Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Today is National Rubber Ducky Day! In 2014, the battleship USS Iowa encountered the world's largest rubber ducky at the Port of Los Angeles during the Tall Ships Festival. The floating duck sculpture was created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman.




Jan 13, 2018: a ballistic missile alert was accidentally issued via the Emergency Alert System and the Commercial Mobile Alert System over television, radio, and cellphones in Hawaii.





Jan 13, 1985: TBS Network broadcast Mick Jackson's UK nuclear war film THREADS. This was the first airing of the movie in the United States.



WTBS (Atlanta, Georgia), Ted Turner's intro to the film.




English science fiction illustrator Peter Elson was born Jan 13, 1947.
Fantastic Planet, 1977:



"The Embedding" is a story of three experiments in linguistics, and is driven by a searching analysis of the nature of communication.

The Embedding by Ian Watson

[This post is part of an occasional series about linguistics in science fiction.  Fair warnings: this bloomed into a very long post, and there are spoilers throughout.]

Ian Watson's 1973 novel The Embedding is, of all the science fiction about linguistics that I've written about so far, the story that most directly addressed ideas from theoretical linguistics.  Where most SF authors have been content with simple ideas from the shallow end of the field, Watson dives right into the deep end, displaying some familiarity with then-current ideas about Universal Grammar and the phenomenon of center-embeddings in syntax.

The Embedding consists of three interwoven plot threads, each of which deals with a different aspect of the idea of center-embedding.  These three threads are often quite separate, although there are certainly characters and events that cross over between them.  I'm going to summarize the three threads separately, then discuss the linguistic speculations they contain together at the end.

The Sp'thra are linguistic typologists on a grand scale.  They have converted a natural satellite, the Language Moon, into a titanic library of information about languages from all over the galaxy—the WALS project on an astronomical scale.  They maintain a strong version of Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis, believing that each language represents a way of seeing the world:

American B-movie actress, dancer, Ziegfeld Girl, and one of the original Rockettes, Suzanne Kaaren (1912-2004), in her elder years refused to leave her NYC condo, frustrating Donald Trump's plan to evict everyone. She got $750,000 out of him in the settlement. What’s old is new again today:




The London-listed company, Kazatomprom, the world’s biggest uranium miner, warned that it’s likely to fall short of its production targets over the next two years, adding another risk to supply as demand for the nuclear fuel rebounds.


Kazatomprom, the world’s biggest uranium miner


The FBI just uploaded part of its file on CIA whistleblower Philip Agee (Jan 19, 1935 – Jan 7, 2008 in Havana, Cuba). There appear to be differences in the records from the one uploaded by BlackVault in 2018 - different page count, different periods covered, etc.


Due to legal problems in the United States, Inside the Company was first published in 1975 in Britain, while Agee was living in London. In a Playboy magazine interview after the book's publication, Agee said: "Millions of people all over the world had been killed or at least had their lives destroyed by the CIA ... I couldn't just sit by and do nothing."

FBI Agee file (Lots of redactions per usual)  |  The Agee file obtained by the Black Vault


Why not just give Ukraine Nukes and get this over with already!

So while NATO nations and her tax-paying citizens seem to be growing fatigued with the fiscal requirements of supporting Ukraine, expect some form of aid to keep trickling in – lest NATO appear to be abandoning Ukraine.

I’m being mildly facetious, but the simple fact is that no weapon would aid the Ukrainians as immediately and convincingly as a nuclear weapon.

Now, I’m not advocating that Ukraine should receive nuclear weapons from her Western allies. Quite the opposite.

Nukes to Ukraine would be bad. But as far as getting the Russians out of the Donbas, nuclear weapons are your most efficient weapons system.

The National Interest

Interesting NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) over Kwajalein Atoll


20th Space Surveillance Squadron