This give me an excuse to trot out the wise words of Douglas Adams in 1999 again:
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
As an Englishman in California, it's nice to find out that this is a holiday that doesn't celebrate fighting the English, for a change.
Now, how about a holiday to celebrate Drake's 1579 landing in SF bay?
As seen previously on Making Light, you can remix your own Bayeux tapestries
adamsj #104 - Marcus Aurelius's blog din't have comments though, which is the same cop-out as me. Maintaining civil comments does take time and effort, as I wrote in The Tragedy of the Comments. That said, the Akismet system of distributed spam removal does work well, but I don't think that can possibly work for trolling and bullying, and it was another blog that fostered the mysogynistic attacks on Sierra, which undermiens my thesis there.
Teresa, you shoud write that book. If you want a collaborator, consider Tom Coates, whose blog of a few years back Everything in Moderation (read the archive links) was very good on the topic.
I work for google these days, though not on search. The number of hits for phrases are estimates, based on overall word frequencies (which is why Language Log et al treating them as meaningful statistics is a bit worrying).
Nice to hear Scalzi is coming to visit though.
I'm sorry I stole your thunder, Suw, I meant to link to your blogpost on it but couldn't find it. You tell it far better than I could.
Talking of Schenectady, it always shows up very high in any online survey that collects zipcodes, second only to Beverly Hills 90210. Though it may have a very wired population, it also has the zipcode 12345.
Some mnemonics I can't ge out of my head, so I may as well inflict on you.
Necessary - Never Eat Cakes, Eat Salad Sandwiches And Remain Young (that one is such a brainworm it stopped me using the word as I would mentally chant the mnemonic and forget the rest of my sentence).
My Chemistry teacher got me to remember fluorescent et al by teaching Fluorine as 'it's not a flow of urine'.
As for 'feudal/futile', my English wife teaches reading therapy in California. Initially this caused some problems as the locals don't distinguish 'o' and 'aw' (hottie vs haughty) and barely distinguish 'd' and 't' (shoddy vs shorty), so they could not pronounce 'o' the way she does, and heard it as 'u'.
My favorite proofreading story is from my friend Suw Charman. She typo'd her first name 'Sue' in a round-robin letter soliciting contributions to a scientific journal she was editing, and rather than admit that "Yes, I'm asking you to submit articles to the care of someone who can't spell her own name", adopted the alternative spelling as her own. This later became a great advantage in her online writing career, as she is eminently googleable.
If yo're going to learn a scripting language, I'd recommend Python over perl, becasues there is a far higher chance you'll be able to understand what your code does when you look at it again.
The pilot was already broadcast - perhaps the BBC can post it to YouTube
Niall, #61: If you made up shit about the IRA and the papers printed it, and they didn't like it, they might come around and kill you.
If you told the truth abut the IRA, they might come round and kill you too, like they did to Ross McWhirter.
Regarding Google and vocabulary, I do wonder if the 'Algonkian' workshops are designed to be found by those radically misspelling Algonquin (reminds me of the 1-800-OPERATOR vs 1-800-OPERATER story).
Oh, and the term for trollish wikipedia editors is 'deletionists'
I live here in San Jose on Koch Lane. Pronunciation varies wildly from cosh to coke to cotch and so on. No-one says 'cock' or an accurate German koch. Reminds me of Waugh in 'The Loved One' , where the protagonist is chided with 'Why are you pronouncing Mr Meddissey's name like that? You make him sound like some kind of wop.'
That reminds me, I always wondered, did the Master resent the Doctor so much because he never finished his Ph.D ?
I always wanted Stephen Fry as the Doctor, or possibly Eddie Izzard.
When I saw the first episode, I wished for Mike Ford to mash it up with Dylan Thomas to give us 'Under Torch Wood'. Sadly no Mike, but Verity Stob had a go.
Personally, I read 'The Long Game' as a satire on the BBC news department by the drama one, and 'Bad Wolf' has a very funny go at Light Entertainment too.
Tennant grew on me over the course of the season. Worth watching them all. 'The Idiot's Lantern' is another good media satire episode, and 'the Girl in the Fireplace' is a perfect bit of writing.
Torchwood has some promise, but the script isn't up to the (very high) Dr Who standards yet, though I did like the 'CSI Cardiff' gags in the opener.
When my friend was working on coding Word at Microsoft, he told me "everyone I meet tells me Word has too much stuff in, then asks for 3 more features".
What I want is a document editor whose native format is HTML+CSS, as CSS, unlike Word has a sensible style inheritance model and a clean separation between structure and layout.
I had hoped Apple might do this, but they went the opposite way, releasing Pages and iWeb that make really nasty HTML derived from the RTF-like data model instead.
This would mean you could use all the version tracking and differencing tools us programmers use for ourselves.
While you're changing templates, do you think you could add the link to the alternate for your atom feed:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/atom.xml
as well as the truncated RSS one?
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/index.rdf
It would make Technorati's task of indexing you much easier
Put
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/atom.xml" />
in the <head> (this will also make discovering your full-posts feed easier for other tools).
Well, lets get busy pushing back. I made this parody of AT&T's ad after their shocking 'we own the pipes and you'll pay' statements.
If someone with a better announcers voice or sharper script wants to do one, I'm happy to help edit things together.
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