Readers of this blog will know that I find Language Log a perennial source of toothsome things. Today’s Mark Liberman posting hits several targets at once. He’s pointing to a screencast about some Digital Commons possibilities for legal education.

There are details in the presentation [a 23:14 Camtasia creation] that I’d quibble with, or formulate differently, and I care not a whit about legal education… but the screencast is worth 23 minutes of your time as an example of …well,
(1) what to do when weather keeps you from getting to the conference at which you’re supposed to speak [really what happened to the author, John Mayer of the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction],
(2) what’s just over the horizon in education generally, and
(3) an elegant and efficient summary of relevant technologies to inflict upon colleagues who don’t get it yet.

Mayer’s other presentations from a [Carnegie Mellon] workshop on “approaches to the analysis of U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments” are also worth your attention: his Introduction to the work of CALI [15:08] and something on their Fantasy Supreme Court project [8:39].

• ScotsGate – hame o the Scots tung
  “a portal to the language variety known as Scots, used in Lowland Scotland, Ulster, Orkney and the Shetland Islands by an estimated 1.6 million people and familiar to at least as many again.”
  (tags: language dialects)

I figure that one of my Cosmic Responsibilities is to rediffuse novelties and other strange stuff that I encounter.

Some of my readers won’t know about l33t/1337/leet, but for others it’s yesterday’s cold oatmeal. Both subsets are likely to find Chris Coutts’ l33t version of Romeo and Juliet enlightening and/or amusing (forwarded to me by Ken Stallcup, stalwart maven of things linguistical). More of Chris’s Flash video productions will further elucidate… for instance, Hamlet is PATR TOO. But nothing will adequately prepare you for “There’s something about Osmethne”, so maybe you should just leave that one alone.

Oh my.

• iRiver s10
  an antiPod (no, not an Aussie mp3 player…) with an interesting form factor
  (tags: musics sound mp3)
• Why Web 2.0 is more than a buzzword
  Kathy Sierra again, clear and to the point
  (tags: web2.0 language)
• Language Map of South Asia
  via Bill Poser, at Language Log: “In addition to being pretty, it’s a nice reminder of some of the writing systems you (or at least I) have still to learn. Sinhala, in particular, continues to intimidate me. All those curlicues give me a headache.”
  (tags: languages writing)

Tom Waits’ latest just arrived by USPS, and I’m a third of the way through the first listening. One of the cuts that’s a distillation of many of Tom’s multiple facets is available as an mp3: Road to Peace. Doubtless some will hate it, and some will decry his meddling in ‘politics’, but I hear something there that’s all too rare, and admire Waits all the more.

BibliOdyssey is a favorite recent discovery. It offers “Books ~~ Illustrations ~~ Science ~~ History ~~ Visual Materia Obscura ~~ Eclectic Bookart”, all of it right up various of my favorite alleys. As a blog it’s a serendipitous delight, but it can also be explored as a heap of de.licio.us tags. Take a look at items tagged ‘ethnology’ for starters.

Going through boxes of negatives, finding treasures:

…this one from a candlelight march at Stanford in 1970

Take a look at Masayuki Kido’s roxik.com and then try Paint! for yourself. Go on, betcha can’t not… Here’s one I quite like, as an incitement. And another, with Empereur content…

• The Concept of Mammals
  illustrations from JCD von Schreber’s Die Saugthiere in Abbildungen, from BibliOdyssey:
  (tags: images visualization whoa)