words, words, words

2003.07.01
So Mo and I started what will hopefully become tradition for our anniversary this year...I came up with the idea of having a "State of Our Union" conversation every anniversary, where we can talk about the direction of things and bring up any issues without having to establish a special time for that, which always sounds a little ominous. I think it worked out pretty well.


Vocabulary of the Moment
100 Words That All High School Graduates - And Their Parents - Should Know I added links to M-W.com just in case you don't. (Amusing comment on that site: "'The words we suggest,' says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, 'are not meant to be exhaustive'." Well, that's a relief.)
abjure, abrogate, abstemious, acumen, antebellum, auspicious, belie, bellicose, bowdlerize, chicanery, chromosome, churlish, circumlocution, circumnavigate, deciduous, deleterious, diffident, enervate, enfranchise, epiphany, equinox, euro, evanescent, expurgate, facetious, fatuous, feckless, fiduciary, filibuster, gamete, gauche, gerrymander, hegemony, hemoglobin, homogeneous, hubris, hypotenuse, impeach, incognito, incontrovertible, inculcate, infrastructure, interpolate, irony, jejune, kinetic, kowtow, laissez faire, lexicon, loquacious, lugubrious, metamorphosis, mitosis, moiety, nanotechnology, nihilism, nomenclature, nonsectarian, notarize, obsequious, oligarchy, omnipotent, orthography, oxidize, parabola, paradigm, parameter, pecuniary, photosynthesis, plagiarize, plasma, polymer, precipitous, quasar, quotidian, recapitulate, reciprocal, reparation, respiration, sanguine, soliloquy, subjugate, suffragist, supercilious, tautology, taxonomy, tectonic, tempestuous, thermodynamics, totalitarian, unctuous, usurp, vacuous, vehement, vortex, winnow, wrought, xenophobe, yeoman, ziggurat


Movie of the Moment
Shootout from The Matrix in ASCII. Not as inventive as the Star Wars one; they just took a greyscale shot of the movie and digitized it into letters. (Star Wars uses the more "traditional" ASCII approach, the same thing that brought us all smilies...)


Article of the Moment
Jakob Nielsen on humans' information foraging (and its implications on setting up your website.) I like the idea that we hunt for information on the web using the same techniques as an animal hunting food, it's the same idea as Daniel Dennet saying we are preprogrammed to build our minds the way a beaver is preprogrammed to build its dam, or the spider its web... (Hrrm, actually this article is a complement of a Wired piece I previously linked to.


Google Prank of the Moment
1. Go to Google.com.
2. Type in "weapons of mass destruction".
3. Hit "I'm feeling lucky"
(if that doesn't bring you to something slightly amusing, click here)