A Tech Czech Net Site
Ubuntu: Just how popular is it? - Starry Hope Productions ...Ubuntu has managed to gain a large portion of the Linux mind share , at least amongst the tech community . Wikipedia: Mind share is the amount of attention required by something and the time spent thinking about something . It can also refer to…
Read more →Is It Possible To Be Half-Adopted?   Imagining someone giving away semen or an egg couldn’t possibly feel the same as imagining a parent giving a way a baby. Could it? The friend who asked whether I consider Mrs. Ramirez to be adopted is adopted herself, something she doesn’t associate with rejection but rather with…
Read more →Now, there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that George Lakoff's theory of mental imagery (usually referred to via the concept of Image Schemas) describes a phenomenon that is profoundly real. However, the question remains what kind of reality it has. It exists and we see it all the time. But is it something that…
Read more →WHNews: Pay Gap - No Pay Day As of 30th October, if you’re a woman and you go out to work, you’re working for nothing until the 31st December. The Fawcett Society and the union Unison have declared today ‘Women’s No Pay Day.’ They’ve worked out that, given an average 17 per cent pay gap…
Read more →Evening News 24 - Refuse fire near City Hall   Arsonists sparked an emergency response after setting light to a rubbish container near City Hall on Saturday evening. The suspects started the fire shortly after 7pm on St Giles Street. Two fire engines were sent to the scene and firefighters used hoses to extinguish the…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "Not So Innocent" (October 5, 2007) RICHARD HALPERN: Right. There's often a kind of loss of innocence that takes place in the paintings themselves, which reflect on a potential loss of innocence on the part of the viewer. I think an interesting example of that is Rockwell's painting called The…
Read more →Quote Details: William Hazlitt: Without the aid of... - The Quotations Page Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room. William Hazlitt   English essayist (1778 - 1830) It's always disconcerting to find that something I've been saying for years has been said a…
Read more →Media Blog on National Review Online What the BBC is telling children about the 9/11 attacks [Tom Gross] Here is what the BBC’s widely-read children’s section of their website (CBBC) is telling kids about the 9/11 attacks, the 6th anniversary of which falls today. It is not quite the al-Qaeda view, but it almost is…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again 11 Sept 2007 08:50 It's the 50th anniversary of the British Computer Society. But what can we expect over the next half century? Will our levels of dependence on the internet and computers change? One of the guests on the programme, Oliver Sparrow , made the…
Read more →Just Say No "Nonetheless I took the tomatoes away." This is only partially a hermeneutic post. It's so rare to see poetry in blogs (unless they're poets' blogs which I don't read) but this last line in a post, turned it into a poem. It reminded me of my favorite poem by Vladimír Holan about…
Read more →On The Media In the parlance of Republican-primary politics, âsanctuaryâ? â as in sanctuary city â has become a bad word. ... GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Well, sometime around 2005, 2006, you begin to hear people on the right using the word, not for these cities and movements that aimed at providing specifically political asylum, but rather…
Read more →Anil Dash: Cats Can Has Grammar The core behavior has existed for some time; "Image macro" is a generic term for this kind of folk art, and cats have always featured heavily in these types of Internet in-jokes. But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon. Two…
Read more →YouTube - Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question Miss Teen USA 2007 - Ms. South Carolina answers a question http://youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww[/youtube] It is all too easy to make fun of speakers like this. But most commenters on YouTube (and elsewhere) got it wrong. ChrisKangaroo It is obviuos that she has no idea…
Read more →"Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill." Lt. Col. Nagel summarizing a new US Army counterinsurgency manual (on the Daily Show ) This quote reminds of the critique of universalist pragmatics by Anna Wierzbicka. Wierzbicka and others (e.g. Goddard) points out that concepts like politeness (let alone professionalism) are extremely culture and language specific…
Read more →When Languages Die: Science and Sentiment : In his book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge K. David Harrison illustrates the individual face of language loss, as well as its global scale. He shows that the disappearance of a language is a loss not only for…
Read more →Its All Semantics - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog A similarly obtuse but less jargon-laden example of unintentially comedic writing is the title of IRS form 5213, which I am convinced was penned by Terry Gilliam a la Crimson Permanent Assurance: âElection to postpone determination as to whether the presumption applies that…
Read more →Film examines Daily Mail 'diet' | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited In the footsteps of Supersize Me, a documentary-maker has attempted to find out whether we are what we read by giving up all news sources except the Daily Mail. For 28 days, Nick Angel screened out all television, radio, print and online news sources…
Read more →The Girl Wars : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com It seems like half the interactions between women can be classified as Girl Wars. Do we ever get out of this? And why the hell are girls so vicious to each other? When did they start this? Just a few years ago, Thing One was small and…
