35152
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Oh No He Turned Into A Tiger (Havoc Park: Episode 4)
A face painting incident goes horribly wrong at Havoc Park.
Creator: Cliff Benfield
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: tarnish
This word has appeared in 60 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
rubber
a condom
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
figure out (1)
If you figure something out, you find the solution to a problem or the answer to a question.
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Language Log
Artificial Conversational Intelligence?
It seems that ChatGPT risthinks/video/7344430645021527298?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7345802197924283950">still has a few things to learn, about conversational dynamics as well as about interlocutor modeling:
risthinks?refer=embed">@risthinks ChatGPT chatting each other about AI ! #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #TechTalk #FutureTech #Conversations #Innovation ♬ original sound – RisThinks
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: gauzy
This word has appeared in 46 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Word of the Day
conversant
Definition: (adjective) Well informed about or knowing thoroughly.
Synonyms: familiar.
Usage: A few words, in explanation, will here be necessary for such of our readers as are not conversant with the details of aerostation.
Discuss
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Idiom of the Day
wash (someone's) mouth out (with soap)
To punish someone for using rude, vulgar, or obscene language by cleaning their mouth with soap (usually used merely as a threat). Watch the video
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Language Log
Words for Water Being Sent to the Moon Europa
"Water", "water", everywhere — and it's pronounced differently wherever you go. See the dozen or so US and UK phonetic and phonemic transcriptions and audio clips provided by Wiktionary here. The last of the US audio clips even has the trace of an initial "h", as some people pronounce "wh-" interrogatives.
——————-
From Marc Sarrel
I recently heard about an engraving that is attached to the Europa Clipper spacecraft, to be launched to the moon of Jupiter in October of this year. Europa likely has a large liquid water ocean underneath its shell of water ice. There is more liquid water on Europa than on Earth.
The vault plate features waveforms for the word “water” in 103 spoken languages, plus a symbol that represents the word in American Sign Language. If you scroll down a bit on the page, you can choose one of the languages, see the waveform and hear the spoken word.
I think this is a really compelling way to represent the common link between Earth and Europa.
I agree with Marc.
Now, let's explore some (just a few) of the features of the vault plate (here's NASA's website for Europa Clipper’s Vault Plate if you want to follow along and do some exploring of your own). Those that struck me most powerfully included, first of all, the Waveform Generator. On the left side, it has a menu of 103 spoken languages, from Abkhaz to Yorùbá. Each language has an audio recording that you can play, together with the word for water in the script for that language, if it has one. On the right side, the generator displays the requisite wave form of the language under consideration.
The second language on the list is American Sign Language (ASL). The circular symbol representing the sign for water in American Sign Language was created using a technique in image processing and data compression, called a Fourier transform.
On one side of the plate is an array of all the waveforms of the "water words" created by Waveform Generator. For those who are capable of "reading" the waveforms of words, it must be quite a thrill in one gaze to see more than a hundred words for water "written" in a single universal "script" that presumably could be used to record the languages of extraterrestrials, if any exist.
Speaking of writing, one thing that astonished me as I was examining both sides of the plate is that the poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, titled "In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa", is engraved in her own cursive handwriting. Given that practically everything else on the plate is so technist and presentist or futurist, it is a pleasant surprise that the creators of the plate cared enough about the arts to include this touch of the traditionalist and humanist.
To match Limón's poem, though taking up much less space, is the Drake Equation:
https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/08459525b4c05af9b9e1748406e26ad869d9462d
where
*
* N = the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy with which communication might be possible (i.e. which are on the current past light cone);
and
*
* R∗ = the average rate of star formation in our Galaxy.
* fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets.
* ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets.
* fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point.
* fi = the fraction of planets with life that go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations).
* fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
* L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
Engraved in the handwriting of astrophysicist[...]
Language Log
When is research "deemed not research", and why?
This post is going to delve into one aspect of a recently-published article from the Centers for Disease Contol: DeCuir J, Payne AB, Self WH, et al. Interim Effectiveness of Updated 2023–2024 (Monovalent XBB.1.5) COVID-19 Vaccines Against COVID-19–Associated Emergency Department and Urgent Care Encounters and Hospitalization Among Immunocompetent Adults Aged ≥18 Years — VISION and IVY Networks, September 2023–January 2024. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2024;73:180–188.
