Kim Reece @kimreece@mathstodon.xyz

That's fantastic.

"Author's dilemma" by Jie Ma

Today's maths PSA: Events of probability 0 are not necessarily impossible.

> Visible name changes promote inequity for transgender researchers

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001104

> Allowing for invisible name changes is a matter of dignity for trans researchers. This would prevent their own publication record from outing them without their consent. A single, centralized name change request through ORCID iD would alleviate the burden of changing each publication individually.

@elilla who would have guessed that conlang-ers are doing what it takes to hold back the End Times

if you use Linux and you like languages, chances are you’ve struggled to find fonts that give good panlinguistic support. Unicode combining characters, for example, remain poorly supported in most popular fonts. Phonetic characters are only included in a few.

if you look into which free fonts have good coverage, you’ve probably found Junicode, which is great but too mediæval manuscript-like for most computer users (I mean no kink-shaming but most of us want a bit higher x-height in our UIs); and, in modern times, Google's android fonts like Noto/Roboto. some ugly computer-generated stuff with no typographers involved.

and SIL. there's some pretty great fonts labelled SIL something, like Charis SIL or Doulos SIL, great for printed articles and with good coverage of non-European linguistic orthographies. Charis may be the best IPA font I’ve ever seen, does better even than (commercial) Brill at complex, combining IPA.

let’s talk about what the "SIL" here means.

Wikipedia’s introductory paragraph is good…

> SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is a Christian non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into local languages, and aid minority language development.

…so we know already this is a Trojan horse, these are missionaries i.e. they want to befriend indigenous folk in order to Christianize them. we get a lot of endangered language documentation, fieldwork recordings and data from SIL. At the cost of cultural genocide. (a concept they deny, and rephrase as "cultural progress"). It’s like catching pretty butterflies to display their beautiful dead bodies in a glass case.

But it gets funkier. SIL was founded by William Cameron Townsend, a Presbyterian missionary. One of his core beliefs was the Great Commission doctrine: that Jesus charged Christians with the mission to spread the word of God to all nations. Townsend’s revelatory experience was that ‘nations’ here isn’t supposed to be all political countries, but all ethnic groups. All individual cultures.

All languages.

So he founds Wycliffe Bible Translations, with the goal of translating the Word to every single language in existence. And the Summer Institute of Linguistics as a front organisation, with a façade of ecumenism and downplaying the missionarism, to learn what is necessary from undocumented languages. So that the Wycliffe institute can translate the Bible into those, too.

After all, only after every living person in the world has heard the Good News will they be able to take a stand, with God or against. Currently they’re about halfway through the world’s 7 thousand something languages.

What happens when you get the Bible readable into every possible language, and every person of every nation has heard the Good News? That’s right. Second Coming.

I’m not making this up:
SIL International is a cabal of Christian linguists doing language documentation with the goal of ending the world.

set theory is just deep lore for mathematics, the only reason you need to know it is if you plan on editing the fandom wiki

3, 5, 7, 11, etc. -- prime

2 -- even prime

1 -- dwarf prime

"These #mycorrhizal #fungi are the key to life as we know it. Human life would not exist without mycorrhizal fungi. We would still be in an aquatic environment without [them]. It doesn't mean that there wouldn't be a Planet Earth, it just means that we wouldn't be here." - Dr Kristine Nichols

"She says that through RNA analysis scientists have been able to determine that an ancient ancestor to [mycorrhizal fungi] was the thing that helped algae move from pools of murkey water onto land."

Please note - "Cat Facepalms" category exists in Wikimedia Commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cat_facepalms

Thank you for your attention, we will now resume our regular programming.

Christ searching the internet is bad

It doesn't matter what search engine you use, all the results are just Bad now

I can search for table saw crosscut sled construction tips and there'll be a listicle with the number 2021 in the FIRST PAGE of results, copied from another site and with the year changed? And it's like that with anything you search? How is this useful?

Librarians, can you please resurrect human-curated web directories when you get a minute, thx <3

@shahaan @wauz

"Fars is the historical homeland of the Persian people.[8][9]"

"Due to the historical importance of this region, the entire country has historically been also referred to as Persia in the West.[9][10]"

"Prior to Arab rule, this region was known as Pars.[11]"

SDLFKJSDflkdjflfkj today I learned a Big something! Thank you so much!! 8)

So is calling Iran "Persia" is kind of like calling America "New York"? XD

#WorldHistory #Persia #Exonyms