Free Republic

Indonesia’s parliament has approved a bill to relocate the nation’s capital from Jakarta to a jungled area of Kalimantan on Borneo island, the planning minister said on Tuesday. The new state capital law, which provides a legal framework for President Joko Widodo’s ambitious $32 billion mega project, stipulates how development of the capital will be funded and governed. The new center will be called “Nusantara”, a Javanese name for the Indonesian archipelago chosen by the president, Monoarfa announced on Monday. Plans to relocate the government from Jakarta, a bustling megacity of 10 million people that suffers from chronic congestion, floods...

The program, a linguistic time machine of sorts, can quickly crunch data on some of the earliest-known "proto-languages" that gave rise to modern languages such as Hawaiian, Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, and others spoken in Southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia, Australasia, and the Pacific. The speed and scale of the work is key here, as proto-languages are typically reconstructed through a timely and painstaking manual process that involves comparing two or more languages that hail from a shared ancestor. "What excites me about this system is that it takes so many of the great ideas that linguists have had about...