George Psalmanazar

Reading Boswell's Life of Johnson, I came across a reference to a man with the intriguing name of George Psalmanazar.

The Old Irish Verbal System

The Old Irish Verbal System (from THE EXPULSION OF THE BLATANT BEAST).

Europa Polyglotta

From this post on strange maps.

“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” - Walter Benjamin (from Our Kingdom)

Carlsberg don't do blog posts...

(via The Dossing Times).

I, for one, welcome our new snowclones database

The Snowclones Database

Considered harmful

Language Log traces the history of the Considered harmful snowclone.

Lost for words

I'm currently reading Master and Commander and trying not to get lost in the fog of naval jargon. Today I found my way to this post on Lost for words which links to this wonderful (and rather daunting) diagram of an 18th century warship:

The Sunlight on the Garden

The Sunlight on the Garden by Louis MacNeice.

TwitterLit

The mystery of Inis Meáin

James Joyce and Marcel Proust vs languagehat

(A Night At the Majestic remix).

Beckett's Actors

Colm Toibin on Beckett's Actors.

April is the cruellest month

April is the cruellest month, breeding  
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  
Memory and desire, stirring  
Dull roots with spring rain.

Recording of the Old Possum himself reading The Waste Land

Game Over

Pole Position never looked this good on the 800XL.
(via Joystiq).

To be sure to be sure

A suffusion of blue.

From XKCD (via Wadler's Blog).

Bomb #20 learns a little phenomenology

In Land of Lexicons, Having the Last Word

In Land of Lexicons, Having the Last Word

Tim Bray on Ruby

Reasonable Doubt

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on Spinoza.

What is this Snowclone of which you speak?

That They May Face the Rising Sun

The Writer's Choice article on Normblog this week is by Peter Mair and discusses John McGahern's That They May Face The Rising Sun.

Creative etymology

About a month ago I read this article about the (supposed) influence of Irish on American English in Counterpunch and was very dubious about it. This Language Log post has confirmed my suspicions. The Lexicographer's Rules is even more dismissive.

Cat herding

Don't let anyone tell you it's easy.

The Gulf Stream isn't keeping us warm

The notion that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth.

John McGahern has died.

IBM's Octopiler, or, why the PS3 is running late.

Banville wins Booker

John Banville wins the 2005 Booker Prize.

Timeline of the Irish Language.

John McGahern

John McGahern interview in The Observer. Also this one from 2002 and a Guardian interview.

Ante-disciplinary science.

Onomasticon Goedelicum

The Locus project at UCC is creating a new historical dictionary of Irish placenames and tribal names.

Surname Distribution Maps of Ireland.

It's always the quiet ones

From a Times leader about Pete Sampras:

“Laconic” is the eponym of the Lacedaemonians. Philip of Macedon wrote to them: “If I enter Sparta, I will level Sparta to the ground.” The ephors replied with a monosyllable: “If.” For a century Sparta ruled the world and defeated the chatterbox Athenians.

A Virulent Eruption of Paddyism

Salon has an article on Flann O'Brian as an antidote to the usual Patrick's Day whackery. Worth reading if only for this quote from one of his Irish Times columns:

If you are Irish, write and tell me about it. Write frankly, secure in the knowledge that no eye other than my eye will peruse your communication. Explain what it feels like to be Irish. State at what age you first realized you were an Irish person. When did you have your first fight? At what age did you make your first 'Irish' witticism? At what age did you become a drunkard? Please tell me all, because there can be no cure until the pathological background has been explored ... It is in your own interests to tell all. Remember that I too was Irish. Today I am cured. I am no longer Irish. I am merely a person. I cured myself after many years of suffering. I am sure I can help you if only you will have faith in me and write to me in confidence. Mark your envelope Irish in the top left hand corner.

Oscar Wilde loses duel with wallpaper

The Onion marks St Patrick's day with an Irish-Heritage Timeline.

It's a Long Way to Tipperary.

The Molecular Biology Toolkit

The Molecular Biology Toolkit is a Java toolkit for structural bioinformatics developed by Phil Bourne's group.

The Paulie Exclusion Principle

J. Westprog explains the Paulie Exclusion Principle.

Obituary for Max Perutz

The grand old man of structural biology died yesterday. Guardian obituary.

W.G. Sebald

W. G. Sebald killed in a car crash in East Anglia.

Fourth ICFP programming contest

The results of the Fourth ICFP programming contest are out. The Dylan Hackers came second, mostly using Gwyddion Dylan, which the website says is still developmental. The write-up of the contest entry says that:

A major design goal of Dylan is to produce a language in which complex programs can be rapidly prototyped in the same way as with dynamically-typed languages such as Smalltalk or Lisp or "scripting" languages, while at the same time enabling performance comparable to statically typed languages such as C or ML.

Bruce Eckel not impressed by Ruby

Bruce Eckel is not impressed by Ruby. I've tinkered with Ruby and I like the object-oriented design but there are two reasons why I don't see myself doing much with it. First, it's not as concise as Perl for writing small scripts. Second, and more significantly, there are no Ruby libraries that make it worth my while learning it. By contrast, there are at least two Python molecular modelling projects, Pmv and MMTK, both of which are fairly mature and featureful. Even if I didn't care about Python having a cleaner design than Perl, these two libraries would be a compelling reason to learn it.

A New Kind of Science

New Scientist has an interview with Stephen Wolfram about his new book. He may or may not be "the Isaac Newton of the 21st century" but the book sounds interesting. This kind of simulation is going to be hugely important in bioinformatics.

I've been trying to get my head around Mark De Pristo's notes on bioinformatics programming in Scheme. Someday I'd like to work my way through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

The Navajo Know

s.c.i.'s infiltration of the Irish Times letters page continues with a letter from Julian West in response to John Water's column on road deaths. Tuesday's page had a letter from Kate Hagerty correcting an error in the opening lines of Kevin Myers's column.

Life's Grand Design

Life's Grand Design is a Technology Review article by Kenneth R. Miller on the flaws in Intelligent Design.

A Designer Universe?

Steven Weinberg pours cold water on the notion of A Designer Universe?

Pioneers of the Fortran Programming Language

O'Reilly jump on the bioinformatics bandwagon.

Humbled by the Genome's Mysteries

Stephen Jay Gould is Humbled by the Genome's Mysteries.