Everyone’s doing it, and now David Friedman is doing it.

What’s wild is that my bookmark chooser showed me his home page, with a prominent link to “My New Blog”, about eleven hours after his first post.

Is education a public good? Does someone else’s learning algebra or Shakespeare make you better off? Well, there are network externalities — in reading this you benefit not only from my learning but from that of anyone from whom I’ve learned. But I would guess that most of the benefit of learning goes to the learner, in enhanced earning power and in the ability to enjoy thoughts not available to the ignorant. (I’ve seen that stated as unsupported fact, somewhere or other.)

The question has many aspects, not all readily quantifiable, but at least it appears that spending on schooling is not correlated with economic health.

There are scholars of slang who hunt for earliest documentable uses. Does anyone do the same for puns?

In 1971, Larry Niven and David Gerrold published a novel The Flying Sorcerors. Recently for the first time I found that pun made circa 1959 (but I’ve forgotten the context). And just now I heard an even earlier one: in “Broom-Stick Bunny”, 1956, Bugs says, “You’re not gonna believe this: I just saw a genie with light brown hair chasing a flying sorceress.”

I don’t know how many times this has happened. I’m on the phone with some chirpy Career Gal, she says something to which I say “Yes, fine,” and then she warbles “Okay??”, leaving me somewhat bewildered and impatient.

It has been observed (alas that I failed to blog it, else I could tell you by whom) that “language is a code used only by code-breakers.” So perhaps I have imperfectly cracked the tacit protocol of such exchanges. Am I expected to refrain from giving my consent until it’s explicitly asked, or has the “No Means No” campaign resulted in a presumption that Yes also means no unless repeated?

The Answer Desimplified, on a t-shirt.

Ligatures for our times

Many translations of a conceivably useful phrase (possibly inspired by a similar project)

(all cited by the muted horn)

when grammarians go bad

Another thing I wouldn’t mind hearing less of: the word infamous used as an emphatic synonym for famous.

When symbol-space is arbitrary, whimsy sometimes happens.