While researching materials for a science lesson I stumbled on this site.

OK, nothing to do with language but there are some very strange effects. Particularly check out the one called "rotating snake illusion".

Really cool, Bob. I had not seen a bunch of 'em.

I stopped watching it very quickly, not because of the illusions - I didn't even get to see them - but because if the profoundly irritating pair of eyes that followed my cursor. Although I understand that this is simply an electronically created device, I found it incredibly intrusive and rude and, had I bothered to stay on the site long enough to find a response facility, I'd have sent some very direct feedback to the course administrator.

You could, alternatively, have clicked the "turn off eyes" button.

I confess I didn't even look for it, so distracting did I find the eyes themselves.

Ah, I remember when Xeyes first came out on the X windows system ... it was actually helpful in finding the little cursor on the large stipled background pattern. Good times.

Xeyes

Ah, good times indeed. I was surprised to see that Xeyes was first implemented for NeWS, which was developed by James Gosling of Java fame. Interesting.

Has anyone ever looked at Sapir-Whorf in the context of programming languages? Are Germans better at PostScript and Forth because they speak a postfix language?

The constructed language Lojban was created to test, indirectly, Sapir-Whorf. I read a paper once that, seriously, suggested Sanskrit as an inter-language to be used in machine translation. Rather than go from language X to language Y, you'd go from X to Sanskrit and then Sanskrit to Y, to reduce the combinatorial explosion that the EU translation teams face these days. And, finally, Dijkstra's famous "GOTO Considered Harmful" letter to the editor (of the Transactions of the ACM) can be seen as a kind of argument against BASIC as ruining rather than nurturing beginning programs with bad language constructs.

Bob, that was great! As far as the "moving eye," remember that irritating little wizard that used to flit around in Word?

zmj, remember on the chat when I said I understand about 50% of what you post here? That above post is outside of that 50%.

quote:

I read a paper once that, seriously, suggested Sanskrit as an inter-language to be used in machine translation. Rather than go from language X to language Y, you'd go from X to Sanskrit and then Sanskrit to Y, to reduce the combinatorial explosion that the EU translation teams face these days.

If Britain would just withdraw from the EU they could make English the sole official language and everybody would be happy.

I keep trying to imagine who the Finnish-Maltese translator must be.

That above post is outside of that 50%.

Edsger Dijkstra was a famous Dutch computer scientist. In 1968, he wrote an open letter, ("Go To Statement Considered Harmful"), which became so famous that even today parodies and such appear of the form "X Considered Harmful".

Yeah, even when you have the syntax of a language absolutely nailed down there's still plenty of stuff for prescriptivists and descriptivists to argue about.

Great link, Bob. The rotating snake is amazing! The moon illusion might look a bit tame but it's very real. I once took a photo of an absolutely humungous moon, hanging over someone's head - but in the actual print it was just a little pinhead!