Saw this first on Digg, where the GOP is trying to use foreclosure roles in Michigan to deny people the vote.
How sadly, sinisterly ironic is this. Deregulate the mortgage lending industry so that the market collapses and voters get booted from their homes. Use this information to eliminate these disgruntled voters from the polling place. (posted by Knute5)
I woke up this morning and opened my browser, and found the Dow down 500 points, to less than 11,000. Lehman Brothers is filing for protection against bankruptcy (Chapter 11, the lesser of the two evils.) Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America for the bargain basement price of $50 billion. AIG needs about $40 billion to stay afloat, and is having a hard time finding it. The soveriegn funds are shying away from US investments. We have have turned a corner here. I put a big chunk of money into Euros just before the summer. Glad I did.
I also received the newsletter The Edge (see below), this time with Nassim Taleb railing agains the Quants. The Quants are the people in the banking industry and in regulation that use statistics (quatifiable methods) to make their decisions. The problem, Taleb says, is that they don’t use the tools correctly, or they use the tools for personal gain at the expense of the institution they are working with. It seems statiticians, true statiticians, are a lot more circumspect when making analyses on data that is less than quantifiable, what Taleb terms the Fourth Quadrant. A good read for scary times.
A 102-year-old former president of the American Literacy Council and other organizations came across the blog at boing boing, pointing to a video of him using a flip-book to show how to simplify spelling in English. If only we could do this.
Justin B. Rye graduated from a Scottish University in Linguistics, worked for a short time as a sysadmin, and then spent the last 10 years unemployed. He built computers out of spare parts and wrote science fiction. He put his studies and interests together in a web page called Futurese, where he explores how English in the US will change over the next 1,000 years. He starts 1,000 years ago and extrapolates changes into the future. With a great focus on pronunciation (reading the IPA, International Phonetic Alphabet, helps), and some very interesting theories, it invites a lot of idle speculation that is a great way to look at the future.
Just a short sample… In 3000 AD we will say:
Za kiad w’-exùn ya tijuh, da ya-gAr’-eduketan zA da wa-tAgan lidla, kaz ‘ban iagnaran an wa-tAg kurrap…
Originally found in BoingBoing, through a blogger called Presurfer.
Lexicographer Erin McKean writes in Boston.com that English and any other language is designed to be upgraded constantly, and an inalienable right of speaking is inventing and using new words. Where would we be without it?