Timely Snow

Gary Feng notes that hyphens are going out of style in British English. Hyphens are, it seems to me, an interesting intermediary step on the way to word hood, word-hood, wordhood. The Onion uses hyphens to good effect to give an air of antiquity to certain of their pieces, such as this one.
I’d say their [...]

For some reason, this struck me as a great way to concentrate my mind, macabre as it indisputably is. So now my Mac tray icons on both laptop and desktop display a countdown timer (I couldn’t get it to say “Days until dead,” but that’s actually okay). Assuming that I live until my next birthday, [...]

I’m nearly done with the transition to the Mac OS. While I still fondly remember the days when I could do things like print a document, most of the problems have been resolved (including a weird disappearing email issue).
I am still at least a bit ambivalent about the Mac OS vs. Vista, and about the [...]

Someday, I’d like to study for and take this test, the Chinese equivalent of the TOEFL and/or TSE. As this report describes it’s being revised, probably in ways that would make it more appropriate for someone like me, and also more like the Test of Spoken English that Chinese students coming to the U.S. take.
Still, [...]

James Fallows points to a discussion of the popular book by the cringe-inducing Tom Friedman (my adjective, not his), by UCLA economist Edward Leamer, which can be downloaded here.
Very interesting and entertaining discussion of the myriad things that it might mean for the world to be “flat”, and how nearly all of them are either [...]

An inbox is not a very good way to manage a task list. This has slowly dawned on me, crystallized by this excellent talk by Merlin Mann. For quite a while, I’ve been carrying around a load of residual emails and tasks that, with difficulty, I could get below 100. As part of moving to [...]