Category - Language

I'm baaaack!

Yeah, it was a busy week. Probably the busiest week I've ever had. I stayed up late. I accidentally skipped a meal. Almost all of my time was spent studying, doing schoolwork, or promoting my Esperanto club's first event. Of course, I also went to my first Florida Free Culture meeting, which was very cool. I also had a Get Carded meeting. Basically, I did all the things I said I was going to do, except that the deadline for my programming project got moved to Monday. Otherwise, I would have been spending much of tonight working on it. I finally have a break.

I worked hard, though. I got a 7 out of 10 on my physics exam, which was higher than the class average and the same score I got on the first exam. At this rate, I can squeak by with a B+ in the class. I think I'm right on the line. I spent many consecutive hours working on my Indian Ocean take-home test, and I did well. I know that because the professor said everyone's responses were probably good before he saw them.

Of course, the elephant in the room is: "Jordon, how was your new Esperanto Club's first event, 'Esperanto: The Solution to the World Language Problem,' that you were promoting like crazy?"

Okay, I promoted this presentation every way I knew how. I invited friends on Facebook (only two said they would come), I sent a blurb to various mailing lists (some of which actually ran the blurb), I contacted the major student newspaper (they didn't write back), I contacted a vaguely related club (they didn't reply), I advertised at other club meetings (okay, one), I handed out and posted flyers (which got covered up by other flyers almost immediately), and I even spoke in a class (of ten people, and not everyone was there).

At first, I had no idea how many people to expect. I wanted a room for 150 people, but I was told flat out that I wouldn't be able to get one at night. (They tend to be used for exams.) I settled for a room seating about 100. Yesterday, 19 people on Facebook said they would go to the presentation. I expected some more than that because I didn't just promote the event on Facebook. 20-30 people sounded pretty reasonable. I would be happy to have that many.

I got to the classroom extra early to make sure the computer and projector worked. Someone was already waiting outside. "Esperanto Club?" I asked. "Mission meeting?" she asked. Uh-oh. Could they have double-booked the room? She was very convinced that there was another meeting there at that same time, but she went over to the computer to double-check the e-mail. Turns out she missed her meeting by a week. Close call for me.

By the magical time of 8:00, only a handful of people were there. I figured the others would be coming shortly; you know how no one's ever on time. At 8:15, there were still only a few people. I decided the show must go on. Present were three of the four club officers, our faculty advisor, and seven others (five of whom were friends with one or another of the officers). Seven people. Actually, really only two.

I decided I couldn't let that put a damper on my enthusiasm. I presented the presentation, and even though I hadn't had any practice with the vocal delivery, I think I did quite well. It's probably because I'd been working on it bit by bit over the course of several weeks. I familiarized myself with it that way. Anyway, if you're curious, here's the presentation as a 5.6 MB PDF. Yes, I am actually hosting a large file here, believe it or not!

It was kind of discouraging to have only seven people come to the presentation, but at the end, when I asked how many people would be interested in learning the language, my spirits were lifted a bit. Almost everyone raised their hand, even our faculty advisor and the other officers, who don't know Esperanto very well yet. It seems that of the seven people in the audience, almost all were very interested. When I showed the information about our recommended textbook, several people jotted it down.

If I could have a small core group of people for this club who will stick with it for the long term, that would be great. And it would give the group room to grow. I use Gator Freethought, whose meetings I usually attend, as a sort of model for my own club. Their meetings draw about 50 people, so they've already reached critical mass. They have enough momentum to go on forever, even when the officers graduate. My vice president and I have three years to build the club up so that it can outlast us. Can we do it? I think so.

The World Names Profiler has surname statistics for several countries. Enter a surname and see which countries it's most common in.

With some creative folding of US paper money, you can spell out some interesting messages.

How do you securely store files remotely? Apparently there's a mathematical method that makes it possible to easily store small pieces of files (encrypted, of course) on a large number of computers.

I have

• a Free Culture meeting Monday night
• a tech writing assignment due Tuesday
• a Get Carded meeting Tuesday night
• a massive physics test Wednesday
• Indian Ocean reading assignments and a take-home test due Thursday
• my big Esperanto presentation Thursday night
• to promote it
• Get Carded tabling on Friday
• a programming project due Friday night
• work Monday-Friday
• a cold

See you next weekend?

