Category Archives: Words

You can never know enough of them.

What “science as science” can offer us – or not

Posted on February 18, 2012 by cicada

This fascinating essay by Marilynne Robinson, “Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred,” is a thoughtful and insightful piece of writing. But unfortunately, as noted by my friend Jacob, it completely fails to distinguish science from scientism (or, I would hasten … Continue reading →

Posted in Biology, Littademia, Neuroscience, Science in culture & policy, Words | Comments Off

World enough, and time

Posted on September 21, 2011 by cicada

“The special value of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.” –Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, September 12, 2011

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3-D Textual Spirographs!

Posted on January 17, 2008 by cicada

. . . or something like that. Courtesy of JK Keller, these Volumetric Redundancies represent the number of times a word appears in a given text. Red cubes represent non-unique words, with size depending on number of occurrences; blue cubes … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Frivolity, Words | 3 Comments

Words I learned in 2007

Posted on December 29, 2007 by cicada

A New Year’s tradition: some truly yummy words I learned in the past twelve months. I love adding to my vocabulary, though odds are I’ll never use a single one of these in conversation. 1. aquamanile 2. scacchic 3. imbricated … Continue reading →

Posted in Words | 6 Comments

Mine, all mine

Posted on November 10, 2007 by cicada

The World’s Fair started a meme to identify phrases for which your blog is the #1 Google result. It seems like there ought to be an algorithm to do this for you, but after much trial and error, bioephemera is … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Words | Comments Off

Typosperma

Posted on May 10, 2007 by cicada

Typosperma Oded Ezer Typographer/artist Oded Ezer says, The main idea of the ‘Typosperma’ project was to create some sort of new transgenic creatures, half (human) sperm, half letter. These imaginary creatures are cloned sperms, that typographic information has been implanted … Continue reading →

Posted in Artists & Art, Words | 2 Comments

A word’s worth at least one picture

Posted on May 2, 2007 by cicada

eternal Berkeley, CA, 2003 The Visual Dictionary is a photographic compendium of found words (from signage, advertising, etc). The goal is to eventually represent every English word as at least one image; users can search the database for a word, … Continue reading →

Posted in Frivolity, Photography, Words | Comments Off

Cloning with a dicot accent: a biologist’s take on linguistic inconsistency

Posted on March 11, 2007 by cicada

Language Log: Foolish Hobgoblins It’s been many long years since I was an English major. That’s my standard justification when I get sloppy and split some infinitives, or use “which” when I ought to write “that.” I put punctuation inside … Continue reading →

Posted in Biology, Words | 4 Comments

Every axiom hums under a toy

Posted on February 20, 2007 by cicada

Now there’s a proverb for the ages. . . or a random sentence generated with the procrastinatory Random Sentence Generator, which also suggests random words of various types (nouns, verbs, common, obscure, etc.) Be warned: if you choose “obscure” words, … Continue reading →

Posted in Biology, Frivolity, Words | 1 Comment

Kinda like Boggle on a Rubiks Cube

Posted on January 31, 2007 by cicada

WORD STRIPS – word game from Flash By Night There clearly aren’t enough ways to waste time on the internet(s) yet. This is kind of fun, although I still prefer good old-fashioned Boggle.

Posted in Frivolity, Words | 1 Comment