jeneralize

…what kind of plants would grow?

My web garden is a dead stick. <sigh>

OrganicHTML

Strunk and White - attacked! How to have an eight-day week!

roses are #0000FF
violets are #FF0000
Stroop’s effect
is all in your head

Language Log

Everybody knows about this. Except everyone that doesn’t know about it, and everyone else who’s forgotten it:

The Jargon File

• most nouns can be adjectived: “lame” -> “lameitude”, “cruft -> cruftitude”
• all nouns can be verbed: “all nouns can be verbed”
• all verbs can be nouned: “hack” -> “hackification”, “disgust” -> “disgustitude”

…and the plural of “mongoose” should be “polygoose”.

Take that, David Foster Wallace - oops, too bad your screed against evolutionary grammar is only available via pulpware.

Larry Lessig is calling on people to send the Copyright Office stories about why the “orphaned works” aspect of US copyright law is damaging to creativity.

Orphaned works are copyrighted works where the copyright owner is hard to find. These works are “abandoned” because the people who would like to use the works can’t get the required permission. It’s a shame, not only for the person that would like to use the work, but for the person who made the original work, because usually the only alternative for the work is a descent into obscurity.

“If you have a relevant story, or a perspective that might help the Copyright Office evaluate this issue, I would be grateful if you took just a few minutes to write an email telling them your story. The most valuable submissions will make clear the practical burden the existing system creates.” more

“It is true that Internet Explorer has been increasing market share from 1997 to 1999. But I predict that IE will never reach the same market dominance as that enjoyed by line-mode, Mosaic and Netscape from 1991 to 1996.”

Dr. Neilsen was basing his prediction on the assumption that browser usage would be determined by rationial choice, rather than monopolistic business practices. Too bad it didn’t work out that way.

Added March 4: Oh yeah - monopolistic business practices and the whole Netscape / AOL debacle. Can’t forget that.

It was interesting to take another cruise through Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability, the seminal book that, when it came out in 2000, defined design standards for web pages.

One interesting aspect is the evolution by which web metaphors become things that everybody knows. An example is the hyperlink: Nielsen recommends using default hyperlink colors (blue for unvisited, purple for visited). At the time of writing, the navigational components of the web weren’t so deeply ingrained that the designer could take for granted that the user could spot and understand hyperlinks.

Among current prevailing design fashions, the link metaphor is the underline, colors are optional, and page layout is sufficiently standardized (with navigational elements usually located in side and top panels) that some links don’t even have special visual characteristics that indicate that they’re a link.

On Nielsen’s site, however, unvisited links are blue and visited links are purple. Is Nielsen an anti-aesthetic curmudgeon? I doubt it. Rather, I expect that he remembers something that the savvy always and forever forget: He remembers that not everybody is savvy. (more…)

The story (below) of the man whose spleen was removed and turned into a multi-billion dollar investment is not funny - it’s scary. But it reminds me of the time when my appendix was removed.

I asked if I could have it. (I had this idea of pickling it in a jar or freezing it or something.) They (the pre-op team) said no. I asked if they could at least hang on to it long enough so that I could see it. They said no. (I also asked “What does that machine do?”, “Is there going to be blood splatters on your scrubs? On the walls?” and “Can I stay awake for the operation? I’d like to watch.” The answer was “Okay, now start counting backwards from 100…”)

Okay, okay, maybe they didn’t take me seriously because of my state of Hospital-Heroin-Highness. But would they, under any circumstances, have given me back my organ?

I suspect not. And I wonder how it is that the ownership rights to our bodies, the most primary and tangible of all our belongings, can be revoked - without consultation, without consent, without even disclosure - by the medical profession.

“When Moore’s spleen was removed to treat a rare form of leukemia, his University of California doctor patented a cell line taken from his organ, without Moore’s knowledge or permission. The longterm market value of the patent has been estimated at roughly $3 billion, and Moore’s doctor received $3 million in stocks from Genetics Institute, the firm that marketed and developed a drug based on the patent.”

