dissonance-renaissance-blog

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@bentarnoff

#politics #current issues #sociology

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The severed head of Henri Landru on display at the Museum of Death, a French serial killer who was executed by the guillotine after being convicted of murdering 11 women between 1915 and 1919. 

#I need to go to some good museums

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The latest and clearest photo ever captured of Pluto.

#fucking superb you funky lil dwarf planet #space #astrology

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Joe and I were checking out this abandoned launch station in Gdynia, Poland, when….

#I guess it's not so abandoned #weird occurences

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In October 2006, Mitsutaka Uchikoshi went missing after a walk down Mt. Rokko in Japan. A passerby found him 24 days later, still alive but apparently unconscious. He had broken his pelvis after falling into a river, and had been unable to get up. His body temperature was at 72 degrees Fahrenheit, and barely had a pulse. After being sent to the hospital, however, Uchikoshi was given a relatively clean bill of health; his brain, especially, was working fine. Doctors believed his body had reverted to a state similar to hibernation for survival. Uchikoshi himself could remember nothing after the second day of his fall.

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X-ray of a pregnant dog.

#wow they all look so jumbled up

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On the morning of Valentine’s Day in 2000, the Degrees planned to celebrate their 12th wedding anniversary. But when Iquilla opened her children’s bedroom door to get them ready for school, her son was still sleeping in bed, but her 9-year-old daughter, Asha, was nowhere in the room. Nor was she anywhere in the house. The Degrees went into panic mode after that. The night before, Asha had gone to bed at 8 PM. When her father checked on her and her brother at 2:30 AM, both were sound asleep. Shortly after, Asha got out of bed and grabbed her pre-packed schoolbag containing clothing and other personal items and quietly escaped the house. Between 3:45 and 4:15 AM, two drivers spotted her marching along North Carolina Highway 18 in the raging storm. One of the witnesses claimed that he turned around because he found it strange that such a young girl would be out by herself at that hour, but she dashed into the woods and disappeared. Three days later, Asha’s hairbow, marker, and pencil were found in a tool shed near the highway. Among them were candy wrappers. A year later, her bag was unearthed during a construction project off the highway. This would be the last trace of Asha. Asha was a shy girl, but she had a good home life, so it is unknown why she would pack up and leave. 

#maybe she could have been meeting someone #someone she knew and trusted who lured her out of her home #unsolved cases

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Straight couple making out next to me… At the dentist… Who brings their Partner and plays Tonsel Hockey at the Dentist #queeranarchynow

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THEY DID HIM WRONG!!!

Mugshot of John Wojtowicz who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for robbing a bank in order to fund his partners sex change. August 23rd 1972, New York

via reddit

#obviously robbery shouldn't be tolerated #but 20 years for robbing one bank #with no injuries or casualties #bullshit my friends

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#queer eye #feminism

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“Fight now” Exarchia, Athens, Greece

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Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Standards Engineer

In this month’s linguistics job interview Amelia Violet provides a great illustration of how students in STEM pathways can benefit from skills learnt in the arts and humanities. I’m glad there’s at least one engineer out there who knows the semantic implications different English modal verbs!

What did you study at university?

I studied a double degree of Mechanical Engineering and Arts, majoring in Linguistics. My areas of focus for linguistics was syntax and semantics, with a focus on the grammar of English.

What is your job?

As a standards engineer, I develop and maintain the standard documents and drawings that my company uses for construction projects. Each day will involve reviewing feedback from the rest of the business, checking our documentation, and proposing changes in order to improve our work to make it safer, work better, or save money in construction. If those changes are approved, I will develop the exact language to achieve the desired end goal, and publish a new document.

For example, in standard documentation, the difference between a “shall” or a “should” is hugely important, and can have legal ramifications if not interpreted and adhered to correctly. I need to ensure a paragraph on the minimum requirements for say, a particular pipe, is clear and easy to interpret - I work hard to remove accidental syntactic ambiguity, as it can have serious, real world ramifications.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

I never expected it to help, but as mentioned in the above question, part of my work involves ensuring our documents are clear and unambiguous. A strong syntactic understanding of English has both improved my ability to find problems, but also have technical understanding of how to structure phrases for clarity of meaning. Interpreting and writing standard documentation often requires treating language like a series of semantic logic puzzles.

Do you gave any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I wish I had been told just how much my arts degree would develop soft skills that I could use to help sell myself and get a job in engineering. I initially studied linguistics for fun, to break the monotony of constant maths in my other degree. I had no intention of trying to get a job utilising my linguistics studies. However, as I went through job applications trying to break into the industry, I was frequently complimented on my writing ability, and fielded questions about majoring in linguistics in many interviews from curious potential employers.

While I have an engineering role now, I do far more report writing than complicated mathematics, which was an almost neglected skill during my actual engineering degree. Instead, my ability to write reports, conduct research for design changes, and communicate clearly with the rest of the business, all came from skills developed while studying linguistics and philosophy, my minor.

Any other thoughts or comments?

Whatever the reason you have for studying linguistics, you will pick up something that will benefit other parts of your life - perhaps not now, but one day in the future. You never know what kind of work you may take on, and what skills will become relevant! Plus, it’s always reliable for fun dinner table conversations!

Previously:

Interview with a Conductor

Interview with an Accent Coach

Interview with two Communications Professionals

Interview with a university course coordinator

Interview with a think tank researcher

Check out the Linguist Jobs tag for even more interviews  

#damn linguistics actually seems like the perfect minor now that I think about it #any job I could have in the future is gonna involve writing and speaking english #plus my desired career involves writing reports #well damn

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Tumblr introduced me to the idea of bisexual Shang and I fell hard <3

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#it me #aes #kidcore

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Whatever You Do, Don’t Talk To Police

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Pale Blue Dot

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan

#astrology #philosophy #sociology