Diacritiques

1. The awesomest eye-chart ever.

   Though I can’t exactly see myself rattling off “GEORGIAN CAPITAL LETTER LAS, LEFTWARDS DASHED ARROW, GURMUKHI LETTER AI, GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA WITH PROSGEGRAMMENI, TAMIL LETTER I, BOX DRAWINGS DOWN HEAVY AND UP HORIZONTAL LIGHT, ORIYA DIGIT SEVEN, VULGAR FRACTION ONE SIXTH, PARENTHESIZED IDEOGRAPH FOUR” at the optometrist’s.#[a] Yet.

2. In other news, it has come to our attention that fungi (pl.: fungi) has joined the ranks of countable singular nouns. Congratulations.

   It sounds like something out of a comic book, although scientists already know that fungi will eat asbestos, jet fuel, and plastic. It has also been shown to decompose hot graphite in the ruins of the Chernobyl power plant, which melted down in 1986. The plant’s release of large amounts of radiation appears to have attracted black hordes of fungi. But how does it work?

   According to Ekaterina Dadachova and her colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York City, the fungi Cryptococcus neoformans and two other species use melanin, also a pigment found in human skin, to transform radiation into energy to use as food for growth.

   (Technology Review, via apostropher.)

3. The Guardian, or rather, Angelique Chrisafis on this Monday’s Guardian Newsdesk podcast, has some strange ideas about adjectives:

   (Note: neither tsunami nor tidal wave counts. The full mp3 can be downloaded here)

[a]: The line I just read looks like this: Ⴊ ⇠ ਐ ῼ இ ╁ ଠ ୭ ⅙ ㈣ — got all your Unicode fonts installed?

On a personal note: I’m currently pondering the choices on offer in the upcoming German Bundestag (parliamentary) election. It’s not easy to get a handle on what’s going on when you’ve been living abroad for some years. From the Guardian News Blog I gather that there have been some significant changes in the campaigning style since I last observed it first-hand. At least the campaign music looks more interesting than what Mr Chirac came up with in 1981. (Except for the (liberal#[1]) FDP — “Money Money Money”, huh? Okay, I wouldn’t have voted for them anyway.)

And I’m still waiting for my postal-vote papers. Dealing with the German embassy is, as always, a pain. They must be the rudest people in Paris.

[1]: Not synonymous with “progressive” or “left-wing”. At all.

Found among the gems on the wonderful Arte Radio site: a clip entitled “Chirac disco” which, in the typical fashion of the Arte team, mixes some (in)famous snippets of the French president’s speeches with, well, you could call it music. For the bit alone where he says “overdose” (of foreigners, by the way) it would be worth it. (Flash and HTML access, leading directly to the clip; a Creative Commons licensed mp3 is available for download here.)

Still, the riddle of that awful, late 70s style disco music needs solving. Here is a rough translation of the lyrics: We have in our country / The power to change our life / For everybody, Jacques Chirac / Now for president / France needs a man / Of courage and determination / For everybody, Jacques Chirac / etc. pp.

Cringeworthy doesn’t begin to describe it.

The history of the song is documented here. About in the middle of the page, there is an write-up in French and a download link for the mp3 file of the original “Votons Jacques Chirac” single. The song really is what it sound like: a musical campaign ad#[1] — from M. Chirac’s unsuccessful 1981 presidential bid against the (also right-wing) incumbent Giscard d’Estaign (who, of course, lost, too). “Unsuccessful” is a relative term, though, as Chirac obtained 18% of the first-round vote, i.e. only 1.7 percentage points less#[2] than when he was reelected in 2002.

Some of us might be a bit disappointed that this attempt to seduce the young voters didn’t resurface then.

[1]: To be distributed on vinyl among his supporters, of course, not played over the airwaves. France is thankfully nearly free of TV and radio campaign ads. [2]: “Fewer” doesn’t work for me here.

US elections provide us with our four-yearly dose of US geography. Some sites have published maps that are more interesting and illuminating than the standard state-by-state red-and-blue ones. Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber has posted a county-by-county map that comes from (Associated Press via) USA Today . His post is a bit terse because the […]