There Is No Spoon
Wednesday 24 December 2014
Max Fisher, writing for Vox:
Kwangmyong, which is Korean for “bright star,” is North Korea’s officially sanctioned intranet. It looks sort of like the internet circa 1994; many users even access it with old-school dial-up or computer labs. It is a closed network that runs on pirated Japanese versions of Microsoft software and looks sort of like the real internet but isn’t. Rather, it runs rudimentary email and browser tools that are restricted to a hand-picked collection of “sites” that have been copied over and censored from the real internet.
To a certain extent, I knew this already. But in this respect, North Korea is like a real-life Matrix. Except instead of blissful ignorance, it’s oppressively enforced cluelessness.
Per Se
Friday 19 December 2014
Among linguists this is probably common knowledge, but the history of the ampersand (&) is one of the coolest etymologies I’ve heard.
First the symbol. The Latin word for “and” is et. Long ago, when scribes would make copies of documents, the cursive form of the letters “e t” morphed into &. Since and was/is such a common word, & was a form of shorthand.
But what about the word ampersand?
At one point, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the alphabet. But ending the alphabet saying “X, Y, Z, and” sounds odd. Instead, children were taught to say “X, Y, Z, and per se and”
“and per se and” became ampersand.
Tell your friends.
In A New York Minute
Thursday 18 December 2014
Via the New York Times:
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration announced on Wednesday that it would ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State because of concerns over health risks, ending years of debate over a method of extracting natural gas.
1 down. 49 to go.
Take A Number or Jump In With Both Feet
Wednesday 10 December 2014
As a perpetually impetuous young’un, Mark Shields’ latest column was quite interesting:
The GOP is a little bit like Kiwanis or the Rotary Club. If you were sergeant-at-arms last year and you’re club vice president this year, then you’ll almost certainly be club president next year. Think about it. Ronald Reagan, who was runner-up to Gerald Ford in 1976, became the 1980 nominee; George H.W. Bush, runner-up to Reagan in 1980, was nominated in 1988; Bob Dole, runner-up to Bush in ’88, won the next open nomination, in ’96. Plausible nominee-in-waiting George W. Bush in 2000 made it “his turn.” And John McCain, who finished second in 2000, went on to win the nomination in 2008, when Mitt Romney, the eventual 2012 standard-bearer, finished second to the senator from Arizona. You get the drift.
Yes, Mark, I do. Go on…
By contrast, Democrats almost always reject the leaders in the pre-primary polls and end up nominating some semi-unknown underdog. Only twice in the past half-century has the eventual Democratic nominee led a year earlier in the Gallup poll: former Vice President Walter Mondale in 1983-84 and incumbent Vice President Al Gore in 1999-2000. Democratic front-runners Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Hillary Clinton, Ed Muskie and Joe Lieberman (that’s right) failed to win the prize. In 1991, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, just 13 months before he would become the first Democrat since 1932 to defeat an elected Republican president, slipped to only 6 percent in the Gallup poll. In the entire year before he won the White House, Jimmy Carter did not even register in any Gallup poll.
That’s remarkable. And it makes a lot of sense. Liberals detest complacency, while conservatives relish it. So given this trend, does Clinton have the nomination sewn up? Perhaps not. Just recently, a spokesperson for Elizabeth Warren responded to MoveOn.org’s push for a Warren candidacy by saying “As Senator Warren has said many times, she is not running for president.”
To paraphrase Taegan: notice the tense of that statement.
Anyone who’s complaining that 2015 won’t be interesting is sorely mistaken.