At wals.info, compare linguistic features by geography (e.g.,: when do ordinal numbers become productive? first second three+th vs. first, two+th, three+th).
Category Archives: Uncategorized
In Case You Needed A New Time-Waster
04-Mar-11New goal: Post here instead of Facebook
03-Mar-11I’ve been posting to Facebook more than I’d like to; so I’m going to try to turn that into more short blog posts with less editing/polish.
Cinematic Dream
03-Mar-11Dream logs are fundamentally uninteresting to anybody but the dreamer.
Ask Boxer
06-Oct-10Eric Scheie asks Boxer the horse, “What’s the glue that holds society together?“: Is work personal and individualistic, or is it social and based on what’s good for the community as a whole? And most important, what is work? […] After all, we don’t want to end up being like Boxer the horse. Say what you […]
The Real World
01-Oct-10Peter Boothe asks twitter— Why do we hold Internet security systems to a high standard that no offline system has ever met? But it’s not so much that the standard is higher as that it’s different. Â Counterfeiting and theft are risks for physical currency that don’t even make sense for some forms of electronic payments. […]
Musing about lexical analysis, language, and liberal education. Becoming big-headed: it’s good for you!
And Now, We Can Skip the Carnegie Course
21-Sep-10Today, in the car, while driving to swimming lessons, K said: “Daddy, people like to be right.” I agreed. “And they don’t like to be wrong.” Yes. “And they especially don’t like it when you tell them that they’re wrong.” Oh yes.
Wouldn’t be American; and wouldn’t be, at all. K has a love of history that we’ve been able to indulge by getting the Story Of the World audiobooks from the library. Â She’s listened to all four volumes, from prehistory through about 1995. Â (I was a bit reluctant to let her have modern history, 1860-1995, what […]
How To Chip Teeth So Kids Will Go To Bed
17-Sep-10As we were leaving Calgary, C asked if we could watch Mulan when we got home. Â I said, “sure” and everyone promptly forgot about it. Â After we got home, we had dinner and did the usual evening things and then I sent the kids to bed. At around 9:30 PM C came downstairs and […]
Brilliant Flash of the Obvious
16-Sep-10I don’t know when I first heard the phrase “Brilliant Flash of the Obvious”. I know I was using it already in the 1990s, in California and I’m sure I didn’t invent it. It has some currency today — David Allen uses it in one of his talks — but only two google hits before […]