That's the "Suggested citation" given within the linked article. To get past the citation, you'll need to expand some abbreviations:
* "Morb Mortal Wkly Rep" means "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report".
* "VISION" is a backronym for "Virtual SARS-CoV-2, Influenza, and Other respiratory viruses Network", and references a "a multisite, electronic health records (EHR)–based network including 369 EDs and UCs and 229 hospitals in eight states that uses a test-negative, case-control design to estimate COVID-19 VE".
* "IVY" stands for "Investigating Respiratory Viruses in the Acutely Ill', and references "a multisite, inpatient network including 26 hospitals in 20 U.S. states that uses a test-negative, case-control design to prospectively enroll patients with COVID-19–like illness (CLI) who receive testing for SARS-CoV-2 within 10 days of illness onset and 3 days of hospital admission".
There's a somewhat de-jargonized version of the article's content by Ian Ingram at MedPage Today — "Latest COVID Shots Protect Against Serious Outcomes — Effectiveness against COVID-related hospitalization ranged from 43% to 52%" — which explains that the article means you probably want to consider getting one of the "recently updated COVID vaccines".
But what I've been trying to decode is only indirectly about the article's content.
The last bit of the article's Data Analysis section tell us:
Analyses were conducted using R software (version 4.3.2; R Foundation) for the VISION analysis and SAS software (version 9.4; SAS Institute) for the IVY analysis. This activity was reviewed by CDC, deemed not research, and was conducted consistent with applicable federal law and CDC policy.**** This activity was reviewed and approved as a research activity by one VISION site.
And the four asterisks take us to the following endnote [with links added to the two cited C.F.R. sections and three U.S.C. sections]:
**** 45 C.F.R. part 46.102(l)(2), 21 C.F.R. part 56; 42 U.S.C. Sect. 241(d); 5 U.S.C. Sect. 552a; 44 U.S.C. Sect. 3501 et seq.
The cited regulations and laws are meant to explain how "this activity … was conducted consistent with applicable federal law and CDC policy". The specific point of interest to me was how and why the described activity is "deemed not research".
We can learn about this in 45 C.F.R. part 46, 102(l), which starts by defining "research" in a way that actually seems to cover the described activity: "Research means a systematic investigation, including research development, testing, and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge."
However, there are four subsections defining specific exceptions to this definition — "For purposes of this part, the following activities are deemed not to be research", and the second of them is
(2) Public health surveillance activities, including the collection and testing of information or biospecimens, conducted, supported, requested, ordered, required, or authorized by a public health authority. Such activities are limited to those necessary to allow a public health authority to identify, monitor, assess, or investigate potential public health signals, onsets of disease outbreaks, or conditions of public health importance (including trends, signals, risk factors, patterns in diseases, or increases in injuries[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: proviso
This word has appeared in 15 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Word of the Day
decennary
Definition: (noun) A period of 10 years.
Synonyms: decade.
Usage: The first decennary of the century was marked by revolutionary movements and general social unrest.
Discuss
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Idiom of the Day
get down to work
To begin being serious about something; to begin attending to business or work at hand. Watch the video
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Language Log
Shoebox skull: an old neologism
"Bones from German cave rewrite early history of Homo sapiens in Europe", by Will Dunham, Reuters (1/31/24)
Bone fragments unearthed in a cave in central Germany show that our species ventured into Europe's cold higher latitudes more than 45,000 years ago – much earlier than previously known – in a finding that rewrites the early history of Homo sapiens on a continent still inhabited then by our cousins the Neanderthals.
Scientists said on Wednesday they identified through ancient DNA 13 Homo sapiens skeletal remains in Ilsenhöhle cave, situated below a medieval hilltop castle in the German town of Ranis. The bones were determined to be up to 47,500 years old. Until now, the oldest Homo sapiens remains from northern central and northwestern Europe were about 40,000 years old.
