words
bioephemera | September 10, 2009"It will die, eventually, because no one will know how to do it." But for now, a few miles from here, Firefly Press' John Kristensen is keeping the tradition of letterpress alive, as seen in this beautiful video by Chuck Kraemer.
Via NOTCOT.
bioephemera | September 7, 2009
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
-John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
On rereading the whole "Ode," this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be that either I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary use…
bioephemera | July 11, 2009I've posted before that I'm a big fan of Garfield Minus Garfield, the alternate reality in which Jon Arbuckle's barely suppressed mental illness is fully revealed. Now we have Garfield: Lost In Translation, in which the dialogue is translated into Japanese and back into English.
Though not as awesome as Garfield Minus Garfield, I still laughed harder at that strip than any of the original Garfields. More here.
bioephemera | June 12, 2009
Turns out DC has, or once did have, a hidden subterranean labyrinth - and you thought it was just a plot device from last fall's South Park election special! Even better, it was dug by a lepidopterist. Take that, you engineers!
ONE of the oddest hobbies in the world is that of Dr. H. G. Dyar, international authority on moths and butterflies of the Smithsonian Institution, who has found health and recreation in digging an amazing series of tunnels beneath his Washington home.
The New York Times revealed its 50 most looked-up words, and Nieman Journalism Lab had commentary:
"All of the 25-cent…
bioephemera | May 11, 2009And if so, will it make us even stupider? Only one more week until we find out! This could be the datahead's ideal engine:
It'll tell you the family, genus, species, and caloric value of an apple, and it'll forecast Apple's stock price, but it won't give you apple pie recipes. It'll tell you the box office take of the first "Star Trek" movie, but it won't tell you the theater where you can see the newest "Star Trek" movie.But a technical audience is still big. This could unlock a lot of data that students, research assistants, lawyers, marketing managers, financial analysts, and scientists…
bioephemera | March 17, 2009I know I've typed out some howlers in my day, so I say this with all due humility. But this post over at iO9 had me rolling on the floor last night:
Paul Murtaugh, a statistician at Corvallis' Oregon State University, claims that our carbon legacy isn't just limited to our own emissions, but 50% of our children's (The other parent gets the other 50%). And 25% of their children's, and so on, and so on. He arrived at this estimate using math: Murtaugh used UN population projections, which say that after 2050, birth rates in all countries will be 1.85 children per woman, on average. Then he took…
edyong | February 17, 2009Babies can say volume without saying a single word. They can wave good-bye, point at things to indicate an interest or shake their heads to mean "No". These gestures may be very simple, but they are a sign of things to come. Year-old toddlers who use more gestures tend to have more expansive vocabularies several years later. And this link between early gesturing and future linguistic ability may partially explain by children from poorer families tend to have smaller vocabularies than those from richer ones.
Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child's academic success, so it's striking…
bioephemera | February 3, 2009In case you missed it, my Sciblings are abuzz about journalists' dismissal of Jill Biden's education.
From the LA Times:
Amy Sullivan, a religion writer for Time magazine, said she smiled when she heard the vice president's wife announced as Dr. Jill Biden during the national prayer service the day after President Obama's inauguration. "Ordinarily when someone goes by doctor and they are a PhD, not an MD, I find it a little bit obnoxious," Sullivan said.
and
"My feeling is if you can't heal the sick, we don't call you doctor," said Bill Walsh, copy desk chief for the Washington Post's A…
bioephemera | January 23, 2009
Speaking of the unpredictable evolution of language, the NYT shares this map of many formerly innocuous placenames in Britain which, over time, have become inadvertently profane. Apparently there are so many embarrassing locale that they've become the topic of two books:
Mr. Bailey, who grew up on Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire, and Mr. Hurst got the idea for the books when they read about a couple who bought a house on Butt Hole Road, in South Yorkshire.
The story isn't that surprising, but seeing this ridiculous little map in the sober Gray Lady just made me smile.
bioephemera | January 23, 2009During President Obama's Inauguration, the staffer said to me, "the President-elect looks nervous." I said, "Why should he be nervous? All he has to do now is get through the Oath without screwing it up!"
Which, of course, he immediately did.
