#Public Lecture

[motherlanguageday]

There are about 6,500 languages in the world.

There are about 6,500 languages in the world, and around 200 languages spoken in Manchester at any one time. UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day is a worldwide annual observance held on 21 February to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and to promote multilingualism. It has been observed globally since 2000 and has important historical roots. In Bangladesh 21 February is the anniversary of the day when Bangladeshis fought for recognition for the Bangla language.

With many events taking place across the city, we have been very excited to welcome new organisations hosting IMLD celebrations this year! A special one for us too, as we launch a brand new exhibition with participants from 10 UNESCO Cities of Literature, on the theme of Threads.

You can join in the conversation by tagging us on social media @MCRCityofLit and using the hashtag #MotherLanguageDay.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Fund Gives Aid To German Jews," Kingston Whig-Standard. June 24, 1933. Page 20. ---- Thousand Acres of Land in Palestine Given for New Settlement ---- MONTREAL - Twenty-three thousand children are being educated in schools of Palestine with £185,000 budgeted for the cause of education. There are kindergarten, public, high and technical schools but the crowning achievement, according to Leib Jaffe, managing director of the Palestine Foundation Fund, is the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, the cornerstone of which was laid while guns were being fired in Palestine during the Great War. Art, philosophy, biology and mathematics are some of the subjects taught along with studies in tropical diseases, oriental knowledge and Semitics.

Mr. Jaffe made reference to the Wolfsohn library with its 260,000 volumes and to the 42 periodicals in Hebrew which are existent in Palestine. The Hebrew theatre, "Habimah," where as many as 3,000 gather to listen to noted musicians and to actors filling their roles in such operas as Samson and Delilah, plays an important part in Jewish Palestine. The great miracle of all, believes Mr. Jaffe, is the revival of Hebrew with 95 percent of Jewry in the country able to speak the language.

It is planned to settle German Jews on 1,000 acres of land which the Jewish National Fund is ready to set aside for the purpose, Mr. Jaffe said.

[mutar-in-lucertola]

Faint Music, BY ROBERT HASS

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

When everything broken is broken,   and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives,   in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

As in the story a friend told once about the time   he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.   He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,   the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,   scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word   was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,   and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up   on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket   he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing   carefully, and drove home to an empty house.

There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.   A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick   with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.   They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears   in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”   she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,   a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.   “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,   and go to sleep.                        And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened   to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up.

It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes.   I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

[russianlanguageday]

Russian Language Day 2024 celebration at the United Nations Offic at Nairobi (UNON).

On June 6th for the birthday of the great Russian poet Alexander.S. Pushkin, the United Nations celebrates the Russian Language Day/День русского языка.

Watch the Russian Language Day 2024 celebration at the United Nations Offic at Nairobi (UNON)!

[miroslawmagola]

Schweizer Parapsychologische Gesellschaft Nene Von Muralt A Letter To Miroslaw Magola : Miroslaw Magola : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

[wetlandsday]

CANADA - 12th Annual World Wetlands Day at the University of waterloo.

The World Wetlands Day 2024 at the University of Waterloo celeberation will start a dynamic poster session and reception, showcasing a visual array of research and insights dedicated to wetland conservation. Dr. Andrea Kirkwood will then deliver a distinguished lecture titled "The Value of Urban Wetlands" from 6:00 to 7:00 pm in EIT 1015. For a global audience unable to attend in person, the distinguished lecture will be livestreamed, ensuring broad participation in this enlightening discourse. Please register to attend the distinguished lecture or to receive the livestream

Country : Canada Organizer : University of Waterloo, Canada

[translationday]

Smart Consecutive Interpreting (online workshop #2)

This two-day online course will give you all the tools to be able to successfully interpret consecutively for any audience, for any length of time, comfortably and with confidence.

What you will learn: On the first day, we will start by understanding the thinking underlying any interpretation, and how it can help you to follow any speech. On the second day, we will move to all that goes specifically into consecutive interpreting. By the end of the course, you will be able to interpret increasingly lengthy interventions using memory, analysis, and notes.

Have you ever become confused, and didn’t know how the speech fits together?

Have you ever worried that your speaker will go on too long?

Have you ever blanked on what your notes mean in the middle of a speech?

The course includes lecture, demonstrations and some exercises, small group work, and practice. Training is in English, and is not language-specific. Practicing interpreters who wish to improve their consecutive interpreting skills, as well as graduates from interpreting courses at any university or training center.  

