Comments by immerbeta

  • Wordnik is a term used describe a geek fond of words.

    Examples:John is such a wordnik that he can often glue himself to a dictionary for days without ever dragging off. People just call him wordnik of the wordniks.

    April 4, 2009

  • a typical Chinglish idiom, meaning a crowded group of people

    March 11, 2009

  • In Chinese, it is "�?�是心�?�", which means what one acts does not correspond with what one says

    March 11, 2009

  • a typical Chinglish idiom, meaning very happy, and come to like something very much

    March 11, 2009

  • in Chinese it is 开门�?山, it means cutting straight to the point when talking

    March 3, 2009

  • (n) The mangled, garbled, butchered, malapropriated or trashed Chinese spoken by native speakers of English.

    That is the definition from Urban Dictionary... Would be interesting if Zhonglish evolves into another Chinese dialect.

    February 26, 2009

  • Kevin Kelly got a nice piece of six species of collapsitarians

    February 20, 2009

  • Juan Enriquez said at TED2009 that Homo Sapiens might not be the pinnacle of evolution, and we are likely to have homo evolutis in the future.

    February 18, 2009

  • a Sanskrit and P�?li word that is often translated as “happiness" or "ease" or "pleasure" or "bliss"

    January 5, 2009

  • Jamais Cascio wrote about "Aspirational Futurism" on his blog today.

    January 2, 2009

  • The word embrangle (to confuse or entangle) won with 1,434 votes, while fubsy (short and stout) came in a distant second. Roborant (tending to fortify) and nitid (bright, glistening) failed to shine; they finished last, drawing roughly 550 votes between them.

    - Hangman, Spare That Word: The English Purge Their Language, article from Time magazine

    December 18, 2008

  • a concept exemplified by E.O. Wilson

    December 18, 2008

  • George Ayittey on Cheetahs and Hippos

    This grab-you-by-the-throat talk by Ghanaian economist George Ayittey unleashes an almost breathtaking torrent of controlled anger toward corrupt leaders -- the "Hippos" (lazy, slow, ornery, greedy) who have ruined postcolonial Africa, he says. Why, then, does he remain optimistic? Because of the young, agile "Cheetah Generation," a "new breed of Africans" taking their futures into their own hands.

    December 9, 2008

  • In September 2003, Mark Liberman reported (Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???) an incorrect yet particularly suggestive creation: someone had written “egg corn�? instead of “acorn�?. It turned out that there was no established label for this type of non-standard reshaping. Erroneous as it may be, the substitution involved more than just ignorance: an acorn is more or less shaped like an egg; and it is a seed, just like grains of corn. So if you don’t know how acorn is spelled, egg corn actually makes sense.

    quote from the Eggcorn database

    December 4, 2008

  • "victims who have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential." - Richard Dawkins

    December 3, 2008

  • The word is Japanese, literally meaning to fold (oru) paper (kami).

    December 2, 2008

  • Based on Karen Armstrong's book, this film examines the concept of God in the three major monotheistic religions from the days of Abraham to modern times. Through analysis of historic and holy texts and incorporation of ancient art and artifacts, the program explores the deity written about in the Bible and the Quran. The evolution and intertwining of various Christian, Jewish and Islamic interpretations of God are also addressed.

    Watch it on Google Video

    November 29, 2008

  • ...Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.

    -Why the future doesn't need us, article by Bill Joy

    November 25, 2008

  • The Dark Continent: It’s Still Dark

    We are considered the African first-movers on web technology, the African Digerati if you will. Our insights into technology are not the same as the vast majority of those who live in Africa and our knowledge and perspective of Africa is much different than the rest of the world’s. We, currently, are the people on the bridge - maybe even the bridge - that spans the divide of both knowledge and technology when it comes to Africa.

    November 22, 2008

  • quote from New York Times

    THIS year, as never before, the line between philanthropy and business is blurring. A new generation of philanthropists has stepped forward, for the most part young billionaires who have reaped the benefits of capitalism and believe that it can be applied in the service of charity. They are “philanthropreneurs,�? driven to do good and have their profit, too.

    November 22, 2008

  • William Safire's pick of word of the year 2008:

    ...one entry on the Oxford shortlist rings my bell, with its rich etymology, current utility and potential staying power well beyond the nonce. It is frugalista, defined as “a person who lives a frugal lifestyle but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying secondhand, growing own produce, etc.�? This could become the nom de guerre of the “recession warrior.�?

