violsva: kaynoxxcrafts: necessary-silence: necessary-silence: ...

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violsva:

kaynoxxcrafts:

necessary-silence:

necessary-silence:

haveialreadyreadthat:

Women’s Work: The First 20,000 years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, 1996

This is a great book, all about the work of spinning and weaving, how it developed, and how and why it was women’s work. It makes the great point that women’s work is ephemeral - food, cloth, it’s all things that don’t survive archaeologically, so that it’s something that gets overlooked. The author also knows how to weave herself, and has tried out weaving some ancient cloths, pointing out that it’s only by doing something like that that you can work out practical issues. 

One of the things that was really great was the author pointing out that the most plausible reconstruction for the Venus de Milo is of her spinning:

Even better, is that since the book has been written, an artist who makes 3D printed sculpture has made a 3D model of what she would have looked like - and you can buy one for yourself:

I love this concept

OKAY Tumblr, I’m gonna try this one more time. The tags for this post haven’t been working properly and more people need to see this, darn it!

Let’s try linking some good people in and see if that makes it play along.

@weekendknitter @makinguselessthings @kaynoxxcrafts @youngyarns

Oh I love this! I would 100% want a spinning venus in my life…. 

Thanks for the tag! 

Also if you have access to an academic library they may have the same author’s Prehistoric Textiles, which is both broader and more in-depth and tells you about the domestication of sheep and terms for weaving in pre-Hellenic languages and is amazing.

stand-up-gifs: If you don’t lose your voice

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If you don’t lose your voice partying with me, you’re doing it wrong, cause we’re drinking all night! - James Adomian (x)

micdotcom: Watch: Nyle DiMarco reminds voters

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Watch: Nyle DiMarco reminds voters what’s at stake on election day for people with disabilities

[Nyle DiMarco signing] You can keep this ad muted if you want and keep scrolling past it. But if you’re still listening to my voice, please know that there are a lot of people out there without one. Among the 50 million Americans living with a disability, many don’t have the ability to work, to travel, or to do countless other things you might take for granted. So this November, please consider voting for the only candidate with a plan to change that.

kedreeva: nerdygrlwonder: twistedlandstourguide: allthingsling...

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mindcrankismycommander:

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bass-borot:

mscottwrites:

shadow27:

Chewbacca… his arms open.

This is some NEXT LEVEL nerd-ing and I nearly cried reading it.

I don’t get it

Please explain ;_;

There is a star trek TNG episode where Picard encounters a race that doesn’t speak in actual structured sentences but conveys ideas through story parralels. The ones referenced here are “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” - cooperation, “Shaka, when the walls fell” - failure and Temba, his arms wide/open" - signifying a gift.

http://ift.tt/1Okvqdp

nice

OK, but here’s what’s awesome/hilarious about this.

The whole point about why communicating with the Tamarians was so frustrating was because all of their communication was contextual. The problem wasn’t that Picard couldn’t understand what words they were saying (the universal translator worked fine) the problem was that he didn’t understand what THOSE WORDS TOGETHER HAD TO DO WITH ANYTHING.

Why is this hilarious/fascinating to me? Because this is essentially what people are doing today with memes. They are posting pictures and writing sentences THAT MAKE NO SENSE WITHOUT PRIOR CONTEXT.

If Picard beamed down right now, and you told him that Data is a cinnamon roll… you are a Tamarian.

Reblogging because A) YES! and B) That commentary. It’s so true, it’s scary. 

I also just want more. ^_^

Actually, this isn’t something just present in memes but it seems to be a foundation of human language and partly why a universal translator could never work (or if it somehow did, it should be programmable to handle Tamarian). It’s just that most metaphors in language are so accepted or necessary to fluency that we don’t really notice them (or they seem to be a common human perspective… which aliens don’t necessarily have to share).

It is why when speaking German I have to remember it is, “How much Clock is it?” and not “What time is it?”. The metaphor in English seems to be that moments are separate entities/temporal locations that we visit through the day so we need to determine what one we are visiting now. Whereas in German, leaving aside the fact the “clock” can clearly be a stand-in metaphor for “time” the overall metaphor there seems to be that moments in time are accumulative entities that we collect through the day and we need to determine how much we’ve collected. 

And speaking of time, human languages tend towards two metaphors, either favouring one or the other or happily indulging in both… either time is a stationary path which the focus moves along (”… as we’re traveling into the month February…”) or time is a river the flows past a stationary focus (”his birthday is rapidly approaching”). Technically those are metaphors to handle an abstract concept, time could just as easily be metaphorically an object that “appears” rather than “approaches” or a location you “turn towards” instead of “move into”… and I don’t know if any human language allows you to metaphorically be a man in a boat traveling up a river (or what that would look like/imply) but it is a possibility (especially if you are considering an alien perspective on time).

Leaving behind time, some emotions are metaphorically a direction. Happy is up, sometimes way up ‘til you’re “on Cloud 9″ (and there’s no obvious reason for it to be the 9th cloud but you accept it) and on the opposite end of that spectrum sadness is down (in the dumps) when it isn’t busy being a colour (blue). And naturally you yourself are a container for your emotions, or more specifically your heart is (at least in English, in Indonesian it’s your liver) and the container can be put under pressure until it is “bursting with joy” or it “explodes in anger”.

And then there are true idioms which actually do reference historic events (which is what I assume is happening in Tamarian’s “Shaka, when the walls fell”) like “Read The Riot Act” or if you “heard it through the grapevine” your people had a mess of telegraph wires at some point and grapevines to compare them to. And “apple of one’s eye” is weird for being a double metaphor… the pupil was once believed to be a solid object metaphorically called an “apple” but then, after Shakespeare popularized the phrase in reference to a person in terms of affection, and science let us know the pupil is not apple-like at all, it came to exclusively mean “this person is very dear to me” and we all forgot why apples were involved in the first place.

Of course, I am far from a linguistic expert so you should take this all “with a grain of salt” ;)

Yes, and there’s even an Official Academic name for this: intertextuality! Aka “texts referring to other texts” – whether those texts are song lyrics, proverbs, historical references, movie quotes, clichés, memes, metaphors, in-jokes, parody, fanfic, and so on. 

It doesn’t even have to be as explicit as an idiom or metaphor: even a turn of phrase will do. For example, saying something “is a truth universally acknowledged” invokes Pride and Prejudice, or “a thing of beauty and a joy forever” invokes Keats (although for me it invokes Mary Poppins, because obviously as a kid I watched that movie long before I’d ever heard of Keats), or “Strange women lying in rivers distributing words” invokes Monty Python. Intertexuality is one of the reasons people study literary works within the context of what other literary works were important at that place and time, so as to catch the intertextual references that the author may be making. 

I Grok that.

I can only imagine what aliens are gonna think of our language when they get here. We’re gonna be the oddest, quirkiest little aliens with gibberish for a language.