Monday’s Link Dump

August 4, 2003 – 12:00 am

I was in the desert this weekend, so stop me if you’ve heard these links already
Frodo gets directions from an online map service. [ via the Badger ]
Of course, the page should be encoded as UTF-8, and use Tengwar.
If Samwise thought to pack a pressure cooker, they could had made some tasty fried chicken on [...]

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If blood be the price of XML

July 30, 2003 – 12:00 am

[ via Caveat Lector ] I thought The Badger might enjoy this one. John Cowan bastardizes some Kipling for the armies of the night on the XML-Dev list.

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God, Wolfowitz: what’s the difference?

June 28, 2003 – 12:00 am

At the end of an article in the paper Ha’aretz, covering the Palestinian Authorities’ negotiations with Haamas over a cease fire, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Abbas is quoted concerning his earlier meeting with President Bush:
According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then [...]

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A Nation of Victims

June 24, 2003 – 12:00 am

From The Nation, a short essay on how Bush uses language to bullyrag people into despair.
President Bush, like many dominant personality types, uses dependency-creating language. He employs language of contempt and intimidation to shame others into submission and desperate admiration. While we tend to think of the dominator as using physical force, in fact most [...]

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Other ways of describing the moment when Clue arrives

April 14, 2003 – 12:00 am

The phrase ‘the penny drops’ is the Angloism of the Day, so UK readers can safely ignore this post.
Example: “The other half look at the kitty and say, ‘Aw, that’s cute, but why is it vibrating?’ Then the penny drops.” — from an article on an interesting application for a Nokia handset.

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Peace activism: a matter of language

April 7, 2003 – 12:00 am

The peace movement has begun a difficult task: reclaiming the language of patriotism and loyality from the Right’s monopoly. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
An underground public relations campaign has begun to introduce patriotic language into left-leaning groups, said George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor and author of “Moral Politics.” Conservatives have “pretty much commandeered [...]

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On the Goodness of Unicode

April 7, 2003 – 12:00 am

Tim Bray’s introduction to Unicode
Link

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P|-|34r my l33t z34r(|-| sk11z

April 4, 2003 – 12:00 am

[ via Memestreams ] Google Search in H4×0R speak.
The title, for the uninitiated, reads Fear my elite search skills, by the way.

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Internationalization Weblog

February 5, 2003 – 12:00 am

Fieldmethods found a weblog on internationalization.

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Why Unicode Won’t Work on the Internet

January 29, 2003 – 12:00 am

To read closer: the problem is that the Unicode space, around 64,000 code points, is smaller than the 170,000 characters used in modern and ancient Chinese (mainland, RoC, and expatriate communities).

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The ernest anti-imperalist drinking game

January 18, 2003 – 12:00 am

Over at Unqualified Offerings, Jim proposes a drinking game for folks attending today’s anti-war rallies.

Speaker mentions “blood for oil” - drink
Speaker mentions “white male” anything - drink
Speaker mentions capitalism - drink
Speaker mentions “Palestine” - drink

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Get off my Mac, you Hoser.

December 20, 2002 – 12:00 am

Mr. Barrett discovered a potential problem with the Canadian localization packages in 10.2.3 Update, eh?

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On ‘Fisking’ and ‘Idiotarian’

October 17, 2002 – 12:00 am

[ via RC3.org ] Thank you, Anil.
I would like you to know that idiotarian is not a word. Yes, I recognize that English is a living, evolving language, where additions are made by usage and not by mandate, but understand, neither are they made through sheer repetition. Fisk is not a transitive verb; It’s a [...]

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We will not be saved by hyperlinks

July 25, 2002 – 12:00 am

[ via Wood s Lot ] Punditry is an exercise in power:
The whole point of pundity is reduce discourse to an extension of raw physical or economic force: raw repetition and numbers win, period. The quality of argumentative content is of superficial concern. The “fact-checking” of any numerical minority is powerless in this scenario–which is [...]

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Garden Linguist

July 24, 2002 – 12:00 am

I thought Darby does a little more explaination of the pun than necessary, but today’s Get Fuzzy strip is amusing.

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