First the French, now the Germans. Apparently the growth of Denglish is troubling some Germans. Canute and tides come to mind.
Who was the only first-class cricketer to win a Nobel prize? Via Rogue Semiotics.
Living Code provides a good argument for open access publishing in science.
“How well does something like Open Access work? Well, as a scientist I found these numbers, from Open Access News, very interesting. Articles from Elsevier’s closed access site, ScienceDirect, were downloaded an average of 28 times in one year. At BioMed Central, the average article was downloaded 2500 times in the same period. This is a huge difference for something that is in the early stages of a paradigm shift. As time goes on, it may very well shift much further.
“I have no real incentive to publish in a journal with very few readers, as opposed to one that everyone in the world can read. We will have to work out some aspects of peer review in all this but the benefits are so huge, I am sure scientific publishing will be moving in this direction.”
Beyond banging his head against the wall 
I’m beginning to worry about Brad DeLong’s blood pressure. The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray wrote that “for a moment” president Bush reminded him of Comical Ali, the former Iraqi information minister. DeLong responds:
“Only for a moment, Alan?
“How about: ‘Every single effing day since he started running for President’? Whether its the consistency of his tax-cut plans with a budget surplus larger than the Social Security surplus, the number of stem cell lines, the cost of the war in Iraq, the ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, the airborne toxic load from the terror attack on the World Trade Center, the likely effects of economic policies. We all know that George W. Bush and his administration lied about the long-term consequences of his tax-cut plans on the budget, lied about the number of lines of stem cells his policies would let exist, lied about the cost of the war in Iraq (and fired Larry Lindsey in large part because he’d let something like the truth slip out), lied about the (nearly nonexistent) ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, lied about the airborne toxic load from the terror attack on the World Trade Center, lied about the likely effects of his economic policies on employment — I could go on.
“Why doesn’t George W. Bush remind you of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf in his ‘brazen denial of reality’ not just for a moment, but every morning when you wake up, every noon when you sit down to lunch, and every night when you go to bed?”