Archive for December, 2006
American Poets
I love this poem by Paul Blackburn which Language Hat found in an online poetry journal called Jacket. It seems to capture the essence of certain strands of American poetry. It is quite long, but here is a taste:
Techniques of juxtaposition.
[…]
Script Map
I love this map of South Asia, showing the names of each of the various countries and states in the local language and writing system. Image from Wikipedia, found on Language Log (which also remarks on some errors in the map).
For a more detailed linguistic map of the region, see here.
{Scripts, Maps, South Asia, India, […]
Bond, Gay Bond
The latest addition to the Bond franchise has one of the best beginnings and one of the worst endings of any Bond film. Fortunately the film doesn’t jump the shark till about three quarters of the way through, so it still offers plenty of bang for your buck.
What really struck me, however, were the opening […]
Posada
A known terrorist enters the United States and the department of Homeland Security only arrests him after a Miami-based NY Times reporter points it out to them. They charge him with the minor crime of “illegal entry” and then “lost” all the evidence relating to his case … Did I mention that this terrorist was […]
Google Video
I’m happy to announce that DER has made Acting Like a Thief available from Google Video. You can, of course, still download the movie for free from our web site using bittorrent, but for those who want it the easy way you can get a high-quality download from Google Video for $19.95, or a day […]
Color
Via Language Hat, I discovered a revolutionary new approach to sorting one’s books: by color! The funny thing is that this is how I usually look for books - by color. Unfortunately I’m often wrong about the colors I’m looking for … or only have a vague sense influenced by one of various design elements. […]
Algorithm
Did you know that a secret government algorithm assigns you a “risk score” every time you fly in or out of the country? That have no way of knowing your own score or of challenging it? That this score will stick around on file for 40 years?
The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving […]
Import
Somewhere along the line, as I moved from one blogging platform to another, I lost 15 months worth of blog posts. Because, before I started Keywords I used to post much more frequently (my posts were also shorter and contained little original content), that is over 1200 missing posts.
Fortunately, thanks two two very useful scripts […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
