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 each other. 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
can’t get the apostrophe right, then…

Websnark.com: Philosophical Snarks Archives

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.