When I first saw this image I thought that some industrious Photoshop user had put together an oil tanker and a power station for the fun of it. Then I discovered she is a real thing: A full thermal power plant on top of a hull. One of these ships is now on its way to the Gaza strip. Read more…
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I thought this was a photoshop but it’s the weirdest ship I’ve ever seen
According to Duke Engineering, their axial engine is the most efficient and lightest engine you can put in boats, light aircrafts, and generators—the mechanical engine of the (near) future! Maybe. I don’t know if their claims are true and I don’t really care. I just love watching it in action in this eternal gif. Read more…
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This is the weirdest engine I have ever seen
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)