Moore sued and lost.

From Freedom of Expression ®, Overzealous Copyright Bozos
and Other Enemies of Creativity (PDF), by Kembrew McLeod.

Knowledge is power. Help keep it free.

…the weird turn pro.” Rest in peace, Dr. T.

In this screencast, John Udell analyzes the evolution of the Wikipedia article “Heavy metal umlaut”.

Seek (weird newspaper names) and ye shall find: The Unterrified Democrat (Linn, Missouri), The Daily Boomerang (Laramie, Wyoming), and the Birmingham Eccentric.

From a word geek’s POV, the Bloomington-Normal (Illinois) Pantagraph gets special mention: “derived from the Greek words panta and grapho, meaning ‘write all things.’ Charles Merriman was co-owner of The Intelligencer when, in 1853, he changed its name to The Pantagraph as ‘a perpetual injunction upon its editors to dip their pens fearlessly into all matters of human interest.’”

(Thanks to Eric Shackle’s EBook.)

(”Bloomington-Normal, Illinois”? The American counterpart to “Standard, Alberta”, I guess.)

Now here I was thinking “Intelligencer” (as in the “The Seattle Post-Intelligencer”) was an example that the drive to create silly words like “prioritizer” has a long and ignoble history. In fact, an intelligencer is:

• one who conveys news or information
• a secret agent, an informer, or a spy

… according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

(Ooooooh, a secret agent…last night I re-saw “La Femme Nikita” - I want to be an underwear-clad innocent-looking chick sitting on the edge of a bathtub somewhere in Vienna, concealing a big (big!) gun under the suds.)

…okay, okay, focus. This whole newspaper thing might just be another proof that time enshrines usage, both bad and good.

I wonder what other weird old newspaper names might be lurking out there?

The Economist, in its January 1 - 7, 2005 edition, cited Wikipedia as a reference in a chart entitled “From ants to atoms” (which compared the size of things in nanometers). As an occasional Wikipedia contributor and an enthusiast of the Wikipedia concept, and as a long-time Economist junkie, I was chuffed.

It brought to mind, however, the ongoing debate regarding the credibility of Wikipedia. The pot was most recently stirred by Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, in A Personal Statement about Wikipedia’s Reliability. Sanger believes that Wikipedia should “fork”, so that the publicly-contributed content is separated from content reviewed and approved by academics and subject-matter experts.

Fair enough. Wikipedia is not unaware of the problem - it has a prominent General Disclaimer that reads: “WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY”. Credible, academic peer-reviewed content is a GT. But I hope the solution lies in “one and the other” instead of “one or the other.”

Wikipedia is an example of what happens when Ideal meets Reality. Marx-Engels communism versus Soviet totalitarianism; the United Nations in 1945 versus the UN in 2005. (more…)

A light bulb just went on over my head. Just a little one - no cure for AIDS, no solution to the question “Why can’t we all just get along?”. But, hey, Sunday morning light-bulbs are enough of a rarity that they should be treasured, regardless of their breadth and depth.

I love the Mozilla Firefox feature where you can type search terms in the URL field and get the top-ranking page match. I hate it when the top-ranking page is a PDF - kunkle-ding, kunkle-dung, hard drive chitters away for five or six seconds, mice running madly on treadmill, while I am taunted by the Adobe splash screen. I probably say: “Wrack-a-frack-ing Adobe” twenty times a day.

I know that the app’s load time has a lot to do with it being embedded in the browser (although it’s no screamer in its native environment either). But if I take off my Engineering Groupie hat, which says: “Awww gee, that’s probably a hard problem“, and put on my User / Victim hat, I say “Too bad. It may be a hard problem, but it shouldn’t be my problem. Solve your own damn problems.”

I’m no fan of the PDF format. It’s another example that the Network Effect (where ubiquity of adoption sets the standard) is not rational. (more…)