I have a strange habit to assign melodies to the people who died.

It takes a good bit of effort to make you think about him in past tense...

Christopher Allen of Life With Alacrity has a post about the Dunbar Number as a limit to group sizes.

Søren Kierkegaard, 19th century philosopher: "Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion--and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion . . . while Truth again reverts to a new minority."

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/001796.php

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

http://www.littlebluelight.com/lblphp/quotes.php?ikey=13

The last one is so true.

Try to get yourself drunk and ride a bus in Portland. You will find so many compassionate souls, you will never meet when you are Ok. I feel like a cheater.

Sometimes I want to shut up, lie on my mattress and wait until somebody will say all I want to say. This is actually a wise idea, and I had many occasions to watch it in action. There is always somebody who can say what you feeling, only better than you could.

David Weinberger's article is visionary:

Art expresses something big in something small. (If it expresses something small in something big, you leave during the intermission.) Likewise, in small talk, we express ourselves in the details of what we talk about, the words we use, the ones we don't, how far we lean forward, how tentatively or aggressively we probe for shared ground. Because all of this is implicitly presented, it tends to give a more accurate picture of who we are and what we care about than big, explicit conversations.

Fourth, I guess I'm more of a constructivist than an archaeologist when it comes to social relationships. My aim isn't to expose my buried self to you. It's to build a conversation and then a relationship that eventually is so deep that we can't disentangle the roots. For that, we need lots and lots of ambiguity. The only people who feel like they can adequately describe us are the ones who don't know us.

Commenting on my badly written "Daddy, kill German! - part 2", Tom asked:

I can't really imagine why after looking at what Germany did to the USSR that anyone would be offended by that poster.

A few words written in it can stop an aircraft.

Who recently joined Blogostan.

David Weinberger:

I understand a community to be a group in which people care about one another more than they have to.

The "binary clock" post reminded me my attempts to decipher Braille numbers.

Today I learnt that much larger Wikipedia community (it is said to have more than 170 administrators) has formal rules for Dispute resolution, which look like a very reasonable, well-thought strategy. A lot to think about , I especially like Mediation page. Also, I am going to print Staying cool and eat it.

"We have been copying other peoples software ideas for years, so who is better to provide you with a product that imitates other peoples style and signature."

Geoffrey K. Pullum on Language Log (entry of May 17, 2004) quotes Mark Pilgrim:

Dive into Python is almost finished. ... Now the copy editor is wielding her virtual pen and striking through every word I’ve ever written.

On September 10, 2003 I made a post in our these days alive "Meaningless Drivel":

This is interesting. Just yesterday I read an interview (in Russian) with a mother who lost her son in WTC explosion. <...>She said she asked many people if there is a word for a mother who lost her child and some language, and did not find any language that has this word. Probably most languages have a word for a wife who lost her husband, but not for a mother (or father for that matter). There are strange holes in out lexicon.

Jim made several good points in response:

Well, historically, losing kids while they were still young was all too common. Modern medicine is, well, a modern thing. If they'd made a word for a mother who'd lost a child, prior to say, the last century or two, the word probably would've just meant "a typical mother". :(

The other difference is that a child without parents typically can't take care of him-/herself, and has a very different societal status than a child with parents. Likewise to some extent a woman who lost a husband (historically, as perceived in many societies). A man who lost is wife was also affected, but less so, which I think is why "widower" derives from "widow" and not the reverse - "widow" is a more drastic condition. Anyway, compared to all these, parents who lose their kids can still take care of themselves, and still have most of their status in society, and, well, it was the normal way of things for a long time.

This sounded very reasonable and persuasive.

The more I was surprised to read today that

Bardi has several such words.
loomiyoon baawa (child who has lost a parent, = orphan; cf loomi baawa, neglected child)
gambaj(oo) (mother who has lost a child, now used as a swear word by Bardi men who don't know its original meaning)
algooyarr (father who's lost a child)
jilarr (man who has lost a brother, sister or cousin)
miiraj (woman who's lost a brother or sister)
galgarr (widow or widower)

URL

(via Language Log).

Ethnologue database defines Bardi as "a language of Australia":

No monolinguals. English and Kriol are the second languages. English is generally spoken in the community, Kriol with Aboriginals from farther east. Children and adolescents can understand Bardi, but never seem to speak it. They appear to use English as their language. Speakers are over 40 years old. Dictionary. Literacy rate in second language: 60% in English. There is a feeling that English or Bardi are the languages that should be written, not Kriol. Christian. Nearly extinct.

I didn't add any comment, because I thought the poster said it all.

There is a popular opinion that it always rains in Oregon. Personally, I didn't notice that, and I like rains anyway. I have been missing them the whole summer. A few days ago the rain season started. Rains are the matter of pride to Oregonians -- you will never see anybody with an umbrella on Portland's streets. I could never understand this fashion. Rains are fun, but why do you need to get wet? Once I walked to the Safeway store with my umbrella. The guy who worked there asked: "where you are from?" "from Russia". "Aaaah… We don't recognize these things here." I figured, it would be a lesser insult to the public if I walked naked in the rain, but without an umbrella.

So today I walked in the rain, and I kept my umbrealla closed. I got all wet. Some more practice, and hopefully I will learn to like it. :)

WWII poster. I didn't use any article, because Russian text is ambiguous here. So:

Daddy, kill German!

I posted a link to the pictures of Beslan school siege on JavaRanch. The discussion is mostly in Russian, and I want to translate one participant's words: "These pictures are too beautiful". That's what I thought too. No idea who shot them, but he must be a genious photographer. These pictures are iconic, they require no commentary, even worse: they make any commentary irrelevant.

How do you call somebody with whom you share blogs to comment? There are a few Russians who leave comments on the same blogs I do. It's actually funny: Language Hat makes a post, and the whole pack is here. Well, almost. We are still waiting for Alex(ei).

In a kinder garden kids took caregivers as hostages. They demanded:

So it was 3 years ago? Only? Feels like an epoch.

I remember that day. My husband called me to turn on the TV. I did. TV people were all excited, two towers falled. People flied from the 94th floor to the ground, vary beautiful. That was the first day when I learnt that I don't feel anything.

the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.
Samuel P. Huntington

Via Salam's blog, missing in action since April.

My mother-in-law called me to ask to tell my parents how they feel sorry for that school siege thing in Russia.

The same day later I got an e-mail from my father with his usual set of jokes he loves to send to me. This time they were particularly funny. I am not going to make any sense out of this.

I really like this: A poem composed from SPAM "subject" lines.