Schedule: 16:00-18:00 / 20:00-22:00 Central European Time (Geneva)

This workshop is scheduled at a time meant to facilitate participation from time zones covering the Americas, Europe and Africa. If you prefer to attend earlier in the day, you may wish to register for the Smart Consecutive Workshop #1 on 28-29 October.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2023 | 04:00 PM ORGANISER: ATPD LOCATION: ZOOM ONLINE CH 

[internationaldayoflight]

Science lectures about light.

The Department of Physics, Ternopil Ivan Puluj National Technical University will hold a series of popular science lectures about light will be held during the festival. Part of the lectures will be devoted to alternative electricity generation and the importance of light during hostilities and war.

International Day of Light 2023 in Ternopil, Ukraine.

[bossesmade]

Atoms and Human Knowledge, Public Lecture ,1957 - , Niels Bohr

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. Niels Henrik David Bohr is a Danish physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of atomic structure and quantum theory. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific inquiry. How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Bohr…

[littlecrittereli]

Hey there! I read both Reprogrammed and Decoded and was blown away. Unfortunately (sorta), my odd little brain had one little question that was burning from the end of Reprogrammed till the end of the story: what about the Wild Kratts Kids? How did they react to Chris's disappearance/return? I know if I were 8 and my teacher (i guess thats an okay metaphor? maybe?) randomly disappeared for 3 months and came back 10 pounds lighter with dozens of new scars and white hair in their early twenties, I'd be a little torn up/curious. How would Chris feel about showing up on screen in front of a bunch of kids in his state? Would he...wear a...hat...or something...? I don't know, just thoughts lol

They never told the public that Chris was missing (Didn't wanna scare the kids or give the Villains the knowledge that they were vulnerable)

And being out in the most rural parts of the world, it's not uncommon for them to go months without any sort of public appearance. For now, Martin is handling any sort of press alone until Chris is ready to be back in the public eye.

But of course they still run into a wild kratts kid every once and a while.

He's still working on his alibi.....

[motherlanguageday]

Acquiring a second language why do we find it so difficult?

ADQUIRIR UNA SEGUNDA LENGUA: ¿POR QUÉ NOS PARECE TAN DIFÍCIL?

Series coordinated by Idoia Elola (Texas Tech University) y Ana Oskoz (University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)

Public Lecture given Greg Kessler (Ohio University)

Language: English (simultaneous interpretation into Spanish)

The Instituto Cervantes Manchester and Leeds presents the second edition of the lecture series: “Acquiring a Second Language: Why do we find it so difficult?”, coordinated by Idoia Elola (Texas Tech University) y Ana Oskoz (University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), a forum aimed at teachers, language studentes, parents and the general public, which will consider how we learn a second, or a heritage language. Presenters will discuss various elements and difficulties that come with second-language acquisition including: myths and realities surrounding language acquisition and age, the effect of explicit knowledge and how it can affect learning, the use of language according to the context in which it is spoken, and the effect of education on our ability to learn a second language. The first lecture will celebrate the International Mother Language Day and will be given by Greg Kessler (Ohio University).

IMLD 2024: ACQUIRING A SECOND LANGUAGE: WHY DO WE FIND IT SO DIFFICULT? DATE: 21 February 2024 TIME: 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm AGES: 18+ PRICE: Free FORMAT: Online THEME: Languages Skills ORGANISER: Instituto Cervantes

BOOK TICKETS

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“He Knocks the Spots from Darwin's Plan, Says Monkeys Have Devolved from Man,” Toronto Star. May 21, 1921. Page 3. ---- Canadian Press Despatch. ---- Ottawa. May 20. - New theories of the origin of man this morning at were presented a meeting of the Royal Society of Canada, by Prof. Charles Hill-Tout. F.R.A.I., F.RS.C., of Abbotsford, B.C. Prof. Hill-Tout took the opposite view to that presented in Darwin's theory of evolution, namely that anthropoids had devolved. from the human form rather than the human being had evolved from anthropoids.

The human race at the present time was much closer in its resemblance. to original type, he thought, than were anthropoids. There was much more possibility of monkeys evolving from human beings than vice versa.

[mutar-in-lucertola]

The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World, BY RON PADGETT

What makes us so mean?

We are meaner than gorillas,

the ones we like to blame our genetic aggression on.

