A robot judges my photos
Over the years, I’ve uploaded thousands of photos into online storage. On a whim last week, I typed the keyword ‘love’ into the search field. Google’s algorithm delivered one result: […]
Category Archives: language
Scientists’ clichéd superlatives
Scientists have discovered that everything they do is astonishingly robust, phenomenally novel, and groundbreakingly unprecedented. The authors of a new paper in the always entertaining Christmas issue of the British […]
Hidden meanings in a torrent of tweets
With tens of million of people posting to social media from mobile devices, researchers have gained access to a growing torrent of geotagged utterances. All those tweets, FB updates, and […]
Boxy kept ham
Eleven letters are shared by the Greek, Latin and Russian Cyrillic alphabets (if you consider Y / У and K / К to be the same). In this dandy Venn diagram, the […]
Behold: The Māori solar system!
Traditional stargazers in New Zealand referred to celestial bodies as Te Whānau Mārama, or the family of light. They observed, without telescopes, most of the planets in our solar system […]
Pison eu, Colon grossum!
“No zoologist should propose a name that, to his knowledge, gives offense on any grounds.” – The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature • • • If you discovered a delicate, […]
Uggstep (rhymes with dubstep) & other portmanteaus
“Generally portmanteaus with the greatest sticking power seem to be those which fill an existing gap in our lexicon. They describe experiences for which we lack words.” – OxfordWords blog […]
