I hope they’re working hard on the bar-call module, but the second sentence could revolutionise my social life: A robot blob that dances “soulfully” to different tunes could pave the way for machines that interact more naturally with human beings, researchers claim… It can also track the rhythmic motion of a person or another object…
Interesting bit in a NYT review of David Crystal’s The Fight For English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (via Conversational Reading): Crystal is … especially good on the Middle Ages. When printing came to Britain in 1400, English was a merry old mess. Choices had to be made, he says, and typesetters were…
Juan Pedro Quiñonero links to an IHT story suggesting the beginnings of a crash in Spanish second home valuations. I’ve seen how they’re built and I think there’s a fair chance the buildings will fall before prices do.
I’ve been out and about rather a lot recently, so warm thanks to MM for pointing out a post by Carlos Ferrero at Las palabras son pistolas cargadas on new(-ish) translation blogs. The most interesting one from my perspective is the Arab-Spanish Turjuman árabe, whose contents include a link by Khaled Musa to the online…
I want to do something quite simple: change from Vodafone to Movistar or Amena-Orange so I get reception in the Pyrenees, while keeping the same phone (a stream-personalised Nokia 3310), number and pre-pay accountability. When I say this shop assistants laugh uneasily and reach under the counter for the bat, and online things are no…
Here‘s why I had a bugger of a time trying to imitate with compass, ruler and pencil the more complex designs I dug up after my first trip into parts Islamic. And it’s got a name that’s new to me and a whole host of experts, it has. (Via Stefan Geens, and do read the…
Margaret of Fürth comments on the online edition of Ronald McIntosh and David Fawthrop’s A discussion of the changing principles of word division, now implemented by computers, in British English and American English, with notes on hyphenation of 39 other languages, which is even longer than its title. The notes on hyphenation in Spanish observe…