already mid November. If this continues we'll end up having nauseating Christmas marketing shit smeared all over the year. Christmas should really be restricted to one day in the year, and then you could let that day be the 24. or 25. (or January 7) according to your local customs. Or start at noon the 24. and cut at noon plus one hour the following day.
So to cut a long tale short, I didn't study yesterday and didn't even watch videos, but I did watch quite a few the evening before. I started out in English (with Czech subtitles) with a video about the Crurotarsians, an extinct animal group fromt the Mesozoic, and that led to an Anglophone video about LUCA 'or how life arose' ('luca' is in this context the name for the theoretical ancestor of all life forms on this planet), After that a video about the voyage of India (part of the way Madagascar) from old Gondwana to Asia, where it crashed into the Asian plate and pushed up the Himalayas - and finally a video about the two million years where it rained constantly during the split-up of the mega-continent Pangea.
After that I decided that 'nuff was 'nuff and I continued with two videos in Dutch, one the self-report from an autist who didn't like surprises and chaotic situations (well, neither do I, but I'm less sensitive than her to them), the second a one-hour long video about autism in general. Then a switch to Portuguese because Youtube proposed a video about Aspergers ... but then back to English because I couldn't resist the temptation to watch a video about tetrachromatism and after that two more about the same topic from someone named Ooqui. Ill write more about that phenomenon below. But first I would like to mention that I watched a video that suggested that people in Scandinavia had huge boats already during the bronze age - thousand of years before the vikings. It's unclear whether they had sails - only rowers are depicted on the ancient petroglyphs (like those on the totally unexpected petroglyphs at Alta museum at the very tip of Norway - far above the polar circle). I finished the evening with a video in Portuguese about "Hiperfantasia em superdotatos" and one in English about Carl Barks, the long anonymous inventor and best illustrator ever of the critters ascribed to Walt Disney. By the way, it's a little known fact that many of the later Donald Duck & Co. comic booklets were drawn in Denmark, and the Danish translators left some words in Danish, like "Langbortistan" for faraway places.
I promised to write a few words about tetrachromatism. It seems that colour cones in your eyes are governed from a gene on the X chromosome, and women have two of those (one from each parent), men just one. This means that the two X genes in women potentially can produce slightly different cones - and then you suddenly have four kinds instead of the usual three. The frequency range of the cones for red and green are relatively close, with the ones for blue are somewhat further away. So if there are two kinds of either red or the green cones then they belong roughly to the same area, but the four kidns still give the women in question a much wider range of perceived colours than the range experienced by us poor trichromats (let alone the colorblind people). They don't see ultraviolet or infrared frequencies, but can see colour combinations that aren't accessible for trichromats.
In one of the videos a man - i.e. a trichromat by definition - tried to achieve something akin to tetrachromatism by wearing glasses with different colours (one side leaving out the red component), and he claims that this with time gave him something like tetrachromatism because his two eyes had been costumed differently - but, aye, this is not the real thing. However it gives me an idea: if you wore glasses for a couple of months where one, but not the other compressed the gamut of visible colours AND thereby included a snippet of ultraviolet (that must be possible!), then you might become pseudo-tetrachromatic, but with an added ability to see ultraviolet, at least as a component in mixed colours. Actually the natural lenses in our eyes block out the ultraviolet rays, and it has been suggested that people like the painter Monet who had their lenses removed due to cataract ought to have acquired some sensitivity to that part of the spectrum. And precisely the colours in late Monet's have been ascribed to his changed colour perception after the operation...
By the way I don't like Christimas and I'm sick and tired of having Christmas symbols and paraphernalia popping up all over the place already mid November. If this continues we'll end up having nauseating Christmas marketing shit smeared all over the year. Christmas should really be restricted to one day in the year, and then you could let that day be the 24. or 25. (or January 7) according to your local customs. Or start at noon the 24. and cut at noon plus one hour the following day.