It wasn't Obama's fault, though - Chief Justice John Roberts appears to have prompted the gaffe by speaking the word "faithfully" out of turn. In a NYT editorial, famous linguist Steven Pinker hypothesizes why.
How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists…
bioephemera | January 18, 2009
Look, it's Ken's "Buddy" Allan! ("All of Ken's clothes fit him!")
This is my all-time favorite example of unintended scandal in advertising. I assume that this tagline somehow sounded okay in the 60s, but come on - those quotation marks are provocative regardless of the decade, because they're just so unnecessary*
Now via Pure Pedantry, I've discovered that there is an entire blog devoted to gratuitous quotation marks and their unintended consequences.
Wonderful! I laughed and laughed this morning. Definitely worth adding to the blogroll.
The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks
*Alas,…
bioephemera | January 11, 2009
"I Want You To Want Me"
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for their "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition
Mining data from online dating profiles, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar have created a romantic, bittersweet peek into the human psyche. This video tour of the "I Want You to Want Me" installation ends on an up note - apparently "intelligence" is the top turn-on for online daters! Still, the sight of all those balloons bumping randomly past each other in the sky serves as a reminder that finding love anywhere, online or in meatspace, is a total…
bioephemera | December 31, 2008My annual list of words I learned in 2008:
alexithymia
exabyte
heteroskedasticity
semordnilap
petrichor
tsuris
picayune
fissiparous
fescennine
ceteris paribus
mutatis mutandis
Mamihlapinatapai
bioephemera | October 27, 2008Robert Crease observes at Physicsworld that the upcoming James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, is only one of many instances - some inaccurate or misleading - of "quantum" in our cultural discourse. To explain the ubiquity of the word, Crease invokes James Clerk Maxwell's observation that "the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recalls some well-known scientific phrase."
More here.
Via 3 quarks daily.
pontiff | September 26, 2008The prime number theorem is a statement of a quantuplicity: there are about N/log N prime numbers in the first N numbers.quantuplicity noun. The quantitative relationship between two amounts. Usually referring specifically to the case when this is expressed as a ratio giving the number of times that one contains another (or vice versa.)
Calculating quantuplicities for different sociological quantities can lead one to a very complicated poset.
bioephemera | September 25, 2008Tomorrow may or may not be the first of the presidential debates between Obama and McCain. I'll watch, although I find political debates really depressing, and not just because reality is a little bleak right now. I'm always frustrated at the level of the discourse. If a candidate goes where a president should be intellectually prepared to go, attempting to seriously discuss the ambiguities and challenges of complex issues like finance or health insurance systems, he'll be totally shooting himself in his (obviously elitist) foot. People don't want to hear serious, complex discussion. They…
pontiff | September 23, 2008A word which might be useful in describing depictions of Jesus in South America:Iconotropy noun. The misinterpretation of icons of an earlier cult by a later cult. Especially so as to bring the beliefs of the old school in line with the new school.
The monotheist bested the polytheist by repeated counterarguments of iconotropy.
pontiff | September 23, 2008The word which is closest in the dictionary to my name:Daven. verb. 1. To recite a prayer. 2. To rock too and fro (as if praying.)
Have you ever noticed how some very smart mathematicians daven when they are excitedly talking about research?
bioephemera | July 29, 2008This morning, Hasbro finally intimidated Facebook and Scrabulous into suspending the popular word game app. I love Scrabulous, and I'm mad as heck - not least because in my current game, I'd scored a whopping three Bingos (words in which you use all 7 letters) and was routing the usually dominant competition (my staffer).
Scrabulous is an online pseudo-Scrabble - a godsend for those of us who can't meet to play real games in meatspace, but can squeeze in a word here and there over the course of the week. But Hasbro, the company which has the rights to most of your typical-American-childhood…
revere | July 27, 2008Maybe it's my imagination, but the great desecration in cracker-gate died down more quickly than I would have imagined. That's some kind of internal imagining contradiction, I suppose, quite appropriate for talking about religious questions, which themselves seem to be endless sources of linguistic tangles. When it comes to linguistics, no better place than The Language Log, where I found a tiny disquisition on Good and Evil connected with a new word (for me), "to linquify":
We need a new term for what is going on; although I don't in general think you can only grasp concepts that you have…