Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

I got a wireless card for my laptop today, so that I can work in one of the two air-conditioned rooms in the house, instead of being stuck in my office, which is getting increasingly uncomfortable as summer progresses. I think it was 90 Friday, and if it wasn’t outside, it sure felt that way inside. Wonder of wonders, the wireless card worked the first time I tried it. Of course, I’ve probably jinxed myself by writing that, but we’ll see bright and early tomorrow.

The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager

The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager is an interactive portrait of America’s name choices. Start with a “sea” of nearly 5000 names. Type a letter, and you’ll zoom in to focus on how that initial has been used over the past century. Then type a few more letters, or a name. Each stripe is a timeline of one name, its width reflecting the name’s changing popularity. If a name intrigues you, click on its stripe for a closer look.

This is pretty interesting, but I notice that the graph is really strange for Joshua. It rises from about 0 in 1960’s, when I was born, to a peak in the ’90s, and a fairly sharp decline to 2003. That made me suspicious, since I know that the 2004 Social Security website shows Joshua as #1 (I blogged about it before). It turns out that if you hover over the decade, you get a pop-up box showing the actual ranking. The 2003 rank is 3. That peak you see there? That’s 1990’s Rank of 4. So the big downward trend in the graph seems to be simply incorrect, it should be almost imperceptibly higher than level. I don’t know how to explain it, other than a coding error in the applet.

Hat tip Marginal Revolution

Just upgraded to a new version of WordPress, mostly to try some new anti-spam plugins. Let me know if you see anything wonky (the broken link in the previous entry seems to be Amazon’s fault, not that of WordPress–at least the same link that used to work shows up with the Not Found message even if I put it in a wiki page instead of this blog).

Got it yesterday, read the first five or so stories, went to bed, and regretted it.

And keep zee eye on zee ball¹!

Experts have discovered a previously unknown work by Johann Sebastian Bach in a German library, a research foundation devoted to the composer said Wednesday.

I’ve been getting a flood of comment spam, dozens of them a day, so I’m temporarily turning off commenting entirely on any posts over a day old. Unfortunately, none of the anti-spam plugins that I’ve tried for WordPress are as ruthless as I’d like; most of them do prevent the spam from actually showing up in the comments, but so far they all save it to be moderated. The WordPress anti-spam community seems to be stuck on the idea that it would be so horrible to have a false positive that it’s worth making the blog owner wade through dozens of held comments daily in order to rescue any that were falsely flagged. Bugger that, though. If the choice is between wading through page after page of spam or not allowing comments in the first place, I’m going to not allow comments. Most days I could spend more time deleting spam than writing posts, and it’s just not worth it for the couple genuine comments I get a month.

Update: Ok, I’m trying a new plugin, so let’s see if it helps…

OKCupid! The Personality Defect Test
*Robot*

You are 100% Rational, 28% Extroverted, 14% Brutal, and 42% Arrogant.

You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very humble and don’t bother thinking of your own interests, you are very gentle and lack emotion, and you are also very introverted and introspective. You may have noticed that these traits are just as applicable to your laptop as they are to a human being. In short, your personality defect is that you don’t really HAVE a personality. You are one of those annoying, super-logical people that never gets upset or flustered. Unless, of course, you short circuit.

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.

2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.

3. You are more GENTLE than brutal.

4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant.

Compatibility:

Your exact opposite is the Class Clown.

Since I haven’t been posting about linguistic topics to this blog very much recently (and in fact all my blog posting has been dwindling), I’ve decided to consolidate a bit, and make this my main blog since it’s the one that actually incorporates my name in the title. I’ll probably cross-post to other blogs, when the topic fits, but for this blog pretty much anything that interests me goes. Well, except politics… I’ll be creating some more categories to support this change, so if you’re only interested in my occassional linguistics and language related posts, you’ll still be able to segregate them out of the general flow of my maunderings.

PostSecret is a site that posts pictures of postcards that have been sent in anonymously, each with somebody’s secret written on it. The two things that strike me about it is how epigrammatic many of the entries are…and the effect builds the more of them you read, and how depressing most of the secrets are…and that effect builds too.

Today’s qwantz is a webcomic on “Computational Measures of the Acceptability of Light Verb Constructions”