The opening scene of my dad's favorite book, At Swim-Two-Birds, features the insight The modern novel is largely a work of reference. The main character goes on to construct a story using several characters from the Irish story collective ( Read more... )

In case you need to email me while doing a handstand: ᵷɹo.əuoʇƨɹoʌəɹʇ@əuoʇƨʇ

In case you'd run out of weird facts about Mormons, here's one I didn't know: they invented Deseret, their own phonetic alphabet for English. The name Deseret comes from the word for "honeybee"[1] in the Book of Mormon and was the name of the proposed and de facto Mormon state that covers the present day locations of Los Angeles, San Diego, ( Read more... )

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... and justice for all.

☺ for the passage of Washington Referendum 71, supporting gay psuedomarriage.

☹ for the passage of Maine Question 1, vetoing gay marriage passed by the legislature and signed by the governor. I find it interesting that every measure on the ballot passed. ☹ for the secretary of state's website not having current

Two follow-up thoughts to my post about writing systems yesterdayThe obvious advantage of simplified Chinese characters over traditional characters is that they're easier to learn. The People's Educators have taught a couple hundred million people how to read and write a very complicated writing system, so using 门 instead of 門 as the foundation ( Read more... )

Messing around with a character pallate today, I discovered that Thai has a character which marks the end of a character or document: ๛ ("khomut," entity ๛, unicode U+0E5B). It's like a signature everybody gets to use. They also have ๚ ("angkhankhu," entity ๚, unicode U+0E5A), which marks the end of long sections. Combined with ะ (" ( Read more... )