Five Vintage SF Works About Travelling to the Moon
Apr. 13th, 2026 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicoll
This is how we imagined humanity's first trip to the moon before Apollo 11...
Five Vintage SF Works About Travelling to the Moon
james_davis_nicollThis is how we imagined humanity's first trip to the moon before Apollo 11...
Five Vintage SF Works About Travelling to the Moon
Industry-funded study of the week: Taurine supplements
Apr. 13th, 2026 01:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
foodpolitics_feedI was interested to run across this article announcement:
Nestlé researchers find Taurine-B vitamin blend may support motivation: A study in healthy adults found that daily supplementation had a positive impact on motivation, attention, mental energy and effort toward achieving goals after 14 days of intake…. Read more
It immediately raised the question: Why would Nestlé researchers do this study?
I went right to the source.
The study: A nutritional blend of taurine, vitamins B6, B9, and B12 improves motivated behaviors in healthy adults—a double-blinded randomized clinical trial. Front. Nutr. 13:1711478. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2026.1711478
Methods: …we identified candidate nutrients found in foods that could enhance brain GSH [glutathione] production as a possible approach to sustain motivated behaviors….we discovered that taurine was able to efficiently increase GSH production…but only when levels of vitamin B9 were adequate. The above led us to test a blend of taurine, vitamin B6, B9, and B12 in humans, in a randomized, double-blind, 2-arm, cross-over study with 44 participants aged 25–40 years old.
Results: Results showed significant improvements after 14 days supplementation in the first period, as well as after 28 days in the second administration period, compared to placebo.
Discussion: Overall, these findings demonstrate how targeted nutritional supplementation can sustain brain health and modulate behaviors, such as motivated and goal-oriented performance.
Funding: The study was sponsored by Société des Produits Nestlé SA.
Conflict of interest: 5 of 7 authors are employed by Société des Produits Nestlé SA. This study received funding from Société des Produits Nestlé SA. The funder was involved in the study design, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article or the decision to submit it for publication.
Comment: This is Nestlé research conducted by Nestlé employees. The company sells nutraceutical products, including supplements. This research seems aimed at providing a seemingly rational basis for marketing a taurine/B vitamin supplement to improve motivational behavior.
The post Industry-funded study of the week: Taurine supplements appeared first on Food Politics by Marion Nestle
Days that Trump spends at his own properties
Apr. 13th, 2026 10:49 amflowing_data_feed
Trump spends a lot of time at his own hotels and golf clubs. Philip Bump has been keeping track since the first term. During this second term so far, Trump spent 170 days in office on his own properties, or 38%, and 80% of weekend days. That seems like a lot given the state of things.
Tags: golf, Philip Bump, properties
Recent language sciences references
Apr. 13th, 2026 12:32 amlanguagelog_feedBecause there are so many excellent entries of interest to Language Log readers in various fields, I am including all of those in this extensive list;
- "Genetic History of Scythia." Andreeva, Tatiana V. et al. Science Advances 11, no. 30 (July 25, 2025): eads8179. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads8179. Updated 27 March 2026.
- "Decoding Parrot Duets: Complex Communication in Yellow-Naped Amazons." Dahlin, Christine R. et al. Journal of Avian Biology 2026, no. 1 (February 12, 2026): e03552. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jav.03552.
- "The Dual Formative *tsi in Tibeto-Burman Languages." DeLancey, Scott. Himalayan Linguistics 25, no. 1 (March 3, 2026). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92z910mm.
- "Lexical Richness in the Speech of Mandarin Chinese for L2 Learners." Hao, Yuxin et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 13, no. 1 (April 9, 2026): 437. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-06566-9.
- "Biomechanics and Evolution of the Primate Tongue." Sekhavati, Yeganeh et al. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 35, no. 2 (April 2, 2026): e70026. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/evan.70026.
- "One Test, Many Tongues: Surveying Language Proficiency across the Globe." Van Rijn, Pol et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123, no. 13 (March 27, 2026): e2420179123. https://pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420179123.
- "Enduring Constraints on Grammar Revealed by Bayesian Spatiophylogenetic Analyses." Verkerk, Annemarie et al. Nature Human Behaviour 10, no. 1 (November 17, 2025): 126-136. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02325-z.
