Get Your Grammar Geek On

We recommend Sentence Diagrams, by Eugene R. Moutoux, for delightful visualizations of how English works. One fun section diagrams sentences taken from famous documents, such as the opening of the Gettysburg Address (above). Another section features sentences from contemporary journalists.

Helium and Celluloid

Helium and Celluloid is a six-minute clip reel created by Jerry Rees which seamlessly, perfectly, and brilliantly inserts a gently bobbling balloon into classic film scenes. The result inspires. We guffawed aloud during Rick's gin joint speech and are gratified to learn the inspiration behind La Femme Nikita's laundry chute dive.

Best of the Web

PC Magazine has listed its Top Web Sites of 2008, including the The Top 100 Classic Web Sites and The Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites. The list is a great place to pick up useful tools and information.

Extend Firefox 3 Contest Winners

One of the beauties of using Mozilla's Firefox 3 as one's internet browser is the ability to customize it as one wishes by adding extensions. Hundreds of extensions are available--some of which we would have trouble living without.

To encourage the development of new nifty extensions, Mozilla Labs periodically holds a contest and the winners of the Extend Firefox 3 winners are now available in categories such as Best Add-ons, Best Updated Add-on, and Best Music Add-on:

• Best Add-ons: Pencil by Dương Thành An; Tagmarks by Felipe Tassario Gomes; and HandyTag by Rémi Szymkowiak
• Best Updated Add-on: Read it Later by Nate Weiner
  
• Best Music Add-on: Fire.fm from Jorge Villalobos and Jose Enrique Bolaños.

You mean you still aren't using Firefox??! Download it now!

Poetry Everywhere

Poetry Everywhere is a series of short poetry films produced by WGBH Boston and David Grubin Productions in association with the Poetry Foundation. Pictured above is "I started Early -- Took my Dog . . ." by Emily Dickinson.

Be sure you also visit the sister-site Animated Poetry created by film students at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in association with the PoetryFoundation.

Are Semicolons Girlie?

Writing in the Boston Globe, Jan Freeman examines "The punctuation mark that makes men tremble" . . . the semicolon. Male authors, it seems, have been particularly suspicious of the semicolon, as this sampling illustrates:

The credit [for debate on the semicolon] probably belongs to Trevor Butterworth, who in 2005 - citing [Lynn] Truss as partial inspiration - wrote a 2,700-word essay on the semicolon in the Financial Times. Butterworth, who had worked in the States, wondered why so many Americans shared Donald Barthelme's sense that the mark was "ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." His answer: As a culture, we Yanks distrust nuance and complexity.

Ben McIntyre, writing in the Times of London a couple of months later, added to the collection of semicolon snubbers: Kurt Vonnegut called the marks "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said McIntyre, "wouldn't be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don't use semi-colons."

And Kilpatrick, in a 2006 column, restated those sentiments at a higher pitch, calling the semicolon "girly," "odious," and "the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented."

Roy Peter Clark, who blogs about grammar and usage at Poynter Online, was more restrained, but still suspicious. The semicolon, he wrote last month, looks "like an ink smudge on a new white carpet." And he's unnerved by its "arbitrariness, as if the semicolon were a mark of choice rather than rule." (our emphasis)

Such vituperative attitudes seem to mark the decline of the semicolon, and a recent study in Slate shows "a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18th and 19th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7."

Our response to this news? ; (

How Good Is Your Ear?

Can You Guess Where My Accent Is From? is a web-based quiz from the Language Trainers Group based on international accents. Each participant reads a couple of lines from Rudyard Kipling's poem "If" in English. Then you--the viewer/listener--are offered six options from which to choose. If you correctly identify the speaker's country of origin, then you get a chance for bonus points by narrowing your guess to the city of origin.

It's harder than you'd think, and we performed abysmally on it . . . but we had a good time doing so!

The Science of Bad Hair Days

According to WebMD, chemistry scientists at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, are discovering the roots of a bad hair day:

They found that mechanical damage to hair raises scaly projections on individual hairs. These scales jut out sideways from the hairs, creating friction as they slide past other hairs. The result: hair that's rough to the touch and hard to comb. . . . The researchers also found that when hair fibers interact, they build up negative electrical charges. Same charges repel one another, making hair literally repulsive. Again friction results, making hair rough and hard to comb.

Sadly, the solution to bad hair days probably doesn't lie in a single bottle of conditioner, since "humidity, the water content of each hair, and hair stickiness" all contribute to the problem. But fear not: science is on the case!

[Photo from Caption-This.com]

Wired.com's City Photo Contest

At the end of July, Wired.com ran a photo contest on the theme of cityscapes. Contestants uploaded pictures and readers voted. You can see the beautiful, evocative winners of the contest at Top 10 Wired.com Reader City Photos, Decided by You. (At right, Doomsday L.A., submitted by Tyler Andersen.)

Wired.com's editors were so impressed with the submissions that they also choose Top 10 Wired.com City Photos, Decided by Us.

Hugo Awards for 2008

Last weekend, the Hugo Awards were presented for 2008. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon won the Best Novel category. You can see all the winner's at the Tor.com web site.

Timeline of Internet Memes

We recommend a trip to Dipity's Internet Memes where you can view a list, flipbook, map, or timeline (pictured above) of the strange and amusing cultural memes which have developed on the internet.

