New words

laptop ballet: the movements made by a person hurrying to a meeting, when he realizes he does not know where this meeting takes place, and that information is only in the email, but he is too busy or lacking a suitable place to sit down, so he ends up running down the hallway, balancing the laptop with one hand, and using the computer with the other.

Sometimes you also see this being performed with PDAs and cell phones, but these are nowhere as spectacular as the full 3 kg IBM Thinkpad version, performed in a narrow corridor in sync with 20 other people.

A Few Words About The War

For the past few days my TV has been fixed on CNN. I've been riveted to their coverage of this second war in the Persian Gulf, which is simultaneously complete and noble. I find myself continually having to keep in mind that this is a war. Bitter reminders are around every corner, however. At this hour thirteen coalition soldeiers, eight U.K. and five American, have lost their lives both in combat and accidents.

In my, ironically, U.S. History class this morning, I saw a girl near me holding a picture of some young man in military garb, and a set of dog tags, presumably his. Godspeed to him and all his brothers and sisters in combat in the Persian Gulf.

Beyond words

More Than Seven Words You Can't Say...

Words aren't even necessary

Last words

In His Own Words

inhisownwords.org
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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

COMDEX Las Vegas 2003 Media Preview
Panel To Take Place At The Aladdin Hotel
Sunday, November 16, 2003

Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Windows
Server 2003 Speed Love Connections For
the Web's Premier Dating Site

Office 2003 Critical Update: November
11, 2003

2003 Political Dot-Comedy Awards - Best
Humor of 2003

politicalhumor.about.com/library/bldotcomedy2003.htm
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2004 in Words

The war of words with Iran

Too geeky for words

Borrowed words

Words to live by

list of words

lssu.edu/banished/archive/2004.php
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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.

Weight of Words

Stolen words

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!

A commander's words to his men

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".

Flip Words 1.0

yourDictionary.com • Top Ten Words of 2003