January 2009
26 posts
Zipf's law →
Zipf’s law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word.
1 tag
Dimidiate Di*mid”i*ate, a. [L. dimidiatus, p. p. of dimidiare to halve, fr. dimidius half. See Demi-.]
1. Divided into two equal parts; reduced to half in shape or form.
2. (Biol.) (a) Consisting of only one half of what the normal condition requires; having the appearance of lacking one half; as, a dimidiate leaf, which has only one side developed. (b) Having the organs of one side,...
How to fix a chronically late spouse? | Ask... →
miasmatist n and adj
A person who studies or investigates miasmas, esp. one who believes in the causation of disease by miasmas. Also in fig. context.
1858 B. DOWLER Mississippi River & New Orleans 682 Authorities might be cited among miasmatists themselves to show that noxious gases may be absorbed, or imbibed, or otherwise limited..by bodies of water. 1890 New Sydenham Soc. Lexicon, Miasmatist, one...
“When I send an email to someone with a Hotmail address, I feel like I am sending...”
– elizaskinner.net
The Daily Mail Oncological Ontological Project →
Documenting the Daily Mail’s quest to categorise everything in the world as either causing or curing cancer.
Phrase of the day: Aircraft Groomer
Someone who has responsibility for cleaning the interior and exterior of a plane between flights.
http:// →
HACKED!
My email got hacked this morning by some spammer in Hunan, China. The only harm done was a spam email sent to 473 of my contacts whose email addresses begin with the letter A-I. There are some features about the email that make me think it was an automated cookie theft, rather than someone brute-forcing my password and browsing round my Google Account. Anyway rest assured that my account is back...
5 Somali Pirates Drown With Ransom →
You couldn’t make this up. Overfill the escape boat with so much money it sinks.
Sponsored Post
This is a paid-for post, which you can feel free to ignore. Webhosting Bluebook is a website that reviews various web hosts, and presumably attracts affiliate fees for click throughs. Thanks to the bounty of those affiliate fees, they are now paying bloggers to create links to their site, in order to boost their Pagerank. I have a vague feeling that it’s unethical to distort the Google...