Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
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 Alan K on Feb 23rd, 2006
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 [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 24th, 2002
Dialect maps have been a standard research tool for linguists and philologists for a long time, but it’s becoming much easier to compile them. Now you can build yourself a nice website and let other people do the work for you. Of course you need some people to visit your site, so it helps if [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 2nd, 1998
Happy Groundhog Day! Groundhog Day is a welcome cross-quarter day — halfway between the winter solstice and the first day of spring, it’s a reminder that warmer days are really coming, even if you don’t quite believe it yet. It’s opposite Grounding Day (August 2) on the calendar and as part of its official celebration, [...]
E-mailbox clogging net stories are circulating in greater and greater numbers, but where do they come from? Is there some cyber-spot where they mate, like squids in the Sargasso Sea? Is there a burying ground where they go to die? Yadda-Yadda-Yadda is a speculative piece that came about because a) Paracelsus received yet another net [...]
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