Nepenthe

Illustration: Caleb Bennett Every day, on the Xiha Life homepage, there’s a playful poll designed to get members conversing. When I recently dropped by the social networking site, the questions were, How many pets do you have in your home? Would you like more or less? The survey sparked a lively thread: One member owned turtles and a dog, another wanted a rabbit, and a third argued she couldn’t have pets because she vacations so frequently. But here’s the thing: Many of these commentors didn’t speak one another’s language. Some posted in English, others in Czech, one in Spanish — yet they were all participating in the same conversation. How? At the bottom of each comment on Xiha Life there’s a Translate button. Hit it and the site uses Google’s automatic-translation software to produce an on-the-fly version in your local language. The upshot is a delightful experience: People across the world engaging in a single conversation without ever leaving their mother tongu...

How we see the world impacts our use of language and our use of language impacts how we see the world. Cognitive scientists in the vein of Benjamin Whorf regularly investigate the connections to thought and language use, including how visual perception varies across languages. Since I use (authentic) visual media to assist in foreign language acquisition, my research does have a practical side to the normally impenetrable fields of visual cognition and psycholinguistics. I use photographs at the earliest stages of language learning to train the brain not only in the use of new words, but literally how to "see" in the new language. Seeing a language differently embeds that language into a visual cultural context for the learner and makes for more effective recall later. Let's look at two aspects of the visual world that provide good examples of how the visual impacts language and vary between languages and cultures: Color & Space. Color In order to hig...

The far side of the moon is shown in this image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image shows the moon's topography, with the highest elevations in red and the lowest areas in blue

From The Guardian (a partnership): The recipe search engine from WhatCouldICook.com is now also running on guardian.co.uk. Learn about how it works and what kinds of commercial possibilities the case study demonstrates. Daniel Levitt runs a recipe sharing web site called WhatCouldICook.com. He was an early beta user of the Open Platform who also helped us see what capabilities people wanted from the Guardian. "I was really pleased to find out that I could use guardian.co.uk content for my website. Then when I learned I could integrate my search tool directly into guardian.co.uk and partner on a commercial deal I realised how powerful the Open Platform really was." This brief case study shows how this partner used the Open Platform to get more out of his project than he would have been able to on his own.

Because of Lady Gaga's videoclip Alejandro , Slate.com and Slate.fr recap nun misbehavior in the movies :) Le walrus , c'était Paul. Lady Gaga, elle, est une prêtresse pornographique. Dans le clip licencieux de sa chanson Alejandro , Lady Gaga (assistée du réalisateur Steven Klein et d'un paquet d'éphèbes glabrissimes) explore quelques comportements fétichistes que je n'aurais jamais songé à tenter par moi-même. Les plus interessants sont ceux où la star apparaît revêtue d'habits de nonne plutôt inhabituels. Elle dégouline de robes en latex, ouvre grand la bouche pour avaler les perles de son chapelet et patin-couffin —en gros, une farce coquine destinée à faire enrager la Catholic League . The walrus was Paul, and Lady Gaga is the pornographic priestess. In the racy video supporting " Alejandro ," Gaga (assisted by director Steven Klein and a mess of smooth beefcake) explores a number of fetish behaviors, many of which I had never be...

Saramago’s narration feels modern and ancient at once from The New Yorker in October 2008 The philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote a paper, “The Makropulos Case,” in which he argued that eternal life would be so tedious that no one could bear it. According to Williams, the constancy that defines an eternal self would entail an infinite desert of repetitive experiences, lest the self be so altered as to be emptied of any definition. That is why, in the play by Karel Capek from which Williams takes his title, the three-hundred-and-forty-two-year-old Elina Makropulos, having imbibed the elixir of eternal life since the age of forty-two, chooses to discontinue the regimen, and dies. Life needs death to constitute its meaning; death is the black period that orders the syntax of life. In “Death with Interruptions” (translated, from the Portuguese, by Margaret Jull Costa; Harcourt; $24), José Saramago, a writer whose long, uninterrupted sentences are relative strangers to th...

So, why vampires? What got you interested in writing this book? My good friend and editor in the book division, Lisa Thomas, called me up one day and said “How about vampires for a book?” I said, “Vampires? I used to know everything about them when I was thirteen years old. Sure I’ll do vampires.” And then she explained that they were trying to get out a book to coincide with this Explorer show on the Vampire of Venice. The other reason I acceded to her request is that one of my long-standing interests was in the history of mythologies-- folklore, and that kind of thing. I have shelves of books on Ancient Greek and Roman and Indo-European religions--where the roots of a lot of these legends are. The thing was not just to do vampires but to do the historical and geographical roots of the vampire mythology. So that appealed to me. That would make it distinctive and different from the corpus of vampire books- and there are lots of them. With Twilight and True Blood , ...

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