So to cut a long tale short, I didn't study yesterday and didn't even watch videos, but I did watch quite a few the evening before. I started out in English (with Czech subtitles) with a video about the Crurotarsians, an extinct animal group fromt the Mesozoic, and that led to an Anglophone video about LUCA 'or how life arose' ('luca' is in this context the name for the theoretical ancestor of all life forms on this planet), After that a video about the voyage of India (part of the way Madagascar) from old Gondwana to Asia, where it crashed into the Asian plate and pushed up the Himalayas - and finally a video about the two million years where it rained constantly during the split-up of the mega-continent Pangea.
After that I decided that 'nuff was 'nuff and I continued with two videos in Dutch, one the self-report from an autist who didn't like surprises and chaotic situations (well, neither do I, but I'm less sensitive than her to them), the second a one-hour long video about autism in general. Then a switch to Portuguese because Youtube proposed a video about Aspergers ... but then back to English because I couldn't resist the temptation to watch a video about tetrachromatism and after that two more about the same topic from someone named Ooqui. Ill write more about that phenomenon below. But first I would like to mention that I watched a video that suggested that people in Scandinavia had huge boats already during the bronze age - thousand of years before the vikings. It's unclear whether they had sails - only rowers are depicted on the ancient petroglyphs (like those on the totally unexpected petroglyphs at Alta museum at the very tip of Norway - far above the polar circle). I finished the evening with a video in Portuguese about "Hiperfantasia em superdotatos" and one in English about Carl Barks, the long anonymous inventor and best illustrator ever of the critters ascribed to Walt Disney. By the way, it's a little known fact that many of the later Donald Duck & Co. comic booklets were drawn in Denmark, and the Danish translators left some words in Danish, like "Langbortistan" for faraway places.
I promised to write a few words about tetrachromatism. It seems that colour cones in your eyes are governed from a gene on the X chromosome, and women have two of those (one from each parent), men just one. This means that the two X genes in women potentially can produce slightly different cones - and then you suddenly have four kinds instead of the usual three. The frequency range of the cones for red and green are relatively close, with the ones for blue are somewhat further away. So if there are two kinds of either red or the green cones then they belong roughly to the same area, but the four kidns still give the women in question a much wider range of perceived colours than the range experienced by us poor trichromats (let alone the colorblind people). They don't see ultraviolet or infrared frequencies, but can see colour combinations that aren't accessible for trichromats.
In one of the videos a man - i.e. a trichromat by definition - tried to achieve something akin to tetrachromatism by wearing glasses with different colours (one side leaving out the red component), and he claims that this with time gave him something like tetrachromatism because his two eyes had been costumed differently - but, aye, this is not the real thing. However it gives me an idea: if you wore glasses for a couple of months where one, but not the other compressed the gamut of visible colours AND thereby included a snippet of ultraviolet (that must be possible!), then you might become pseudo-tetrachromatic, but with an added ability to see ultraviolet, at least as a component in mixed colours. Actually the natural lenses in our eyes block out the ultraviolet rays, and it has been suggested that people like the painter Monet who had their lenses removed due to cataract ought to have acquired some sensitivity to that part of the spectrum. And precisely the colours in late Monet's have been ascribed to his changed colour perception after the operation...
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- Iversen
- Black Belt - 5th Dan
- Posts: 5148
- Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
- Location: Denmark
- Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more... - Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
- x 16332
Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
My my, once again a long pause sincce the last message in thois thread.
I have been on a four day trip, where I didn't had access to Youtube, but I did bring along my own old portable with old travelogues and photos and most of my artworks. As for learning languages, well - I could have read things on my phone and some things I have stored on that laptop, but I didn't. Basically no study time. After that one day to fix my photos and a handful of new drawings, followed by several days where I have done the usual things.
Today I started out working with a miniscule piece of Czech that irritated me yesterday evening when I tried to use it for relaxing goodnight reading. It's taken from the homepage of the National Art Gallery in Praha, and I have earlier read other similar texts abouot other museums without too much fuzz, but even though I had a (French) translation I had a hard time understanding those few lines. So I decided to give them a serious treatment today, and I did - first I copied it once and jotted the new (or forgotten!) words down, then I went through it again and added a few words, and then I did it a third time - and now I feel comfortable with that passage. But there is more, so I still have some work to do on the rest of that artsy piece of recalcitrant museal prose.
