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Erin McKean, the Dictionary Evangelist, has a post today on the coinage of the term ygology, meaning the study of palindromes.
Her take is that the word was an inevitability of English, demanding birth. No argument there.
But then she also references ambigrams, which are visual representations of words that are somehow symmetric. If you flip them upside down, they form the same word. Or perhaps the negative space in the word forms another word. Probably the most famous such figure is the cover of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach
When I hear a number like 3828, it doesn’t sound all that high. I mean, that’s a fraction of the number of people who died in Vietnam (about 60k, including missing), which was a small fraction of the number who died in World War II (14+ million). And those are just the American and allied military casualties. The numbers for the opponents and civilian casualties dwarf those. But 3828 is a big number. Each one a person with a family, many with children, most of them with living mothers who will mourn them. Each one had a life at home, dreams.
Obleek.com has a very nice flash animation that helps bring this home by animating the coalition deaths as they occurred by day from the start of the Iraq War until 13 February 2007. Data used to create the animation was taken from icasualties.org. Worth a look and a thought, perhaps.
