The colour photos from Mars are amazing (the link is for an 8 MB image — there’s also a 40 MB one here).
On the recommendation of Crooked Timberite Brian Weatherson, I read Geoff Pullum’s The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. Now I’ve come across Language Log, which includes Pullum among its contributors.
Appropriately, a recent posting is about words for snow in New Yorkish.
I have an unreasonable fondness for unlikely connections. So I highly recommend Scott Martens’ latest posting on A Fistful of Euros which manages to segue neatly from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the banning of headscarves in European classrooms.
More important, he makes some valuable points: “The idea that there is some conception of Frenchness, Belgianness or even Europeanness to which immigrants must comply is an idea that deserves to be consigned to oblivion. Instead, governments ought to advance the idea that just as Arab Christians are still Arabs, and that Christians in the Middle East have distinctive institutions that are different from those found in Europe, European Muslims need to have distinctive institutions of their own too. Institutions which are at once Islamic and European, institutions which are not necessarily shared by their non-Islamic neighbours but which aren’t shared by their extra-European brethren either, will do far more to advance the cause of a common identity than social integration at gunpoint ever will.”