It is in our nature to hide behind what Darwin said about survival,

as if survival were the most important thing on earth.

It isn't.

You know—surely it has occurred to you—

that there is no way that humankind will survive

another million years. We'll be lucky to be around

another five hundred. Why?

Because we are so mean

that we would rather kill everyone and everything on earth

than let anybody get the better of us:

"Give me liberty or give me death!"

Why didn't he just say "Grrr, let's kill each other!"?

A nosegay of pansies leans toward us in a glass of water

on a white tablecloth bright in the sunlight

at the ocean where children are frolicking,

then looking around and wondering—

about what we cannot say, for we are imagining

how we would kill the disgusting man and woman

at the next table. Tonight we could throw an electrical storm

into their bed. No more would they spit on the veranda!

Actually they aren't that bad, it's just

that I am talking mean in order to be more

like my fellow humans—it's lonely feeling like a saint,

which I do one second every five weeks,

but that one second is so intense I can't stand up

and then I figure out that it's ersatz, I can't be a saint,

I am not even a religious person, I am hardly a person at all

except when I look at you and think

that this life with you must go on forever

because it is so perfect, with all its imperfections,

like your waistline that exists a little too much,

like my hairline that doesn't exist at all!

Which means that my bald head feels good

on your soft round belly that feels good too.

If only everyone were us!

But sometimes we are everyone, we get mad

at the world and mean as all get-out,

which means we want to tell the world to get out

of this, our world. Who are all these awful people?

Why, it's your own grandma, who was so nice to you—

you mistook her for someone else. She actually was

someone else, but you had no way of knowing that,

just as you had no way of knowing that the taxi driver

saves his pennies all year

to go to Paris for Racine at the Com��die Francaise.

Now he is reciting a long speech in French from Andromache

and you arrive at the corner of This and That

and though Andromache's noble husband Hector has been killed

and his corpse has been dragged around the walls of Troy by an

     unusually mean Achilles,

although she is forced into slavery and a marriage

to save the life of her son, and then people around her

get killed, commit suicide, and go crazy, the driver is in paradise,

he has taken you back to his very mean teacher

in the unhappy school in Port-au-Prince and then

to Paris and back to the French language of the seventeenth century

and then to ancient Greece and then to the corner of This and That.

Only a mean world would have this man driving around in a city

where for no reason someone is going to fire a bullet into the back of

    his head!

It was an act of kindness

on the part of the person who placed both numbers and letters

on the dial of the phone so we could call WAverly,

ATwater, CAnareggio, BLenheim, and MAdison,

DUnbar and OCean, little worlds in themselves

we drift into as we dial, and an act of cruelty

to change everything into numbers only, not just phone numbers

that get longer and longer, but statistical analysis,

cost averaging, collateral damage, death by peanut,

inflation rates, personal identification numbers, access codes,

and the whole raving Raft of the Medusa

that drives out any thought of pleasantness

until you dial I-8OO-MATTRES and in no time get a mattress

that is complete and comfy and almost under you,

even though you didn't need one! The men

come in and say Here's the mattress where's

the bedroom? And the bedroom realizes it can't run away.

You can't say that the people who invented the bedroom were mean,

only a bedroom could say that, if it could say anything.

It's a good thing that bedrooms can't talk!

They might keep you up all night telling you things

you don't want to know. "Many years ago,

in this very room. . . ." Eeek, shut up! I mean,

please don't tell me anything, I'm sorry I shouted at you.

And the walls subside into their somewhat foreverness.

The wrecking ball will mash its grimace into the plaster and oof,

down they will come, lathe and layers of personal history,

but the ball is not mean, nor is the man who pulls the handle

that directs the ball on its pendulous course, but another man

—and now a woman strides into his office and slaps his face hard

the man whose bottom line is changing its color

wants to change it back. So good-bye, building

where we made love, laughed, wept, ate, and watched TV

all at the same time! Where our dog waited by the door,

eyes fixed on the knob, where a runaway stream came whooshing

down the hallway, where I once expanded to fill the whole room

and then deflated, just to see what it would feel like,

where on Saturday mornings my infant son stood by the bedside

and sang, quietly, "Wa-a-a-ke up" to his snoozing parents.

I can never leave all the kindness I have felt in this apartment,

but if a big black iron wrecking ball comes flying toward me,

zoop, out I go! For there must be

kindness somewhere else in the world,

maybe even out of it, though I'm not crazy

about the emptiness of outer space. I have to live

here, with finite life and inner space and with

the horrible desire to love everything and be disappointed

the way my mother was until that moment

when she rolled her eyes toward me as best she could

and squeezed my hand when I asked, "Do you know who I am?"

then let go of life.

