Thursday, September 27, 2007
I’ve started learning (modern) Greek, and I caught my first sentence in the wild this weekend. It was “I want a (cup of) tea” (θέλω ένα τσάι). What’s that to be excited about, and what is “in the wild”? Well, it means it was spoken by someone I don’t know well, in a context where [...]
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
There’s a lot of fun stuff in the next couple of months. Check out my event queue on Last.fm for what I know about, and let me know if you want to join in or there’s something I haven’t heard of yet.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
(Updated with more evidence below) Ok, that reads like a headline from The Onion… but I just came upon a passage in The Scar that seems to suggest that Miéville’s world is flat. Here it is, from page 166 of the Del Rey mass market paperback edition: The seasons were only points of view—matters of [...]
Friday, September 21, 2007
I’ve been looking again at the iLiad1 ebook reader, and it just keeps looking better and better. You can get shell access. You can make notes onscreen. There are LaTeX users using it, posting style files, and they’ve been added to the downloads page. It weighs about the same as a medium-sized banana.2 The only [...]
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Following up my confusion about the UN declaration on indigenous peoples (which New Zealand voted against), Robin sent me a Radio New Zealand piece (vanished, but still in Google cache) which says that the declaration isn’t good enough. It “implies different classes of citizenship”, and it could “put[...] into question matters that have been settled [...]
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
On September 13th the UN General Assembly adopted the “UN Declaration of Indigenous Rights of Indigenous Peoples” with 144 votes for, 11 abstentions, and votes against from Australia, the US, Canada, and New Zealand.1 I’m intrigued, confused, and slightly worried about the four votes against. First intrigued: because these are four countries that have reached [...]
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Word of the day: formication. No, formication. It’s Wouter’s brilliant translation of one of my favourite Dutch words, mierenneuken. Idiomatically this is similar to English ‘nit-picking’1 but literally it means having sex with ants (mieren-neuken — the pictures should make everything clear, for those who don’t speak the language). A shame it doesn’t carry the [...]
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Hot on the heels of the Riddley Walker annotations project I found a couple of months ago, the extraordinary Zarf1 has produced a monumental cross-indexed reference for John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting. Like the Riddley Walker project, if you haven’t read the book don’t read the annotations. In this case you won’t spoil yourself [...]
Thursday, September 13, 2007
So here’s an unconventional way of catching that certain someone’s eye. The following notice was written in pink highlighter on a sheet of paper strapped to the back of a woman’s backpack, as she cycled off the ferry (I’ve anonymised the address, but I’m pretty sure I have the vagaries of grammar correctly): > To [...]
Sunday, September 9, 2007
This morning’s internal post brought a dynamic initiative from the university: they’re going to enhance my employability by a modest capital investment leveraging my existing information processing skills. No, really, they’re making me more employable … by giving me money to buy books with. They have no idea what they’re in for… (For those who [...]