For Your Words Only

To really get creative writing done, I need to filter out all the distractions and let the words flow. I need an editor with fullscreen mode. By Giles Turbull, O'Reilly Network

Stolen words

TPM on the importance of words

X-Words Deluxe 3.0.6

Words to live by

I lack words!

2004 in Words

New HP chief's way with words

glittery words

Silmarillion in 1,000 words

VALAQUENTA:

MANWE: I'm in charge!
VARDA: I'm Manwe's spouse. And the queen of the stars!
NAMO: I do death and fate. They call me Mandos.
VAIRE: I'm Namo's spouse. I weave things.
IRMO: I have gardens. They call me Lorien.
ESTE: I'm Irmo's spouse. I take care of the gardens.
YAVANNA: I make things grow.
NIENNA: I'm sad.
ULMO: I live in the ocean.
AULE: I'm Yavanna's spouse. I've got a great big hammer! I made dwarves.
NESSA: I dance.
OROME: I hunt!
VANA: I'm Orome's spouse. I make living things happy.
TULKAS: I'm strong. I'm Nessa's spouse. I got here last.
MELKOR: I'm bad, momma, I'm ONE BAD MUTHA-
TULKAS: Grar.
MELKOR: Um. Yeah. Hiding now.

Viral Words

Daypop "word bursts" is an interesting idea.  The implementation seems to be rather naive at the moment, though.  It would be great to be able to quantify and track various viral phrases.  For example, I've noticed a resurgence of the adjective "super" around Microsoft; particularly "super" with at least one other adjective ("super slick", "super cool", etc.)  Another example: after the 2000 presidential election fiasco, the incidence of the phrase "rule of the law" made a stunning statistical jump (and is still way more common than before, as far as I can tell).  And has anyone else noticed how widespread the phrase "make no mistake" became after 9/11/2001? 

These are all the sort of things that a reasonably smart computer could clue us in to.  The computer could recommend that you use a phrase that is at the cusp of becoming popular, or warn you when you use a phrase that is trending hyperbolically to becoming cliche.

This is no different from concerned parents who analyze the past 100 years of census data to select a child's name that will be most auspicious when the child reaches maturity and to avoid names that are trending toward obsolescence.  Most parents do that, right?

~

Whoa!Did I just see some guy explaining to Greta van Susteren that "the CIA has done Bayesian analysis to predict with 85% certainty that Saddam will launch a pre-emptive terrorist strike on the U.S."?I wonder what they used as inputs for their analysis, considering that nobody even knows what Bin Laden or his crew have been doing for the past year and the weapons inspectors haven't been able to find any of the weapons that Saddam is hiding.  Apparently Bayesian techniques are so powerful that actual information is unnecessary.I wish we had known about this magic technique before!  Hurry up! Let's run a Bayesian analysis to tell us where Bin Laden is!

250,000 Words of Wrongdoing

Borrowed words

Too geeky for words

Education and Words

Tyler is worri ed that college cheaters might get an unfair head-start in the job market.  In my experience, he has nothing to worry about.  GPA is certainly something we look at when reviewing resumes, but students often fret about GPA with an intensity that is rarely justified by subsequent life experience.  Good grades can sometimes play a part in getting a candidate invited to an interview (which is admittedly important for people starting out), but again I wouldn't worry too much about cheaters.  My sense is that people normally don't cheat unless they feel that they need to -- in other words, people cheat in order to avoid getting kicked out of college, not as a way to get the sort of GPAs that might stand on their own to get someone into an interview.  You could argue that it's unfair for a 2.0 student to perhaps get a job based on a fraudulent 3.2 GPA.  But with a 3.2, it isn't going to be the GPA that plays the major part in that person getting a job anyway.  And if they are the sort who need to cheat on college exams, they'll be left behind and Tyler won't be working anywere near them five years from now.

~

This makes a nice segue to a rant that's been building for awhile.  Nothing annoys me more than those who whine "the government doesn't do enough to educate our children!"  This seems to be a very popular political tactic, but turns education on its head and does more harm than good.  Education is not a passive thing that students have done to them, but rather an active thing that students do for themselves.  If a person wants to learn Calculus, History, or Music; but doesn't, he has nobody to blame but himself.  It is not the parents' fault, it is not the teachers' fault, and it is certainly not the government's fault.  There are plenty of good Calculus books available, and the cause of failure to learn isn't lack of government funding or lack of quality teaching -- it is lack of reading the book.

It is true that children don't normally teach themselves to read, but this is really the sort of thing that parents should teach their children.  Even if 50% of children enter first grade without being able to read, teaching kids to read is a tiny fraction of what our government spends on "education".  And once a child knows how to read, virtually all of the world's learning becomes hers for the taking.  The invention of written language guaranteed that great "teachers" could continue to communicate to students long after the death of the teacher.  The printing press lowered the cost of such communications almost to zero, and public libraries made such teaching affordable to societies poorest members.  It is impossible to overstate the impact that these three developments have had on humans' ability to teach one another, yet we still have people who reach adulthood without knowing basic arithmetic.

I believe that the advent of the Internet and mass storage are having the same sort of impact on humans' ability to teach and learn that the printing press had.  And furthermore, I think that the "semantic web" will be another such leap for mankind.  But even without today's "mass-storage web" and the coming "semantic web", there is absolutely no excuse for someone failing to learn something that he or she desires to learn. 

Kids today have things soooo much better than Aristotle had.  I wish they would stop whining already, and "just read the book!" (as Mark MacLeod would say)

~

And speaking of literacy, here is a nice little story about the "100 words you should know".  This list has provoked some disagreement recently, with some people violently rejecting the idea that flowery words are evidence of intellectual horsepower.  It is true that people sometimes use intimidating words as a sort of facade to dazzle and deflect away from real intellectual deficiencies.  But that is not the same as saying that a rich vocabulary is not worth acquiring.  Words are the atoms of language, and language is the substrate of thinking (especially abstract, higher-level thinking).  Words lubricate the brain.

On the other hand, I have a hard time taking seriously a list which considers "Ziggurat" a sign of intelligence.  I suspect they mixed up the "words that help you think" with "words that are good for Jr. High spelling-bee finals".

X-Words Deluxe 3.0

Master of few words

Words, not bullets

"The Words Speakers Use"

In 75 Words or Less, What is the
Semantic Web?

list of words

lssu.edu/banished/archive/2004.php
track this site | 3 links

A play on words

Amazon's odd words

Idle Words

track this site | 7 links

Words that I don't care about*

Numbers to words with PHP

Some words from a remixer

Victor Stone writes a remixer-readabl e description on how the new Creative Commons Sampling license compares to our standard licenses. He also mentions that it's important to have format specific metdata, so that search engines can find Creative Commons licensed audio, as opposed to text, images, or video. This way remixers can easily find sounds they can remix legally, rather than having to wade through a mass of content.

You get format specific metadata when you choose a license and designate what format your content is in. We'll soon launch a seach engine that reads this metadata so that you can find works to use as part of your own creations. Unfortunately, currently no major search engine offers this service.

A commander's words to his men

Flip Words 1.0

making up the words