The other question was, Did I know who I was?

It is hard not to be appalled by existence.

The pointlessness of matter turns us into cornered animals

that otherwise are placid or indifferent,

we hiss and bare our fangs and attack.

But how many people have felt the terror of existence?

Was Genghis Khan horrified that he and everything else existed?

Was Hitler or Pol Pot?

Or any of the other charming figures of history?

Je m'en doute.

It was something else made them mean.

Something else made Napoleon think it glorious

to cover the frozen earth with a hundred thousand bloody corpses.

Something else made . . . oh, name your monster

and his penchant for destruction,

name your own period in history when a darkness swept over us

and made not existing seem like the better choice,

as if the solution to hunger were to hurl oneself

into a vat of boiling radioactive carrots!

Life is so awful!

I hope that lion tears me to pieces!

It is good that those men wearing black hoods

are going to strip off my skin and force me

to gape at my own intestines spilling down onto the floor!

Please drive spikes through not only my hands and feet

but through my eyes as well!

For this world is to be fled as soon as possible

via the purification of martyrdom.

This from the God of Christian Love.

Cupid hovers overhead, perplexed.

Long ago Zeus said he was tired

and went to bed: if you're not going to exist

it's best to be asleep.

The Christian God is like a cranky two-thousand-year-old baby

whose fatigue delivers him into an endless tantrum.

He will never grow up

because you can't grow up unless people listen to you,

and they can't listen because they are too busy being mean

or fearing the meanness of others.

How can I blame them?

I too am afraid. I can be jolted by an extremely violent movie,

but what is really scary is that someone wanted to make the film!

He is only a step away from the father

who took his eight-year-old daughter and her friend to the park

and beat and stabbed them to death. Uh-oh.

"He seemed like a normal guy," said his neighbor, Thelma,

who refused to divulge her last name to reporters.

She seemed like a normal gal, just as the reporters seemed like

     normal vampires.

In some cultures it is normal to eat bugs or people

or to smear placenta on your face at night, to buy

a car whose price would feed a village for thirty years,

to waste your life and, while you're at it, waste everyone

     else's too!

Hello, America. It is dawn,

wake up and smell yourselves.

You smell normal.

My father was not normal,

he was a criminal, a scuffler, a tough guy,

and though he did bad things

he was never mean.

He didn't like mean people, either.

Sometimes he would beat them up

or chop up their shoes!

I have never beaten anyone up,

but it might be fun to chop up some shoes.

Would you please hand me that cleaver, Thelma?

But Thelma is insulted by my request,

even though I said please, because she has the face of a cleaver

that flies through the air toward me and lodges

in my forehead. "Get it yourself,

lughead!" she spits, then twenty years later

she changes lughead to fuckhead.

I change my name to Jughead

and go into the poetry protection program

so my poems can go out and live under assumed names

in Utah and Muskogee.

Anna Chukhno looks up and sees me

through her violet Ukrainian eyes

and says Good morning most pleasantly inflected. Oh

to ride in a horse-drawn carriage with her at midnight

down the wide avenues of Kiev and erase

the ditch at Babi Yar from human history!

She looks up and asks How would you like that?

I say In twenties and she counts them out

as if the air around her were not shattered by her beauty

and my body thus divided into zones:

hands the place of metaphysics, shins the area of moo,

bones the cost of living, and so on.

Is it cruel that I cannot cover her with kisses?

No, it is beautiful that I cannot cover her with kisses,

it is better that I walk out into the sunlight

with the blessing of having spoken with an actual goddess

who gave me four hundred dollars!

And I am reassembled

as my car goes forward

into the oncoming rays of aggression

that bounce off my glasses and then

start penetrating, and soon my eyes

turn into abandoned coal mines

whose canaries explode into an evil song

that echoes exactly nowhere.

At least I am not in Rwanda in 1994 or the Sudan in '05

or Guantanamo or Rikers, or in a ditch outside Rio,

clubbed to death and mutilated. No Cossack

bears down on me with sword raised and gleaming

at my Jewish neck and no time for me

to cry out "It is only my neck that is Jewish!

