information that breaks the confines of categories!
Another wonderful episode from the World in Words podcast is “How the Basque language has survived”. There are many interesting points in the episode, making the whole thing worth listening. Below, I’ve picked out one small section from the podcast that is interesting and inspiring.
A friend of mine has just finished a novel / book of interlinked stories in which the Tamil experience is an important factor. It begins with an Eelam Tamil family grieving about the end of the war in Jersey and connects stories across time/place. There’s also a chapter/story called “The Office of Missing Persons,” which directly deals with disappearances. The book has gotten really positive reviews from some well-known writers in the literary world. It’s coming out in a month, available on pre-order (links below).
By now, I have visited enough Tamil & other South Indian restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area to have some favorites (and not-so-favorites). Here are my favorites, “honorable mentions”, footnotes, and disclaimers. Enjoy!
The podcast story “Meet the last native speakers of Hawaiian” is a fascinating story about how to revitalize a language that almost (but not quite) went out of existence. The story of Hawaii and the Hawaiian language probably shares some elements in common with the story of many Native American languages and nations/cultures/tribes. The story of Hawaii is interesting because, despite the efforts to squelch the language from existence, there still remain pockets where the language is still spoken. Similar to the story of Myaamia, a concerted effort by community-based linguists and collective support from the community was crucial. The efforts are successful in that many kids grow up knowing how to speak Hawaiian because they go to Hawaiian-language primary schools. With the basic step solved, the next-step problems take their place.
The podcast story “How the Miami Tribe got its language back” is really fascinating. The Myammia (“Miami”) tribe and language lost its last speaker decades ago. The story of how and why the language went out of usage is not pleasant, but worth knowing. Regardless, thanks to the work of early linguists during the time when the language was spoken, there were historical records of the language (vocab, pronunciation, and perhaps grammar). And thanks to the interest of a Myammia descendent, a linguist, and a seed amount of resources, a lot of work coalesced in reviving the language into something that is spoken by a few hundred people on some basis. For a language that had completely died decades ago, that’s remarkable. Hearing the full story is worth it, especially for certain tidbits that do not appear in the written article.
The new post from the Google Design blog entitled “The New Wave of Indian Type” is very interesting. The differences already noticeable in the examples of Tamil fonts in the blog post are already striking. And the blog post, of course, is showcasing fonts with open-source licenses and encouraging people to use them as starting points to create their own. I like these ideas very much.
If you have seen the talk that Tim and I presented at Clojure/West in October on Learning Clojure through Logo, it should come as no surprise that topics of education, technology, and language are of interest. A couple of recent articles were published that caught my attention:
The Tamil Internet Conference in 2018 is taking place on July 4-6 in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. Anyone interested in submitting papers should do so before March 30 (see the above link for further details).
In my previous job, I had a basic grasp of writing a SQL query, but I was never quite comfortable with “advanced” queries. (By “advanced”, it’s more like intermediate at best — it’s the nuances of joins, group-bys, having vs. where.) I was told that whatever SQL I didn’t know would be “easy” to pick up and would happen naturally, although in practice that never quite happened. It wasn’t until I started to come up with a system for solving interview-style programming problems that I started to similarly come up with a system for writing any SQL query. The following is the result, which is less of a “tutorial” for “beginner SQL” and more of a systematic process for constructing a SQL query:
Here are my sequential steps for writing SQL queries in a somewhat methodical way. YMMV.
Note: ‘key’, ‘column’, and ‘field’ are used interchangeably.
For those of you with experience with Maven, you might be wondering why anyone who is using Leiningen to build a project would then want to run that build tool from Maven, which is itself another build tool. There is a reason why I even ventured down this path. I would like to share what I have found so far, in case it benefits anyone else, but I would also like to get feedback from people who know of a better way of accomplishing the same goals.
Sequenced Thoughts from C/S 