xkcd: Git

Donald Trump falls somewhere between “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Ben Carson resembles A.W. Tozer’s “The Pursuit of God.” Marco Rubio has a lot in common with “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” while Jeb Bush is a little simpler and sunnier — closer to “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” Marie Kondo’s tribute to decluttering.These comparisons aren’t about the candidates’ policy platforms. Mr. Trump has not advocated a great rafting trip down the Mississippi, at least not yet. They are instead based on an analysis of the candidates’ speaking styles in this year’s presidential debates, measuring both the complexity of their speech and the positivity (or negativity) of the words they use. To help make their speaking styles concrete, we compared them with a range of books, drawn from the most commonly downloaded titles on Project Gutenberg and supplemented with selections from our personal libraries.

Source: Ted Cruz as Beowulf: Matching Candidates With the Books They Sound Like – The New York Times

[Oh dear lord, yes. This is me all over. -egg]

Source: I used to suffer from FOMO – The Oatmeal

Linguists studying a signing system that spontaneously developed in an isolated Bedouin village say they have captured a new language being generated from scratch. They believe its features may reflect the innate neural circuitry that governs the brain’s faculty for language.

The language, known as Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, is used in a village of some 3,500 people in the Negev desert of Israel. They are descendants of a single founder, who arrived 200 years ago from Egypt and married a local woman. Two of the couple’s five sons were deaf, as are about 150 members of the community today.

The clan has long been known to geneticists, but only now have linguists studied its sign language. A team led by Dr. Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa says in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today that the Bedouin sign language developed spontaneously and without outside influence. It is not related to Israeli or Jordanian sign languages, and its word order differs from that of the spoken languages of the region.

Source: A New Language Arises, and Scientists Watch It Evolve – The New York Times

[Somehow I’m just feeling really moved by this one. -e]

When flipping through these prints by Netherlands-based printmaker Jaco Putker it’s difficult to pintpoint the exact emotion one should feel, but generally, if it’s somewhere between amused and terrified, that’s just what the artist intends. Putker combines both digital preparation with traditional photopolymer (solar plate) etching to create collages that can be both highly ridiculous and downright frightening. He refers to the artworks as “illustrations to fables which don’t exist, but hopefully take shape in the beholders’ minds.”

Source: Dually Sinister and Playful Solarplate Etchings by Jaco Putker | Colossal

Anosognosia (/æˌnɒsɒɡˈnoʊziə/, /æˌnɒsɒɡˈnoʊʒə/; from Ancient Greek ἀ- a-, “without”, νόσος nosos, “disease” and γνῶσις gnōsis, “knowledge”) is a deficit of self-awareness, a condition in which a person who suffers a certain disability seems unaware of the existence of his or her disability.

I was particularly interested to learn that

As with unilateral neglect, caloric reflex testing (squirting ice cold water into the left ear) is known to temporarily ameliorate unawareness of impairment. It is not entirely clear how this works, although it is thought that the unconscious shift of attention or focus caused by the intense stimulation of the vestibular system temporarily influences awareness.

Anosognosia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Today, the land registry system in Honduras is controlled and updated by government officials. The closed nature of the system means that the data are not secured and are thus susceptible to manipulation. The same applies to many similar government ledgers around the world.

This sort of setup has, for example, led to consternation in some countries over the apparently disproportionate number of current and former civil servants owning prime beachfront real estate.

With blockchain, it’s possible to make changes to public ledgers more efficiently. Meanwhile, anyone can see exactly who has authorised a given change to, for example, a land registry ledger.

“Distributed architecture, immutability and transparency are the three main attributes that allow blockchain-based apps to combat fraud and corruption,” says Abhi Dohal, VP of Business Development at Epigraph. “The most well-known blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain, is secured by more computational power than all the Google servers combined.”

Today Corrupt Officials Spend Your Money—Tomorrow Blockchain Will Stop Them – Singularity HUB

For close watchers of the interactions between the Justice Department and the financial industry, the mistrial in the Dewey & LeBoeuf case was about more than just the fact that a handful of jurors were too overwhelmed by the evidence presented to reach a verdict. The mistrial, after a four months in court and 22 days of deliberations, hints at a much deeper problem: Perhaps most financial crime has reached a level of such complexity that it’s beyond the reach of the law.

Has It Become Impossible to Prosecute White-Collar Crime? – Bloomberg Business