If you’re new to Linux and trying to decide what distro is right for you, it can be a bit daunting…as Wikipedia’s Comparison of Linux distributions proves. Asking n Linux users will give you n different answers.

Doing some Googling earlier, I came across this spiffy utility that offers an easy way to figure it out: the Linux Distribution Chooser, which leads you through a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure story/test/wizard. Whether you’re a total newbie or grizzled vet, this looks like it will definitely help you make your choice.

The LA Times has a story on a new dictionary that is helping to save Samala (the Chumash language) from extinction: “Chumash language brought back from the brink”:

A generation ago, the ancient Chumash tongue of Samala was all but dead, its songs and sagas buried in a university basement beneath mountains of yellowing research notes.

But now Samala is the talk of the reservation.

Thanks largely to a non-American Indian graduate student who was working for pocket money 40 years ago, the tribe has unveiled the first major Samala dictionary, a key moment in the language’s rebirth.

Continue…

“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”

— Emily Bronte, from Wuthering Heights

A most peculiar program description popped up on the TV last night. You’d get rapped on the knuckles if you submitted this in elementary school:

When Dinosaurs Ruled
Rumors of the existence of an ancient, gold-rich South American empire destroyed by a 250-million-year-old predator that decimated South America following the worst natural disaster ever suffered by mankind persist.

Sifting it out results in “Rumors persist” — the nose and tail of this brachiosaurus-like sentence.

Archaeologists have found evidence of human habitation in Australia. Really, really old habitation.

Tools dating back at least 35,000 years have been unearthed in a rock shelter in Australia’s remote northwest, making it one of the oldest archaeological finds in that part of the country, archaeologists said Monday.

The tools include a piece of flint the size of a small cell phone and hundreds of tiny sharp stones that were used as knives. One local Aboriginal elder saw it as vindication of what his people have said all along — that they have inhabited this land for tens of thousands of years.

LA Times: “Ancient Tools Unearthed in Australia”

And I also love the use of “small cell phone” as a sizing aid. What would it have been twenty or fifty years ago? Pack of bubble gum?

Living in SoCal, I am always reminded at times like this of Steve Martin in LA Story — “Some of these houses are over twenty years old!”