    November 22, 2008

  • Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This future history book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person's current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.

    definition from Wikipedia

    November 22, 2008

  • Malcolm Gladwell’s elegant and wildly popular theories about modern life have turned his name into an adjective—Gladwellian! But in his new book, he seeks to undercut the cult of success, including his own, by explaining how little control we have over it.

    quoted from Jason Zengerle

    November 12, 2008

  • wordnik: a new way to learn about words.

    October 31, 2008

  • n. - an obsession with words

    October 31, 2008

  • "The Open Source world embraced this mantra a long time ago — they call it "scratching your own itch." For the open source developers, it means they get the tools they want, delivered the way they want them. But the benefit goes much deeper."

    from Getting Real

    October 25, 2008

  • Couchsurfing the Zeitgeist, article by Alex Steffen

    Couchsurfing on Wikipedia

    October 21, 2008

  • A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.

    http://barcamp.org

    October 21, 2008

  • Antony Garrett Lisi proposes the creation of a more casual kind of science institute — a Science Hostel — which he says "would essentially be a large house somewhere beautiful where theorists could live and work." Citing his experience living in Maui and the mountains of Tahoe and Colorado, Lisi says it is important to have opportunities for good hiking and things to do outside in attractive environments.

    More on Wikipedia

    October 15, 2008

  • Be prepared for linguistic diversity, change, playfulness, and creativity wherever you listen and look - on radio and television, in the press, literature, film, pop music, the internet...

    David Crystal, On learning English

    October 4, 2008

  • Surfing a social networking site instead of working. Also: social not-working.

    from Word Spy

    October 3, 2008

  • ..."Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They're suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven't moved anywhere. It's just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.

    Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It's a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it's pining for a lost environment. "Solastalgia," as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, "is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.'"

    Wired Magazine, Clive Thompson on How the Next Victim of Climate Change Will Be Our Minds

    October 2, 2008

  • we can take advantage of our cognitive surplus, but only if we start regarding pure consumption as an anomaly, and broad participation as the norm. This not a dispassionate argument, because the stakes are so high. We don't get to decide whether we want a new society. The changes we are under can't be rolled back, nor contained in the present institutional frameworks. What we might get to decide is how we want this change to turn out.

    Clay Shirky

    September 30, 2008

  • "Xenophiles are people who are fascinated by the whole world, by things other than their ordinary experience. They’re people who want to connect with people who see the world very differently."

    Ethan Zuckermann, founder of Geekcorps and Global Voices Online

    September 29, 2008

  • "We need to become more multilingual in our thinking and in our abilities."

    David Crystal, The Language Revolution

    September 28, 2008

  • Daniel Sabin at Language Scraps called words like Cold Blue and Screeching Stench and the like "Mix the Senses".

    September 27, 2008

  • RenGen, short for renaissance generation, is a term coined by Patricia Martin in her book RenGen: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer and What It Means to Your Business

    New York Times recently did an interview with Pat about the concept of RenGen and its possible implications for our society at large.

    September 27, 2008

  • your lists are of infinite jest, thanks:-)

    September 26, 2008

  • log-uh-RI-uh, n an excessive flow of words, prolixity Gr logos word + roia flow, stream

    cite from the International House of Logorrhea

    September 26, 2008

  • The purpose of Wikisaurus is to serve the role of an electronic thesaurus—a dictionary of synonyms and antonyms in a rather vague and inaccurate sense of the word "synonym".

    from the Wikisaurus project page at Wikitionary

    September 26, 2008

  • Microcelebs are those people who are well-known to a small set of folks...and nowadays we achieve this celebrity through the artifacts we leave behind on the Web.

    http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-12/st_thompson#

    September 25, 2008

  • Kevin Kelly is running an ongoing blog on the technium: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/

    September 24, 2008

  • Douban is a wildly successful web community for book lovers in China

    September 21, 2008

  • Hi, are you NullPointer@douban?

    September 21, 2008

  • it can also mean the TED conference

    September 21, 2008

  • GNU is a recursive word, meaning "GNU is Not Unix", coined by Richard Stallman 25 years ago in his initiation of the Free Software Movement

    September 21, 2008

  • Dan Dennett talked about memes and dangerous ideas at TED 2002

    September 21, 2008

  • Dan Dennett talked of "unthinking engineering" in his 2002 TED speech, quote:

    Yesterday, Amory Lovins spoke about "infectious repetitis." It was a term of abuse, in effect. This is unthinking engineering. Well, most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking; it's infectious repetitis.

    And we might as well try to have a theory of what's going on when that happens, so that we can understand the conditions of infection."

    link

    September 21, 2008

  • Wow, that's a cool collection itself...

    September 20, 2008