It’s a morning of fun new words! First I hear greenwashing on the Today Show, which Donna likes to watch while she eats brekkie. Then, Language Log delights me with nanoblahblah, henchgoon, and celebufreak. Erin McKean, the Dictionary Evangelist, twitters words of the day so I also got a nice infusion when I examined her [...]
Archive for January, 2008
Nanoblahblah, borne forth from the blagoblag
Posted: 31 January 2008 in UncategorizedTags: blagoblag, dictionaries, english, language, nanoblahblah, neologisms, words
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Flow my tears, the Coral Reef said
Posted: 30 January 2008 in UncategorizedTags: algae, coral reefs, environmentalism, marine biology, reef bleaching, roberto danovaro, sunbathing, sunscreen
I felt like this was too important not to mention. Four common ingredients in sunscreen are the cause of coral reef death according to a recent study. The chemicals wash off of swimmers’ bodies and activate dormant viruses in symbiotic algae that live on the reefs. This symbiotic algae provides reefs with food. It also [...]
The Crowd Thins
Posted: 30 January 2008 in UncategorizedTags: clinton, edwards, epic fail, giuliani, mccain, obama, politics, presidential election, romney
Well, Edwards is all set to announce he is dropping out of the democratic race and Ghouliani has withdrawn from the republican side. Of the mainstream democrat candidates, Edwards was the least likely to become corporate lapdog of the year. He had some unfortunate things against him, which made me less than meh about his [...]
Help Science Funding
Posted: 30 January 2008 in UncategorizedTags: activism, america competes, funding, innovation, nist, nsf, petitions, science funding
The current omnibus package for 2008 does not provide funding for many of the science programs that were promised in the America COMPETES Act passed last August. If something doesn’t happen, it will mean less funding for the NSF, NIST, and DOE Office of Science for this fiscal year. In turn, innovation in science in [...]
What’s in a CS degree?
Posted: 28 January 2008 in UncategorizedTags: college, computer science, computing education, java, programming, robert dewar, software engineering, universities, usc
Just what value is there in getting a degree in Computer Science (CS)? Are new graduates competent programmers? Is that the purpose of a CS degree? Should companies be spending money to train new hires out of college in the programming languages and practices that they use? Robert Dewar is a professor emeritus at NYU [...]
Moon in the Clouds
Posted: 28 January 2008 in UncategorizedTags: astronomy, digital cameras, model rockets, moon, photography
I can stare at the moon on a clear night for quite a while. When I was very young, I felt like I could reach out and touch it. When I first got into model rockets (around 8 years old), I thought I could build one big enough one day to send it to the [...]
Dogs of Winter
Posted: 27 January 2008 in UncategorizedTags: dogs, frick park, ice, ice road, schenley park, snow, winter
It has been snowing here all day, so I’m in a wintry mood. I’ve taken a few pictures over the past couple weeks with my new camera. I particularly like this picture of Willow in the mirror with a snowy tree visible in the window. A couple weeks ago at Frick Park, one of the [...]
Cognate Identification: Orthographic Methods
Posted: 26 January 2008 in UncategorizedTags: algorithms, cognate identification, cognates, computational linguistics, historical linguistics, language change, linguistics, machine translation, natural language processing, orthography, string matching
In previous posts on cognate identification, I discussed the difference between strict and loose cognates. Loose cognates are words in two languages that have the same or similar written forms. I also described how approaches to cognate identification tend to differ based on whether the data being used is plain text or phonetic transcriptions. The [...]
Mein Führer, die Cowboys haben verloren…
Posted: 26 January 2008 in UncategorizedTags: cowboys, football, german, hitler, humor, videos, youtube
I’m not at all a sports fan, but even I can appreciate this humor. Sorry if you’ve already seen it (I actually saw it last week and was just reminded of it). My favorite line: “It’s ok, he can afford one, don’t worry.”
