According to Idibon, a company that makes language processing applications, these are the weirdest languages on different continents: In North America: Chalcatongo Mixtec, Choctaw, Mesa Grande Diegueño, Kutenai, and Zoque; in South America: Paumarí and Trumai; in Australia/Oceania: Pitjantjatjara and Lavukaleve; in Africa: Harar Oromo, Iraqw, Kongo, Mumuye, Ju|’hoan, and Khoekhoe; in Asia: Nenets, Eastern Armenian, Abkhaz, Ladakhi, and Mandarin; and in Europe: German, Dutch, Norwegian, Czech, and Spanish. But is weirdness relative? Maybe the World Atlas of Language Structures provides a source for objective evaluation. Here’s what Idibon did with it: For each value that a language has, we calculate the relative frequency of that value for all the other languages that are coded for it. So if we had included subject-object-verb order then English would’ve gotten a value of 0.355 (we actually normalized these values according to the overal entropy for each feature, so it wasn’t exactly 0.355, but you get the idea). The Weirdness Index is then an average across the 21 unique structural features. But because different features have different numbers of values and we want to reduce skewing, we actually take the harmonic mean (and because we want bigger numbers = more weird, we actually subtract the mean from one). In this blog post, I’ll only report languages that have a value filled in for at least two-thirds of features (239 languages). What’s the weirdest language (subjectively speaking) that you’ve ever encountered? Link -via Marginal Revolution (Photo: Amazon.com)
If there’s one thing we all hate, it’s losing a yacht race. Owning a yacht and taking the time to think up a really clever name for it, only to become the laughingstock of the marina because it’s too slow, is a feeling few of us enjoy. That’s why when my next paycheck comes in, I’m going to pick one of these Adastra superyachts up. The trimaran design keeps most of the boat out of the water, allowing for swift speed with less fuel consumption; as soon as I’m skipper, I’ll ensure my old yacht-racing nemesis, Blake Chambers, will regretta his next Regatta. Every time I turn these lights on, I whisper to myself: “Boo-yah” (more…) 
alphadogg writes “The founder of an eavesdropping-resistant instant messaging application called Cryptocat has apologized over a now-fixed bug that made some types of messages more vulnerable to snooping. Cryptocat, which runs inside a web browser, is an open-source application intended to provide users with a high degree of security by using encryption to scramble messages. But Cryptocat warns that users should still be very cautious with communications and not to trust their life with the application. The vulnerability affected group chats and not private conversations. The encryption keys used to encode those conversations were too short, which in theory made it easier for an attacker to decrypt and read conversations.” The bug report/merge request, and an analysis of the bug (although, in light of the Cryptocat’s gracious response, overly acerbic and dismissive of the project). Read more of this story at Slashdot.