In the meantime I have studied something else: SQL. First I checked my book collection and confirmed that I don't have anything there on that topic - the book I used when I still worked belonged to my employer and stayed there. So instead I looked some commands up on the internet. And the real reason for looking at SQL is of course our problem with lost accounts, but right now I don't feel qualified to serve up a finished shiny solution - I'm just trying to regain something I have lost.
The situation is that we have two backups, one from May and one from.. was it September? Anyway, I have never had to open (or use?) a database in PHP so I'll skip that step.
OK, we have two databases, named something like Forum1 and Forum2, which I will assign avatar names May and and September. Inside each of those there will be tables which I'll call Members and Posts (and several more, which I'll ignore here - including one with passwords and maybe some indexes). And then you have to find all the member posts in May that had disappeared in September. Let's assume that the member tables have a field called ID (plus sundry fields for other things, like name and admission date). And oh, you'll probably get some kind of result. Where to store that? Well, you could create a new empty Database called Found with the same fields as the other two (the structure can be copied).
The syntax would then be something like
Select
May.members.*
from Forum1.dbo.members as May
left outer join Forum.dbo.members as September
where September.members.userid = NULL
Insert Into Found.dbo.members.*
... and of course this wouldn't work at the first go
(I'm especially sceptical about the Insert into thing), but then you would do some corrections and at some point you would have a database with all the lost members from May to September.
After that you could try to find the passwords, image names and maybe even the posts from the September database using a Join on userid with the members table in 'Found' - but in all likelihood they dísappeared when the corresponding memberids at some point were deleted. If so, then the logical possibility would be to make a Join back to the May database, which probably would yield some content to insert into the respective tables in Found, albeit nothing from the time after May.
At this point a copy of the latest database should be made, and into that you could try to ADD the content of Found - though with a caveat: if any content corresponding to lost members had survived into the current database, then you shouldn't insert that content into the running database - it would create dublets and maybe break some indexes. So far we can only be sure that the content of the table I have called members has been disturbed, but at least we would then have the lost items in that table in the members table in Found ... if everything worked as planned.
... BUT IT NEVER DOES!
I have been on a four day trip, where I didn't had access to Youtube, but I did bring along my own old portable with old travelogues and photos and most of my artworks. As for learning languages, well - I could have read things on my phone and some things I have stored on that laptop, but I didn't. Basically no study time. After that one day to fix my photos and a handful of new drawings, followed by several days where I have done the usual things.
Today I started out working with a miniscule piece of Czech that irritated me yesterday evening when I tried to use it for relaxing goodnight reading. It's taken from the homepage of the National Art Gallery in Praha, and I have earlier read other similar texts abouot other museums without too much fuzz, but even though I had a (French) translation I had a hard time understanding those few lines. So I decided to give them a serious treatment today, and I did - first I copied it once and jotted the new (or forgotten!) words down, then I went through it again and added a few words, and then I did it a third time - and now I feel comfortable with that passage. But there is more, so I still have some work to do on the rest of that artsy piece of recalcitrant museal prose.
In the meantime I have studied something else: SQL. First I checked my book collection and confirmed that I don't have anything there on that topic - the book I used when I still worked belonged to my employer and stayed there. So instead I looked some commands up on the internet. And the real reason for looking at SQL is of course our problem with lost accounts, but right now I don't feel qualified to serve up a finished shiny solution - I'm just trying to regain something I have lost.
The situation is that we have two backups, one from May and one from.. was it September? Anyway, I have never had to open (or use?) a database in PHP so I'll skip that step.