"These fragments are directly dated by radiocarbon and yielded well preserved DNA of Homo sapiens," said paleoanthropologist and research leader Jean-Jacques Hublin of Collège de France in Paris.
Homo sapiens arose in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, later trekking worldwide and encountering other human populations, including Neanderthals. The spotty fossil record has left unclear the details of how Homo sapiens spread through Europe and what role our species played in the extinction of Neanderthals, who disappeared roughly 40,000 years ago.
The research, presented in three studies published in the journals Nature showed that the region was colder then than now – a chilly steppe-tundra setting akin to today's Siberia or Scandinavia – illustrating how Homo sapiens, despite roots in warmer Africa, adapted relatively quickly to frigid conditions.
The researchers concluded that small, mobile bands of hunter-gatherers used the cave sporadically as they roamed a landscape teeming with Ice Age mammals, and that at other times it was occupied by cave hyenas and cave bears.
"The site in Ranis was occupied during several short-term stays, and not as a huge camp site," said archaeologist Marcel Weiss of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, another of the research leaders.
Bones and stone artifacts from the cave showed that these people hunted large mammals including reindeer, horses, bison and woolly rhinoceroses.
"It is interesting that the diet of both these early Homo sapiens and late Neanderthals appears to be focused on large terrestrial game, which could have led to areas of competition," said zooarchaeologist Geoff Smith of the University of Kent, who led one of the studies. "However, we still need additional data points to more fully understand the role and impact of climate and incoming Homo sapiens groups in the eventual extinction of Neanderthals in Europe."
The research appeared to resolve a debate over who made a specific set of European stone artifacts – attributed to what is called the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician (LRJ) culture – including leaf-shaped stone blades useful as spear tips for hunting. Many experts had hypothesized these were fashioned by Neanderthals. Their presence at Ranis with no evidence of Neanderthals instead indicates they were made by Homo sapiens.
"These blade points have been found from Poland and Czechia, over Germany and Belgium, into the British Isles, and we can now assume they most likely represent an early presence of Homo sapiens all over this northern region," Smith said.
…
The cave was excavated in the 1930s, with bones and stone artifacts found, before World War Two interrupted the work. Technology at the time could not identify the bones. Researchers re-excavated it from 2016 to 2022, uncovering more bones and artifacts. DNA sequencing on newly found and previously unearthed bones identified Homo sapiens remains.
"The results for Ranis are amazing," Weiss said, adding that scientists should return to other[...]
Language Log
"She can talk however she wants!"
A max_balegde/video/7344045004312022304">fun interview about acting, contact, accommodation, and identity:
max_balegde?refer=embed">@max_balegde My favourite interview of all time. She was so sweet and she can talk however she wants!!!! Damsel is out now! @Netflix #milliebobbybrown ♬ original sound – Max_Balegde
There's been quite a bit of media coverage of MBB's accent and the reaction to this interview. This Netflix Film club video gives some commercial background:
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Idiom of the Day
be as good as gone
To be very nearly, inevitably, or for all intents and purposes lost, departed, defunct, or deceased. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
repugnance
Definition: (noun) Extreme dislike or aversion.
Synonyms: revulsion, repulsion, horror.
Usage: Does any secret repugnance, or any hereditary dislike, exist between you and her family?
Discuss
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Face Paint Gone Wrong
He doesn't speak human, he's a tiger. Check back tomorrow for a new episode of HAVOC PARK from Cliff Benfield!
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Language Log
Sinoglyphic scripts for Sinitic and non-Sinitic languages in East / Southeast Asia
Forthcoming from De Gruyter, July 14, 2024 (ISBN: 9783111382746):
Vernacular Chinese-Character Manuscripts from East and Southeast Asia, edited by: David Holm.