Memes are those persistent cultural elements which are transmitted and often transformed within a population. Every time you've passed along a funny video on the internet to your friends or created a mash-up, you've become part of the process which causes memes to flourish.

Do you remember the Dancing Baby? Or JenniCAM, the first real, full-time web cam girl? The Hampsterdance? Bonsai Kitten? Or I Am Canadian? There's all on the timeline at Internet Memes, where a click on the link will take you down memory lane.

Writers' Rooms

Where Seamus Haney writes. (from The Guardian.)

Since 5 Jan. 2007 The Guardian has been running a more or less weekly series entitled Writers' Rooms. It's a small feature article which focuses on where an author does (or did) his or her writing, along with a photo of the room and comments from the author, if possible. Currently 73 the rooms of 73 authors have been featured. The first was English playwright and novelist Michael Frayn, and the most recent is Jane Austen. Between these two falls a host of the known and not so well known. Their rooms range from the fastidious to the chaotic, but all are interesting and most inviting.

Here's the link.

100 Most Common Words

So, what are the 100 most common words in the English language? Code Box software has a nifty little game that lets you see how many you can name in five minutes.

Here's the link. (No cheating, now. Don't being doing a search on Google to see a list of the most common words in English-- not that a reader of nHumanities would do something like that, but we feel obligated to help folks resist the temptation.) In case you are interested, here is the next 100 most commonly used words. Finally, here is one more level.

By the way, this list is considerably different from the 100 Most Common SAT words. Actually, it is completely different.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, none of the words on the most common list show up on Dictionary.com's 100 Most Often Misspelled Words list.

Boredom: "a legitimate human emotion that can be central to learning and creativity."

A recent New York Times article based on several studies points to some interesting conclusions about boredom:

Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.

This news leaves us feeling ambiguous. As professors, we want our students to be productive and creative, but we find it disconcerting to be on the receiving end of NOELs (nod-off episodes per lecture) caused by boredom. In one study, investigators analyzed medical presentations on the topic of dementia "and found that a monotonous tone was most strongly associated with 'nod-off episodes per lecture (NOELs),' followed by the sight of a tweed jacket on the lecturer."

Photo of Yale law school ornamentation from http://www.henrytrotter.com

Olympic Links

Visit the Librarians' Internet Index for a useful set of links to the Beijing Olympics.

Typewriter Sculpture by Jeremy Mayer

Jeremy Mayer creates evocative sculptures of humans and animals using the parts of disassembled typewriters--all without solder, welds, or glue. You can view his folio at Jeremy Mayer.

Data Visualization: Walmarts

We're always fascinated by the visual representation of data. FlowingData is a web site that explores how statisticians, computer scientists, and designers work together to create meaning out of the sea of statistics in which we live.

Take, for example, the interactive map FlowingData created to illustrate the spread of Walmarts across the breadth of the nation, starting in 1964. The hypnotic result looks a bit like a disease map, as green blobs pop up to represent 3,176 stores in 2007.

"Who knew Sith Lords could be so darn cute?!"

Reportedly, it's impossible to walk more than a few feet at the San Diego Comic-Con without running into a fan dressed in character: superheroes, supervillains, video game characters, horror film creatures, pirates, vampires, werewolves, comic book-manga-anime characters, and lots of SF icons . . . especially from Star Wars.

We like the little pretty-in-pink-princess-turned-to-the-dark-side at left. You can see a nice selection of Star Wars-themed costumes at Star Wars Blog.

Of course, these folks are dressed up at a special occasion. For a look at people all dressed up and situated eerily within their home environments, we suggest a look at The Land of the Free gallery from Steven Schofield.

In the British Journal of Photography, Schofield explains his project:

Land of The Free explores the fascination the British public has with American popular culture and the sub-cultural world of fandom. I have shown people in their own homes and environments in costumes they wear to attend events with other like-minded individuals. I made the work in response to Bush's involvement in Iraq as I wanted to make a political reference to globalisation and America's ongoing ability to infiltrate all cultures via various channels of popular media. By working in the individuals' homes and personal spaces, I have sought to present my sitters in a their very British 'found' environments and to allow the viewer to evaluate the juxtaposition of cultures and how neither appear to sit comfortably with each other.

Updated Art

Last week's Gizmodo Photoshopping contest resulted in 85 Famous Works of Art "Improved" via Modern Technology. The challenge was to insert modern gadgets into famous works of art. You can see the wonderfully wacky results in the online exhibit.

The Antikythera Mechanism

In 1901, Greek divers found a wreck off of the island of Antikythera which was stuffed with treasures of ancient Greece. Among them, was an inconspicuous lump of corroded metal which researchers have discovered to be one of the incredible marvels of the ancient world: the Antikythera Mechanism.

Thanks to the revelations of recent three-dimensional X-ray tomography, scientists say the instrument's complex gears predicted solar eclipses, lunar eclipses, and the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner to our modern Olympic Games.

In a recent article in Nature, the authors explain many of the new discoveries about the mechanism, including its probable cultural antecedents, perhaps in the area of Syracuse. The device outstrips anything that scholars imagined since it combines cosmic predictions with human cultural activities--the cycles of the Olympiad.

To view or read more:

• Video feature on the mechanism from Nature
• The article in Nature--"Calendars with Olympiad Display and Eclipse Prediction on the Antikythera Mechanism"
• Homepage of the Antiklythera Mechanism Research Project
• New York Times article, "Discovering How Greeks Computed in 100 B.C."