Category Archives: Words

You can never know enough of them.

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

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

“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

Posted in Words | Comments Off

3-D Textual Spirographs!

. . . 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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