OK, we have two databases, named something like Forum1 and Forum2, which I will assign avatar names May and and September. Inside each of those there will be tables which I'll call Members and Posts (and several more, which I'll ignore here - including one with passwords and maybe some indexes). And then you have to find all the member posts in May that had disappeared in September. Let's assume that the member tables have a field called ID (plus sundry fields for other things, like name and admission date). And oh, you'll probably get some kind of result. Where to store that? Well, you could create a new empty Database called Found with the same fields as the other two (the structure can be copied).
The syntax would then be something like
Select
May.members.*
from Forum1.dbo.members as May
left outer join Forum.dbo.members as September
where September.members.userid = NULL
Insert Into Found.dbo.members.*
... and of course this wouldn't work at the first go

After that you could try to find the passwords, image names and maybe even the posts from the September database using a Join on userid with the members table in 'Found' - but in all likelihood they dísappeared when the corresponding memberids at some point were deleted. If so, then the logical possibility would be to make a Join back to the May database, which probably would yield some content to insert into the respective tables in Found, albeit nothing from the time after May.
At this point a copy of the latest database should be made, and into that you could try to ADD the content of Found - though with a caveat: if any content corresponding to lost members had survived into the current database, then you shouldn't insert that content into the running database - it would create dublets and maybe break some indexes. So far we can only be sure that the content of the table I have called members has been disturbed, but at least we would then have the lost items in that table in the members table in Found ... if everything worked as planned.
... BUT IT NEVER DOES!

3 x
- Iversen
- Black Belt - 5th Dan
- Posts: 5148
- Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
- Location: Denmark
- Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more... - Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
- x 16332
Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
As I mentioned in an earlier message, I had some unexpected trouble with the first paragraf in a text from the homepage of the National Art Gallery in Praha, so I took it into my sittingroom and put it on my notestand for closer study. And I actually did study some more of that text before I somehow got distracted - but at that point I had already noticed that I had less problem now than the evening before - even without an avalanche of citionary lookups (I did some, since it would be foolish not to solve the small riddles along the way). Then yesterday evening I wanted to read something before going to sleep, and the Czech text was not on my goodnight chair-at-the-bedside so I looked through the pile of papers there and found an Irish text about the Tuatha De Danann. Actually this text had been lying untouched there for at least one half year, so I expected to have grave problems reading it - even with the help of a translation (into Portuguese). However I didn't find it as difficult as expected. After such a long pause with a language I had never really learned well I couldn't have read it without help, but I found that I remembered many words, and I could understand the syntactic structure. Or in other words: as soon as I knew what each sentence meant, I could read it
And now I should tell about the Thúatha de Danann in Irish, ... but no, I would have to prepare at least a week to do that, so you'll get the tale in Icelandic instead (haha).
IC: Ef þú lest Saxo, sýnir hann norrænu guðina sem konunga. Þú finnur sama tvíræðni með írska Tuatha. Sögurnar voru skrifaðar niður af kristnum munki sem lýsti þeim sem skurðgoðum, en í síðari texta er þeim lýst sem jarðneskum konungum - en með undarlegum venjum. Þegar Nuada konungur missti handlegg gat hann ekki verið konungur. En svo gerði læknir ('einn lia') honum silfurhandlegg og hann var aftur samþykktur. Seinna börðust Tuatha við einhvern sem hét Clan Mile, og í friðarblöðunum var tekið fram að þeir ættu að halda helmingi landsvæðis síns - og þá fengu þeir það sem liggur undir yfirborði jarðar. Og þeir hafa að sögn buað þar síðan. Þannig að ef þeir voru guðir, þá voru þeir einhverjir smávægilegir guðir þegar þeir samþykktu við þessi viðskipti.
EN: ANd why this rant in Icelandic? Well, I got the idea that it might be entertaining to reread Völuspá, which is past and future as told to Odin by the wise, although dead (!) völva (fortune telling sorceress or shamaness). The only problem is that I have to find the original text on the internet first - I'm definitely not going to read it in Danish (or English).
