Monthly Archives: December 2016

A strong woman

The Washington Post: Annie Glenn: ‘When I called John, he cried. People just couldn’t believe that I could really talk.’.

“As John [Glenn] himself wrote, “We practically grew up in the same playpen. We never knew a time when we didn’t know each other.“ (Annie says they were 2 years old when they met.)

But they were different. John was athletic and outgoing while Annie barely spoke, not because she didn’t have anything to say, but because when she did, people often assumed she was either deaf or mentally deficient.

For most of her life, Annie was afflicted with an 85 percent stutter, meaning she would become “hung up on 85 percent of the words she tried to speak, which was a severe handicap,“ as John put it.

Those years must have been torture for Annie.”

Hildegard Hamm-Brücher im Alter von 95 Jahren verstorben

Die Zeit: Die freischaffende Liberale.
“Hildegard Hamm-Brücher ist gestorben. Mit ihr geht eine leidenschaftliche Kämpferin für die Demokratie und eine Sozialliberale, die auch die FDP nie mit Kritik schonte.”
Von Margrit Gerste.

Deutsche Welle: FDP-Politikerin Hildegard Hamm-Brücher mit 95 Jahren gestorben. “Die ehemalige FDP-Politikerin Hildegard Hamm-Brücher ist tot. Sie starb im Alter von 95 Jahren. Das teilte der bayerische FDP-Landesverband mit. Sie war unter Bundeskanzler Schmidt Staatsministerin im Auswärtigen Amt.”

Deutsche Welle: Hildegard Hamm-Brücher: Die Grand Dame der Bonner Republik. “Aufrecht, unbequem, furchtlos und immer mit Grandezza. Hildegard Hamm-Brücher war Politikerin und Demokratin aus Leidenschaft. Nun starb sie im Alter von 95 Jahren.” Von Martin Muno (mit Munzinger, dpa).

“John always had the right stuff“

New York Times: John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95.

“John Glenn, a freckle-faced son of Ohio who was hailed as a national hero and a symbol of the space age as the first American to orbit Earth, then became a national political figure for 24 years in the Senate, died on Thursday in Columbus, Ohio. He was 95.
[…]
Finally, 36 years after his Mercury flight, in the last months of his final Senate term, he got his wish for a return to orbit. […] At 77, he became the oldest person to go into space.”

NASA has a lot of material and further links on their John Glenn page.

Deutsche Welle: Former US astronaut and senator John Glenn dead aged 95. “John Glenn, the first US astronaut to orbit Earth and a former Ohio senator, has died at 95. Hailed as “the ultimate hometown hero,” he served as a senator for 24 years and later became the oldest man in space.”

Die Zeit: Astronautenlegende John Glenn – ein Pfadfinder im Weltraum. “Was für ein Leben: John Glenn umkreiste vor 50 Jahren nicht nur als erster US-Amerikaner die Erde. Er wollte Präsident werden und flog mit 77 ein zweites Mal ins All.” Von Hellmuth Vensky, 20. Februar 2012.

You’ve probably never heard of the language they deemed the hardest of them all

The Economist (on Medium): We went in search of the world’s hardest language. “English is pretty simple. Learning to speak Ubykh or !Xóõ presents more of a challenge.”

“With all that in mind, which is the hardest language? On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. […]

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)“ , while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)“ . English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.”

Link via MetaFilter.