The Rainbow Queen accompanied by the Puzzle King, a blue knight, and a red dragon.

A #BoardGame before bed: Sleeping Queens

Pennsylvania's motor-voter system effectively screens non-citizens from voter registration • Pennsylvania Capital-Star The audit also revealed problems with PennDOT’s data security protocols and recommended tighter internal controls.

Pennsylvania's auditor general, a Republican, audited 210,000+ new voter registrations under Gov. Shapiro's new motor voter system to see if noncitizens were registering to vote.

They found one. One.

And that was because a PennDOT staffer erred. It was fixed before the driver left the office.

Sherlock Holmes in the True Crime section at Barnes and Noble

Some confusion here, I think

Just plastic. It's in three or four parts!

A huge serpent mini dwarfs a player mini

Tonight's #BoardGame:
Mansions of Madness

Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez: “Here in Spain, we are approving and advancing a process to regularise half a million immigrants.

“And I want to say to the Right and the Far Right who oppose this: Spain is the daughter of migration and will not become the mother of xenophobia.”

The NFL barely cares about violence against women. They definitely don’t care about extramarital activity.

Screenshotted excerpt from linked article reading as follows: "In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis. When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately."

OOP

New York Times got receipts on John Roberts being like, 'I know this isn't how anything works, but a Democratic president is about to implement a policy!!'

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

Just saw someone tell Inna Kanevsky she's "too old" to be using the word "tankie" 🙄

#TankiesAreTheWorst

Cards in Innovation representing different levels of civilizational endeavor

A board representing a battlefield to be fought over by toys

Tonight's #BoardGames:
1. Innovation
2. Toy Battle

Betting slips and cash from Hot Streak

A #BoardGame before bed:
Hot Streak

ICE Agents Face Kidnapping Investigation, Virginia Defunds Confederate Groups, and Federal Judge Blocks Voter Suppression Plus, a historic win for clean energy

ICE agents could face 20 years or more. Good.

Really then, the only non-British varieties of Middle English were varieties spoken in places close to Britain, such as Ireland, Man and the Channel Islands.

Anglophone colonisation of the Americas began in the 1600s, while the Middle English period istypically thought of as being from 1066 to the late 1400s. So no American Middle English!

and that, say, Middle English and Middle Scots, or Old English and Old Scots, were the same language.

I think it almost implies the opposite though. By specifying that it's "Modern" English and Scots that are siblings (as opposed to English and Scots more broadly), there's a stronger implication that this is only true of the modern languages...

Absolutely an option. Though there are also ways in which it makes better sense to talk in terms of dialect continua (compare the well-known Dutch–German continuum). Northumbrian varieties also have features in common with varieties further south that they don't have in common with Scots.

Sure. As I say, I don't see why that implies that it's better to say that "Modern English" and "Modern Scots" are siblings than to say that "English" and "Scots" are siblings.

Sure—I didn't say it had.

In fact, doesn't adding "Modern" actually slightly imply the opposite of what you're saying (that before the Modern period they weren't sisters but were the same language)?

Though I'm a bit confused as to why this makes it more useful to say that Modern English is a sister to Modern Scots than to say that English is a sister to Scots.

I don't think the view that Scots and English descend to a significant extent from different Germanic varieties is especially controversial among linguists. Though it's obviously complicated by longstanding contact and the fact that some varieties of English descend from the same varieties as Scots.

WOTY 2026 candidate right here
#linguistics

Title page

This is work based on our recent paper in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1364661325002797

Monika Boruta et al "First observe then perform – Children's changing gestural comprehension between the ages of 2 and 5" evolang.org/2026/proceed...

me presenting

w/ mperlman.bsky.social, @glupyan.bsky.social Koen de Reus & @limorraviv.bsky.social we presented work on going "Beyond Hockett's Design Features"
evolang.org/2026/proceed...

Stefan presenting

Tobias Ungerer, Michael Pleyer, Theresa Matzinger, Stefan Hartmann, Blair C. Armstrong: "The role of social biases in linguistic innovation: An artificial language learning study" evolang.org/2026/proceed...

Przemek presenting

Przemysław Żywiczyński et al. had a talk on "How bodily affordances shape the evolution of a novel communication system: A motion-capture study of pantomime and gesture" evolang.org/2026/proceed...

Emily Davis & Robert Kluender presented a poster on "The evolution of center-embedding: Emergence, ephemerality, and processing constraints" evolang.org/2026/proceed...

From extant to extinct: The role of experiments and interdisciplinary inferences in studying cognitive and language evolution This article evaluates the role of experiments and interdisciplinary inferences in the field of language evolution and, more broadly, studies of cogni…

(This was based on our recent paper in Journal of Archaeological Science: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...