The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
How did humans learn to talk, anyway?
Vervet monkeys use different words (or, at least, “different alarm calls to refer to different types of predators, such as snakes and leopards”) but don’t arrange them into diverse kinds of sentences. Songbirds, meanwhile, create elaborate sentences with a variety of notes, but the notes don’t act as words the way the monkey alarm calls do.
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Pictures of plant gall, one of the weirdest/raddest looking things in the world.
It is hard to argue with 8-bit NYC.
By the way, if you live in New York, you should probably go see Olafur Eliasson’s new installation (for free!).
...moreBlimps might be making a comeback.
Meteor shower late Sunday night, well, late by east coast standards. Well, late by people-with-9-to-5-jobs standards. Even though it’s supposed to be the most intense shower of the year, if you’re in a city, you probably won’t see much due to light pollution–you’ll have to head out a bit.
...moreIt’s not like they’re gonna be writing for The New Yorker anytime soon, but a team of scientists just published a study in the journal Biology Letters saying that monkeys can “recognize bad grammar.”
Researchers spent a day familiarizing a group of cotton-top tamarins with a series of two-syllable words that followed a certain pattern.
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