- "Social Perception of Creaky Voice in Mandarin Chinese: Everyone's Gender Matters." Yao, Yao et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (March 27, 2026). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07108-z.
[Thanks to:
Edward M "Ted" McClure, Librarian
https://patreon.com/Bluehorse887
https://researchbuzz.masto.host/@Bluehorse ]
お誕生日会！ Birthday Party!
Apr. 12th, 2026 11:00 pmmaru_feedはなの誕生日にたくさんのお祝いメッセージをありがとうございます！ Thank you for all the congratulatory messages on Hana’s birthday! お誕生日会 […]
(no subject)
Apr. 12th, 2026 06:36 pmflemmingsWhat's the use of sleeping till past noon if all it gets me is a dream of sitting the top level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test and not being able to read the tiny print of the exam, while the kind invigilator told me not to worry about quitting. I might as well have got up when I woke up, or woke for the third time because I kept coming to the surface in the dark.
The tiny print was in English and probably references the tiny print of my Plato texts. Anyway, finished the Meno last night and the Crito today. The Meno is head-hurty and hard to follow, even with diagrams, so I am happy to be embarked on the Phaedo now.
Seems we've had yoyoing temps for a good two months now, but in April we get near the need for change of season clothes. I put away the thickest of the wool socks and brought out a couple of the cotton sockettes, pulled the mid-weight culottes from storage, and shall swap the thickest of the waffle tops for tshirts. When temps swing from 20+humidex to 12+wind in the same week, you need a wardrobe for all seasons.
The tiny print was in English and probably references the tiny print of my Plato texts. Anyway, finished the Meno last night and the Crito today. The Meno is head-hurty and hard to follow, even with diagrams, so I am happy to be embarked on the Phaedo now.
Seems we've had yoyoing temps for a good two months now, but in April we get near the need for change of season clothes. I put away the thickest of the wool socks and brought out a couple of the cotton sockettes, pulled the mid-weight culottes from storage, and shall swap the thickest of the waffle tops for tshirts. When temps swing from 20+humidex to 12+wind in the same week, you need a wardrobe for all seasons.
Abebe On Language.
Apr. 12th, 2026 08:36 pmlanguagehat_feedktschwarz reminds me that the NY Times has rebooted On Language:
Written memorably by William Safire for most of its run, the original column was a mainstay of the magazine for 32 years until 2011. Now that social media, online communities and contemporary political discourse are transforming language profoundly — and these new grammars and vocabularies are flowing into large language models that, slowly but surely, are becoming a dominant force — we think it’s high time to bring the column back. The primary writer will be Nitsuh Abebe. His first column published earlier this week, on the word “lethality.” That follows a string of great columns Nitsuh has written in recent months about the em-dash, the neologism “cope,” the suffix “-maxxing” and the reluctance people have to use periods in texts.
I had actually planned to write about it last week, but that “lethality” essay (archived) annoyed me by being so focused on the news of the day. The new one (archived), on “agentic,” is more to my taste, paying greater attention to word history:
There are various reports and they all seem to agree: The tech world is currently awash in the concept of agency. It is, more specifically, extremely into the word “agentic,” which peppers the language of the tech-associated, the tech-adjacent, the tech-adjacent-adjacent.
That’s “agentic” as in, you know, having agency — possessing the capacity “to influence and control outcomes through assertive individual action,” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it. The word holds a lot of meaning in computing, but Silicon Valley aspirants seem just as eager to apply it to themselves. They talk about being agentic people; sometimes they dress up the idea in a little rhetorical suit and talk about the Highly Agentic Individual. They are describing the kind of person who simply acts, assertively, to shape the world, rather than seeking approval or meekly following the herd. Candidates for tech jobs get asked if they’re agentic (good) or mimetic (yuck). On X, people debate whether the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is in fact “the most agentic person alive.” One poster laments the way a cold can ruin your workday: “You won’t make any deals, you won’t be an agentic person. You’re milquetoast.” Another just needs an adequately agentic aide to help schedule medical appointments.