Here's a reading assignment while I'm gone. Noisome Beasts is the first novel by one Robert Chatham, and you can download it for free. I can't explain it better than the author himself: "It's a short novel that tells the compelling story of Todd, a young rapper who is determined to seek out Reginald Vel Johnson, the man who played Carl Winslow in the hit TV show Family Matters. Aided by several bags of cheese puffs and his mathematician-historian friend Edgar, Todd travels to Wichita in hopes that he can discover his true father and, in doing so, compose a rap song that will haunt history for all of eternity."

As I was reading the book, I couldn't help but think that it would make a pretty cool movie. Since the book has been released under a Creative Commons license that allows derivative works, even for commercial purposes, I very well could be the one to adapt it. The songs in the movie would have to be under an identical or more generous CC license, but that wouldn't be a problem; there's lots of great CC-licensed music (see Jamendo).

Part two of the assignment: post a comment stating which character you would like to play.

Here's a probably overgeneralized map of baby naming trends by US state. Note that Sarah Palin comes from a part of the country where bizarre names are common.

Here are 10 creative responses to junk mail.

I've been wondering when someone would make this. It's finally here: a Google Maps-based pedometer.

Yesterday morning, I was reading articles at the Alligator's web site when a headline caught my eye. Student... club... language... hm... sounds like me. Oh wait, it is! I immediately went downstairs to pick up a hard copy.

A month ago, my friend Mark and I were teaching Esperanto phrases at a "language cafe" on campus. Rebecca Deely, a journalism student, was there looking for a story. She was very interested by Esperanto and interviewed both of us. She suggested that she could submit the story to the Alligator, and that's all I heard about it for a month. I kept thinking about what quotations of mine she would use — we talked quite a bit — and the only one I could remember was "It's not a word game." I couldn't really remember the context, but it stood out in my mind, so I thought it could end up as the all-important article-ending quotation.

Ooh dang. Who called that?

I thought the article was good and positive, and it apparently did get a few people interested enough to join our Facebook group. It was also apparently Rebecca's first publication. Everyone wins! (By the way, the entire article can be found here for however long.)

Throughout the day, I was watching people read the Alligator to see if they would read our story. The placement could hardly have been better. It was an important issue, being the day after Student Government elections, so probably more people were reading it than usual. The front page story jumped to page 10, where it took up the whole page, and we were at the top of page 11. That's almost like being on page 2.

I got two copies for myself. I cut the article out of one and posted it on the door of my dorm room. More promotion for our upcoming event. And in fact, on my way home from class, I actually did see someone reading the story. I wanted to start talking to her, but that would have probably freaked her the heck out. "Hi, I'm the person you're reading about in the newspaper!"

Another Ask Jordon!

Cody - Natashas BFF: Why, on your Faq, do you have somebody set up us the bomb?, its someone set up us the bomb! =) Zero wing Rules

Sorry, but it's definitely "Somebody set up us the bomb." I know what I doing.

Check out this Multicolr Search Lab. Select some colors, and you'll get some photos from Flickr that contain those colors. It's pretty mesmerizing.

When you've got a word on the tip of your tongue, use Tip of My Tongue to get it out. You can enter some letters of the word, synonyms, and more.

And here are, according to someone, the Top 10 Amazing Prison Escapes.

I've been busy with my new webmaster job. I started it on Monday, and it's been pretty nice. It's pretty easy so far, and I like it. If I ever get stuck on something, I can talk to my friend Mark, who works there as well. He's already been showing me the ropes quite a bit.

I've also been busy promoting my Esperanto club's first event, which I mentioned in my last post. That's taking a lot of my time. We had an executive meeting last night where we went over the presentation and some ways to promote it. My ultimate goal is for us to be featured in the main student newspaper before our event. That way we could get the word out to tens of thousands of people.

I hardly get any Ask Jordon questions anymore.

diana: why i am lefty?

