geekosystem

Earlier this week, I confessed to watching much too much British television. So much so that I lobbied for 10 pieces of British slang to be adopted here in America, but just because I like some of it doesn't mean I like it all. Some British slang is confusing, distasteful, or forever marred for me by weirdly personal reasons. There were a few I liked that didn't make that list, but instead of adding more I think my time is better served by sharing 10 British slang terms I'd like to see stay on the other side of the Atlantic.

Look, I'm not going to try and convince you that LOLcats are high art or anything, but they can certainly be amusing when the right moment strikes. Look at that cat over there on the left! Isn't it hilarious how he can't spell? Given that the phenomenon originated on the Internet, it only makes sense that the Internet should embrace it. In that vein, Twitter has now added a LOLcat language option to their service. No, I'm not joking.

I took four years of French in high school, but barely squeaked by with a D average. I remember maybe twenty words in French, but now -- thanks to the French government -- I know one more: mot-dièse. It's the newest word in the French language, and it was created to replace the common Twitter term "hashtag." Sadly, like almost every other word in the French language, I'm just going to forget it after the test.

Expectant parents replacing respected epithets with things like "the F word" may want to start being more careful how they talk in front of  their children earlier than we've realized. That's according to a new study showing that at just a few hours old, babies' brains can tell the difference between the sounds mother's native language and one they haven't been exposed to. Those early processing differences show that that primitive language acquisition may begin while children are still in the womb.

Twitter can be a pretty nasty place sometimes. That's what happens when you give everyone a place where they can immediately post their reactions on impulse. When people don't like what they hear, or read, online, they can get pretty perturbed. Sometimes things get heated and they say things like "fuck you." Things aren't all bad, however. Sometimes folks still greet each other with a cheery "good morning" instead. Now we even have a heat map showing exactly where these two crop up!

In order to better understand how babies move from squealing bundles of joy to toddlers with the ability to form sentences, British researchers have created a robot capable of learning the English language. Skynet is here and it's a gender neutral robot of three feet.

We all have to make tough decisions, and it's never easy. According to a new study in Psychological Science, it can be a little easier if you know a second language, and think in that one when trying to make a rational decision. Along with your rational, fact-based thinking, there's a sneaky side of your brain that pushes all kinds of emotional buttons regardless of what the facts may be. If you're thinking a language other than the one you grew up with, however, that sneaky side has much less of an effect.

Google's ongoing attempt to turn the libraries of the world into a single, massive collection of scanned documents has found an unusual use in the hands of some physicists. Venturing into realms usually left to the English majors and linguists, the researchers used Google Books' scanned tomes as a massive data set announcing new findings on the evolutionary life and death of words, including the assertion that English contains about 1,000,000 words -- far more than most dictionaries would have you believe.

Conventional scientific wisdom has held that most mammals make vocalizations based on one thing, and one thing only: Genetics. Unless the creature uses its voice to communicate or navigate -- as is the case with bats, whales, and good ol' Homo sapiens -- a mammal will sound the same no matter where it comes from. A U.K. sheep will be the same as a Utah sheep, and so on. However, a new study looking at (adorable) pygmy goat kids suggests that this might not be the case, and that the voices of mammals are far more flexible then we thought.

All you omniglots out there might not have any trouble in telling anyone, anywhere, that you love them in any language. The rest of us might have a little trouble. For all you cross-language lovers out there -- or aspiring cross-language lovers -- here's a crash course in "I love you" from Memrise. They've even got you covered in the unlikely case that the apple of your eye speaks pig-latin, and the unlikely case that you don't already know how to speak it. Check out a full I-Love-You below.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a link between problems with how dyslexics hear language and how the brain processes that information. Dyslexia is commonly regarded as a visual processing problem, with sufferers mixing up written letters and words. But, researchers now believe that the reading difficulty characteristic of dyslexia is merely part of a larger overall problem with how the brain processes language. Published in the journal Science, the research led by professor of cognitive neuroscience John Gabrieli, and graduate student Tyler Perrachione examined the ability of people with and without dyslexia to recognize voices. The researchers asked participants to match a voice speaking in English and Mandarin to an avatar. Non-dyslexics were able to do this 70% of the time in English and 50% of the time in Mandarin. Dyslexics were only able to match the voice correctly 50% of the time regardless of language.

When we read about experimental robots, we're used to the phrase "talk" as shorthand for electronic communication between multiple robots. But researcher Ruth Schulz and her team have created a duo of robots designed to create their own spoken language for inter-robot communication. The two "Lingobots" were placed in a maze-like room, with the space divided by several walls. Once switched on, the robots used their cameras, laser range-finder, and obstacle avoiding sonar to navigate. As they went along, they created words for the spaces they encountered from a database of syllables. For instance, on the map generated by the robots, "jaya" was the center of the room.

After debuting in September, Google's two-way speech translating mode called "Conversation Mode" has just arrived on Android phones with a refresh of the popular Translate app. While most of the Translate update provides usability changes -- new buttons, drop down boxes, etc. -- the addition of Conversations Mode adds a new way to communicate. With Conversation Mode, a pair of users can speak back and forth using an Android phone as interpreter. The first person speaks in their native language, allows the phone to say the translation to the second person, who then repeats the process back and forth. There are some catches, of course.

Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Tom Felton appeared on MTV News for a comedy segment called "American Talk with Josh Horowitz," where each cast member was given a few "popular" American phrases, such as "Twilight blows," and are asked to speak said phrases in their best American accents.

Koro is a new (well, old) language discovered in 2008 by a couple of field linguists, doing research in northeastern-most state of India. They announced their findings, along with their efforts to date to preserve it against its eventual extinction yesterday. Koro is spoken by only about 800 people in Arunachal Pradesh, and the most striking thing about it is its uniqueness. According to Gregory Anderson, the director of the nonprofit that funded the research:

Their language is quite distinct on every level—the sound, the words, the sentence structure.

The researchers themselves said it was "as distinct from [the languages] spoken by other villagers as English is from Russian."