ze_ben

Wow, TIL. I was going to protest that all the traffic circles near me are awesome, but I now understand it's because they're all roundabouts

Yeah, as someone with a linguistics degree, I can smell the marketing bullshit in that title as well. I'm sure it's a great book about data and math, but I'm not sure I see the point of the "it's just like any other language" assertion.

This tells me he's being disingenuous about Obama

It sounds tricky, but really, anyone who's ever taken (and passed) an intro linguistics course can do it, at least to Hollywood standards. If you want to satisfy Tolkien nerds, you're gonna want, in particular, a good bit of Historical Linguistics, because that's where you really cultivate an appreciation for what can happen on both a phonetic and syntactic level, as well as how linguistic contact can alter languages. A little Socio would be great, but I've never heard of an invented language that bothered REALLY going into sociolects other than just throwing in a few "slang" words here and there.

A lot of guys I know who take karate and BJJ seem to live in this fantasy where they're gonna get in a fight and it'll be like a movie, which is moronic. Even if you're good enough to beat an attacker, the risk to your livelihood in the event of a lawsuit makes the fight rarely worth it.

Aikido at least offers a lot of other benefits - balance, cardio, meditation, etc., and the Aikido mindset is much more geared to avoiding fights.