PUBLIC MARKS with tag language

The hashtag was born on IRC networks before migrating to Twitter and evolving into something that people verbalised ("hashtag fail"). Now some factions are trying to turn it into a gestural expression and Nimrod Kamer -- a filmmaker and journalist -- is all for it. You can follow him on Twitter at @nnimrodd

Cockney Rhyming Slang

BASIC-256 is an easy to use version of BASIC designed to teach anybody (especially middle and high-school students) the basics of computer programming. It uses traditional control structures like gosub, for/next, and goto, which helps kids easily see how program flow-control works. It has a built-in graphics mode which lets them draw pictures on screen in minutes, and a set of detailed, easy-to-follow tutorials that introduce programming concepts through fun exercises.

Scriptol has been designed to be simple, safe and universal. It is a modern, object-oriented, procedural language with innovative features, for example it can use XML as data structure. Scriptol is compiled to PHP with the Scriptol PHP compiler.

We’ve been moderately quiet about the kanji learning site WaniKani. Since it’s getting close to private alpha time (if you get the 30 Day Ebook there’s a link in there for previously said private alpha) I wanted to shed some details on the project that Viet’s been so hard at work on all these months. Of course, since it’s quite early everything I’m about to say is liable to change, but don’t you want to know more anyways?

The application for iPad or iPhone that tells the story of Chinese writing, explaining its logic and showing its beauty, sign after sign.

An introduction to the JavaScript programming language, by Marijn Haverbeke. Very complete, extensive, and well-written resource. Must read for every intern in web developement ! :-)

Defuse is a new method for navigating and participating in online discussions. Previous designs for online discussion were successful under the assumption that participation would be limited to tens or at most hundreds of participants. Emergent social conventions have been able to smooth over media as they scale, but ultimately they are limited by the design of a medium itself. Defuse seeks to continue scaling online discussions by adding social, structural, and historical context throughout the interface, and by widening the expressivity of a message to match the user's intention. It does so using a combination of natural language processing, machine learning, visualization, data portraiture, social network analysis, and medium design.

“(When you are silent,) you see it” or “You find it”. What struck me was that this “it” made it sound like a person experiences or practices silence and the result is immediate or even immediately visible. Of course, I think that it’s presumed by the speaker that it isn’t actually so simple. It’s just that the language is not sufficient so we rely on the presumption that the listener understands that there’s more beyond the words. Two things come up for me: one is the use and handling of form, in this case words or language; the other is the tendency, or danger, for people to not notice that they are handling a form at all.

. In a year that brought us vuvuzelas (the dronelike plastic horns at the World Cup in South Africa) and mama grizzlies (Sarah Palin’s cadre of fierce women in the midterm elections), there’s no obvious front-runner in the sweepstakes for WOTY (pronounced “WOE-tee”). But for my money, the one word that sums up the scrapheap of the past year is junk.

BASIC JAPANESE SWORD TERMINOLOGY

水源 (suigen): source d'une rivière

What terrible business jargon do you need unsucked?

Learn languages trough games

From the 17th of May, Bandai are to release a new series of trading figures in the form of kanji that transforms into its animal counterpart. The product is called "Mojibakeru" [もじバケる] which is a compound word of "Moji" [文字] meaning "character" and "Bakeru" [化ける] meaning "to change into."