Archive for the ‘words’ Category

Shortcomings

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Shortcomings coverSpotted this in Foyles yesterday – the last few Optic Nerve editions (the ones about Ben Tanaka) collected into a hardback published by Faber in the UK, and also on Amazon.

I've been following this series since I ran across a copy of Tomine's Sleepwalk and other stories a few years back and proceeded to buy pretty much everything of his that I could find. It's quite remarkable and, assuming nothing drastic has happened to the content in the translation from series to book (I had a flick through, and it appears to be complete), I'd thoroughly recommend it.

More info at Drawn and Quarterly, who also have a web shop (and who are also publishing the very different abut also quite wonderful Moomin archive)

XO

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

Cheap laptops, Elliott Smith, Sanrio characters – they're all there in what must be the best Wikipedia disambiguation list ever.

Linguistic jujitsu

Saturday, November 17th, 2007

I don't read many technology magazines for fun – it's something of a busman's holiday – but I do read Wired. This month's issue is pretty good, and it contains this article on the linguistics of the evolution vs. creationism debate. Excerpt:

For truly solid-gold, well-established science, let's stop using the word theory entirely. Instead, let's revive much more venerable language and refer to such knowledge as "law."

Best of all, [this] performs a neat bit of linguistic jujitsu. If someone says, "I don't believe in the theory of evolution," they may sound fairly reasonable. But if someone announces, "I don't believe in the law of evolution," they sound insane. It's tantamount to saying, "I don't believe in the law of gravity."

I quite like the idea, but then I'm not a scientist.