carob nanotubes

headline of the week: Warriors lock up young veterans

In keying data from handwritten forms, I’m struck by how badly our digits are designed: there are few pairs for which I haven’t seen an ambiguous case.

I do write somewhat defensively. I write ‘9’ with a single stroke, like ‘6’, so that it cannot be mistaken for ‘4’. I usually write ‘8’ as two circles rather than in a single stroke, so that it cannot become ‘5’ by malformation of the upstroke, nor become ‘9’ by rising too early from the lower loop. By some quirk I tend to begin ‘0’ (and ‘Oo’) by rising from the lower right, so it cannot become ‘6’.

Mars has a crater named Vishniac. If you’re anything like me, you’re curious about the etymology of such a name: it doesn’t fit the spelling and morphology of any language that comes to mind.

Ephraim Vishniac tells all.

In his blog Literal-Minded, Neal Whitman reports on his toddler’s acquisition of syntax.

I am moderator of two lists which received a spam entitled: Nid the chiipaast mads on wab? We gut it! — evidently from a dialect which has lost most of its mid vowels!

One David Mortensen observes:

. . . language is a code employed only by code-breakers: that none of us knows the language we speak as a fully explicit system. Instead, we bluff our way through, filling in the gaps in our knowledge of the code with an inference here and a leap of logic there. This capacity to extrapolate from the known to the unknown is, in essense, grammar. . . .

(Cited by languagehat)