Volume 40 in the series Studies in Manuscript Cultures
Keywords: Asia; vernacular; ritual; library collections; recitation
Topics: Asian Literature; Asian and Pacific Studies; Dialectology; Linguistics and Semiotics; Literary Studies; Literature of other Nations and Languages; Southeast Asia; Textual Scholarship; Theoretical Frameworks and Disciplines
About this book
Open Access
This collection brings together studies on vernacular manuscripts in regional Chinese dialects such as Cantonese and Hokkien (South Fujian dialect), those of non-Han peoples in China and Southeast Asia such as the Zhuang and Yao, and a vernacular character manuscript in Vietnamese. Across this wide range, the focus is on manuscripts written in regional and vernacular adaptations of the Chinese script. Three chapters on Yao manuscripts each focus on a different aspect of their use in local society or on collections of Yao manuscripts in overseas collections; there are three chapters on Zhuang and related Tai languages; two studies on Hokkien; one on the Cantonese script in contemporary Hong Kong; and one on a Buddhist manuscript with Vietnamese chữ nôm commentary from a temple in Bangkok. Detailed descriptions of traditional paper manufacture in the villages are given for both the Yao and the Zhuang, as well as paper analysis used to date a Vietnamese manuscript. Coverage includes information about the physicality of the manuscripts investigated and the vernacular Chinese scripts in which they are written, but also a wealth of information about their use and significance in local society. This collection will be of interest to scholars and students interested in the philological analysis of East and Southeast Asian character scripts and manuscript traditions, but also the broader social contexts of manuscript use in traditional and modern society.
Considering the comparatively heavy overemphasis on East Asia during the past few centuries, it is refreshing to witness the recent turn to greater scholarly interest in Southwest, Central, Northeast, Southeast, and South Asia. A better balanced and more accurate view of the history, culture, and languages of the peoples in all of these regions will result.
Selected readings
* "Bahasa and the concept of 'National Language'" (3/14/13)
* "A hidden minority revealed" (1/29/22) — Zhuang
* "Katratripulr" (5/6/22)
* "The geo-, socio-, ethno-, and politicolinguistics of Taiwan" (7/24/18)
* "Thai 'khwan' ('soul') and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (1/28/19)
* "Two-fifths of the people in Vietnam have the surname Nguyen. Why?" (1/18/20) — with extensive bibliography
* "Words in Vietnamese" (10/2/18)
[h.t. Geoff Wade]
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
high
intoxicated, under the influence of a mind-altering drug
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
speak out
If you speak out, you publicly state your position on an issue, or publicly oppose or defend someone or something.
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and astrobiologist, Frank Drake (1930–2022),
…the Drake Equation is a tribute to the visionary idea that the probability of finding life in the cosmos is something we can estimate. The Drake Equation is a mathematical formula for the possibility of finding advanced, communicating civilizations in the Milky Way. This equation has guided and inspired scientific research in various fields related to astrobiology, which is the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe.
(source)
A neat feature of this NASA website is that the two-sided image of the Europa Clipper vault plate is in 3D and is ingeniously designed so that you can spin it around in every direction (up, down, left, right, obverse / reverse), all the while carrying the intricate contents of the two surfaces, no matter which way you turn it. The plate is about 7 X 11 inches in size and .4 inches thick. It is made of tantalum (Ta; atomic number 73).
To conclude, I will bring this post back down to language as it is actually spoken on earth, at least by one person, my granddaughter Samira. When she was young (let's say, ages about 2-8), I thought she had a speech impediment. I knew she was smart because of the clever things she would say and do, but — no matter how patient I was with her and how long I worked with her — simply couldn't get her to pronounce things correctly. For example, once she told me that she wanted a "marmay tay". For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what she wanted. Finally I had to ask my son to interpret. "Oh," he said, "she wants a 'mermaid tail'".
Directly germane to this post, however, is the way she pronounced "water". From Samira's mouth, it came out as "wadduh". Thinking that other people would make fun of her, I despaired.
I said very, very clearly in enPR (like AHD): wô'tə(r) (including the "r", which is the way I pronounce the word.
"Yes, grampa," she said, "wadduh". That went back and forth many times, but she just couldn't hear what I was ever so patiently saying, it was impossible for her to utter the word I begged her to say. That continued for several years of visits, and I would always go back to Philadelphia crestfallen.
Then the pandemic struck, and I was unable to see Samira in Dallas for four years. When I at last had a chance to visit her, Samira was already a teenager, or close to it. I was stunned when I heard her say, "Granpa, would you get me a glass of water?"
