Has it occurred to you that Listerine is named after Joseph Lister, who we learned (when? junior-high biology?) was the inventor of antisepsis. Listerine was named in 1879, when Lister was still alive and working, so the association was presumably livelier than it is today.
The -ine in Listerine has the sense, from chemistry, of “forming [...]
This morning on NPR we heard from a fellow name of Rob Atkinson, president of something called the “Information Technology and Innovation Foundation” (where do these think tanks come from, anyway?). He was riffing on Obama’s SOTU line, “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.”
Mr Atkinson helpfully points out that [...]
STV, to be precise. Circa 1985. Pretty good.
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“But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police…” —Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque.
Civil unions and straight marriage
Arthur Goldhammer’s excellent blog on French politics and society points to this article on the French pact civil de solidarité – [...]
Semantic satiation
Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.
Actually, a whole lot of terms. Who knew?
“Many other names have been used for what appears to be essentially the [...]
Some future civilization is going to look back and find our obsession with time and clocks mighty peculiar.
It’s time to reset the clocks again, now that we’re no longer saving daylight. I lost count this morning, but I can reconstruct some of it.
Three setback thermostats. OK, these are justified; they need to know the time, [...]
Steve Benen has made a graph of part of the results of a Research 2000 poll:
Now sure, it’s a DKos-sponsored poll, but R2K is a respectable outfit and the sample size is big enough to push the margin of error down to 2%. So even if the absolute numbers are off, the region-to-region comparison ought [...]
The very best engineering finds innovative ways to do something in a simple, elegant, and surprisingly original way. To see something that’s done at great cost and complexity and think of a completely new way to do it for a tiny fraction of the cost and effort is a unique satisfaction for the engineer who [...]
I’ve had this bit from Glenn Greenwald hanging around for the last week or so. I really need to add Glenn to my blogroll.
It’s time to embrace American royalty
We’re obviously hungry to live with royal and aristocratic families so we should really just go ahead and formally declare it:
Bush daughter Jenna Hager becomes ‘Today’ reporter [...]
If you study sociology or history, yes. Education, praise the Lord!
As the article mentions in passing, the causality might run in the other direction. Or in parallel.
via Ars Technica
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently launched a nice service that monitors the legal terms of service and privacy policies of prominent web sites and tracks changes that may impact their users. These documents are universally “subject to change without notice” so having an RSS feed lets customers know when changes happen as they are made. [...]
The press is supposed to ensure fair and open exchange of information and opinions, but in recent times it seems to be serving a contrary purposes – information filtering and message control. Paul Krugman uses his excellent blog at the country’s biggest newspaper to make this point in very direct terms. Simply put, by doggedly [...]
We live in a strange country.
On Yankee Stadium Restroom Dispute, the City Settles
New York City will pay $10,001 to settle a federal lawsuit on behalf of a Queens man who was ejected from the old Yankee Stadium last August after trying to use the bathroom during the playing of “God Bless America.” In addition, the [...]
Felix Salmon points us to an entertaining takedown of Steve Forbes.
… And how does Caesar figure into the Finkelstein saga, exactly? Well, there was that whole flap over the inhouse Macy’s clothing brand, just for starters. Under Finkelstein’s power-mad reign, you see, Macy’s “began pushing its own private labels despite the fact that customers still [...]
The Washington Post quotes SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor: “each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.”
Have we established that split infinities are perfectly grammatical only to have them declared unconstitutional?
I’m looking forward to the ruling on distinguishing necessary from unnecessary uses of [...]
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
—Anatole France
I added this to my quote collection today, and in looking it up had a look at its context, from The Red Lily, 1894.
Nowadays it is a duty [...]
This is from a CNN pointer to a Pew Research Center poll.
Survey: Support for terror suspect torture differs among the faithful
The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
More than half of people who attend services at least [...]
Matthew Yglesias. Worth keeping in mind.
Normal Flu
If I were to say that this year 30,000 Americans would die from the flu, you’d probably think I was offering an alarmist take on the current swine flu outbreak. In fact, I would be offering an extremely optimistic take on influenza in 2009. According to the Centers for [...]
From the NY Times:
Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says
BEIJING — “Ma,” a Chinese character for horse, is the 13th most common family name in China, shared by nearly 17 million people. That can cause no end of confusion when Mas get together, especially if those Mas also share the same given name, [...]
Matthew Yglesias has a post on The Declining Demographics of Suburbanism, which by all means read, but what caught my eye was this graph:
The change isn’t quite so dramatic as it appears at first glance (it’s based at 40%), but it’s dramatic enough. There are two relevant trends, say the Census Bureau.
Increases in longevity [...]