Here’s what happens when someone offhandedly makes a comment about a music video on Friendfeed: dozens of librarians, thousands of miles apart, put together a small, almost-musical tribute to JoCo.
I discovered three things in watching this:
So this weekend is my annual pilgrimage to Indianapolis to GenCon. This may be my last until Eliza gets big enough to want to go with me…but it’ll be great if that happens!
I know that Josh Neff has done the GenCon thing…with all the rage around gaming librarians, any other librarians hitting the largest gaming convention in the world?
cue the theme music
From NPR, a fascinating story about a bonobo that seems to have linguistic skills far beyond any other non-human in history. From the story:
Savage-Rumbaugh made a decision; She would stop trying to teach words and sentences to apes. She would give Kanzi a reason to talk, and something to talk about.
“What I had to do is come up with an environment,” she says, “a world that would foster the acquisition of these lexical symbols in Kanzi and a greater understanding of spoken human language.”
…
Before long, Kanzi was doing many of the things humans do with language. He was talking about places and objects that weren’t in sight. He was referring to the past and the future. And he was understanding new sentences made up of familiar words.