This one comes from an IP address in Pakistan. But anyway, I have a whole book about this subject since I did a psychology paper on it in high school. It's The Left-Hander Syndrome by Stanley Coren, and it's quite revealing about why people are left-handed. I forget now, but I think he said it had in part to do with early brain trauma like a stressful birth. That's the book where he advances his controversial finding that left-handers die nine years earlier on average than their right-handed counterparts.

All political links today. Less than a month till the election, though.

A while back I blogged about Change Congress, the new initiative started by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig (founder of Creative Commons). Change Congress aims to have politicians, candidates, and other citizens state their support (or lack of support) for four key issues that they believe would help improve fairness and end corruption. They've sent a letter to every Senator and Representative as well as every Congressional challenger too. You can see their progress on their iPledge campaign page. Change Congress is looking to improve their low response rate by having citizens pester their members of Congress. Click "Pester Now" next to the name of your member of Congress to find contact information, a phone script, and a form letter.

News coverage about things that don't matter: Presidential Physiques of the Modern Age.

I've saved the best for last. John McCain Gets BarackRoll'd.

My last few posts have been pretty weighty. Let's get back into the normal swing of normal things.

Ah, college. It is pretty nice. Except for, you know, the classes and stuff. But it's good to have good friends. Adam, my roommate from last year, invited me over to his dorm for dinner tonight. But the place isn't really a dorm in the traditional sense. It's an apartment-style dorm, and it's pretty comparable to student apartments you'd find off campus (that is to say, sweeeet). He lives there with Cameron, who was one of our suitemates last year. They also invited Evan, who was also one of our suitemates, so it was like a little reunion. Fajitas and TV with old pals. Ain't nothing like it.

It was good to catch up with Adam. Turns out he still reads this blog. I think he didn't read it over the summer, but tonight he brought up the themes of some of my recent posts. I believe that would make him a World of Stuff fan. You don't have to have read all 993 posts to be a fan (although it doesn't hurt).

What else? Oh yeah. I start my new job tomorrow, the one I was interviewed for a few weeks ago. I'm the new webmaster for the Dean of Students Office. Actually, my friend Mark, who works there and told me about the job, showed me the ropes last week, so I got a bit of a head start by making some small updates. But tomorrow, it is official. I won't have as much free time, but I'll be gaining knowledge and experience (and I'll have a cool job). Plus, I probably won't have to work at strange times. I know some people who have to work at night while going to school. I don't know how they manage.

Also, my new Esperanto club is getting off the ground. We're going to have a presentation entitled "Esperanto: The Solution to the World Language Problem." It'll be an introduction to Esperanto explaining why people use it and such. If you happen to be in the area of Gainesville, Florida, it'll be on Thursday, October 16, at 8:00 P.M., in room 110 of Rinker Hall at the University of Florida. If you have a Facebook account, RSVP on our event page. Everyone is welcome.

Surprise? Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China. Yet another reason not to trust Skype or any other non-free software.

Also in the news: Military Hit with 2nd Suit Over Religious Freedom. They can't seem to wrap their heads around the idea that they shouldn't be pushing religion on people.

Finally, a blog: Cake Wrecks, for "when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong."

I had a physics test today. I've spent the past few days studying like a madman. Now I am a mad man. I don't think I did very well on the test, you see. I was really nervous, and there was a lot of pressure. 10 questions in 50 minutes. I think I only had time to do about 6. Some I didn't know how to do, so I had to guess.

My last physics class was cool because after each test, they would post the answer key online so you would could compare it to your scratch work and see how you did right away. For today's test, we had to sign and hand in our scratch work, and they'll be grading the exams and posting the answers tomorrow. I guess they're trying to prevent cheating.

I feel that I deserve whatever grade I'll get. I spent as much of the previous 48 hours studying, but it wasn't enough.

But I do have some good news. My Esperanto club was approved today. We had registered for the 2007-2008 year at the very end of that year — so close, in fact, that we didn't get all the way through the approval process. Now we are official for the 2008-2009 year. I just need to straighten out a snafu with the name. (Last year we were "The Esperanto Club at the University of Florida," but for this year, we had to drop the "at the University of Florida" from our name due to new guidelines for student organizations. However, they registered us under the old name, which might get us in trouble. I will have to talk to someone about that.) Pretty soon, we are going to have our first event, I guess. I'll be sure to tell you all about it.

