Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy…

I’ve upgraded to the latest WordPress, and things seem to have gone smoothly (moment of panic when I wasn’t sure I had backed up the configs before deleting, but I had). Now I just have to reinstall a bunch of anti-spam plugins….

update: or maybe not, since the new version comes with a plugin for spam fighting already, so I’ll try that for a while…

I haven’t updated in a while, but I thought I’d point out an interesting medievalist blog Unlocked Wordhoard which I’ve been reading regularly, but hadn’t blogrolled until now when I was prodded to do so by this post in which Dr. Nokes rants about how medievalists don’t link their blogs to eachother. I’m not a medievalist, but since I do read his blog and recommend it to others, I really ought to do my small bit to increase its visibility to Google.

Google’s new toolbar for IE and Firefox has a spell-check feature that lets you spell-check form submission boxes. So you can spell-check your blog entries and comments you leave. Very spiffy, with a nice drop-down suggestion list.

In comic form!

qwantz.com – dinosaur comics – October 17th 2005

It’s funny because it’s true.

Computational Resources for Linguistic Research

Bill Poser, who posts at Language Log, maintains a page of goodies for computers and linguistics, with lots of links to freeware that runs on Unix systems. Unfortunately, I’ve pretty much abandoned Linux (gave away my spare computer that was running it to a friend in need), and I’m not sure how much of it will run on OS X. I know that at least one project to do GTK on OS X was abandoned, and another is in pre-alpha…

Alan Wood has a Unicode Resources Page with various utilities for Unicode on Mac OS X, some free, some not, but I’m not sure there’s anything exactly equivalent to the BabelMap or gucharmap utilities. The best bet may be the builtin Character Palette, though it seems to be limited in the scripts it has available (Ethiopic, for instance, is listed, but seems to be empty, but Gujarati is there). Still it’s pretty cool to be able to look up Japanese by Radical.

Google Print (application/pdf Object)

Despite the attempt by the Authors Guild to cut the noses off of their authors to spite their faces, according to this analysis Google will probably prevail with a fair-use defense, assuming that the court follows the holding in Kelly v. Arriba Soft. There was a point when I would have been surprised at the various authors who are up in arms over Google adding their works to what amounts to a gigantic online card-catalog (if the authors and publishers don’t specifically license Google to display more, the search results only return a few sentences on either side of the search term, and the search term will only return three hits per work so you can’t stitch together a complete copy of the work by searching for common terms such as “a” or “the”). Then I learned that when it comes to intellectual property law, most authors that I’ve talked to about this are cranks who in their heart of hearts still resent the fact that public libraries are allowed to exist.

But if somebody who “sells a Strunk & White Revelations T-Shirt”:http://www.websnark.com/archives/2005/07/_target_blankit.html
can’t get the apostrophe right, then…

Websnark.com: Philosophical Snarks Archives

bq. Hurricane Rita has, as of this writing, just been upgraded to Category 5. It’s barometric pressure is worse than Katrina’s was at Katrina’s height.

I do echo his wish that everybody in the path of the storm will be safe.

Roger L. Simon: You never write, you never call, you never email!

Google’s not asking permission, because what Google is doing is fair use, if it’s even reproduction or distribution at all. Google and its lawyers say (and I happen to agree) that they are under no legal obligation to seek permission from an author, although as a courtesy they’ll exclude an author’s works from the program if requested to do so. They aren’t making the works available online, they’re just making them searchable. In your view, would somebody need explicit permission from the author if a friend who knew you had a copy of the book called up and asked you to look up whether a particular line occurred in the book, or to consult the index and tell him whether there was an entry for a particular topic? If not, then why would automating the process be different? It seems to me the only tricky bit is making sure that they don’t display so much of the context as to violate fair use, or allow people to access the whole thing by searching for successive chunks in context.

Terrence Ross is either being misquoted or tricky with words, because under copyright law you do *not* need permission to “use” a copyrighted work; you only need permission to reproduce or distribute it, and even then there are the “fair use” exceptions. I’m sure the Authors Guild and various publishers have lawyers who are prepared to argue that it’s the scanning into the database that’s an unlicensed reproduction, even if there is no way to access that copy except under conditions that would not conflict with copyright or constitute fair use. That might even prevail, but it’s hardly settled law. Google could argue that regardless of the copyright in the original work, the number of times the words “Moses Wine” occurs in the work is a fact, and not subject to copyright and that moreover they have a right (recognized in Feist v. Rural) to use the copyrighted work to compile their own work.

528 books cataloged, 4 bookcases complete, 17 bookcases to go. Several of them are full of manga and comic collections, though, so that might wait til a second pass…

I’m discovering books that I had forgotten I owned, or had thought I lost. Would I have bought that hardcover Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide if I had known that I still had all three of the original paperbacks, scattered about? Well, possibly, since it was on sale for only $16 dollars, but still. It doesn’t help that I have most of my paperbacks doubled up on the shelves (with paperbacks that I doubt I’ll ever reread on their sides beneath the back row so that I can at least glimpse the spines of the back row). I’m thinking that once I finish cataloging, if I pack away most of the trashiest of the paperbacks and the things that I can’t imagine ever looking at (am I ever going to consult the Handbook of Employee Benefits again? I don’t think so. Ditto for Patterns in Java, Volume 2) I might be able to free up an entire bookshelf. Bliss.