Read more →‘Bourne’ flick is ultimately un-American - Opinion & Editorial - BostonHerald.com I knew this movie was trouble when I read the reviews. Almost all the critics liked it. The only way American movie critics would like a violent car-chase film like this was if it bashed the USA, which, of course, it does. ... As…
Read more →Virtual Economics: Why newspapers are not screwed ...newspapers' core value is not their content but their validation. Sure it's expensive to create content. In the long run this probably doesn't really matter. There's plenty of content. The value that newspapers add to the picture is verifying which of it is true. The problem with many…
Read more →Confessions of a BBC liberal - Times Online There is a perfectly reasonable case for progressive liberal reform of penal policy. There is also a perfectly reasonable case for a stricter and more punitive penal policy. This programme was quite clearly on the side of the former and the producer/writer was a member of BBC…
Read more →Media Matters - "Media Matters"; by Jamison Foser "I believe in the usefulness and validity of the telling anecdote -- the seemingly small story that reveals a broader truth about a politician or other subject," Carney wrote. And who can blame him? For the reader, an anecdote -- a "short account of an interesting or…
Read more →Making Light: Bookstore chain puts the screws on small publishers We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers, Malarkey again. Rimmer is inappropriately borrowing language from other industries, as though A&R were a construction firm and he’d noticed they were buying their bricks from too many different brickyards. Bricks are interchangeable. Books aren’t…
Read more →Analysis: Military Shows Gains in Iraq Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up—with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists —rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act. Commanders are encouraged by signs that…
Read more →Disfavor for Bush Hits Rare Heights - washingtonpost.com That may stem in part from the changing nature of society. When Caddell's boss was president, there were three major broadcast networks. Today cable news, talk radio and the Internet have made information far more available, while providing easy outlets for rage and polarization. Public disapproval of…
Read more →New Statesman - Who is the real Hillary? she is certainly the most extraordinarily self-disciplined politician I have ever watched in action. But then she has to be, because she must balance the projection of images of supposedly masculine US power and strength with the reality of being a woman; she must be seen as…
Read more →BBC NEWS | Technology | Robot unravels mystery of walking "Babies use a lot of their brains to train local circuits but once they are trained they are fairly autonomous."Only when it comes to more difficult things - such as a change of terrain - that's when the brain steps in and says 'now we…
Read more →Michael Gerson - What Atheists Can't Answer - washingtonpost.com So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically…
Read more →OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan President Bush was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response. That's the deal. It's the real "grand bargain." If you are a midlevel Verizon executive who lives…
Read more →Shifting Idioms: An Eggcornucopia : OUPblog Original New sleight of hand: 85% 15%: slight of hand fazed by: 71% 29%: phased by Ben Zimmer lists the increasing changes (by 'false' analogy) in the spelling of some common English idioms. I saw his table and wondered what would happen in a Google Fight . Not only…
Read more →Congress must end U.S. role in a civil war nobody voted for That is why we propose to end the authorization for the war in Iraq. The civil war we have on our hands in Iraq is not our fight and it is not the fight Congress authorized. Iraq is at war with itself and…
Read more →Language Log: Keeping "wrong grammar" off the air A program will be assigned a "PG" rating if it shows "people speaking with wrong grammar (except for humorous effects)." The article doesn't say who gets to be the "grammar cop" -- some colonel with time on his hands, I guess, who would presumably delegate the problem…
Read more →Language Log: The Supreme Court Fails Semantics All that the Court actually argues is that "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" contains a reference to drug use. Gibberish is surely a possible interpretation of the words on the banner, but it is not the only one, and dismissing the banner as meaningless ignores its undeniable reference to…
Read more →Language Log: The Linguistic Abilities of the Presidential Candidates For what it's worth, if we count only confirmed languages spoken fluently or reasonably well, the average number of languages other than English spoken by the Democrats is 0.83, by the Republicans 0.33, or 0.53 overall. I can't say that I'm impressed. This is a useful…
Read more →Why Winston Wouldn't Stand For W - washingtonpost.com Writing about Churchill and Chamberlain, I've discovered, is like administering a Rorschach test to one's readers. People see in Churchill and Chamberlain what they want to see. They draw parallels between the 1930s and the events of today according to their own political philosophy. I've received congratulatory…
Read more →Quote Details: Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy is a battle... - The Quotations Page Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein Austrian philosopher (1889 - 1951) Two interesting things about this quote. First, that it was posted in the first place. It's on a list of quotations that…
Read more →Amazon.com: Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods: Books: Jonah Goldberg Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that âpolitical correctnessâ? on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis' suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic…
