Design Observer, after learning why the latest new elements are named ununtrium and ununpentium: “Maybe we can learn something from this rational process. There are clearly too many names in the world, especially for products with unsubstantiated claims and unproven track records. (Not to mention twentieth-century quackery: Enron and Parmalat? Enough said.) Imagine if all new products were simply designated by number (Latin would be fine) until they proved their worth? Every start-up would simply be a number until it turned a profit. Names would then be granted upon certification by the International Union of Pure Honesty and Applied Human Needs. We could limit names to places, people, planets, mythological concepts, unusual font families.”
The excellent British Politics stayed up through the night to watch CNN’s coverage of yesterday’s seven primaries. “I’ve seen a lot of the resentment about US political coverage around left wing blogs, but for the first time I felt it too. I’m not sure if it was an ideological problem with Dean, or something more primal. For some reason these commentators wanted to stomp on Dean hard. This might have been purely ideological but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like Heathers.”
Freedom to Tinker: “Googlocracy is the worst form of page ranking, except for all of the others that have been tried.”
Language Log (see below) has a regular series of postings on constructions like Ed Felten’s, which are dubbed snowclones. Some popular ones are: “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z” (BTW, they don’t), “In space, no one can hear you X” and “W is the new Y”. More snowclones here and here.
Language Log: “There’s certainly a lot of garbage out there on the web. But a surprising amount of it is in the digital pages of reputable publications. And the low barriers to informal publication and re-publication, combined with (up to now) trustworthy information about authorship of such material, and the still-emerging mechanisms for establishing and navigating cross-links, combine to produce (the beginnings of) a dynamic, distributed information source that can be more reliable than the major outlets of science journalism are.”