Today I have been to a neighbour town and visited three museums there, including one with an exhibition about Danish kings before Gorm the Old. Because this king got a runic stone hewn where he mentioned his beloved wife, queen Thyra Danebod (ahem, Thorwig), the romantic historians spread the myth that the Danish royal line started with them and continued unbroken right up to our present king Frederik X. But that's nonsense. Gregor of Tours mentions one Danish king in the 600s, but then there is pretty much silence up to shortly before 800, where king Angantyr sends a Christian missionary Willibrord back home. And then we have the mighty Gudfred, who defied Charlemagne, and Horik I, who sent the emperor's marionett doll Harald Klak back down to the empire. Those early kings are really worth mentioning - and the only problem is that very few contemporary writers from down South bothered to mention them. And then we are left with legends, like the Irish with their Tuatha's.
Now I'm gonna search for a free copy of Völuspá.
PS: I found the Völu-thing at https://www.voluspa.org/voluspa.htm, and already on page 2 there is some guy called Durin. Tolkien was an expert in Old Norse lore, but I also have another reference: a few days ago I watched a TV program about Neanderthalian finds in Southern France - and the (Francophone) archeologists there dubbed their best specimen Durin after the dwarf king invented by Tolkien. And by the way, I suppose you already know that the whole Tolkienesque slew of Dwarves plus Gandalf got their names from the Edda (cfr. the following selection from Völuspá):
11. (...)Alþjófr, Dvalinn,
Nár ok Náinn, Nípingr, Dáinn,
Bifurr, Bafurr, Bömburr, Nori,
Ánn ok Ánarr, Óinn, Mjöðvitnir.
12. Veggr ok Gandálfr, Vindálfr, Þorinn,

And now I should tell about the Thúatha de Danann in Irish, ... but no, I would have to prepare at least a week to do that, so you'll get the tale in Icelandic instead (haha).
IC: Ef þú lest Saxo, sýnir hann norrænu guðina sem konunga. Þú finnur sama tvíræðni með írska Tuatha. Sögurnar voru skrifaðar niður af kristnum munki sem lýsti þeim sem skurðgoðum, en í síðari texta er þeim lýst sem jarðneskum konungum - en með undarlegum venjum. Þegar Nuada konungur missti handlegg gat hann ekki verið konungur. En svo gerði læknir ('einn lia') honum silfurhandlegg og hann var aftur samþykktur. Seinna börðust Tuatha við einhvern sem hét Clan Mile, og í friðarblöðunum var tekið fram að þeir ættu að halda helmingi landsvæðis síns - og þá fengu þeir það sem liggur undir yfirborði jarðar. Og þeir hafa að sögn buað þar síðan. Þannig að ef þeir voru guðir, þá voru þeir einhverjir smávægilegir guðir þegar þeir samþykktu við þessi viðskipti.
EN: ANd why this rant in Icelandic? Well, I got the idea that it might be entertaining to reread Völuspá, which is past and future as told to Odin by the wise, although dead (!) völva (fortune telling sorceress or shamaness). The only problem is that I have to find the original text on the internet first - I'm definitely not going to read it in Danish (or English).
Today I have been to a neighbour town and visited three museums there, including one with an exhibition about Danish kings before Gorm the Old. Because this king got a runic stone hewn where he mentioned his beloved wife, queen Thyra Danebod (ahem, Thorwig), the romantic historians spread the myth that the Danish royal line started with them and continued unbroken right up to our present king Frederik X. But that's nonsense. Gregor of Tours mentions one Danish king in the 600s, but then there is pretty much silence up to shortly before 800, where king Angantyr sends a Christian missionary Willibrord back home. And then we have the mighty Gudfred, who defied Charlemagne, and Horik I, who sent the emperor's marionett doll Harald Klak back down to the empire. Those early kings are really worth mentioning - and the only problem is that very few contemporary writers from down South bothered to mention them. And then we are left with legends, like the Irish with their Tuatha's.
Now I'm gonna search for a free copy of Völuspá.
