Got back from speeches

I think it went well. The speech acted like Oprah all morning - constantly changing size with each rendition. For the actual speech itself, the one being marked on, i was neeearly done when I noticed that the timer-girl was reaching for the button and staring intently at her stopwatch. For the minimum time bell. So I slowed down my conclusion to a leasurely pace and ended up ~4:35.

SO.



While watching MS Paint-guy may not sound interesting, the background music is so over-the-top bombastic that not only do you not lose interest, you also spontaneously sprout full facial hair.

• Some of these trees are older than the human race. What I find interesting is that they look old. Methusela and the Jardene Junifer in particular look like the sort of tree commonly found in Mordor. It feels as if these trees have lived longer than in a healthy world they should. Other ones, like Jomon Sugi, look suspiciously like Avatar's World Tree - no coincidence, I am sure. They give the impression of wisdom. The bottom one looks younger than me.
  

• This article explains a very curious linguistic dilemma - the fact that in nearly every language in the world, the word for mother is either mama, mommy or some similar variant. It manages to explain this while remaining extremely readable and interesting. I only wish I could write like this.

Tl;dr: Its because those are the first sounds that children make, and parents are always convinced that their babies are speaking to them. The process happens where the baby-babble word becomes formalised, like in English with Mother (descended from Latin's mater, which is in turn from mata, which is close enough to mama not to make a difference), only to be eventually supplanted by newer generations of baby-babble, like Mum. The alternate explanation - thoroughly debunked in this article - is that mama and papa are relics of a proto-language in use some 100,000 years ago.

If the tl;dr was too long for you, then Ryan North is the answer. Actually, even if it wasn't too long for you, Ryan North is STILL THE ANSWER.