For a couple of years in my early twenties, I was a die-hard believer in the Sapir-Whorf, though I had never encountered the term, or even read a description of it, which begins to hint at what’s wrong with it as a theory.

Samuel R. Delany in a recent interview with the Paris Review. I’m reading his novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand — and it’s something else.

• Since learning the word skeuomorph (a contemporary decorative touch that was once functional), I’ve been seeing them everywhere.
• Mapnificent uses CTA schedules to overlay Google Maps with an estimate of where you can get from any point in a certain amount of time.
• Talking Funny features Louie CK, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Ricky Gervais talking shop about comedy. They’re able to really analyze jokes and still crack each other up. It’s available on youtube, at least for now.

ProPublica got together a dream panel of Ira Glass (This American Life), David Remnick (The New Yorker), and Raney Aronson-Rath (Frontline) to discuss “Long-Form Storytelling in a Short-Attention-Span World.”

The combination of radio, magazine, and television experience makes for some interesting parallels and a few stark differences. All have great stories to tell, and each has been around long enough to really see the changes in media over the past decade (ie its convergence on the internet). At the same time, they each hold steady on the benefits of their own format.

• Today it would be created with computers, but the opening sequence of Blade Runner was all done with miniatures. This video shows the considerable work that went into that tiny dystopian world.
• It’s not going to win any beauty contests, but this site for learning to tie useful knots is dead simple.
• This week in Wikipedia lists: military figures by nickname. Don’t mess with the “Swamp Fox,” the “Electric Brain,” or the “Black Swallow of Death,” but what about “Uncle Wiggly Wings?”

Wikipedia has an extensive list of shibboleths (definition), a page I found after watching a West Wing episode of the same name.

• The German words Streichholzschächtelchen (small box of matches), Eichhörnchen (squirrel), Fachhochschule (University of Applied Sciences) and Strickstrumpf (knitted sock) serve as shibboleths for distinguishing native speakers from foreigners, due to their many “ch” sounds and the large number of consonants.
• Rødgrød med fløde [ˈʁøðɡʁøːˀð mɛð ˈfløːðɛ]: The definitive test of one’s mastery of the Danish language. No non-native is likely to pronounce the phrase (which means ‘mashed strawberries with cream’ in English) correctly due to the overwhelming amount of Danish phonemes.
• “Woolloomooloo” (a suburb of Sydney) was used by Australian soldiers in the Pacific Theatre during the Second World War to identify themselves when approaching a camp.

Two men are talking on a Pyongyang subway train.
“How are you, comrade?”
“Fine, how are you doing?”
“Comrade, by any chance, do you work for the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Have you worked for the Central Committee before?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Then, are any of your family members working for the Central Committee?”
“Nope.”
“Then, get away from me! You’re standing on my foot!”

A New Zealand site collected this and a few others.

• The WSJ asks writers how they write. In addition, Kurt Vonnegut talks about creative writing courses.
• The Ship of Theseus is an example I hadn’t heard for the paradox of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object. Also known as the Reunion Tour problem.

If you don’t watch out, you could really get lost in a site like TV Tropes. Or at least I could. To be sure, the site appeals to a particular type of person. Someone who likes patterns and categories.

The easiest way to understand what it’s trying to do is to look up a show that you know, like The Wire or So You Think You Can Dance.

A wiki-style site is perfect for TV Tropes. Traditional ideas, like Chekov’s Gun, are outrageously annotated and linked. On some shows there’s a bingo game waiting to happen.

• Pete Drake and Peter Frampton aside, have you ever wondered if an instrument can be played fast enough to mimic human speech? Well, it turns out it can. Using, MIDI controllers to play piano keys VERY quickly, Austrian composer Peter Ablinger translates a child’s voice to a piano. Check out the video with the full article.
• Some old-timers talk about Chicago, a piece from Granta magazine.
• Letters of Note is a blog of historical correspondences. Presented with scans of the original letters and typed transcriptions, the site is well curated and already has a variety of content. Some are terribly sad, like the mother who lost five sons in WWII without knowing it until she got a response from FDR. Others are hilarious, like this letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asking him to investigate the obscene lyrics to “Louie Louie.”

A nice graphic by Craig Robinson of Flip Flop Fly Ball. Check it out full-sized and with short explanations. I’d love to see it expanded into all professional sports.

The site has a full series of these infographics, visualizing the shape of balls and ballparks, the records of World Series winning teams, the direction of home plates, and more.