Read more →Metaphorically Challenged : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com âThat is an awesome metaphor,â? I said. Because it is. Itâs funny without the use of burning children. But it isnât accurate. John isnât on some emotional island where he canât understand what heâs doing. And he isnât trying to fight, really. He doesnât want to be inconvenienced…
Read more →CBC.ca Arts - Retired Czech leader Havel pens new play "Living in the world of political language was quite an inspiration" he said. "I try [in my play] to reflect the automatic political language, where you say one word to which other words are immediately added and the cluster [of words] then travels from one…
Read more →FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Freedom, not climate, is at risk As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to…
Read more →The Newshoggers: Jeri Thompson - asset or albatross? [Part Two] However, thanks to a commenter at my place , I see by common definition "trophy wife" is indeed considered to be an insult. All I can say is that I didn't mean it as such. I define the term to simply mean a marriage where…
Read more →Hitchens vs Hitchens | the Daily Mail If we are weak and poor, we can all summon up self-interested decency, behaving in a kind way, in public, towards those from whom we hope for decency in return. But as soon as we have the power to do evil, we generally do. What is to stop…
Read more →Malfunctioning fax machine prints out bomb ClipArt, forces evacuation of area - Engadget In any normal town across America there are countless faxes sent and received which feature poorly chosen ClipArt: why then must a promotional fax like the one pictured above fail to print out correctly -- leaving only a picture of a bomb…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "Secrets & Lies" (May 4, 2007) BOB GARFIELD: The issue in question was Saddam's aluminum tubes and whether they were meant for centrifuges to produce nuclear fuel. If, as you say, the administration briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee that it was uncertain about those tubes but then hid that uncertainty…
Read more →Comparison To Clinton Is Dismissed - washingtonpost.com Tom Ingram, who was an adviser to Fred D. Thompson 's 1994 Senate campaign and has talked to him about a potential 2008 presidential run, said that he thought the Royal race might be good for Republicans, but not because of gender or any similarity Royal had to…
Read more →RealClearPolitics - Articles - Is the War on Terror Over? Do we still need to fight a war on terror? The answer seems to be no for an increasing number in the West who are weary over Afghanistan and Iraq or complacent from the absence of a major attack on the scale of 9/11. The…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "Me is for Media" (April 20, 2007) BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I don't want to diminish the horrific experience that those people went through, but it did seem at times as if they were reading lines from a script, almost as if they'd been through all this before. THOMAS de ZENGOTITA…
Read more →The following segment from the Wikipedia entry on suicide attack is a good example of how the restrictions on mapping in conceptual integration can be negotiated even "against the grain" of the "logic" of some of the basic propositional structures behind the conceptual frame. So, the argument against 'homicide bombing' correctly points out that the…
Read more →Imus's last outrage? - The Boston Globe Imus apologized for his latest remark and was suspended for two weeks. But this time, his job could be on the line, said John DePetro, a radio talk show host who was fired by WRKO after calling gubernatorial candidate Grace Ross a "fat lesbian." "As much as mine…
Read more →Nancy Pelosi, Respectfully Maintaining Her Own Image - washingtonpost.com There are few images more discomforting than public figures thrust into foreign cultures and required to wear the host's traditional attire. Almost without exception the visitors tend to look smaller and more vulnerable. They evoke the uneasiness of children who have been dressed by a parent…
Read more →Think Progress » Gingrich: When I Said âLanguage Of Living In The Ghetto,â I Meant Hebrew (Or Maybe Yiddish) Newt Gingrich said this past weekend that the U.S. should abolish bilingual education so that people arenât speaking âthe language of living in a ghetto.â? But last night on Hannity & Colmes, Gingrich claimed his statement…
Read more →Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 - Swampland - TIME Brooksâs distinction is between two different conceptions of the word âpolitical.â? Or rather, like most nice clear distinctions, there actually is a spectrum of meaning. US Attorneys are supposed to be political in the sense that in performing their duties they reflect the policies of…
Read more →Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 - Swampland - TIME David Brooks has an excellent column today, and not for the usual reasons that liberals praise Brooks (and he drives conservatives crazy): because he comes halfway toward us. It’s because, in discussing the US Attorneys story, he nails a distinction that I, at least, was…
Read more →Golden Arches Wants 'McJob' Removed: McDonald's Targets the English McLanguage - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News McDonald's Corp. on Tuesday restarted its push to get the word "McJob" removed from dictionaries -- and has set its sights on the gold standard of lexicons, the Oxford English Dictionary. " Dictionaries are supposed to be paragons…
Read more →The metaphoric mappings that structure most of our frames are usually seen as automatic. However, more often than not, they are negotiated through discourse prior to becoming fully blended (entrenched). This image is a great example of one such mapping negotiation done almost entirely visually. This Apple Lisa ad from the 1970s has two functions…
