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Casa Blanca was a boring movie without a lot of action, but Star Wars, man did that have some great light saber fights. I’m speaking here, of course, as a kid: to see how children understand language, you need look no further than your own memory, specifically, your memory of movies and video games from [...]

René-Louis Baire His “Baire space” and “Baire Category Theorem” help us understand topological spaces whose complements are very bare. George Cantor Taught us how to count infinite sets. Carl Friedrich Gauss Made a pretty good guess at how many primes there are below x. Also, some stuff about statistics. Kurt Gödel Played God by applying [...]

Other languages ain’t got nothing on the English double negative. Improper as it’s come to be seen by stuck-up language pedants and grammar police, there’s actually an interesting explanation behind it. Imagine a band of pirates who helped capture a pile of gold. The pirates are grumbling about how little their shares of gold are… [...]

As a high school student, I was a big fan of British progressive rock legend Pink Floyd. Like, to the point of memorizing whole albums worth of lyrics. Here are some of my favorite lyrics from the band: Echoes Overhead the albatross Hangs motionless upon the air; And deep beneath the rolling waves, In labyrinths [...]

As you know, I’m a big fan of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, especially his epic poems Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I was introduced to these poems through, and both play a critical role in, Douglas Adams’ under-appreciated masterpiece, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. That book is the type of [...]

So I programmed a page to randomly generate names of Japanese restaurants. It’s pretty cool, check it out here: Japanese Restaurant Name Generator. Not only does it come up with randomized names, but you can even vote on them So far it’s been a fun quick little project to give me more practice incorporating 3rd [...]

Japanese grammar is famous for being so out-of-order compared to English. Or is it the other way around? Maybe English is the out-of-order grammar! Just for fun, let’s imagine WWII turned out drastically different, computers were invented in Japan, and they got to make up all the syntax. What would a typical programming language’s syntax [...]

The cool thing about comparing languages which are as distantly related as English and Japanese, is when you dig deep enough, you’ll uncover little linguistic quirks which blow your mind. Here are a few examples. 1. Raccoons are Bears Japanese people consider raccoons to be small bears, in the same way English speakers consider lions [...]

To an adult language learner, the first language is always the hardest. It makes a lot of sense to pick an easy language from the start. That’s absolutely fine if you’re interested in learning, say, Spanish. But maybe you don’t wanna study Spanish for a year. Maybe you want to learn Japanese, Russian, or Mandarin. [...]

This is a very long-delayed continuation of the Goldmine of Engrish I published previously. I wasn’t planning on posting an Engrish sequel, but the original was so popular, people are practically demanding an encore, so here we go These are some of the most horrifically badly translated subtitles ever put forth by any translation agency. [...]