I have been on a familie visit again, and this time I used the rest of my "Muy Interesante" as goodnight reading - and finished it. In principle is it not a hard job to read such a magazine, and if I buy one I can read it in less than an hour. But the purpose of reading something in bed is not to to be entertained, but to get sleepy - and therefore it is rare that I read more than 10-15 minutes. But now I have finished that magazine for the second time.
SP: Entre los artículos más extensos, había uno que podría parecer un poco provocativo para algunos: un rechazo total al aseveración que hayan personas que podrian quedar discapacitadas por la energía de los teléfonos celulares, líneas aéreas o televisores y otros electrodomésticos. Las personas que creen que les molestan las ondas de radio fueron ejemplificadas por una señora que no tenía electricidad en su casa y solo salía a la calle con un sombrero plateado - terminó suicidándose. Y fue más que sugerido que el tratamiento psiquiátrico podría ser más relevante que los cambios físicos en el entorno. Se mencionó que casi todos los estudios científicos niegan que pueda darse una influencia real de las ondas de radio, y se determinó que siete publicaciones que estaban excepciones a esta regla eran al borde de la incompetencia. Pero, ¿es realistico que se puede evitar que la gente se queje de las ondas de radio solo por ler algo en una periódico? Probablemente no.
EN: I also did some new French wordlists and repetitions of the Greek ones from earlier visits - we had one rainy day, and otherwise I would probably have been doing a bit of gardening instead (I have plastered my Mother's garden with rhododendrons and other flowering plants, and now I'm fighting the weeds). And when I came home I had planned to do some studying, but I fell into a trap: I knew that the number of species of cartilaginous 'fish' and their jawless predecessors was relatively limited so as I wrote above I did one wordfile with a selection o such critters last week. But being a bit spineless ("rygrad som en regnorm" or "som kogt spaghetti" as we say in Danish) I succombed to the temptation of doing a similar job for the most primitive rayfinned fish, starting with the Polypteriformes (bichirs and their kind) and ending after 35 pages with the Anguilliformes (eels and their relatives) - andd at the same time I learn a lot of English (and Latin) words, albeit from a fairly specialized field.
Pelican eel-Adayinthedeep.jpg
My work the next couple of weeks is laid nicely out in the clados for the
Teleostei (including the second cladogram for the Percomorpha, which seems to be the most scary). I have however already discovered that I'll need also to consult the Spanish wikipedia: the English page for the
Gobiidae with some 2000 species hasn't got links to the relevant subgroups, let alone a genus list or cladogram, but I found out that there is an adequate list of genera in the
Spanish Wikipedia, and from there I can get back to the English pages for one subgroup at a time - I have chosen to use Latin and English names for the species,
not Spanish nor Danish ones for the simple reason that they don't cover the ground, so I can't just switch to Spanish names.
And by the way, I have also found time to do a little bit of text studying: some time ago I made some printouts from the Ukrainian Wikipedia about the the Middle Ages, and I have spelled my way through about half of it. And as a follow-up on this I have made pauses in my species collection to read a few articles in Ukrainian and a few other languages about some of the animal groups I have been reading about in English - like for instance the short one in Ukraninian about the Siluriformes (
Сомоподібні = "catfish" in English, "maller" in Danish") plus a much longer one about
pelican eels in Russian - and I'm pleased to see that my studies until now seem to be sufficient to give me access to articles about simple topics like ichtyological nomenclature in Ukrainian. I can't speak the language, but if I at least can learn to read it then it'll be enough ... for a start.
F2410a04_catfish carcass_Okavango.jpg
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