Rambles at starchamber.com

Font designer Mark Simonson does an occasional blog piece called Typecasting (or more recently Son of Typecasting) in which he skewers films for the anachronistic foibles in their fonts. Did you know, for instance, that the steam pressure gauge on James Cameron’s Titanic was set in Helvetica? Crikey! That font was sinking 45 years before [...]

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French and English have been tied together since William the Conqueror made French the language of royalty in England. Traces of that linguistic shotgun marriage persist. For example, when the peasants fetch the beast from the barnyard, it’s pig, cow and sheep, but by the time Monsieur sees it spiced and steaming on the table, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 a [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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