PS: I found the Völu-thing at https://www.voluspa.org/voluspa.htm, and already on page 2 there is some guy called Durin. Tolkien was an expert in Old Norse lore, but I also have another reference: a few days ago I watched a TV program about Neanderthalian finds in Southern France - and the (Francophone) archeologists there dubbed their best specimen Durin after the dwarf king invented by Tolkien. And by the way, I suppose you already know that the whole Tolkienesque slew of Dwarves plus Gandalf got their names from the Edda (cfr. the following selection from Völuspá):
11. (...)Alþjófr, Dvalinn,
Nár ok Náinn, Nípingr, Dáinn,
Bifurr, Bafurr, Bömburr, Nori,
Ánn ok Ánarr, Óinn, Mjöðvitnir.
12. Veggr ok Gandálfr, Vindálfr, Þorinn,
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- tarvos
- Black Belt - 2nd Dan
- Posts: 2928
- Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2015 11:13 am
- Location: The Lowlands
- Languages: Native: NL, EN
Professional: ES, RU
Speak well: DE, FR, RO, EO, SV
Speak reasonably: IT, ZH, PT, NO, EL, CZ
Need improvement: PO, IS, HE, JP, KO, HU, FI
Passive: AF, DK, LAT
Dabbled in: BRT, ZH (SH), BG, EUS, ZH (CAN), and a whole lot more. - Language Log: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/fo ... PN=1&TPN=1
- x 6202
- Contact:
Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
It is good to see you are still active. You haven't changed a bit.
Speaking of, I'll say this in Swedish för jag kan inte lite på min danska än:
Jag var i Köpenhamn idag och köpte en vetenskaplig tidskrift: Illustreret Videnskab. Det påminde mig om dig. Goe gamle Iversens metoder slutar aldrig funka.
Speaking of, I'll say this in Swedish för jag kan inte lite på min danska än:
Jag var i Köpenhamn idag och köpte en vetenskaplig tidskrift: Illustreret Videnskab. Det påminde mig om dig. Goe gamle Iversens metoder slutar aldrig funka.
3 x
I hope your world is kind.
Is a girl.
Is a girl.
- Iversen
- Black Belt - 5th Dan
- Posts: 5148
- Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
- Location: Denmark
- Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more... - Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
- x 16332
Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
SW: Jag hoppas att jag inte behöver ändra några bitar, vilket innebär att jag fortsätter att studera hemma med mina tvåspråkiga texter, grammatikstudier och .. ja, jag tittar mer Youtube än jag gjorde förr i tiden, för jag har upptäckt hur mycket kul (och nytta) man kan ha av maskingjorda undertexter på alla möjliga språk.
EN: But sometimes I get distracted. Today I for some reason decided to look at the pdf version of some texts I did about the taxonomy of primates earlier this year (actually they are the last in the row of such texts all the way through the chordates).. and then I saw that two images had been partly superimposed. then I went back to my .doc file to see why Libra Office had moved them, and then .. well, I thought that I would add some more species, and to lull my language learner conscience to sleep I also made a new set of bilingual texts, this time about lemurs and loris and galagos & co. in several Slavic languages. I had actually planned just to make a Czech collection, but apparently the Czech WIkipedists aren't interested in half monkeys. However I found some OK texts in Ukrainian, Serbian and even the Bosnian language, which I haven't even studied - but with a translation and a Croatian dictionary within reach I shouldn't have problems getting through it.
The much learned paleontologists have found out that the closest relatives to the primates are the tree-shrews or tupaias, and those animals have apparently hardly changed a whisker since the eocæne more than 30 million years ago. And after them our closest relatives are the rats and mice and other rodents, but I have listed them in another file in the series, and there are so many species there that I have have skipped a large percentage of them - and to an amateur like me rats and mice and rabbits have a tendency just to look the same, which makes it less interesting to learn scores of species names. I have not yet decided my strategy with the rodents, but today I focus on the primates and their closest relatives, and their numbers are less mind numbing. By the way, I'm glad that I'm not a professional taxonomists - some of the extinct species are known from just one single tooth, and then I really hope that the learned ones know what they are doing. How can they be sure that the one and only tooth from their brandnew species isn't just a slightly different molar from a wellknown species? It's just a tooth, for heaven's sake!