!!!
I have gone on at such length about Samira's pronunciation of "water", because what the audio of the Waveform Generator says is pretty close to what she said when she was still a little kid. Listen for yourself here.
Now, after all these exertions, I need a cup of wô'tər. Selected readings
* "Tap water water" (6/14/13)
* "The curse of bottled water" (1/25/12)
* "Opens the waterhouse; open water rooms" (3/2/13)
* "That mystifying, baffling Mid-Atlantic / TransAtlantic Accent" (3/2/24)
* "Hwæt about WH?" (4/13/11)
* "Hwæt, the parking-spaces …" (6/14/12)
* "'What?!'" (12/3/20)
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from using consumer products). Such activities include those associated with providing timely situational awareness and priority setting during the course of an event or crisis that threatens public health (including natural or man-made disasters).
As normal lexicography, this is weird — it's like defining mammal in something like the usual way ("A warm-blooded animal that has hair and produces milk to feed its young") and then specifying that certain kinds of mammals, like "Angora goats with brown coat color", are specifically excluded from the category.
But as legal lexicography, this seems to be normal. The motivation, I think, is to avoid more complex re-writing of a law or policy.
In this case, 45 C.F.R part 46 defines policies for the "protection of human subjects", including various sorts of procedures for approving and constraining various stages of various sorts of activities involving those "human subjects". These (evolving) procedures are highly (if variously) complex, and specify elaborate chains of documentation and approval, as well as complex constraints on what sorts of information can be released to whom and when. In that context, the motivation for the four exemptions is clear.
Consider the first exception, covering "Scholarly and journalistic activities (e.g., oral history, journalism, biography, literary criticism, legal research, and historical scholarship)", where recordings and transcripts are often published along with the names of subjects. When the humanities and social sciences first came under the purview of academic Institutional Review Boards, there were several cases where IRBs blindly applied the normal rules for interviews in clinical studies, insisting that the names of oral history subjects could not be published, and that interview recordings and transcripts had to be entirely deleted after studies presenting general conclusions about the "research" in question were completed. (See this 2015 post…)
It would be very complicated to re-write the laws and regulations so that oral history is subject only to appropriate constraints in all of the many places where constraints and procedures are specified — instead, the responsible authorities apparently just decided that oral history is actually just not "research", for the purposes of the regulations in question. (At least they didn't decide that oral history subjects are actually not human…)
As for exemption number 2, covering the cited C.D.C. article, the reasoning seems to be that such work is important and needs to be done and published quickly, without the potentially time-consuming approval process. (This one is the "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report"…) It also happens to be true that the collection and submission of the underlying data was covered by multiple institutional approvals, though the regulation doesn't seem to require that.
And of course, court cases often involve complex lexicographical arguments, in ways that sometimes seem to defy common sense. (See e.g. "Is a fish a "tangible object'?", 4/30/2014; "A result that no sensible person could have intended", 12/8/2005; etc.)
I assume the laws and policies in other traditions (e.g. Napoleonic) use similar techniques, for similar reasons — readers will no doubt be able to enlighten us.
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Great-Uncle Eddie with Robby Hoffman (Bless These Braces: Episode 3)
Comedian Robby Hoffman (Too Far, Verified Stand-Up) sits down with Tam to look back on her Bat Mitzvah, keeping Kosher, and putting ointment on her Great-Uncle's feet.
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01:41 - Argentinian Jews; going to school on subsidy
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07:28 - Resisting temptation/McDonalds
13:54 - Tam's teacher went to prison
15:14 - First period
18:00 - Uncle Eddie
22:45 - Masturbation?
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30:12 - Robby "could never survive a second Holocaust"
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
nerd
a studious person with few social skills
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hold against
to dislike somebody, or be angry with them, because you blame them for something bad that happened in the past
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European sites from this time period to check for similar evidence of an early Homo sapiens presence.
The 47,500 BP C14 date puts the Ranis man considerably before the previous earliest finds for Cro-Magnon man whose dating had been set to the Upper Paleolithic Period (c. 40,000 to c. 10,000 years ago) in Europe. This new dating matches the rise of art, music, and language.
