I came across a newspaper article called Did You Catch That. The gist is that some of us are talking too fast for other people to understand. For many people, quickness of speech is associated with quick thinking. So those fast-talking New Yorkers tend to look at Midwesterners as plodding bumpkins instead of thoughtfully intelligent. [...]

:http://www.craigfrazier.com/ I was talking to Jeff last week about journals as they relate to artistic process. He mentioned that [Craig Frazier], the well-known illustrator / graphic designer, started putting up a few pages every day at 98pages.com. I saw him speak at an AIGA Boston meeting once, and he also showed a few of these [...]

Continuing on the Libertarian thread, I just read this interview with Neil Stephenson. Stephenson is the author of the seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, which I hadn’t realized could be considered a “parody of a libertarian future”…

I was browsing Language Log after seeing a mention on Slashdot. Linguists use Google to track how contemporary written language use is changing; you can enter in a phrase or expression that you’re interested in, and see how many hits show up, and try to come up with a pattern of use. It’s cool stuff, [...]

Continuing my previous thread of thought: In response to the original laments about Wikipedia’s growing pains, Clay Shirky’s “Rebuttal” points out the organizational issues, calling it “governance”, and comments that (my paraphase here) the academic process is one of collect-filter-publish by experts; academia values this process to the exclusion of Wikipedia’s group-filtered process. Shirky makes [...]