Several friends have asked that I post some of my astrophotographs to the web, so I’ve added a section to the website to do just that. I’ll also probably add occasional blog posts on what works and doesn’t work about my photography of the night skies.

Bear in mind that I’m still pretty new at this and am refining my techniques, so most of these images are flawed in one way or another. But I’m learning.

The judge also cited the Humpty Dumpty scene from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass in his decision.

(Hat Tip: Martin Laplante, DSNA mailing list)

But actually no such decision has been made and will probably not be made for another decade. Here is the official statement from Oxford University Press, via Jesse Sheidlower’s personal blog.

If I had to speculate, I would predict that there will be a print edition, but aimed at presentation copies and for those who have money to burn and like the ego boost that impressive-looking books filling their shelves gives them. The print runs will be small, and perhaps printed on demand. Other than possibly “college” or “pocket” dictionaries for quick reference, I just don’t see a market for print dictionaries. I don’t believe that “print is dead” (print is and will remain a very useful technological form), but certain classes of printed material certainly are dying, and dictionaries and similar reference books are among them.

I particularly like the quote from Roman Jakobson that, “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”

(Hat tip to Arts and Letters Daily)

(Hat tip to Pharyngula)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted or linked to a post about the problems with Google Books. But here’s an article on the topic by Geoffrey Nunberg. For those that are familiar with the topic, there is little new in this article, but the parade of errors in the metadata is humorous, if nothing else. And this conclusion of Nunberg’s is spot on:

In short, Google has taken a group of the world’s great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore.

While I share many of Nunberg’s complaints, I don’t share the sentiment in the title that Google Books is a “disaster.” On balance, Google Books is an invaluable resource. Yes, Google has gotten a lot of things wrong, and those errors severely limit the utility of the digital library, but the benefits of ready access to the truly vast number of books outweighs the problems with the system.

(Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily)

The first is an article in Der Spiegel Online about a hypothesis by historian Eckhard Höffner that contends Germany’s economic and industrial expansion in the nineteenth century was largely the result of the country not having a copyright law. While I’m skeptical of this rather strong contention, I have no doubt that the free exchange of ideas does lead to economic and technological progress and that can be strangled when ideas are given too limited a circulation. In this case I think the problem in England, to which Höffner compares Germany, was not so much the copyright law, but the business models of the publishers that limited the free flow of ideas.

The second is a very creative, graphical review by cartoonist Ward Sutton of Lewis Hyde’s new book, Common as Air. Hyde’s book takes on what is perceived by many to be abuses of copyright law in contemporary American society. Evidently, Sutton regularly produces graphical reviews for Barnesandnoble.com. 

London may be my favorite writer. His prose style is terse, yet evocative (and can’t be easily parodied like that of his imitator Hemingway), and unlike many of his nineteenth-century predecessors remains accessible and readable today. Yet he was an enormously complex, and in some respects despicable, human being.

One of the reasons I may like London so much is that, unlike most kids, I was not assigned his works in middle or high school. (I read the short story “To Build a Fire” in school,” that’s all.) I discovered his work as an adult. I object to the characterization of his most famous work, The Call of the Wild, as “a dog story.” Yes, many consider it that, probably because they last read it in eighth grade, at an age where they could not truly appreciate its themes. But calling it “a dog story” is like calling Huckleberry Finn “a boy’s adventure novel.” It is a complex tale that highlights how thin the veneer of civilization is in us all. And the prose is just glorious to read. I’m all for exposing children to great literature at a young age, but in so doing we should be careful not to pigeonhole those works as children’s literature.

The Bodleian Library is reprinting (I didn’t know they had a publishing imprint) a 1699 dictionary of slang, the earliest known dictionary of English slang.

Some sample entries from the Bodleian’s press release:

• Anglers, c. Cheats, petty Thieves, who have a Stick with a hook at the end, with which they pluck things out of Windows, Grates, &c. also those that draw in People to be cheated.
• Cackling-farts, c. Eggs.
• Keeping Cully, one that Maintains a Mistress, and parts with his Money very generously to her.
• Mawdlin, weepingly Drunk.
• Mutton-in-long-coats, Women. A Leg of Mutton in a Silk-Stocking, a Woman’s Leg.
• One of my Cosens, a Wench

This is a welcome edition of an often forgotten classic, and at a very reasonable price.

(As soon as I saw the notice, I checked the Early English Books Online database, which I know have access to via the University of Toronto library. And sure enough, the 1699 edition is in there. I’m going to like being at a university that gives me off-campus access to its resources—I’m looking at you, UC Berkeley, and not in a good way. Since I’ve got an electronic version, I probably won’t be running out and purchasing this print edition—not only am I now on a grad student’s budget, but now that I’ve slimmed down my print library to a manageable size, I’m not looking to expand it unnecessarily. But I encourage others to get it if they’re so inclined.)

(Hat tip to languagehat.)

The WashingtonWatch.com Blog has the full scoop.

(Hat tip to Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette of A Way With Words.)

(I’m not quite back. I’m in Toronto and have an internet connection, but that’s about it. I’m still rushing around trying to get a phone, car registration, etc.)

If you haven’t seen it, you have to check it out. You can spend ten seconds scanning the latest entries, or an hour scouring the archive. Either way, you’ll be glad you did.

My fave is “the Dr. Zoidberg of international relations.”

(Hat tip to the Dictionary Evangelist)

This time around they’ve aptly summarized the work of Stanford linguist Lena Boroditsky that was recently reported in the Wall Street Journal’s “Lost in Translation” article. What’s especially impressive for a bunch of journos, is that they’ve managed to look past the press release and actually see the data (including error bars!).

To summarize, Boroditsky’s research reinforces what linguists have known for a long time, that language does influence thought but the effect is small and subtle. There is a grain of truth to Whorf’s theory, but it is nothing like Orwell made it out to be in 1984.

(Over a year ago, I linked to another article on Boroditsky’s work.)

[Edited to correct typos]