paperpools

One R Tip a Day offers a package which enables one to display one's favorite strips from xkcd.  Here.

A commenter has pointed out that it is no longer possible to ride around and around and around on the Circle Line. Since 2009 (always the last to know), the line has been reconfigured: trains now go in a clockwise direction to Hammersmith, then loop back counterclockwise.

 

Paul Waugh tells the full story here.

xkcd has a terrific graphic (with disclaimer) on different levels of radiation exposure, here.

I find that my landlady is unfamiliar with the classic xkcd on cat proximity. I tell her to do a search on Google for xkcd and kitty.

[Cliff Notes for one of my books in regress]

[Why Bill & I needed more than 3 hours]

Results of xkcd colour survey are out

By a strange coincidence, the same night I first made the color survey public, the webcomic Doghouse Diaries put up this comic (which I altered slightly to fit in this blog, click for original):

It was funny, but I realized I could test whether it was accurate (as far as chromosomal sex goes, anyway, which we asked about because it’s tied to colorblindness). After the survey closed, I generated a version of the Doghouse Diaries comic with actual data, using the most frequent color name for the handful of colors in the survey closest to the ones in the comic:

Basically, women were slightly more liberal with the modifiers, but otherwise they generally agreed (and some of the differences may be sampling noise). The results were similar across the survey—men and women tended on average to call colors the same names.

So I was feeling pretty good about equality. Then I decided to calculate the ‘most masculine’ and ‘most feminine’ colors. I was looking for the color names most disproportionately popular among each group; that is, the names that the most women came up with compared to the fewest men (or vice versa).

The whole post on xkcd blog

Also courtesy MR, Cory Doctorow on a publishing experiment. Including, among other things, a limited hardback edition with a cover illustration by Randall Munroe. Form an orderly queue.

why no novelist should EVER be asked to go on a book tour PROMOTING what ONCE looked like a brilliant idea

It's 12:03pm in Berlin. The sun is shining. Cars whiz up and down Hauptstrasse outside this café. Wherever Randall Munroe may be it is now definitely Wednesday. I'm supposed to be sorting out contractual issues, which ought to mean writing an e-mail and sending it but turns out to mean writing e-mails and putting them in the Drafts Folder and wandering Etherworld in search of solace. A frame of mind in which I naturally turn to XeTeX. The webpage now has screenshots of various multilingual documents, which look awfully nice; I could use XeTeX to typeset a book.

One of the screenshots was of the Arabic version of What is Unicode; went over to the Unicode website to have a look around, and came upon the Last Resort Font:

Last Resort Font

The Last Resort font is a collection of glyphs to represent types of Unicode characters. These glyphs are designed to allow users to recognize that an encoded value is one of the following:

• a specific type of Unicode character
• in the Private Use Area (no private agreement exists)
• unassigned (reserved for future assignment)
• one of the illegal character codes.

These glyphs are used as the backup of "last resort" to any other font; if the font cannot represent any particular Unicode character, the appropriate "missing" glyph from the Last Resort font is used instead. This provides users with the ability to tell what sort of character it is, and gives them a clue as to what type of font they would need to display the characters correctly. (For more information, see The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0, Section 5.3 Unknown and Missing Characters, pages 155-156.)


Which sounds like the sort of thing we need for daily life. In its absence things go horribly wrong and no one knows why, because unrepresentable characters have no appropriate "missing" glyph.

The worst thing about living in Germany.

It's now 1.06 am in Berlin.

By OUR time, the Wednesday xkcd should be out.

But it's not.

We simply don't know when we can legitimately check.

What is your time zone, Randall Munroe? What is your time zone?

We in Berlin have borrowed Nahin's book on e to the i pi from the Staatsbibliothek on the strength of your check to Verizon. How can you do this to us, RM? How can you do this? We all live on the same semi-spherical planet, oder?

It's 1.14 am.

Anatol Stefanowitsch at Bremer Sprachblog takes another look at a classic xkcd


(pop-up: And nothing for I'm glad I saw 'Epic Movie')

AS:

Ich bin ja ein erklärter XKCD-Fan, aber ich finde, dass er in diesem Fall durch die Zusammenfassung der Ergebnisse für him und her eine Chance vertan hat, detaillierteres Wissen über die menschliche Natur herauszufinden. (I'm an avowed xkcd fan, but I think in this case, by amalgamating the results for him and her, he lost a chance to bring to light a more detailed knowledge of human nature.)

AS makes good this important omission, first by running searches in English according to gender:

(pop-up: Tu es oder tu es nicht, du wirst beide bereuen (Sören Kierkegaard) [do it or don't do it, you'll regret both])

and THEN by running searches for Ich hätte ihn/sie (nicht) küssen sollen


(pop-up: Das einzige, was ich bereue, ist das ich nicht jemand anders bin (Woody Allen) [the only think I regret is that I'm not somebody else])

Stefanowitsch has revealed several striking disparities between the anglophone and germanophone worlds of sexual regret - or, at least, disparities between the pools of regretful English and German speakers who feel called upon to share their disappointment on the WWW. (Perhaps English-speaking men are likelier than both English-speaking women and German-speaking men AND women to have no alternative to the kindness of strangers.)

There's a lesson to be learnt.

The lesson, of course, is that Randall Monroe and Antaol Stefanowitsch should collaborate on a T-shirt. Guys. Guys. You know it makes sense.

(Bremer Sprachblog, as so often, brings to mind the possibly apocryphal British headline: Fog in Channel: Continent cut off. In this case, it's the non-German-speaking world that's cut off from this consistently excellent blog; if you know any German at all, check out the rest here.)

Levitation aside, there is a vocabulary test engine called Lavengro that is written in Python (one you can use, in other words, to build your own vocabulary tests); I started learning Python months ago and then something came up, but I'd like to go back to it.

I had gone innocently across the road to buy Le Monde as soon as the newsagent opened (just 10 dirhams, or 1.10 euros) and went into breakfast and was innocently reading Le Monde when someone I met yesterday came in and sat at the table and said 'Just go on reading your magazine.' I did not immediately realise that this was meant to be a joke.

I met TAR ART RAT at Yorckschlößchen for a beer last night, and we did NOT talk about nothing but blogs, but in the course of the conversation I discovered that T.A.R. had never come across xkcd, so I whip out my laptop, call up today's page. This is my favourite, I say, after a quick search for Merlin:


and today we have


T.A.R. had never visited Language Log, so had also missed out on the great intellectual cereal packets post. I have not worked out how to upload the cartoon, but the link's here. Sound resistible? Punchline: Silly deontologist! Cocoa Krispies are for consequentialists! Kant: I hold you morally responsible!