words
bioephemera | July 23, 2008
I'd never bowdlerize any author's work, but wordlerizing is a lot of fun. Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle is an easy way to create pretty frequency-based word clouds from plain text.
I entered the text of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and this is what I got. No surprise, "species" is the dominant word. But I like the appearance of "will" as a dominant word as well, suggesting the inexorable drive of evolution. . .
I also Wordlerized Watson and Crick's seminal Nature paper, "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid", and got this pretty vertical column:
In…
revere | July 17, 2008Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD, not to be confused with a disease of cattle, Foot and Mouth Disease) is the result of an infection by one of several intestinal viruses, the most common being Coxsackie A and Enterovirus 71 (Ev71). HFMD is a fairly common contagious infection of infants and children that often appears in outbreak form in schools and daycare centers. Children with HFMD have fever, sore throat and characteristic lesions around the mouth and in the throat. Recently some very sizable outbreaks caused by Ev71 have been reported in China, Singapore and Mongolia, with thousands of…
bioephemera | July 2, 2008
Any recent decline in the popularity of reading, especially reading long books, appears to have totally bypassed Ammon Shea. Shea recently spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary, and his book about the experience, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, drops today.
When I first heard about Shea's project, I wasn't especially inspired. What is an "expert dictionary reader" anyway? And who wants to read a book about reading a book - especially a dictionary? It's not that I don't love dictionaries. I keep a massive unabridged Funk & Wagnalls flopped open in my…
bioephemera | June 30, 2008
Cristina Vergano, 2006
Via the wonderful Phantasmaphile, I just discovered artist Cristina Vergano. Her latest series, "Figures of Speech," are like Old Masters crossed with children's puzzles - playful Renaissance rebuses that spell out their own titles (key at the bottom of this post).
Cristina Vergano, 2006
Vergano mixes trompe l'oeil with typefaces, clear-eyed, enigmatic people and animals, and allegorical landscapes to perfectly balance frivolity with the suggestion of deeper meaning. Vergano said in the artist's statement for an earlier exhibition, "Knowledge and our approaches to it…
bioephemera | June 23, 2008My friend Rhett alerted me to this little word game, which is kind of like Balderdash: you pick the correct etymology or definition from a group of fakes created by tricky readers. I did quibble with a couple of mistakes (one definition was off, one word was misspelled) but I tried three times and couldn't beat it. Can you?
Other wordy recreations:
this is my all-time favorite hard online word quiz. . . I scored 183 and broke a sweat doing it.
this is an addictive Boggle-style game from Flash By Night.
bioephemera | June 16, 2008
Via Rag & Bone Blog
By Christopher Tovo
Are we falling out of love with books?
I realized a little while ago - when yet another book arrived from Amazon and was thrown on the to-read pile - that I'm no longer the bibliophile I once was. I love the idea of reading books, but I'm not making time to do it. Recent fiction isn't appealing - I don't seem to have the patience or interest. (I feel like Jessica Crispin in that respect). And nonfiction, which I have been reading occasionally, seems too much like a part of my job.
I'm really disturbed by this trend. I self-identify as a devoted…
bioephemera | March 4, 2008
Gary Gygax, who died today at age 69, has a special place in my heart - but not for the obvious reason. I was never a disciple of his famous creation, Dungeons & Dragons. I grew up in a rural, conservative area, and while I'm sure there were a few gaming groups around, they were neither very popular nor co-ed. Perhaps as a result, the gaming bug never bit me - I've never played Magic, Myst, WoW, or any other fantasy game more complex than Castle Risk.
But circa 1983, one of those obscure local fantasy geeks upgraded to the D&D Monster Manual II, abandoning his well-worn Monster…
bioephemera | February 23, 2008I first saw these anatomical letters at Street Anatomy:
Typeface AnatomyBjorn Johansson
Unfortunately artist Bjorn Johansson doesn't seem to have completed the alphabet; these three specimens are all we find in the fossil record. But you can view another typeface, Handwritten, based on photos of hands, in his portfolio.
bioephemera | February 8, 2008I finally got around to visiting freerice.com, a vocabulary game that lets you "win" donations of rice for needy countries. (Yes, it's like the SAT, but some of us find that kind of thing fun.) The words start off easy, but ramp up to a pleasing level of difficulty; I played for about ten minutes and hovered around a score of 50, peaking at 52.
How does it work? Advertisers pay per click, and the rice is purchased (mostly in Pakistan and Japan) and distributed by the United Nations' World Food Program. This story describes how the program is helping refugees in Bangladesh; 20 grains of rice…
revere | January 29, 2008This isn't a contest, exactly, but more a question to the huddled masses. Mrs. R., who is Italian, was asking me the other day what the Yiddish word Mitvah meant. It turns out it isn't a Yiddish word (it's Hebrew) and while it has some kind of religious meaning about fulfilling commandments, I'm not into religious meanings so I told her the colloquial meaning: doing a good deed or a kindness, or an act of kindness. Maybe it has a one word English equivalent, but it's still a pretty good single word for an idea that usually takes more words in English. So we started talking about other words…
revere | May 14, 2007Taxes, national service, diplomacy. A far cry from immunology and virology. Unless you are a blogger or interested in words. Then you get to bring them together.
First, taxes and national service. In Rome of old, these were things you owed to the Republic (as opposed to the Rome of today, the things you are expected to evade). The Latin word was munis, "sense of duty" (cf., "municipal"). Not everyone has a sense of duty (you noticed?). Even today -- imagine -- some people don't have to serve (they are given foreign policy roles in Republican administrations) or are exempt from paying their…