The remarkable thing isn’t what Miss Teen USA (South Carolina) says so much as the way she says it: as if she’s making any sense at all. There’s something almost inhuman about the way she mangles grammar without appearing to notice the violence she’s doing to language.
Ever since Dan Kaminsky demonstrated that the US Legal Code is more structurally similar to software than to literature, I’ve been attuned to comparisons between the structure of natural languages and programming languages.
Over at BugBlogger, Ken Gilmore looks at this relationship in terms of “context”:
Dear Boingers,
I’m a longtime reader and BB fan. After the recent relaunch I eagerly added “BB Gadgets” to my daily RSS feed.
Today I dropped it.
I was annoyed by the flood of content, most of which isn’t worthy of carrying the BB impreteur. BB has never been about quantity over quality, but for some [...]
Reasonableagreement.org are fighting the good fight against restrictive, coercive, and legally non-binding “agreements” that our overly litigious society has seen fit to encourage.
READ CAREFULLY. By [accepting this material|accepting this payment|accepting this business-card|viewing this t-shirt|reading this sticker] you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any [...]
After receiving a manifesto from “the Splasher” (person(s) unknown who’s been defacing street art around NYC over the last few months), Gothamist checks in with a lengthy critique and analysis. The gut shot is below:
A) Why are anarchists always so verbose? These “criticisms” could have been boiled down to five bullet points– [...]
I had the idea to trace classic typefaces as fonts a while back, and let it languish in my notebook. That’ll teach me to sit on a good idea. It looks gorgeous.
Make television a little more tolerable by masking out all of the image except for a few horizontal lines worth, and presto: you’ve got an ambient art work. It works even better if you have the groovy tunes in this video.
Click To Play
from Abstractor.tv Related: Graffiti Research Lab’s & Anti-Advertising [...]
The World Values Surveys were designed to provide a comprehensive measurement of all major areas of human concern, from religion to politics to economic and social life and two dimensions dominate the picture: (1) Traditional/ Secular-rational and (2) Survival/Self-expression values. These two dimensions explain more than 70 percent of the cross-national variance in a [...]
The New Yorker has a long profile on Gordon Bell, who’s the lead guinea pig for Microsoft’s My LifeBits project, which is an effort to go Massively paperless: he’s scanned every artifact and bit of ephemera (photos, papers, receipts, etc) that he’s acquired over the years into a database, and now wears a small [...]
100 Words “All High School Grads” should know. I carved the list up into words I did and didn’t know, and had the strange experience of not being sure in several cases. It comes from developing a vocabulary from reading; there’re often words that I place from context, and can use in [...]