This sense of agency is hundreds of years old: That O.E.D. entry — II.4, “Ability or capacity to exert power” — features citations from the year 1606 onward, concerning things like “the moral Agency of the Supreme Being” versus that of humanity, or the state’s role in preserving the “personal free agency” of its citizens. But you could be forgiven for thinking it feels new, given how much our understanding of it has been shaped by recent thinking in psychology. In that field, agency is the ability to act independently and, by doing so, to feel control over your own direction — steering your fate instead of watching helplessly as life happens to you. (Children, for instance, are said to gradually develop more “agency and autonomy” as they grow.) Readers of things like feminist criticism will have watched a related usage bubble up from academic thought (1988: Unlike depictions of “women as victims of forces beyond their control,” Emma stands as “Austen’s most agentic heroine”) and eventually cross into everyday speech. […]
Most Americans remain more connected with a different meaning of “agent.” We’re used to the agent as representative — someone who acts on behalf of. Talent agents negotiate deals for actors, writers, models. Travel agents book vacation packages for tour groups. Customer-service agents appear, if you’re lucky, after a minute or two of wearily declaiming the word “AGENT” into a speech-recognition phone system.
The word’s etymology contains both strains: the agent as actor, yes, but also as advocate, instrument, emissary. That double meaning is incredibly handy for the tech industry. It can sound as though agentic A.I. models are meant to assist us — even when the people using the word are boasting that their models are just fine acting without us.
I had actually been wondering what all those people meant by “agentic,” so I’m glad to have it explained, and of course I’m glad the NYT has revived the column.
administration and government
Apr. 12th, 2026 09:01 pmacommonlanguage_feedIt's about time this topic has its own blog post. It's been an aside to other discussions on several occasions. It's not so much a difference between American and British English per se, but a difference in how our political systems work, and hence a difference in which words we need to use about them.
.jpg) |
| PM's Question Time at UK parliament (Wikimedia commons) |
The US has a presidential system, in which the president is elected independently of the legislature. The executive (presidential) and legislative branches of government are accorded their own powers, and the party in control of the executive branch may not be in control of either or both of the legislative chambers (the Senate and the House of Representatives). So when talking about the president and cabinet, it's inaccurate to say things like the Obama government (let me live in the past, please), since the president leads only one branch of the government. Instead, we usually speak of the Obama administration.
So, this isn't really a difference between AmE and BrE because if Americans talk about British politics, they would need the more parliamentary language, and if Britons talk about American politics, they'll need the more presidential language, for accuracy. But do people always speak accurately about these things?
For government, they mostly do. The images below show the most common words between the and government in the AmE & BrE parts of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, which was collected in 2012–13, when the UK had a coalition government of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. There, you can see coalition and Labour in the UK data, but only general adjectives and countries in the American. That hasn't changed in more recent data. There's little talk about the Biden government or the Trump government.
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| Most common words before government in GloWbE AmE subcorpus |
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| Most common words before government in GloWbE BrE subcorpus |
At American sub-national levels, it works the same: American states have 'presidential' systems (just with governors, rather than presidents) and therefore they have administrations led by the governors, and American cities generally have city councils and mayors (details vary from state/city to state/city), and so we can talk of the administration of a mayor or a governor. You can see that in the GloWbE results below, where administration is mostly prefaced by names of presidents, but also, at the bottom Bloomberg, who was mayor of New York City at the time.
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| most common words between the and administration in US GloWbE |
In the UK, Wales and Scotland have their own parliaments, and so we see them having governments in the chart above. At the county and city level, there are councils, and people tend to use the word council instead of government at the local level—e.g. the Labour council.
Directly elected mayors are a 21st-century thing in England, and we don't yet seem to be seeing much use of mayor's name + administration. I tried Johnson administration in GloWbE (since Boris J was London mayor in GloWbE time), but all examples in the UK referred to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the American president—and most of the other the ___ administration examples in UK GloWbE refer to American politics. (I also looked for the Khan administration in a more current corpus, but there one finds it referring to Pakistani politics, not the government of London.) But there is an interesting point at the bottom of this chart:
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| most common words between the and administration in UK GloWbE |
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| the + [UK party name] + administration |
But that usage is going up, across the country:
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| the Labour/Conservative administration in the News on the Web corpus (UK part) |
Without any willingness to go through a lot of examples, I can't tell you how many of these administrations refer to the UK government versus devolved country governments or local governments, but I believe there's a mix. There are a very small number of cases of the Sunak administration and the Starmer administration as well.
