A simple if-check would take care of this.
Archive for January, 2009
The user’s website was a porn link, but the comment they tried to leave was priceless: Hi, friends! Thank you for this forum. I have underlied a lot of useful infomation for me. I have a question: can i ssppaamm in this topic ny sites to ads they? Sorry, if I made the mistake, when [...]
It literally still has meaning
Posted: 28 January 2009 in UncategorizedTags: american heritage dictionary, dictionaries, etymology, language change, linguistic data, linguistics, literally, meaning, twitter, words
I hereby declare that the word literally has not lost its meaning, despite a rash of rumors to the contrary. What would it even mean for a word to lose its meaning? A word can change from one meaning to another, certainly. Maybe you could argue that a word that has dropped out of usage [...]
Movie idea #7210
Posted: 24 January 2009 in UncategorizedTags: cliches, creative commons, genetic algorithms, hackers, movie ideas, movies, stock market
The main character is a geeky computer programmer playing around with genetic algorithms. He comes up with a representation that lets him evolve intelligent agents for market trading that become wildly successful. He makes over a billion dollars in a very short period of time, like say, a week. He shuts them down, in nervousness [...]
Aeolus Airship Design
Posted: 21 January 2009 in UncategorizedTags: aeolus, airships, blimps, concepts, design, murder, real sci-fi
I would kill for one of these. Seriously. Unfortunately it’s pie-in-the-sky speculation at the moment. But the day may come when I am asked to make a choice, and if your name comes up, sorry mate.
Visualizations of Obama’s Speech
Posted: 20 January 2009 in UncategorizedTags: many eyes, obama, rhetoric, speeches, tag clouds, visualizations, word tree, wordle
Obama’s inaugural speech was truly a masterpiece of presidential rhetoric. I would be surprised if it’s not studied by future generations. Even if the speech had been delivered by a drunken three-toed sloth it would have been powerful. Now perhaps you detect my cynicism. I sincerely hope we will actually see change, but given the [...]
Linguistic Homogenization and Power
Posted: 12 January 2009 in UncategorizedTags: black iron prison, english, history, language, linguistic homogenization, linguistics, philip k dick, power, sociolinguistics, thought, uniformitarianism
This is a subject much larger than the treatment I am about to give it. Linguistic homogenization occurs in modern states where regional dialects are marginalized and a standard dialect is advanced as the primary method for acceptable public communication. The powerful favoring a single dialect is nothing new, but now more than ever, states [...]
Twitter Wordle
Posted: 10 January 2009 in UncategorizedTags: tweetstats, twitpic, twitter, word clouds, wordle
I was recently pointed to @miljoshi‘s blog and a post on twitter word clouds (using Wordle, of course!). My twitter background was made using Wordle from a sampling of text from my blog. Tweetstats offers the ability to create a Wordle cloud automatically from your tweets, which is fairly cool. Mine is below. It’s dominated [...]
