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• The Rosetta Project is a cool mission to make a modern hugely-multilingual rosetta stone, the multitranslation archaeological find that let us start to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics. By the same guy who brought you The Long Now.
• Geekness: I'd previously posted about OO-skeptics, and here's another one.

• The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.

• The Toy Robots Initiative. How cool is that?
• Old Wired article on how different cultures prefer different kinds of user manuals.

• When I was first asked to write an article about how women get over a broken heart I figured it would be the easiest money I ever made. Are you ready? We don't.

• I do, believe it or not, consider myself to be a Christian--and I'm sorry, but you just don't go shooting doctors. If a judgement's to be made, God gets to make it. Not you. Him. You are Barney Fife. Keep your bullet in your shirt pocket. All right?

• I thought I liked the Fran Liebowitz line "Sleep is death, without the responsibility" but then I realized I only liked it because I was reading it wrong... I thought that it was saying it was death that had no responsibility, which really is one of the few cool thing about dying...

• "This linguistic oddity stemmed from the fact that educated people used to learn Latin. This is no longer the case. In Latin, data is the plural, and datum is the singular. So it sort of bled over. I was delighted when reading early Roman texts that they considered Etruscan a "better" language and used it for religious purposes for quite some time. Sound familiar? Apparently, "Roman Numerals" were borrowed from the Etruscans as well."

  I think this quote ties into this link on the Etruscan language but I'm not sure how, exactly.
• Mark Twain on Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses. This classic essay pretty much stick Cooper in a big old ghetto, though I'll always remember how "Last of the Mohicans" was set in Glens Falls, New York where Dylan (of pointless sidebar fame) and I used to live.