Well, that's it for my 989th post, cats and kittens. I've got to do homework and also eat and stuff. And then sleep. Enjoy these links.

I don't know how many times I've had to comb through the edit history of a Wikipedia article to see who added a certain bit of vandalism. WikiBlame makes it easy to see who added what to an article.

I never realized it, but my own state of Florida has some weird holidays. Grandmother's Day is right around the corner!

If you're like a lot of people, you make yourself lots and lots of coffee. Here are 11 Good Reasons Why Coffee Grounds are Worth Keeping.

"What is your favorite branch of engineering and why?"

With that, I had three minutes to outline a three-minute speech. I took the prompt as I left the classroom and went into the hallway to work. I had enough time. Computer engineering would have to be my fave, of course, since I'm a computer science major. As I was practicing making impromptu speeches, I had realized that you can make anything about computers.

Computers have had a profound effect on engineering and science, and also, programming has allowed me to think more logically and analytically.

I spoke clearly, but I really wasn't sure of what I was saying. I think my hands were shaking also. I did manage to restrain myself from saying "um." I had to cut it short and bail after almost running out of time.

It took me a while to calm down after that. Right after my tech writing and speaking class, I was due to be at the Talk to Me Language Cafe, an event where speakers of several languages would teach people to say some basic phrases. (I'm starting an Esperanto club, and our faculty advisor got Esperanto to take the the place of Spanish in the program.)

It really was like a cafe. There were a few tables set up, and coffee and cookies were served. Passersby could meet with a speaker of Turkish, Italian, Czech, Chinese, Japanese, sign language, and (of course) Esperanto to learn some basic phrases. Most people I talked to hadn't heard of Esperanto but were interested in the idea. (The people who had heard of it either had a friend who was interested or had lived in Europe.) When I mentioned how popular Esperanto was around the world, people were surprised that they hadn't heard of it before. It was a great chance to plug our group.

I was there for about two and a half hours, but it didn't seem that long. Then, Mark took over for an hour while I had class, and after that, I returned for the last few minutes. We ended up giving out 24 copies of a "What Is Esperanto?" flyer and 21 copies of a flyer with basic vocabulary and grammar. Most people received one of each; a few left before I could give them any. I'd say we talked to 25-30 people.

Mark and I each got interviewed by journalism students who needed material for an assignment. One of the ones who talked to Mark later arranged an interview with me. She said she was going to cover the language cafe in general but discovered Esperanto and decided to make it the focus of her story. We talked for about 20 minutes, and I enjoyed it. She also said she'd try to get the story published. That almost certainly means she'd shoot for the widely-read Alligator (which I have decided not to write an editorial column for due to a lack of ideas).

What's next for the Esperanto Club? We're going to have a talk introducing Esperanto to anyone who's interested. But we won't be able to book a room until we're officially approved for this year... whenever that will be.

Here are some free (as in freedom) fonts listed by license and where to download them.

More and more people are using Wi-Fi in their homes nowadays. Some people like to share their connection with their neighbors, and that's where sharemywifi.com comes in. It's a geographical listing of Wi-Fi access points that their owners want to share access to.

Finally, we have 3 Controversial Maps.

Last night, as I was trying to go to bed, my heart was racing. I wasn't sure why.

There could have been a lot of reasons. It might have been the cheeseburger, french fries, cookie, brownie, and Gatorade I had for dinner. It might have been that my roommate was getting sick and I was trying to fight it off. It might have been that somebody took the dry erase board off my door and chucked it at the bike rack outside. Who would do such a thing? I suspected everyone at first. I thought someone might have something against me, but the consensus around here is that it was a random act of drunkenness by a stranger.

It might have been things in the future, too. I was anxious about having to give an impromptu speech in my tech writing/speech class. I would have to choose one of three topics presented to me, and I would have three minutes to come up with a three-minute speech. I was also nervous about teaching people simple phrases in Esperanto, a language I'm not entirely fluent in. (Both of those things are tomorrow, by the way.)

