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 many different sentences [...]
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.
(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 perspective. [...]
I’ve been looking again at the iLiad11. When I thought the name was “Iliad” I could almost take it seriously, but the lowercase i is just a joke. [↪] 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 [...]
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 by [...]
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.11. Hat tip: of all places, I came upon this news on BoingBoing. [↪]
I’m intrigued, confused, and slightly worried about the [...]
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’11. Thanks, Wikipedia — my previous rough translation was ’splitting hairs’, which captures neither the negativity nor the entomology. [↪] but literally it means having sex with ants (mieren-neuken — the pictures [...]
Hot on the heels of the Riddley Walker annotations project I found a couple of months ago, the extraordinary Zarf11. Author of some damn fine interactive fiction, a bunch of apps and libraries, many reviews and a wonderfully strange column, among many, many other things. [↪] has produced a monumental cross-indexed reference for John M. [...]
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 man [...]
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 really need the [...]