I was up past midnight last night cataloging, and I’ve gotten 237 books done. That’s approximately the builtin bookcase next to the fireplace, plus the top two shelves of the bookcase next to the computer (which are stacked two deep w/paperbacks). I’m trying to be methodical about it, otherwise I know I’ll end up skipping bunches, so I’m going shelf-by-shelf, doing the complete shelf even if it means entering the book manually (mostly the older paperbacks, that don’t have a Library of Congress listing or an ISBN number). I’m skipping the manga for now. I’m thinking of reshelving them, or storing them some other way anyway, and I’ve already discovered that works in multiple volumes appear in LibraryThing as duplicated (my lovely four-volume set of A Dance to the Music of Time revealed this to me), so I don’t know whether I’m going to bother to catalog the manga. If I do I may just do one volume per series, and use the notes to indicate the volumes I have. I’m also trying not to get to compulsive about exactly which edition I have; most of the genre paperbacks are found on Amazon instead of in the Library of Congress, and Amazon tends to list only the most recent printing unless somebody is selling a used copy through zShops. I try to make sure that it’s at least the right publisher, but even then I think there are some slip-ups.

I’ve added a widget in the sidebar that displays random books from my library, via “LibraryThing”:http://librarything.com Cool, ne? Hacking the WordPress template wasn’t hard, but figuring out exactly where to hack was a pain in the _tuchis_.

Qu�dam cuiusdam is a blog about library tech. Well, somedbody’s got to blog about it, right?

OneLook Reverse Dictionary

hat tip (again) to: “language hat”:http://languagehat.com

LibraryThing | Catalog your books online

This looks really interesting: a way to catalog your books online. It’s cheap (free for up to 200 volumes, $10 for a lifetime subscription after that), and it appears to be really easy to add books; you just do a search that looks through Amazon and the Library of Congress catalog, and then check the correct book from the result list.

hat tip: “language hat”:http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002081.php

The Morning News – Camille Paglia, by Robert Birnbaum

Interesting interview, well worth the time to read, even if Birnbaum comes across as a bit of a twit. I might have to pick up her new book, _Break, Blow, Burn_.

hat tip: “Tightly Wound”:http://www.bigarmwoman.com/archives/000755.html

Poet: Ogden Nash – All poems of Ogden Nash

Sweet. I have a whacking great book with 650 of Ogden Nash’s poems, so it’s not that so much as poemhunter.com itself. I love sites like this. Ooooh, and you can comment on the poems if you wish.

Tip of the hat to “languagehat”:http://www.languagehat.com

and writes a long, but interesting and amusing piece on it in Poetry, but misses the perfect chance to use the word _materteral_.

Ah, hell, I’m getting tired of coming up with new ways of mocking the NYT’s arrogance.

languagehat is tearing his hair out over the paper of record’s refusal to consult a dictionary before offering its pronunciation advice:

bq. I had just started the article “Those Ancient Incan Knots? Tax Accounting, Researchers Suggest” by Nicholas Wade in today’s NY Times when I had occasion to grind my teeth: “They believe they may have decoded the first word – a place name – to be found in a quipu (pronounced KWEE-poo)…” What the hell? Is the Times too proud to actually consult a dictionary? Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, for instance, which says “Pronunciation: ‘kE-(“)p{u”}” …

In Dynamist Blog: Incomprehensible Headline, Virginia Postrel writes:

bq.. Bush’s Aid Cuts on Court Issue Roil Neighbors

Unless you click to the story, you’ll never figure out what it means. Or at least I couldn’t.

p. Well, it is headline-ese ( _Aid Cuts_ instead of _Cuts in Aid_) does have an unusual number of words that can be either a noun or a verb ( _Aid, Cuts, Court, Issue,_ and _Roil_ ) , but it seems to me that there’s only one valid way to parse it:

[Bush's [[Aid Cuts] [on Court Issue]]] [Roil [Neighbors]]

I’m still working my way through Huddleston’s and Pullum’s _A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar_, but I believe this should be analyzed as:

This is a simple Subject-Predicate construction

_Cuts_ is the head noun of a NP that forms the subject, and is modified by both _Bush’s_ and _Aid_, and complemented by the PP _on Court Issue_

_Roil_ is the head verb of a VP that forms the predicate, with the complement NP _Neighbors_ as the direct object.

So basically it boils down to: Cuts Roil Neighbors.

And following the link, that appears to be the case. Cuts in aid that the US has made to countries over a dispute about the International Criminal Court have upset those neighboring countries.

*update:* Thinking about it some more, what’s probably confusing about this is that it’s a “garden path” sentence: it starts out with a plausible parse that suddenly hits a word that can’t fit and forces you to backtrack. Bush’s Aid looks completely natural as an NP with Aid as the head, then Cuts heads a VP…On Court Issue starts to stretch it as a complement. Cuts doesn’t seem to license on, but maybe it means something like cuts class. Then you hit Roil and the whole thing falls apart.