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  • Email

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    No comments on Email

    It used to be that I’d reply to all personal email as soon as it arrived. Those days, alas, have been gone for some time now. While I do receive more personal emails, response time has not increased proportionally – more likely it’s increased logarithmically. I’m not entirely sure why this is so. It’s not…

  • Bulwer Lytton

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    The reliably humorous winners of the 2002 Bulwer Lytton contest for worst opening sentence for a novel. Also, check out the 2001 Lyttle Lytton contest winners, which limits the sentence length to 25 words.

  • Lobsters

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    I’m in the middle of reading Lobsters by Charlie Stross and while it’s very enjoying (a kind of superpowered MacLeod without the communism – okay, that doesn’t make any sense, but still) I can’t help but think – does anyone actually talk like this? “I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly…

  • Haiku 2

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    The folks at New Mars won second place in the Kuro5hin haiku contest for the princely sum of $24! See the reaction at the New Mars forums.

  • Garden path

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    2 comments on Garden path

    There’s an interesting phenomenon in language comprehension called the ‘garden path effect’. Proposed by Frazier and Fodor (1979), it basically meant that when you are reading or hearing a sentence, you split it up into chunks (you parse it), and due to something called ‘late closure’ you keep on adding as many words as possible…

  • Foreign emoticons

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    Inspired by a post on the Culture mailing list, I was going to write something about the universality of emoticons on the Internet between different cultures and languages here. I then realised that it was far more interesting than I first envisaged and so it deserves a full write up. Expect a new article in…

  • Writing

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    Something popped into my head today as I was scribbling down some notes during a supervision: does the fact that I write with a pencil (as opposed to a pen or biro) affect my writing style, and on a higher level, my method of thinking? Pencils provide a much less constrained and linear way of…