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[steveg]

there was a milkmaid from Nantucket
who swore she saw god in a bucket
the sceptic said Nay
it's just curds and whey
the milkmaid she replied Oh Fuckit

[TropicalSnowstorm]

Right, does anyone have a link for the guy who cuts his arm with a sword?

Meanwhile, I think this is closer to how a subtle martial art should be performed, take a look. Pure jiggery-fakery, or is there something to this (takes a minute to really get going)?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RaUpEMpxuY

Yes, for goodness sakes quit talking about Randi's ass and someone post the arm mutilation! : )  

I couldn't find it on youtube myself, but I enjoyed the other links very much.  I had actually seen that Chi vs MMA clip before, but without the lead-in so I originally thought it was just a master from an ineffective fighting style...I had no idea he was actually trying to use magic... : )  The portly, out of shape instructor with the sickly looking students was also classic.  I loved how the newslady just looked at him and said "you just tapped me in the head".  Fantastic!

[Retro]

...

[Joel]

As clearly as can be deduced,
When a creationist's tongue can be loosed,
There's a god in the sky,
Who created the eye,
As it's complex and can't be reduced.

[tristanjay7]

I skipped some pages, but I want to explain the difference between a dialect and a language. Languages are mutually intelligible. Stick someone speaking English, someone speaking Navajo, and someone speaking German. Each speaker can't understand what the other is saying.

Dialects are mutually telligible. Take an American speaker of English, a British speaker and an Irish speaker and put them in a room together. While they all sound different, they can successfully understand each other.

[tristanjay7]

Here's why so many languages die: There are not enough linguists in the world to record languages. One of my professors working with a nearby tribe on language revitalization. After like ten years of research, she has a decent grammar (rules for articulating sounds, interpreting the sound system, making words, making sentences and interpreting sentences) and a medium-level dictionary. 10 years and she still doesn't have definitive resources.

Also, the whole claim about creating an orthography for language being impossible is moot. We linguists can capture subtleties in language. For instance, Rebecca's claim that these languages are verbal (she's probably thinking primitive) is true for many polysynthetic languages. In these languages the domain of a sentence can be a single word.

Here's an example from Wikipedia:
Aliikusersuillammassuaanerartassagaluarpaalli.

aliiku-sersu-i-llammas-sua-a-nerar-ta-ssa-galuar-paal-li

entertainment-provide-SEMITRANS-one.good.at-COP-say.that-REP-FUT-sure.but-3.PL.SUBJ/3SG.OBJ-but

'However, they will say that he is a great entertainer, but ...'

Here we see the nuance you guys were talking about. The second line shows all the atomic units of meaning of the molecular sentence. Beads on a string. Polysynthetic grammars can be exceedingly precise and all the subtleties have a surface representation.

[thenewbeat]

Sorry to bump such an old post, but I just listened to this episode and the whole Katana Sword topic reminded me of this hilarious video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcF7tsRRgw0

-Robert