Archive for Technology
Some technical terms
Hi, I’m S. You may vaguely remember me from such comments as “I think it’s good to be aware of the peculiar rules of the Pretentious Pedant dialect of English” and Eleanor Heffalump’s double-dactyl, which were written under the name of “Shmuel” before I came out as nonbinary and changed my handle. (It turns out […]
Only peripherally about words, or for that matter stuff.
The Washington Post has teamed up with Jigsaw (which is part of Google’s parent company, Alphabet) to create a new site called Sideways Dictionary, which provides brief explanations of various tech terms, in the form of analogies. Readers can vote existing analogies up or down, and add new analogies. For more info, see an article […]
An embeddable way to annoy visitors to your site: CRAPCHA. CRAPCHA is an acronym for Completely Ridiculous And Phony Captcha that Hassles for Amusement. It is a parody of the annoying CAPTCHA codes that try to verify that you are not a bot. […] CRAPCHA takes this to the next level, with characters that are […]
Ah, yak-shaving. I was curious about the use of the word “sectional” in Civil War-era documents; that's not a usage I had encountered before. So here's how looking up a...
Someone mentioned the Emmy Awards the other day, and I realized I wasn't sure why they were called that. I figured they must have been named after some famous person...
Not long ago, I read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (in a printed copy, on paper—the relevance of which I'll explain later), and was struck by this...
Way back in 1997, I introduced the term “obsolescism” to refer to a term or phrase (like “dialing” a telephone) that has lost its literal meaning but hasn't yet become...
Video demo of a nifty project called Typeface 2 by Mary Huang. It analyzes the user's face and generates letters of a typeface based on things like the user opening...