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Why is the US focused on Iran so much right now? I say we focus on the real threat: Greenland. That’s right — Greenland.
Why nuke the poor peace-loving people of Greenland, you might ask. They are not doing anything per se. But they are sitting on a mountain of fresh water locked in their glaciers. And in those glaciers lies the key to temporarily halting global warming.
So we drop a multi-megaton hydrogen bomb over Greenland and detonate it in the air. The heat wave will vaporize some of the ice, but the temperatures will be so hot for miles that much of it will melt (a hydrogen bomb reaches temperatures in excess of 10 million degrees Celsius at the burst point). The melting ice will flow into the ocean as runoff and then proceed to cool down the North Atlantic Deep Water current. The same current was cooled down about 8200 years ago when Lake Agassiz (a giant North American glacial lake 7 times bigger than all the Great Lakes combined) melted and drained into the North Atlantic. That melting event spurred a mini-ice age according to new research.
What about the people of Greenland? Do they deserve to die to cool down the northern hemisphere? Well, there are only 56,000 inhabitants, so we can easily relocate them to more sensible locations like the coastlines of the US. Once this plan is announced, miles of beach-front property will go on the market and will be easily purchased for next to nothing.
As an added benefit, monsoon seasons will be much lighter throughout Asia. All that pesky rain previously used for growing crops and the mosquitoes that pass on malaria will be significantly lessened. This will lead to thousands of lives saved who might have otherwise succumbed to malaria.
Look, Greenland is melting anyway. Do our children deserve to wait decades for it to slowly melt before they get relief from the awful effects of global warming? NO! Nuke Greenland now for our children. Those glaciers and the bears that live on them are the real terrorists.
I recently finished a literature review for my Language & Statistics 2 class. The topic was computational models of historical linguistics and my partner and I focused on cognate identification and phylogenetic inference. We split the work and my part was cognate identification. So I decided to blog about it for a bit and maybe someone out there will have something to offer. Granted, that won’t help my grade, but improving my understanding is more important. You can also check out our presentation.
First of all, to frame the problem, historical linguistics is a branch of linguistics that studies language change. Language can change in many ways, but the methods we looked at pretty much solely focused on phonological and semantic changes, with a few brief nods to syntactic change (on the phylogenetic inference side). The main tool used by historical linguists in reconstructing dead languages is the comparative method. This method looks at two languages suspected of being related and tries to infer the regular sound changes that led to the divergence. By examining lists of suspected cognates, they find sound correspondences — sounds that appear in similar contexts in both languages, but which aren’t necessarily the same phoneme. For example, the word for beaver in English and German derives from the Proto-Germanic word *bebru. In Old English, this became beofor (the f sounds like a /v/). In modern German, the word is Biber, with the /b/ phoneme preserved as it was in Proto-Germanic. So we could infer a sound correspondence between English /v/ and German /b/ in this context.
So what are cognates? If you have studied a second language, you no doubt have heard this term. I propose the following two classifications for cognates. A loose cognate will be a pair of words in two languages that is spelled or pronounced the same, with some minor variations. In this way, French resumé and English resumé would be considered cognates. Loose cognates have also been called orthographic cognates. A strict cognate is a pair of words in two related languages that descended from the same word in the ancestor language. Loan words are words that come into a language directly from another language, such as resumé. These words do not undergo the regular sound changes that are observed in strict cognates and so they are not considered cognates at all by historical linguists.
What is the effect the distinction between these two definitions would have on computational approaches to this task? I will look at this further in a future post, but feel free to post your thoughts in the comments.
