Rambles at starchamber.com

Which word is more colorful: color or colour?
If you’re American, do you ever color your “colors” with an occasional “U” to lend your prose a sense of savoir faire? At any rate, have you ever wondered where the U went? A lovely blog called COLOURlovers addresses this question with an informative post called Color [...]

Read Full Post »

Today I’m happy to present another contribution from the classroom of Alan Kennedy, our correspondent from the front lines of teaching English as a Second Language. This time he’s talking about the surprisingly complicated dangly bits of English: articles and prepositions. You never notice them until they’re out of place.
One of the odd things about [...]

Read Full Post »

Regular Rambles readers will recall my friend Alan Kennedy’s last contribution: RIKE ORION. In it, he recounts some of his experiences teaching English as a Second Language in New York City. He’s back this week with some more transcultural observations.
The way names move across language barriers makes for a good spectator sport. I am reminded [...]

Read Full Post »

Dogma is a funny word to appear so prominently in a science like biology. Any picture, any model, any theory currently in vogue is resting on the shifting sands of biological weirdness. I love, for instance, the fact that the Nobel Prize in medicine this year was awarded for major form of genetic regulation that [...]

Read Full Post »

Have you seen the Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager yet? It’s the product of the prolific and masterful Martin Wattenberg and his wife and baby name consultant Laura Wattenberg (she maintains an entertaining baby name blog). Martin is a scientist/artist at IBM Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We were actually lucky enough to have him give [...]

Read Full Post »

Just because you can do something, does that mean you can teach it? Ever had a professor who you knew was brilliant, but was nevertheless feebly inarticulate when it came to helping you understand why the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality was so freaking important?
Doing is one skill, and teaching is another, and the intersection of the two [...]

Read Full Post »

I have known St. Frank since my days in California, many years ago. He has been a steady friend of the Star Chamber throughout its tenure, and has contributed many pieces to this site, of which the most graphically disturbing is surely The Naked Felix. The proprietors of this site cannot in good conscience recommend [...]

Read Full Post »

Are you ordinary or odd? And how does that make you feel? My friend Jay Czarnecki (you remember Rambles regular Jay by now) has an unusual name. At least in this country he has an unusual name. But this spring, for his 40th birthday, he decided to go to a place where his name is [...]

Read Full Post »

A very good friend of mine from college, Alan Kennedy, worked until recently in the music industry. It’s very common these days to read uninformed bloggy prognostications about the music business by people like me who have no real direct experience with it. I’m extremely happy, therefore, to report that Alan has volunteered to go [...]

Read Full Post »

My friend from college Jay Czarnecki has written enough pieces for the Star Chamber to be considered a regular contributor. His first contribution goes all the way back to the days of the DC area sniper. Here’s another item in which he describes the magic that holds a musical performance together and the damage that [...]

Read Full Post »