Avast yer browsing! I ran into a funny story about character set mishaps on Language Log today. If only I were having problems with unintentionally affiliating my work with piracy--alas, no. Hopefully, you're using a browser that actually displays Unicode correctly. If not, you'll be perplexed by the icon below. (What Icon...

Many of the books I've read in the past have been thrust into focus recently: my previous post describes a little bit of text indexing I'm doing with Project Gutenberg's E-Books . This work has put a lot of great classic literature across my screen. One such book juxtaposed itself in my mind with Gary's recent post on bitt...

Part of my Informatics Capstone project requires a large number of freely available electronic texts -- the project is based around managing one's personal library, after all, and a lot can be done if one has access to an electronic version of one's library. One aim of my project is to provide greater access to the books i...

I've been reading Stories from the Thousand and One Nights each night to help Jessica fall asleep. Last night, while reading The Story of Nur-Ed-din and Enis-El-Jelis , I came upon the following rather poignant passage: [T]hey arrived in safety at Baghdad, and the master of the vessel said to them, This is Baghdad, and it...

I dropped Jessica off at school yesterday, and I happened across a most perplexing sign. Affixed to the back of one of Seattle's many "eco-friendly buses" was the following tag line: "Brown Bear Car Wash: Good for your car, Good for the environment". I must backpedal for a brief moment. I am not generally concerned about t...

During Jessica's and my nightly mental wrestling match , one of the categories centered around an area formerly within my expertise: wrestling -- the martial kind. The $2,000 question centered around the following move, of which I was the unequivocal master: The Fireman's Carry. I was so excited that I just had to make use...

I'm looking into using the D programming language for part of my Capstone project this coming quarter. It's really an attractive looking language, supposedly taking the speed of C and the object oriented structure of Java to a new level. Part of my capstone project may involve an automatic classification of texts using a c...