The rest is Russian Orthodox!" No smiling man tips back

his hat and says to his buddies, "Let's teach

this nigguh a lesson." I don't need a lesson, sir,

I am Ethiopian, this is my first time in your country!

But you gentlemen are joking. . . .

Prepare my cave and then kindly forget where it was.

A crust of bread will suffice and a stream nearby,

the chill of evening filtering in with the blind god

who is the chill of evening and who touches us

though we can't raise our hands to stroke his misty beard

     in which

two hundred million stars have wink and glimmer needles.

I had better go back to the bank, we have

only three hundred and eighty-five dollars left.

Those fifteen units of beauty went fast.

As does everything.

But meanness comes back right away

while kindness takes its own sweet time

and compassion is busy shimmering always a little above us and

     behind,

swooping down and transfusing us only when we don't expect it

and then only for a moment.

How can I trap it?

Allow it in and then

turn my body into steel? No.

The exit holes will still be there and besides

compassion doesn't need an exit it is an exit—

from the prison that each moment is,

and just as each moment replaces the one before it

each jolt of meanness replaces the one before it

and pretty soon you get to like those jolts,

you and millions of other dolts who like to be electrocuted

by their own feelings. The hippopotamus

sits on you with no sense of pleasure, he doesn't

even know you are there, any more than he takes notice

of the little white bird atop his head, and when

he sees you flattened against the ground

he doesn't even think Uh-oh he just trots away

with the bird still up there looking around.

Saint Augustine stole the pears from his neighbor's tree

and didn't apologize for thirty years, by which time

his neighbor was probably dead and in no mood

for apologies. Augustine's mother became a saint

and then a city in California—Santa Monica,

where everything exists so it can be driven past,

except the hippopotamus that stands on the freeway

in the early dawn and yawns into your high beams.

"Hello," he seems to grunt, "I can't be your friend

and I can't be your enemy, I am like compassion,

I go on just beyond you, no matter how many times

you crash into me and die because you never learned

to crash and live." Then he ambles away.

Could Saint Augustine have put on that much weight?

I thought compassion makes you light

or at least have light, the way it has light around it

in paintings, like the one of the screwdriver

that appeared just when the screw was coming loose

from the wing of the airplane in which Santa Monica was riding into

     heaven,

smiling as if she had just imagined how to smile

the first smile of any saint, a promise toward the perfection

of everything that is and isn't.

[russianlanguageday]

Watch the ceremony starting at 3-00 PM GMT (Paris time)!

The Russian Language Day is celebrated on 6 June – the birthday of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.

Join the UNESCO Celebration!

[miroslawmagola]

Alexander Imich letter to Miroslaw Magola

[starcurtain]

One thing I wish I'd see more of among Ratio fans is some thought about how he views himself as a teacher.

Like yes, of course he refuses to compromise on the quality and rigor of the education he imparts, and he would find it unforgivably unethical to lower his standards in order to pass more students who had not genuinely learned the material. This is core to his character.

However, as someone who is a teacher IRL, I know the absolutely miserable feeling setting that kind of standard can cause. There's the obvious disheartening sense of disappointment ("Are students these days really not capable of doing the work correctly? Is our future in danger, if this is the highest level of understanding our current generation of students can achieve?"), but even worse than that is the self-doubt.

"Is this somehow my fault? Am I not teaching this material in the right ways for the students to learn? Is there something I could have done differently to get through to these students? Would a better teacher have a higher passing rate?"

We know that Ratio does (or at least did) struggle with feeling inferior to the Genius Society, so I think it is also likely, as much as he absolutely will not budge on his academic standards, that he has doubts about his teaching ability as well.

This is the man who wants to educate the entire world to cure the disease of ignorance, and yet only 3% of his actual students are able to get there. How can someone who gets so few of his direct students to a state of enlightenment hope to enlighten the whole universe? If so few students are successfully learning the material of a given class, doesn't that mean the teacher is doing something wrong?Would a better teacher--would a genius, maybe--not be able to impart their knowledge more efficiently and educate even the most challenging of students?

As someone constantly struggling with that balance between keeping academic standards high while also meeting the needs of today's students, I think the passing rates of his courses must affect Dr. Ratio much more deeply than I've seen fans discuss. I think he would question himself harshly over his class success rates, and I think he must be constantly trying to push himself to become the best teacher he possibly can be.

tl;dr: I hope one day the HSR fandom will stop sleeping on the fact that Ratio is an actual practicing professor who probably has astronomical levels of teacher angst. 😂