Spam

My sister got her first ever spam message today. Despite having an account at the same ISP as me, she’s never gotten any before. Amazing.

On the Origin of Creoles

Although I love linguistics, I’ve never conducted research in it beyond class projects. A few weeks ago I posted my term paper on periphrasis just for kicks. It was a fun project, and I had found the research challenging. There were a lot of papers with relevant information, but few that focused on the precise areas I was investigating. Googling for “periphrasis tsai” revealed that my paper hadn’t been indexed yet, but I came across an article (PDF) by Michel DeGraff (one of my favorite professors). It’s definitely worth reading if you’re interested in this sort of thing. DeGraff is a master at debunking.

Related books:

• Language Creation and Language Change (a collection of papers)
• The Power of Babel (popular)

Verdana

Verdana is my favorite Microsoft product. It’s not as nice as Geneva (except for headlines, where it’s better), but Mac OS X can draw it well. I’m now using it in Cocoa programs like Safari, NetNewsWire, and Path Finder that can’t draw Geneva right.

Mac Faithful

Waferbaby interviews John Gruber:

there are only two reasonable explanations for the mac’s continuing success in the face of microsoft’s dominating monopoly: (a) it offers advantages over windows; or (b) mac users are blindly loyal to apple for completely illogical reasons.

so what i’m saying is that the truth is (a), but that most so-called “industry experts” have decided the answer is (b)—they don’t perceive the mac’s advantages, and so they refuse to believe there are any.

(Thanks for the plug.)

Fowler Bliki

Martin Fowler, author of Refactoring and Analysis Patterns has started a blog-wiki hybrid.

Adobe Reader

Sven-S. Porst:

Today brought us the advent of Acrobat Reader 6. And at a first glimpse this is a piece of software that wants to make you puke. I really like using PDF files because they’re an easy way to distribute documents efficiently without relying on other people to have a working TeX (or whatever other program you like to use) installation. But step by step Adobe has managed to turn Acrobat Reader into a crappy behemoth without any actual improvements.

Quote of the Day

A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author. —S. C. Johnson

Term Papers

The Boston Globe:

A panel of academics gathered by the College Board, found that 75 percent of high school seniors never receive writing assignments in history or social studies. The study also found that a major research and writing project required in the senior year of high school “has become an educational curiosity, something rarely assigned.”

I’ve complained a lot about my high school, but if you signed up for the right classes they did have you write a lot.