I happened upon Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: a language history of the world (Amazon link, and try some of the Explore and Browse options) in a Brattleboro bookstore and I’m gobsmacked again. In Bill Thompson’s 9-minute interview with Ostler you’ll get a running start at the flavor of the book. Just buy it –at less than $12, what do you have to lose?

• Double-Tongued Word Wrester Dictionary
  (tags: dictionaries language)

Skookumchuck-AT junction
Betsy drove up from VA for the weekend, we met in Plymouth NH, and on Saturday we hiked up the Skookumchuck Trail to the AT, then up the north side of Mt. Lafayette and back down the Greenleaf Trail –about 9 miles, our first above-treeline hike since finishing the AT in 2003.

• Journaling in .txt with Notepad
  from Lifehacker: why didn’t I know about this already?
  (tags: writing geekery)

• How to Create Timelines
  MIT’s SIMILE: “Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based event”
  (tags: ajax javascript time)

• Surname Profiler
  “Surnames as a quantitative resource”
  (tags: geospatial surnames)
• Surnames as a Quantitative Resource
  “the geography of British and Anglophone surnames”
  (tags: geospatial surnames)

• USGS and Google Maps
  “All 2 million of the USGS datapoints are mapped out in paged results. Over 60 different types of locations including lakes, rivers, craters, glaciers for all 50 States.”
  (tags: geospatial geotagged)
• What is a Lost Word?
  phrontistery, thanks to Bryan Alexander
  (tags: language)

March

July

• geotagthings
  “a simple way to assign any web resource – anything with a url – a location in the normal, human physical world”
  (tags: geospatial geotagged tools)

In case it’s not on your regular reading menu, a recent posting from Crooked Timber tickles the risibility meters (they’re stereo…): The Holy Trinity is getting a makeover…. Puts me in mind of a favorite Pratchettism, in which I first encountered the [well known British] term “godbothering” [glossed as “fervent religious grovelling”] :

Archchancellor (of Unseen University) Mustrum Ridcully: So… how are things in the godbothering business?
Chief Priest of Blind Io: We do our humble best. How is the dangerous meddling with things man was not meant to understand?
Ridcully: Pretty fair. Pretty fair.
(incidentally, they are brothers)

(from Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man, pg 91)