FR: Le prochain groupe que je dois étudier est celui des lémuriens, et j'ai eu l'occasion d'en rencontrer certains d'eux plus tôt cette année lors de ma visite à Madagascar. Dans les zoos, on ne voit pas plus d’une demi-douzaine d’espèces, et plusieurs d’entre elles sont sur le point de disparaître à l’état sauvage. Les plus grandes espèces ont déjà disparu – assassinées par les immigrants qui ont traversé l'océan Indien il y a environ mille ans.
EN: But sometimes I get distracted. Today I for some reason decided to look at the pdf version of some texts I did about the taxonomy of primates earlier this year (actually they are the last in the row of such texts all the way through the chordates).. and then I saw that two images had been partly superimposed. then I went back to my .doc file to see why Libra Office had moved them, and then .. well, I thought that I would add some more species, and to lull my language learner conscience to sleep I also made a new set of bilingual texts, this time about lemurs and loris and galagos & co. in several Slavic languages. I had actually planned just to make a Czech collection, but apparently the Czech WIkipedists aren't interested in half monkeys. However I found some OK texts in Ukrainian, Serbian and even the Bosnian language, which I haven't even studied - but with a translation and a Croatian dictionary within reach I shouldn't have problems getting through it.
The much learned paleontologists have found out that the closest relatives to the primates are the tree-shrews or tupaias, and those animals have apparently hardly changed a whisker since the eocæne more than 30 million years ago. And after them our closest relatives are the rats and mice and other rodents, but I have listed them in another file in the series, and there are so many species there that I have have skipped a large percentage of them - and to an amateur like me rats and mice and rabbits have a tendency just to look the same, which makes it less interesting to learn scores of species names. I have not yet decided my strategy with the rodents, but today I focus on the primates and their closest relatives, and their numbers are less mind numbing. By the way, I'm glad that I'm not a professional taxonomists - some of the extinct species are known from just one single tooth, and then I really hope that the learned ones know what they are doing. How can they be sure that the one and only tooth from their brandnew species isn't just a slightly different molar from a wellknown species? It's just a tooth, for heaven's sake!

FR: Le prochain groupe que je dois étudier est celui des lémuriens, et j'ai eu l'occasion d'en rencontrer certains d'eux plus tôt cette année lors de ma visite à Madagascar. Dans les zoos, on ne voit pas plus d’une demi-douzaine d’espèces, et plusieurs d’entre elles sont sur le point de disparaître à l’état sauvage. Les plus grandes espèces ont déjà disparu – assassinées par les immigrants qui ont traversé l'océan Indien il y a environ mille ans.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
Ich möchte gerne zu deinen Aussagen über die Zähne von ausgestorbenen Tierem sagen, dass es auch haft vor ist gekommen, dass Forscher etliche Tierenarten verwechselt haben, oder sich durch die Datenmangel geirrt haben. Diese Fehler kommen dann erst später am Licht, wenn mehr Forschung die Details weiter erklären kann. Aber oft reicht's auch nicht - und ich glaube, für viele Wissenschaftler ist es auch dieses Faktum, warum sie Lust haben, sich mit diese Puzzles zu beschäftigen. Ein einzelner Zähne kann nur mit guten sonstigen ausreichenden Daten zu einer Entscheidung uber den Art des Tieres führen.
Es macht natürlich Spass, wenn man diese Neuigkeiten entdeckt und dann auch stolz darauf sein kann, was man erreicht hat. Zumindestens ich werde es auf dieser Weise interpretieren.
Es macht natürlich Spass, wenn man diese Neuigkeiten entdeckt und dann auch stolz darauf sein kann, was man erreicht hat. Zumindestens ich werde es auf dieser Weise interpretieren.
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I hope your world is kind.
Is a girl.
Is a girl.
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