Christina Wodtke’s Elements of Style for Designers is a useful reminder of things one might choose to do, or not, drawn directly from Strunk and White’s ave atque vale list of admonishments. As I read through the list, I reflected wincingly that I regularly and wilfully violate most of those injunctions for habits that lead to Good Writing, as many antiprescritivist postings at Language Log suggest I may, if I like.
Monthly Archives: July 2006
links for 2006-07-25
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“Rapid mashup development tool for Google and Yahoo maps”
Clarity from Doc Searls
he sez:
why trust building the “first mile” of the Net to people who never wanted it in the first place, who have always felt threatened by it, who can imagine their customers as nothing other than “consumers” of one-way “content”, and who want to create scarcities and insert billing valves everywhere they can? Because they’re the only ones in a position to do it? That’s not a good enough reason. It’s also not true.
The phone and cable companies will be the only ones in a position to do it if we let them lobby that privilege into law. That’s their real agenda, and that’s the important story here. And it’s a lot bigger than Net Neutrality.
links for 2006-07-24
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empirical answers to long-running questions
Passive avoidance
The ancient roots of passive avoidance over at Language Log has either everything or nothing to do with the tragedical unwindings in the Levant. For a moment I thought that lexis eiromeneand lexis katestrammene were on a different plane altogether from the bombast and dissembling, (akin to “Here’s to pure mathematics, may it never be any use to anybody.”), but there’s something Hemingwayish and unforesightful about the various actors in the current drama.
Don’t miss the diagram at the end, and it’s worth meditating upon the statement “Hemingway gives a physical description of a journey through a specific landscape, while Johnson offers an abstract discussion of the reasons for valuing older works over newer ones.”
Tracking Middle East news
I’ve decided to try to follow the horrors of the news stream via a conventional Web page, mostly for my own purposes in sorting it (and what I think about it) all out later. Each item is too fragmentary for me to blog sensibly, and there’s already too much ill-informed blogventing out there.
links for 2006-07-23
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not sure I wanted to know about this, but via William Gibson’s blog 21 July. Excerpt: “The mission of a think tank is to introduce ideas into public discourse and normalize them within the public discourse.”
links for 2006-07-22
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music, tablature, midi files
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“…any entity that attains reality solely by the act of imagination…”
links for 2006-07-21
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“I decided to take a screenshot of the war zone from Google Maps and overlay it with a map of part of the northeast US, using the same scale for both images…” (QuickTime)
links for 2006-07-19
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from O’Reilly