The Lair

From Claws of Steel over there, Wordy No, I meant : Wordy, ah for heaven’s sake Wordie. That’s right. I only fixed it at the third time of asking.

Which is rather nice, even if they don’t have any photos like Flickr. In my particular line of work, I’m always hunting for more language resources and this might actually help. Right now, it’s all about xWn and its forebears but who knows… a project like this might just be that viable replacement that we’re all looking for. It’s silly really, but linguistics (and I’m just confining myself to English) may be a field with rich resources but the computational branch is very much the red headed stepchild of the lot. Out of the estimated 600,000 words in the English language, a mere 150,000 have been catalogued and classified by Wordnet. And quite a few of those catalogued words are genus/species names of plants and animals. Useful, yes but not exactly the sort of thing that you’d encounter in the mundane workaday sentence.

And this leads me seamlessly to 33 names of things that you never knew had names. I tried chanking (spat out food) on Wordie and three people had listed the word already. Unfortunately, all the linked resources weren’t quite so helpful in figuring out the etymology of the word.

And not about linguistics per se, but lists of all sorts… Including one of my favourites, potato crisp flavours from around the world.

It appears that gremlins have once again taken over the blog. Since I couldn’t figure out a prosaic explanation for why some people get linky problems I decided to go on an upgrading spree instead.

If a problem doesn’t have an immediately apparent answer, it is always best to complicate things with new versions of software. That way, more things can go wrong and you can immediately blame the upgraded plugins for all your woes. That’s a win-win situation all round.

Weirdly, I have not been able to duplicate this linky problem. Based on what I hear, it sounds like either a rendering or rewriting problem. How much dodgy JavaScript is running on this site? Well, other than the technorati embed, not much. No external stats trackers here either. And Tz tells me it appears to be a Firefox specific problem too.

Some days, you’re the bug. Other days, you’re the windscreen. Please feel free to scream loudly if more things break so that I can commiserate with you and blame the bad bad plugins and Wordpress. Thanks.

Update: Oh and by the way, the snippets RSS feed now works in Google Reader. Just a problem with a missing header, which has been sorted out.

I’m immediately going to put my citation of Skitt’s law into effect and take this opportunity for a little bit of snark from the sidelines peanut gallery.

Since I generally follow this stuff (to the detriment of work, research and whatever else that is supposedly happening in meatspace)… Consider the following pair of statements.

a) Thou shalt not beat anyone up. Not under any circumstances. Never. It’s bad, mmmkay?

b) This whole situation would be sorted out if we just killed [public enemy number one].

I paraphrased of course, since I have no real intention of poking at the author with a pointy stick. No, honestly. I don’t. Stop looking at me like that. But in summary, not ok to open a can of whoopass, or have someone open said can for you. Completely ok to advocate assassinating someone, sans judge and jury. Move on, please. This is not the reality distortion field you’re looking for.

And this is probably why changing online identities every so often can be a good idea, especially if you debate politics online.