Category Archives: humanities

paraphrasing Groucho

Posted on Tuesday, 2008 April 29 by Anton

Another Facebook “friend” request from a foaf I’ve never heard of. This one appears to be a scientist, in a field of which I approve, and we have six “friends” in common – or five, not counting one of his … Continue reading →

Posted in society | Leave a comment

saw me coming

Posted on Sunday, 2008 February 24 by Anton

Friday I happened to pass a bookstore (believe it or not!) and found A Gateway to Sindarin by David Salo. It’s a few years old now; I wonder how I missed it. After overviews of the history and writing systems, … Continue reading →

Posted in fandom, language | 1 Comment

a curious concentration

Posted on Tuesday, 2008 January 15 by Anton

All of the Cyrillic spam I see has Moscow phone numbers (495). How come no one in the rest of the Slavic Orthodox world is getting in on the game? Next day: What d’ya know: I got one with (3435), … Continue reading →

Posted in language, spam | Leave a comment

Schindler’s subtitles

Posted on Sunday, 2007 December 30 by Anton

My hearing is just poor enough that I usually turn the subtitles on when I play a DVD; I could mostly do without the help, but it’s good to have when someone mumbles. It’s often clear that whoever made the … Continue reading →

Posted in cinema, language | Leave a comment

sometimes there are no good possibilities

Posted on Thursday, 2007 November 08 by Anton

Years ago, in a Usenet thread about Lincoln’s unconstitutional reconquest of the South, someone asked me (I paraphrase): “As a descendant of slaves, why should I prefer to live in that alternate history where the CSA continued to keep slaves … Continue reading →

Posted in history | Leave a comment

legibility

Posted on Tuesday, 2007 September 25 by Anton

Fellow WordPress users! If you find that bits of Unicode in your archives have recently (=in version 2.2 or later) become illegible, comment out these lines in wp-config.php: define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’); define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Posted in blogdom, language, neep-neep | Leave a comment

the horrors of anarchy

Posted on Wednesday, 2007 September 12 by Anton

Since Somalia’s state collapsed in 1991, life expectancy has increased by two years, vaccination rates have increased, deaths from measles have dropped by close to a third, telephones and radios have multiplied . . . I wish I’d said that: The golden … Continue reading →

Posted in law, politics | 1 Comment