heyimnic

The first light after the rain. Spring in Zion National Park.

A-List Directors, interviewed by Sam Mendes | Features | Empire

An interesting article about the “pop-punk voice”: “I made a linguistics professor listen to a Blink-182 song and analyze the accent”. The song is in the video above, and an excerpt from the article is below, although the whole thing’s worth reading: 

Penelope Eckert, a linguistics professor at Stanford, is one of the foremost scholars examining what’s known as the “California Shift.” The California Shift is a linguistic theory covering the particular changes in dialect that affect the Pacific coast of the United States. Eckert was nice enough to humor me and listen several times to a song I chose based on its particularly egregious “pop-punk voice,” Blink-182’s “First Date.” I love the song, but am aware others may find it horribly annoying. “It really does sound like someone’s messing around,” she told me. […]

Some 240 million years ago, this 8-inch-long critter lived in a large lake, in a fairly warm, subtropical climate. But it didn’t have the kind of shell modern turtles have, says Hans-Dieter Sues, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

“It has the real beginnings of the belly shell developing,” says Sues, “little rib-like structures beginning to fuse together into larger plates.”

More on this new species here.