Archive for September, 2012
There's been some interesting work lately in analyzing documents and speeches in terms of statistics and word clouds and such. The most recent piece I've come across in this area...
Recently happened across a snowclone that I hadn't really noticed before: phrases of the form “an X grows in Brooklyn,” riffing on the title A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Headline...
Spam subject line: Strange 11-Letter Word That Doubles Your Metabolism Wow! A strange word, a long word, and a word that has an effect on the real world, all in...
The other day, Jim and I were looking at a eucalyptus tree, and I realized that although the eu- part was obvious, I had no idea what the -calyptus part...
TIME magazine provides a list of 11 Great Secret Service Code Names. I don't love their discussions and presentation of the names, but I like the names themselves, from Paul...
A couple weeks ago, I came across the phrase assortative mating in an article about autism: Judith Warner explores a provocative theory about why rates of autism, particularly the mild...
A few weeks back, I re-listened to the Clancy Brothers' rendition of “The Minstrel Boy,” and it's been running through my head intermittently ever since. Stirring and patriotic in an...
It struck me a while back that every time there's any text on any sign, someone had to choose a font and a size for it, among other design choices....
LPT, I recently learned, stands for Life Pro Tip: a tip about how to do something in real life (as opposed to on a computer). My understanding is that, as...
MW11's definition 1b for free is: enjoying civil and political liberty Definition 1 for liberty is: the quality or state of being free Of course, there are other definitions for...