Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 14th, 2008
Many years ago, while doing the college Europe thing, I found myself on an underground train in Munich. I had just come from London, where they mostly speak English, by way of Amsterdam, where they all do. I speak no German. So Munich was the first place where I was completely unable to communicate with [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 12th, 2008
Fargo North Decoder, of Electric Company fame, once helped a character played by Rita Moreno with her dangerously loose interpretation of a No Fishing sign. Her version went like this: “Private Property? No! Fishing Allowed.” She was wrong; trouble ensued.
In a similar vein, here is a good one from Steve Crandall’s blog. It appears he [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 7th, 2008
Here’s a fun image: the most complex Chinese character in common use.
You have to arrange 57 little lines just so to make that character. What it means (besides “Chinese is hard”) is a kind of noodle, the biang biang noodle. Now let’s imagine you work at a noodle shop in China’s Shaanxi province where these [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 22nd, 2008
There was a time, years ago, when even clever, well-informed programmers pronounced name of the operating system “Linux” much like the name of Charlie Brown’s friend Linus. Lye-nix. One of the things that eventually set people straight on this (it was certainly the thing that set me straight) was a little audio recording of Linux [...]
Posted in Language on Jan 14th, 2008
Good stories always trump facts. A good story is like brain glue. It stabilizes loose piles of memory inventory, thereby relieving some of your mental strain. This is why we have famous people say the things they should have said: because your brain is always trying to relax.
For example, did Galileo, while being tried in [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 7th, 2006
You may have heard about Engrish.com, the site that tracks amusing abuses of the English language in Japan (”Let’s happy and feel the lucky!”). But what about the view from the other side? Are Americans abusing Asian languages by any chance? Yes they are, and whereas Japanese have a knack for zany T-shirts and signs, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 3rd, 2005
This is known: writing is magic. I scratch marks on paper, and you know my mind. Magic. The next question is, is some writing more magical than others? Can some written languages enter your brain more naturally than others? Of living languages, Japanese and Chinese seem to sway our Western imagination as links to a [...]
