Archive for October, 2007
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
First mention of T.S. Eliot in the New York Times:
T.S. Eliot of St. Louis, a student in the Summer school of Magedeburg University, arrived in London today with a number of students from Freiburg and other German universities which have been closed on account of the war.
"The German officials," said ...
Posted in First mention | Comments Off
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
First mention of Harriet Beecher Stowe in the New York Times:
Harriet Beecher Stowe, wife of Professor Stowe, of Bowdoin College, and the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," has received $4,000, as her share of the sales already made of that book. She receives 10 cents on each copy sold, and ...
Posted in First mention | Comments Off
Monday, October 29th, 2007
This cross-legg'd cabbage-eating son of a cucumber!
(Sir J. Jollup in Hone Every-day Book 2, from the OED entry for cucumber.)
Posted in Language, Whim | Comments Off
Sunday, October 28th, 2007
Second thoughts, perhaps, on the part of the religious right, according to the New York Times Magazine's David D. Kirkpatrick.
(Perhaps I should tag this under 'politics' alone).
Posted in Politics and News, Religion | Comments Off
Saturday, October 27th, 2007
I have no time to create my own, but I hope this is easier to read than the last. Three columns are a bit much, though. And for some reason I wasn't getting updates about comments, but I seem to be doing so now.
Let me know what you think (esp ...
Posted in Meta | 4 Comments »
Saturday, October 27th, 2007
In more news of our always-wearing-helmets future:
“This is more a piece of safety equipment, along the lines of a child car seat, than just a piece of athletic equipment,” Ferrara said.
From Helmet design Absorbs Shock in a New Way -- yet another new helmet design.
Posted in Science and Tech, Whim | Comments Off
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
I was reviewing a Wiki project, Wikicompany.org, today. Its stated mission is be a "free, worldwide business directory that anyone can edit," in the same spirit as Wikipedia. I thought it might be a good resource for company names and facts.
But then I noticed that the vast majority of edits ...
Posted in Search technology | Comments Off
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
Google is now using their internal translation software for all language pairs, and my very, very brief look at their results look good. This is very idiomatic, for example:
I was amused by calculating the number of video tags football (soccer) and rugby on Dailymotion (English pages). No doubt, soccer is ...
Posted in Language, Science and Tech, Search technology | 3 Comments »
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
David G. Lockwood has died, reports the Linguist List.
David Lockwood was one of my professors when I did my degree in linguistics at Michigan State in the 70's. He was (and remained, I think) an adherent of "stratificationalism," a kind of constraint-based network theory of language. His classes were the ...
Posted in Personal and family | Comments Off
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
Cool.
Over at the Powerset blog, Jim Kellerman is talking about Powerset's use of Hadoop and development of HBase, an open-source replacement for Google's BigTable.
If you have any idea what 'Hadoop' or 'BigTable' or 'HBase' are, it's worth checking out.
Posted in Search technology | Comments Off
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
Acccording to the AHD:
Desultory suggests a shifting about from one thing to another that reflects a lack of method: a desultory conversation.
Pronounced: deSULtory. This is one of those words I thought I knew, but I didn't when I actually looked it up. It's a good word to describe this ...
Posted in Language, Whim | 2 Comments »
Sunday, October 7th, 2007
One of my wackier predictions is that in the future, everyone will wear bike helmets. Obviously, not like current bulky bike helmets, but just as today it is almost unthinkable for someone to ride a bike without a helmet (at least for some people), I have been claiming that someday ...
Posted in Science and Tech | 1 Comment »