Administration is not the first US political word I've seen used in a slightly-less-appropriate way in the UK: gerrymander was my US-to-UK Word of the Year in 2016. But lest you think political words only go in one direction, I'll point you to backbencher, my 2015 UK-to-US Word of the Year.
Replaced video for Artemis
Apr. 12th, 2026 03:36 pmneonvincentI found a much shorter video from CBC News to open Artemis II for Yuri's Night.
NASA's Artemis II mission in 20 minutes.
NASA's Artemis II mission in 20 minutes.
The monumental 10-day Artemis II mission, which sent four astronauts on a record-breaking flyby of the moon, has concluded. Watch highlights of the mission from NASA, from the launch countdown to the astronauts' recovery after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
Distribution of acronym lengths
Apr. 12th, 2026 01:32 pmlanguagelog_feedOr maybe "initialism lengths"? Wiktionary defines initialism as "a term formed from the initial letters of several words or parts of words, which is itself pronounced letter by letter"; while some (fussy) people argue that the term acronym should be reserved for words like laser (= "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation") or NATO (= "North Atlantic Treaty Organization").
Acronyms/Initialisms are (mostly) words, under any reasonable definition. But this category has the special property that most items have multiple specific and distinct senses, generally known to small groups and/or used in very special circumstances.
For example, American linguists know that LSA stands for "The Linguistic Society of America" — but the LSA didn't act in time to lock up https://lsa.org, which belongs to the "Louisiana Sheriffs' Association". And Acronym Finder gives 123 interpretations for LSA, including the linguists but (curiously) not the sheriffs.
Mark Davies' NOW ("News on the Web") Corpus has 3,680 hits for the string LSA — quickly checking a few of them (literally) at random gives us references to the Liangmai Sports Association's Badminton team; the Law Students Association at McGill; a recipe's abbreviation for a mix of ground linseed, sunflower seeds and almonds; Lifesaving South Africa; the Law Society of Alberta; and so forth. In that corpus, the Linguistic Society of America gets 55 hits, and the Louisiana Sheriffs Association has 6.
Someday it would be fun to run an acronym-finding script over that dataset, or a similar one. But this morning, as a crude approximation to the (non-frequency-weighted) distribution of initialism length, I checked the entry counts for probes of Acronym Finder with random letter-string samples of different lengths, generated by this simple R script.
A sample 20 random single letters yielded a mean of 65.5 hits and a median of 64.5:
G 66
V 65
Y 31
E 77
L 64
W 60
H 64
V 65
X 48
D 115
A two-letter sample yielded a mean of 58.1 and a median of 25.5:
ZZ 13
BO 85
UO 26
ND 82
OY 10
WY 8
MM 248
JR 25
YI 6
SK 78
A three-letter sample has a mean of 47.7 and a median of 41:
KXS 2
WRK 4
DCL 63
KNU 6
NPN 37
IPE 60
PVP 45
CCB 154
BJH 4
MCM 102
A four-letter sample has a mean of 1.4 and a median of 0:
EKCK 0
EPRL 6
BLUE 6
WIXI 0
QLCS 1
DZCZ 0
YJGM 0
BTDW 1
CWJI 0
FVOE 0
(Though the AcronymFinder's "acronym attic" has one unverified entry for EKCK as "Embassy in Kuwait City Kuwait".)
And a five-letter sample has mean and median of 0 — though ARKEM has one "unvalidated" entry in the AcronymFinder's attic, listed as "alarm remote keyless entry module":
RDZCI 0
LPEYZ 0
TUWRX 0
WMHXQ 0
ARKEM 0
VCEGP 0
MZMKH 0
WTFAY 0
RDITH 0
DBRBY 0
If we believed the unreliable probability estimates derived from those mean values, we'd estimate 6.55*26=170 single-letter entries, 5.81 *26^2=3928 two-letter entries, 4.77*26^3=83838 three-letter entries, and 0.14*26^4=63977 four-letter entries. Implausible estimates that still confirm my prejudice that three-letter initialisms are the most commonly used.
