“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.”
50mg:
Month: September 2011
Phrases We Owe to Shakespeare – via English Muse
Becky, a 20-year-old English Lit geek living in London, scribbled out this list in a Moleskine notebook at 3 am a couple nights ago. She posted it on her Tumblr page,
Ponzi Scheme vs. Social Security – By Veronique de Rugy – The Corner – National Review Online
This is another perspective on my other post on the differences between the two schemes.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Fast or Slow
Speaking fast or slow, most languages convey the same amount of information in a minute due to the correlation between data-density and the syllables per second of speech. This means someone speaking high data-density language (like English) and a low data-density language (like Spanish) will still communicate the same amount of information in a minute, even though one sounds much faster:
English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.
via Kottke
Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive
Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive
The 9/11 Television News Archive is a library of news coverage of the events of 9/11/2001 and their aftermath as presented by U.S. and international broadcasters. A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, it presents one week of news broadcasts for study, research and analysis.
Television is our pre-eminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. This Archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media.
Explore 3,000 hours of international TV News from 20 channels over 7 days, and select analysis by scholars.
Google Gravity
This is really fun. Try a Google search on this site.
