jeneralize

“Normally I’m so self-absorbed that if you hug me hard you’re likely to get ego all over your sweater”

– Lore Sjöberg, Wired columnist

…to use a rhyming dictionary?

367.1.2: filiate, affiliate, humiliate, conciliate.

516.7.1: agonize, antagonize.

17.203: antler, dismantler.

17.218.1: monomer, gastronomer, astronomer.

…12 hops, according to The Amazing Baconizer, which uses Amazon Web services to see how two items are linked by consumer preference via intermediate items (ie, the “people who bought this also bought…” thing). Think The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (The Oracle of Bacon), except for stuff sold on Amazon.

Here’s a first (for me, anyway): Oxford Dictionary of English -> Madonna, by Andrew Morton - “There is no path currently connecting these two items“. How can that be? Errriiiiccccc!

(…as seen on boing boing), “SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers.” One of its papers was recently accept as a “non-reviewed” paper by The 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. A quote from the accepted, auto-generated paper:

“Our overall evaluation seeks to prove
three hypotheses: (1) that we can do a whole lot to adjust
a framework’s seek time; (2) that von Neumann machines
no longer affect performance; and finally (3) that the IBM
PC Junior of yesteryear actually exhibits better energy than
today’s hardware. We hope that this section sheds light on
Juris Hartmanis ’s development of the UNIVAC computer in
1995.”

The auto-generated drawings are magnificent.

OHOHOH - surely it must be possible to make a Random Software User Guide.

…and then some.

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/05/1913250

contact pr@dev.null

It’s always worth checking Google first for April Fool’s Day pranks. This year, Google Gulp (BETA)™ with “Auto-Drink™ (LIMITED RELEASE)”.

Google never lacks a sense of humour about itself:

• Being a limited release product, Google Gulp can only be obtained by getting a cap from another Gulp user - “if you don’t know anyone who can give you one, don’t worry – that just means you aren’t cool. But very, very (very!) soon, you will be”
• Periodically, Google will collect usage data from Google Gulpers, which is stored in “the GulpPlex™, a heavily guarded, massively parallel server farm whose location is known only to Eric Schmidt, who carries its GPS coordinates on a 64-bit-encrypted smart card locked in a stainless-steel briefcase handcuffed to his right wrist”.
• Google Gulp was developed by a Google VP who spends his one-day-a-week 20% time “collecting flora samples in several Bolivian sub-equatorial rain forests.”
• From the FAQ: “Wait – you’re saying Auto-Drink™ changes my brain chemistry?” “Um, yeah – but for the better.” “When will you take Google Gulp out of beta?” “Man, if you pressure us, you just drive us away. We’ll commit when we’re ready, okay? “

Element: wordasword

Description:

A lot of technical documentation contains words that have overloaded meanings. Sometimes it is useful to be able to use a word without invoking its technical meaning. The WordAsWord element identifies a word or phrase that might otherwise be interpreted in some specific way, and asserts that it should be interpreted simply as a word.

It is unlikely that the presentation of this element will be able to help readers understand the variation in meaning; good writing will have to achieve that goal. The real value of WordAsWord lies in the fact that full-text searching and indexing tools can use it to avoid false-positives.

I’m prepping a book for Project Gutenberg: Stephen Graham’s 1922 Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies. Graham was a British journalist and travel writer; Vachel Lindsay was an American poet.

In one of their conversations, Graham teases Lindsay, a poet of the proletariat, on his membership in Oxford’s “Society for Pure English” and on his (contradictory) use of slang and vernacular. Lindsay remarks that he’d give up the slang “if I could get rid of ‘motivate’ and a man’s ‘implications’ and ‘the last analysis’ and ‘the twilight zone’ and ‘canned metaphor’ and the dollar adjectives, a ‘ten-million-dollar building’ and a ‘million-dollar bride.’”

“It was the kind of landscape that had a particular type of story attached to it … a story that flapped wings against the moon…

‘Der flabbergast,’ muttered Nanny.

‘What’s that?’ said Magrat.

‘It’s foreign for bat.’”

–Terry Pratchett, “Witches Abroad”

It annoys me that Monty Python is a pervasive social reference in my head. Nothing against Monty Python; god knows, they’ve made me laugh to the point of apoplexy many times. But now I can’t use the phrase “the means of production” without the image of Karl Marx on a game-show panel popping into my head. In my Saturday morning “Philosophy Lite” course yesterday, the mention of “Emmanual Kant” made me have to turn a giggle into a cough. (It is not cool to laugh at the name “Emmanual Kant” during a philosophy lecture.)

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.

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?