A local girl who is recovering at Tampa General Hospital after a serious crash is making progress.

8-year-old Dasha Dorofeev was critically injured in a crash last on June 15th along Alico Road in Fort Myers.

She suffered traumatic brain injuries and was transported to Tampa General for neurological care.

Dasha's family says she had only been able to speak two words since the accident: "ya puknula", which we're told means "I farted" in Russian. But Tuesday she was able to count up to five and say a few more words.

Commander Bonespur is gonna have a military parade at his latest campaign rally!

In claiming that the census "belongs" to the President, Hugh Hewitt shows that he hasn't read the Constitution.

This is shocking, I know.

A: Everything Trump says is a lie.

“We don’t say a dish is spicy — we say it has pepper.” The recipe writer Yewande Komolafe, who grew up in Lagos and found herself searching for the heat and flavor of Nigerian food in New York, chooses the dishes that define the cuisine for her.

This piece was on the front page of the NYT web site most of the day yesterday.

So cool. And the recipes sound amazing.

(via Wil Wheaton)

I've long wondered if the words "stupid" and "stooped" were related. Perhaps "stupid" was derived from the adjective "stooped" - as if, in 1300s England, someone decided that a handy personification of someone likely to come up with bad ideas was someone who was bent over, eyes-averted, perhaps shuffling, low-class, etc.. "Young master Chowderhead's comments are stooped and infirm." And then "stupid" became a spelling variant of "stooped", etc..

Today, I finally looked it up.

stupid (adj.)

1540s, "mentally slow, lacking ordinary activity of mind, dull, inane," from Middle French stupide (16c.) and directly from Latin stupidus "amazed, confounded; dull, foolish," literally "struck senseless," from stupere "be stunned, amazed, confounded," from PIE *stupe- "hit," from root *(s)teu- (1) "to push, stick, knock, beat" (see steep (adj.)). Related: Stupidly; stupidness.

And:

stoop (v.)
"bend forward," Old English stupian "to bow, bend," from Proto-Germanic *stup- (source also of Middle Dutch stupen "to bow, bend," Norwegian stupa "fall, drop"), from PIE *(s)teu- (1) "to push, stick, knock, beat" (see steep (adj.)).

PIE being Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed root language of most European and many central Asian languages.

So, the relationship between "stupid" and "stooped" isn't a bit of middle-English wordplay. They are actually both derived, separately, through two different languages, from a word that meant to be beaten or hit. And they've preserved the sound of that original word for five thousand years.

"I'm going to be called Dr. Marijuana Pepsi!" she declared.

...

It's fitting that an African American woman who has gone through life as Marijuana Pepsi chose as her dissertation topic: "Black names in white classrooms: Teacher behaviors and student perceptions."

Kevin missed one

d) 90% of news is about a tragedy or strife or war or hardship. So we assume everybody else is miserable.

For better or worse, it’s getting easier than ever to doctor video footage, and the latest development in this field is as scary as it is impressive. A new algorithm developed by researchers from Stanford University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University, and Adobe makes it possible to alter human speech in a video, just by changing the text in its transcript.

This method is said to alter the video while preserving the speaker’s characteristics. To accomplish this, the algorithm first reads the phonemes and pronunciation of letters and words from the original video, and creates a model of the speaker’s head to accurately replicate the speaker’s voice and movements.

Once you edit the transcript, the algorithm performs a search for segments containing lip movements that make the words you’ve typed in, and replaces the original phrase. But the replaced part can have a lot of pauses and cuts, because it’s stitched together tiny segments of video from across the clip. So, the algorithm applies some intelligent smoothing to make the edited video appear more natural.

We humans aren't smart enough to not trust what our eyes and ears tell us. If we see a video of someone saying something, we're going to believe she said it.