Read more →MyDD :: Direct Democracy for People-Powered Politics Roger Ailes: "And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don't know if it's true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, 'Why can't we catch this guy?'" [...]Obama is a terrorist. Ha ha ha. Ailes is clearly upset that his brand is being…
Read more →Why I had to quit the John Edwards campaign | Salon News Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note…
Read more →OBAMA: We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and has seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted . Michelle Malkin: Obama: Soldier deaths = "Wasted" lives I could go on, but it…
Read more →Eugene Robinson - An Inarticulate Kickoff - washingtonpost.com What is it, exactly, that white people mean when they call a black person "articulate"? ... Biden explained Obama's appeal as a presidential candidate by calling him "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." ... It's interesting that Obama's…
Read more →Media Matters - Conservatives continue to use Fox's 24 to support hawkish policies conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham told host Bill O'Reilly: "The average American out there loves the show 24. OK? They love Jack Bauer. They love 24. In my mind that's close to a national referendum that it's OK to use tough…
Read more →Was 9/11 really that bad? - Los Angeles Times Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?…
Read more →BBC NEWS | UK | Younger Muslims 'more political' Young Muslims are much more likely than their parents to be attracted to political forms of Islam, a think tank survey has suggested. Support for Sharia law, Islamic schools and wearing the veil is much stronger among younger Muslims, a poll for the centre-right Policy Exchange…
Read more →The Politico But it wasn't revealing because she was suggesting her husband is "evil and bad." It was revealing because -- asked about dealing with evil men like Osama bin Laden -- her mind seemed to go to her domestic enemies. It's absurd to suggest that she thinks Bill is evil like Osama. But Kenneth…
Read more →iTWire - A new 'iBook' from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid Google is plotting to do for books what the iPod has done for music: make them purchasable by download to a portable access device. Could civilisation as we know it be under threat? ... The news immediately lead Sunday Times commentator, Bryan Appleyard…
Read more →'Hold Your Wee for a Wii' Death Shuts Down Show - Gameworld Network news story Ten employees have lost their jobs over the incident, and the radio show is permanently off the air. .... 28 year old Jennifer Strange was found dead in her Rancho Cordova home on Friday. A preliminary coroner's report indicated the…
Read more →Hawking says climate change poses greater threat to humanity than terrorism - International Herald Tribune LONDON: Scientist Stephen Hawking described climate change Wednesday as a greater threat to the planet than terrorism. The interesting thing here is not so much that this clearly illogical comparison is being given any credence but that none of the…
Read more →digg - The Digg Comment Algorithm Everything in this world can be shown as a flowchart algorithm. This, of course, applies to the complex and not well researched field of “Digg comments“. Here’s my humble attempt to define an algorithm which should encompass all of the many possibilities of comment development on Digg. There are…
Read more →I got an A in Phallus 101 - Los Angeles Times The problem that the Young America's Foundation list, first issued in 1995, highlights isn't simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities and social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable — although that's a serious…
Read more →Limp language leaves kids with an awesome paucity of speech [Teenagers on which the author eavesdrops] They've got one all-purpose word -- "awesome" -- to cover everything from mild approval to exhilaration. When they're indignant or angry, they have to fall back on clichés -- including a few tired four-letter words. ... Today, teens aren't…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "God No!" (December 15, 2006) In response to the global challenge posted by religious extremism, a small group of impassioned atheists has taken a new approach. They target the tolerant with both reason and ridicule. "The New Atheists", as they were dubbed by Gary Wolf in a recent article in…
Read more →OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren't. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded--permanently. "We're being very ruthless," boasts library director Sam Clay. ... But this raises a fundamental question: What are…
Read more →Foreign Policy: Why Hawks Win Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind . People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. This is an interesting blend of folk psychology and 'professional' psychology. The first part if completely within the realm of sensationalist…
Read more →Amazon Online Reader : Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage p. 82 The sexual double standard was so completely accepted by Romans that the educator Quintilian used the notion of a sexual single standard as the perfect illustration of an illogical proposition : "If a relationship between a mistress…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 - Today - 20006 Vote The Hunting Act with 52.8% Dangerous Dogs Act: 1.6% Serious Organised Crime and Police Act : 6.2% Human Rights Act: 6.1% European Communities Act : 29.7% The Act of Settlement: 3.6% Radio 4 is listened to by British political and cultural elites and could be thought…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Has Love Conquered Marriage? For the first time ever, married-couple households are in the minority both in the UK and the US, outnumbered by single-person households and cohabiting couples. Whilst many blame the stresses of modern life and the failure of couples to invest enough time in their relationships…
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