Tuesday, October 07, 2003

Angry Moroccan teacher throws pupils out of window (Reuters). Two Moroccan schoolboys were injured Monday when their teacher threw them out of a first floor classroom window for being too noisy, an Education Ministry official said. 11:25:41 PM    comment []

Kicking Ass on Bush's blog. The Bush/Cheney campaign has created its official blog, and we just wanted to say welcome. A few notes about the blog: No comments. That means there's no feedback and no community. Too bad, really. That's what makes a blog interesting. No names of the posters. Every post is signed "GeorgeWBush.com," so the readers get no sense of who is posting. Circular conservative logic. Most of the posts link to conservative publications and columnists who have their talking points fed to them by the administration. (Literally in the case of a linked Colin Powell op-ed.) There's little commentary on these links, just, "Hey, check out this story which just happens to repeat what our press releases have been saying. What a coincidence!" Creepy logo. Seriously, what's up with that Bush/Cheney '04 Blog logo off to the right? That's just freaky. Well, they've got 13 months to improve it. 6:14:07 PM    comment []

The Doctor Who Made His Students Wash Up. The lifesaving power of handwashing to prevent the spread of infection was not discovered by physicians until 1847. By Howard Markel. [New York Times: Science] 5:02:07 PM    comment []

RIAA TO FORCE ISPs NATIONWIDE TO ADOPT COLOR CODE SYSTEM: New System Will Scrutinize Each Internet User, Rating Their Risk Level for Music File Sharing (parody/satire, FYI) 2:23:46 PM    comment []

EFF white paper, Unintended Consequences - Five Years under the DMCA. A discription of some of the very real problems that have already appeared because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (Also available in PDF.) 12:23:28 PM    comment []

A defining moment: Updating the dictionary calls for a way with words. By Don Aucoin, Boston Globe. A deceptive stillness pervades the word factory as Stephen J. Perrault strolls past the cubicles where the English language is being stretched into a provocative new shape. Perrault is the unassuming owner of a grandiose title -- "director of defining" -- at Merriam-Webster Inc., the venerable dictionary publisher tucked into a squat brick building that resembles a grammar school. It was Perrault, along with more than 40 editors, who spent the past two years plucking words such as "barista," "Botox," "dot-commer," "Frankenfood," "headbanger," "McJob," "paintball," and "phat" from the American vernacular and plopping them into the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. The thing about the lexicographic game, though, is that the job is never finished. Perrault already has his eye on a certain word that mushroomed beyond its rodeo origins to become the anthem of Red Sox Nation. If the Sox go all the way this year, he said last week, maybe we'll put "cowboy up" in the next edition. He was only half kidding. If Kevin Millar's midsummer exhortation to Sox fans lives on in newspapers, magazines, Internet sites, and books (a lot depends on the outcome of last night's game, of course), Merriam-Webster lexicographers will duly log such "citations" onto 3-by-5 slips of paper and add them to the chest- high crimson card catalogs already groaning with more than 15 million citations of words and their usages that date back to the late 1800s. If "cowboy up" or other promising newcomers -- at the moment, "blog" and "senior moment" are coming up fast on the outside -- appear in a wide range of published sources over a sustained period of time, they could land a spot in the next edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary a decade or so from now. If not, they will meet the fate of such former up-and-comers as "vidiocy" and "cable-ready," which now sit forlornly atop the citation files in brown cardboard boxes marked "rejected," or old standbys like "long play," which was dropped from the dictionary because CDs have supplanted long-playing records. We're looking primarily for evidence of new vocabulary, Perrault says. The only question we're asking ourselves is: Is this word an established part of the language? A question they do not ask themselves is: Do I personally like this word? So "wack" (slang meaning "not up to the mark; lousy, lame") made it into the dictionary even though, Perrault notes dryly, It's not a word I expect ever to use. In the choice of Merriam-Webster versus American Heritage what do you prefer? Myself, I like the AHD best. (See also the neologism boot camp, the dialect survey, some words created by error, many word origins, and keeping languages alive.) 11:23:20 AM    comment []

Let Them Eat War, by Arlie Hochschild, tomdispatch.com (via AlterNet), on blue-collar support for Bush. Analysis worth the five minutes it'll take you to read it and the much longer you'll think about it afterwards. 9:23:00 AM    comment []

Pictures taken with mobile phone showed up on neighbour's TV: Default password must be changed when starting to use Bluetooth- equipped devices; read the manual! By Jussi Niemeläinen, Helsingin Sanomat. The Sandström family from Espoo, just outside Helsinki, were enjoying a quiet September evening at home watching the main TV newscast. The news anchor had just started an item about the President of Finland when the screen unexpectedly went blank. Then all of a sudden there was this picture of a boy on the screen, Pia Sandström recalls. The next thing we knew, our neighbour Pauliina Lunna was smiling happily from our telly. 3:20:52 AM    comment []