Shiny things 3/
Beautiful Peking Opera costume drawings (ca 1900) from the Public Domain Review. I absolutely love the public domain review.
Great essay on the contemporary weirdness that is being an American Expat. Author's perspective is via Colombia, but it's quite a fun read, with many truths that resonate with my Asian expat experience.
international travel often becomes a new, expensive version of provincialism, with expats making friends mostly with other expats.
Another Billion Dollar ponzi scheme duping big money investors and the US government. This one starts with some solar panels attached to a trailer. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. The Atlantic, via metafilter
Anytime people ask me why I studied linguistics, I should send them this article about Great Andamanese. Absolutely nerdy, absolutely beautiful. I hope Andamanese enjoy many more of their tomorrows.
"it turns out, is exceptional among the world's languages in its anthropocentrism. It uses categories derived from the human body to describe abstract concepts such as spatial orientation and relations between objects." [...] "Even “morning” and “evening” were relative, depending on who experienced them. To say, for instance, “I will visit you tomorrow,” one would use ngambikhir, for “your tomorrow.” But in the sentence “I will finish this tomorrow,” the word would be thambikhir, “my tomorrow.” Time depended on the perspective of whoever was involved in the event."