Monday 8 February 2016
lexus-nexus
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐, ๐, language, networking and blogging
weary giants of flesh and steel
Writing for Quartz magazine Gideon Lichfield presents an interesting long look back at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s charter statement—the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace—which was proclaimed two decades ago this week.
catagories: ๐, ๐ฑ, ๐ฅธ, 1996, foreign policy, networking and blogging, Wikipedia
Sunday 7 February 2016
zut alors ou le oignon
Many francophiles and language purists are very upset with the universal arbiter, Academie Francaise, and the plan to enforce some institutional changes in spelling first proposed back in 1990.
More than two thousand minor changes to the orthography of French (including dropping the i from onion, reducing the ranks of hyphenated- words and vowels that take the little chapeau, the circumflex) have incite vocal dissatisfaction and downright militant opposition. The Academie (the national body which also assigns gender to newly discovered exoplanets and quantum particles) assures the public that both old and new spellings will be considered correct but I wonder what sort of diglossia will result. In Britain in the seventeen hundreds the circumflex-o was shorthand for -ough for economy’s sake and thus had thรด for though and (confusingly) brรดt for brought. Is getting rid of the รช possibly some concession to lazy typists and web-navigators?
seven points of articulation
Via the superb Dangerous Minds comes a look at the creations of one Etsy artisan, Glinda the Geek, and her adorable and necessary contribution to the universe of LEGO minfigs with the addition of characters from the British comedies The Young Ones and Absolutely Fabulous (plus many more at the artist’s stand).
I think that branching out is always laudable as sometimes I find the whole mainstream franchise a little grating as it seems to be only capitalising on some other popular movement and the tie-ins usually mean that one can only every play-out one very specific adventure (although the standard-issue repertoire of building-blocks can create pretty inspired tableaux as well)—as opposed to Sigmund Freud’s consulting-couch, also on offer from Glinda the Geek.
Saturday 6 February 2016
dander and demonisation
If it’s to be believed, the Norwegian Council of Heart and Lung Health is encouraging, as reported by the Norwegian edition of the Local, to get parents steaming mad at dirt and the threat of dust-bunnies by portraying Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong-il and Muammar Qaddafi as plush toys and uncuddly repositories of respiratory-ills. Not withstanding that over-sanitary conditions lead to over-sensitivity, lumping these characters together threatens to make a caricature of out of each of these tyrants and place them on the same level. While the government is not necessarily advocating the destruction of childhood familiars, but rather only regular and thorough washing of them, the retreat to allergic reactions and bespoke dietary sensitivities (whether real or imagined) has been fraught with vulnerabilities and fretful mothering. What would you think if your teddy suddenly was turned to a symbol of hate and evil? Does that make you a better house-keeper and less likely to sweep things under the rug?
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ณ๐ด, foreign policy, lifestyle