For sequence lengths of six and above, traditional initialisms or acronyms are increasingly unlikely, though "backronyms" like DREAM and PATRIOT buck the trend. And social-media and email names sometimes involve initialisms combined with abbreviations, like @FmrRepMTG.
The longest example I 've ever seen is MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+. For an explanation and motivation of all 16 characters in that one, see Lezard Dr, Percy, Noe Prefontaine, Dawn-Marie Cederwall, Corrina Sparrow, Sylvia Maracle, Albert Beck, and Albert McCleod. "2SLGBTQQIA+ Sub-Working Group MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ National Action Plan Final report." (2021).
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$$$Billions
Apr. 12th, 2026 08:15 aminfoisbeautiful_feedEvery year(ish), since 2009, I’ve been gathering and visualising billions from news headlines and reports. These gargantuan numbers often make little sense unless put in context and comparison with other billions. So here’s the latest interactive edition.
» see the interactive visualisation
» check the data
Explore our companion visualisation, $$$TRILLIONS
はな13才のお誕生日会。-Hana’s 13th Birthday Party.-（動画）
Apr. 12th, 2026 04:47 ammaru_feedはな１３才のお誕生日会！ Hana’s 13th Birthday Party!
はな１３。-Hana 13.-（動画）
Apr. 12th, 2026 04:45 ammaru_feedはなの13才のお誕生日記念動画。まるさんと一緒に遊びながら成長してきたはなの記録。 Hana’s 13th birthday commemorative video. A record of Hana gro […]
The case of the missing notifications
Apr. 11th, 2026 11:58 pm![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
denise posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_maintenanceI keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.
Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)
We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.
(no subject)
Apr. 11th, 2026 08:54 pmflemmingsThis being the last sunny day till oh who knows, I put a box of books out by the sidewalk and then... stayed in, because Saturday at the Opera was Don Giovanni from the Met last year. Having missed Idomeneo on Valentine's Day through not checking the schedule, I was very careful to keep today open. That library hold that came in will just have to wait. And being in the front room, I managed 30 minutes on the bike machine without triggering my Don'wanna reflex, that has kept me away from it for months.
Not to be snotty, though, but some of the singers' Italian was seriously English-inflected, particularly the Commendatore. Other English speakers can manage the vowels, like Kiri Te Kanawa, but obviously not everyone. And of course nobody else's Elvira comes up to hers. Still, a pleasant interlude. Don Giovanni was played as an oily snake, which makes sense, but is new to me since I imprinted on Raimondi's menacing Giovanni in the Losey film, which now gives me the oogies to listen to.
And note that May 23 is Turandot, that Met production that I've seen clips of on Tiktok and would adore to see live.
I did make it to an oddly empty Fiesta at 5. I wanted bagels but woe is me, Fiesta no longer has bagels. Can't think why not because they bake them on the premises and cannot keep them in stock. Mind, I don't *need* bagels, but those fritters yesterday upset my tum and I wanted some cushioning starch. Ah well, rice crackers it is.
Not to be snotty, though, but some of the singers' Italian was seriously English-inflected, particularly the Commendatore. Other English speakers can manage the vowels, like Kiri Te Kanawa, but obviously not everyone. And of course nobody else's Elvira comes up to hers. Still, a pleasant interlude. Don Giovanni was played as an oily snake, which makes sense, but is new to me since I imprinted on Raimondi's menacing Giovanni in the Losey film, which now gives me the oogies to listen to.
And note that May 23 is Turandot, that Met production that I've seen clips of on Tiktok and would adore to see live.
I did make it to an oddly empty Fiesta at 5. I wanted bagels but woe is me, Fiesta no longer has bagels. Can't think why not because they bake them on the premises and cannot keep them in stock. Mind, I don't *need* bagels, but those fritters yesterday upset my tum and I wanted some cushioning starch. Ah well, rice crackers it is.