About 35 years ago, I went to a wonderful exhibition of human skulls at the University of Tokyo Museum. They had put together a large collection of skulls from Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, and other archaic hominins. They were lined up chronologically in a series from earliest to contemporary times.
I spent a couple of hours in that dramatically dark exhibition room and was stunned by the physically presented visual evolution of humankind. The thing that struck me most was the shape of the Cro-Magnon skull. I stared at it for at least a quarter of an hour and went back again and again to view the Cro-Magnon skull, then repeatedly compared it with all the previous skulls. (The effect was comparable to the first time I beheld Ur-David [who looked so much like my brother Dave] in the Ürümchi Museum in 1988.)
The Cro-Magnon skull was so different in its shape from all of the previous skulls in being elongated, relatively narrow, and tall, with a flat forehead falling straight down and no protruding brow ridge (whereas the other skulls and crania were round, broad, and relatively compressed in depth and length — like a pumpkin — with a backward sloping forehead and massive brows), that I called it the "shoebox skull".
Still to this day, whenever I think of Cro-Magnon Man, that designation — "shoebox skull" — comes into my mind as a powerful image of that early Homo sapiens. Rectangular, with the back of the skull projecting rearward like an extension of the braincase.
When I first started using the expression "shoebox skull" around 3-4 decades ago, it was my own personal neologism. Inasmuch as I've used it continuously since then, it's no longer a neologism for me. That's just what I call it — for myself. Since the discovery of Ranis man, which is of such great importance in human evolution, I might as well go public with what, for many years, used to be a private expression: shoebox skull.
Selected readings
* "New Light on the Human History of Symbols" (2/6/21)
* "Brain hole" (11/17/17) — a Chinese neologism
* "Thought panzers" (2/24/24)
* Victor H. Mair, “Prehistoric European and East Asian Flutes”, contained in Anderl and Eifring 2006, pages 209–216, for which see Flutopedia, under "The Isturitz Flutes".
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
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Language Log
At the rind of the debate
Here are a couple of puzzling word-choices from Charlatan Magazine, sent to me by someone who was somehow put on their mailing list.
This one is from "The Politics of Immigration", 3/3/2024 [emphasis added]:
While Biden patrols the Texas border (taking a wide berth around the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas) he assuages the American voter whose ire toward illegal immigrants under his presidency has doubled. “There were 49.5 million foreign-born residents in the United States (legal and illegal) in 2023,” according to the Center for Immigration Statistics, and the foreign-born population has grown by 4.5 million under Biden's exegesis.
My correspondent identified "exegesis" as a malapropism, but we couldn't figure out what it might be a substitution for. I guess the author might have meant something like "Biden's interpretation (of immigration policy)", though there's nothing else in the article to raise the question of alternative interpretations of such laws or policies.
And here's another odd usage, from "Chasing the Light", 3/10/2024:
The U.S. Senate has passed the Sunshine Protection Act that'll make daylight saving time permanent across the nation. The House has yet to advance the bill out of committee. Likewise, the European Parliament proposed removing daylight saving time altogether across the EU, but the initiative presents challenges for transportation and has yet to be implemented. At the cortex of the debate about clocks lies some science.
Cortex originally meant "the bark, rind, shell, hull", or figuratively "the outward part, covering" of other things, and that seems to be exactly the wrong metaphor for what the Charlatan author had in mind: the fill for "at the ___ of the debate about clocks" should presumably be "center" or "heart", not "rind" or "covering".
Today, cortex is mostly used to mean "the outer or superficial part of an organ or bodily structure", and especially the cerebral cortex. So maybe the author meant to refer somehow to "the brain of the debate" — though that's not a common metaphor. Google finds "about 18,200,000 results" for "at the heart of the debate", and no results at all for "at the brain of the debate" or "at the cortex of the debate".
On the other hand, maybe the article's author is insinuating poetically that sleep science is actually "at the rind of the debate" over Daylight Savings Time?
Charlatan Magazine doesn't provide author information for its articles, but its Editor-in-Chief has the look of someone who might be behind that insinuation:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/DrewGowing.png
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hoops
the game of basketball
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