love this idea: "One person a day wins a chance to write to the growing list of subscribers. It could be you."

thoughtful post from leonard about findings

via @waxpancake / @aparrish

rima < Projects/ruby/rima/data/bush.txt

All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

An auto-antonym (sometimes spelled autantonym), or contranym (originally spelled contronym), is a word with a homograph (a word of the same spelling) that is also an antonym (a word with the opposite meaning).

via: http://mlkshk.com/p/3OPH

As far as company blogs go, @Typekit's is exemplary. Came across their contribution guidelines today. This is progress!

ScriptSource is a dynamic, collaborative reference to the writing systems of the world, with detailed information on scripts, characters, languages - and the remaining needs for supporting them in the computing realm. It currently contains only a skeleton of information, and so depends on your participation in order to grow and assist others. Learn more about ScriptSource

I am lolling all over the place. "Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by the theoretical limits of relationships. What starts out as hope soon becomes debased into a hegemony of power, leaving only a sense of decadence and the chance of a new synthesis."

Adoxography is a term coined in the late 19th century, and means "fine writing on a trivial or base subject."

Lojban is a carefully constructed spoken language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication. It was made well-known by a Scientific American article and references in science fictionLojban has been built over five decades by dozens of workers and hundreds of supporters.

Lojban has a number of features which make it unique:

Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.
Lojban has an unambiguous grammar, which is based on the principles of logic.
Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words.
Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
Lojban's 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exception.
Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.

The Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS) is an O'Reilly experiment that tries to bridge the gap between private manuscripts and public blogs. Following on the let-them-comment-on-everything model established by the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others), OFPS allows readers to read in-progress O'Reilly manuscripts, communicate suggestions with the authors, follow others' comments, and directly participate in the development of new books.

Manuscripts developed with OFPS sites allow the authors to publish the in-progress work as whenever they think it's ready for public comment and then update the site with new versions as the text is improved. Authors note sections of the text that they'd like comments on (potentially down to an individual paragraph) and that allows readers on the site to comment on that particular section.

Publish quickly, edit at leisure, make the first version coherent.

Day One encourages writing through quick Menu Bar entry, a Reminder system and inspirational messages.Support for Dropbox allows easy backup and syncing with the Day One iPhone application.

“Every page must explode, whether through seriousness, profundity, turbulence, nausea, the new, the eternal, annihilating nonsense, enthusiasm for principles, or the way it is printed. Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless and impossible to justify.” —Francis Picabia

Like this mission statement:
"An idea can be bound between covers, bound by convention, or bound for the dustbin of history. The ideas of Cato Unbound, we hope, are none of these.

Cato Unbound is a state-of-the-art virtual trading floor in the intellectual marketplace, specializing in the exchange of big ideas. To be sure, there is no shortage these days of online forums for hashing out the issues of the day. All too often, however, the advantages of instant analysis and communication are compromised by obsession with the trivial and ephemeral. Here at Cato Unbound we try to step back, take a deep breath, and focus on the larger picture.

Each month, Cato Unbound will present an essay on a big-picture topic by one of the world’s leading thinkers. The ideas in that essay will then be tested by the comments and criticism of equally eminent thinkers, each of whom will respond to the month’s lead essay and then to one another. The idea is to create a hub for wide-ranging, open-ended conversation, where ideas will be advanced, challenged, and refined in public view.

But the discussion only begins at Cato Unbound. It ends, if it ends at all, with you. Cato Unbound readers are encouraged to take up our themes, and enter into the conversation on their own websites, blogs, and even in good old-fashioned bound publications. Trackbacks will be enabled. Cato Unbound will scour the web for the best commentary on our monthly topic, and, with permission, may publish it alongside our invited contributors. We also welcome your letters. (Send them to JKuznicki@cato.org.)

“Protection . . . against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough,” wrote John Stuart Mill; “there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.” Here at Cato Unbound, we aim to do our part.

Welcome. All you have to lose are your preconceptions!"

blog about the unusual stories behind some well-known — and some rather more outlandish — marks of punctuation

“The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book, just as Kevin suggested,” writes Lanier in his book. “What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video.”

The issue isn’t one of taste. “I want to define a line,” said Lanier, “between subjective judgment of what future generations might like or care about, and just this basic functioning mechanism of civilization and culture. If it’s the case that future generations don’t like things the length of books, and prefer things that have a graph structure and are made of little pieces, then my hope is that whatever they do with that is done well. But what I think is crucial for it to be sustainable, and to be more than a single generation’s fling before the collapse of civilization, is that whatever they do respects the integrity of each personal point of view and grants the idea of personhood with an almost mystical stature.”

The problem with writing a biography of Socrates, as Bettany Hughes merrily admits, is that he’s a “doughnut subject”: a rich and tasty topic with a big hole right in the middle where the main character should be. Despite his fame and his insistence on an examined life, Socrates never wrote anything, and our knowledge of him comes mainly from three contemporaries — his devoted pupils Plato and Xenophon, and the parodist Aristophanes — each of whom had his own agenda. He produced no great answers, only great questions, and the most enduring image we have of his life is his leaving of it, as the title of this book suggests.

When I first started blogging, I told myself it was ok to post half-formed thoughts; a blog was ephemeral, reactive—the medium cared not so much about completeness as about timeliness. I still believe that to be true, but with one important modification: it’s not that a blog post has permission to be rough so much as that roughness is its natural state. Meaning, blogging encourages exploration and experimentation. In this way, blogging is the kind of writing authors have done for centuries but which usually remained hidden away.
On the contrary, a book is the culmination of this writing: it’s what emerges after years of scratching around the same topic, when all the little pieces start to come together. Where the blog suggests paths, the book draws conclusions. Neither is superior to the other; rather, they represent different modes of writing—the first expansive, the latter convergent. Each mode suggests and learns from the other. And this is why, even if the form of the book perishes, the writing therein may survive—even if it happens on a blog.