I felt like a wreck. Actually, I just felt really awake. I lay in bed for an hour or two, trying to figure out how to calm my nerves. I got up for a drink of water. I played the guitar a little. Finally, I decided to go out to the common room and hang out there till I got tired. I was chatting it up for about 45 minutes. Since I had class at the asscrack of dawn, I decided I should finally go back to bed. And when I got there, I didn't feel my heart pounding.

Why did it happen?

Incidentally, the class was my physics lab. I didn't think there was anything worse than having physics lab at 7:25 A.M. on Mondays. But when I got back to my room after the lab, I realized that there was. The fire alarm had gone off right after I left.

I think I'm going to write a column for the student newspaper as I said that I might. I'll send them one, and I guess they'll run it if they like it. Another follow-up from my last post: equal time. Fraternities and sororities do good things. They work toward charitable causes and provide strong friendships for their members.

BugMeNot is a convenient site where you can submit (and look up) login information for sites that require free registration (usually newspapers' web sites that make you register before you can read the articles). Even though BugMeNot does not keep logins for Facebook, Facebook censors mentions of BugMeNot on its site.

Here are 10 mispronunciations that make you sound stupid. Of those, I'm only guilty of mispronouncing "jewelry."

Unfortunately, some people suffer from the delusional belief that photographing buildings from a sidewalk is a crime. Here are the details of just one encounter between a photographer and an irate security guard.

I'm home for Labor Day weekend. In fact, I'm about to go to my friend Nick's house for a barbecue. Will the weather cooperate? Let's hope. It looks like Hurricane Gustav, which is heading for the Gulf Coast, is bringing some clouds our way. And then there's Hanna out there too. Oh yes, it is a good time of year for hurricanes. I believe September 12 is the statistical peak of the Atlantic hurricane season (that is, the day of the year that has seen the most hurricanes since recordkeeping began).

In the spring, I got an Esperanto club started at school. I filed the application at the end of the spring semester, and they were supposed to get back to me when it was approved. They didn't. I asked our faculty advisor, Holly, if she knew what was up. She contacted them, and apparently we were approved. We just need to re-register for the '08-'09 year as all student organizations do.

Holly was by far the best choice for faculty advisor. She's a language teacher (Czech, specifically), and she was very impressed by our initiative in starting an Esperanto club. She was also willing to work to promote our club, and that she has done. She told me she had landed a gig for us at a language fair coming up in a week or two. They're going to have a flyer with some basic phrases in each of the languages that are represented. Apparently, Holly got her to drop Spanish from the flyer in favor of Esperanto.

The phrases in English:

1. Hi, how are you?
2. My name is ____.
3. I speak English.
4. What are you doing tonight?
5. Goodbye.
6. Go Gators!

In Esperanto, with phonetic transcriptions added just for you:

1. Saluton, kiel vi fartas? (sah-LOO-tohn, KEE-el vee FAR-tahs?)
2. Mi nomiĝas ____. (mee noh-MEE-jahs ____.)
3. Mi parolas la anglan. (mee pah-RO-lahs lah AHN-glahn)
4. Kion vi faros ĉi-nokte? (KEE-ohn vee FAR-ohs chee-NOHK-tay?)
5. Ĝis! (jeese!)
6. Ek, Gatoroj! (eck, gah-TOR-oy!)

I'm not sure if I could justifiably shorten "aligatoroj" to "gatoroj," but I wouldn't say it's justifiable in English either. Nicknames are off-limits from logic.

Here's why you should never use an online translator.

From The Consumerist, it's false advertising. This water slide thing looks way bigger on the box than it actually is. See the sad children for comparison.

At 1:00 A.M. on Sunday, September 10, 1995, WTVJ-TV, Miami's NBC affiliate broadcasting on channel 4, and WCIX-TV, the CBS affiliate broadcasting on channel 6, traded channels. At the same time, WCIX changed its call sign to WFOR. Here are videos of the changeover as seen on channel 4 and channel 6.

Prediction: The title of this post will make people mad. Relax, amigos, it's all in good fun.

More metablogging: in my last post, I mentioned that "for reasons that are outside the scope of this entry, my posts from 2003 and 2004 have never been loaded into WordPress." It's a topic I want to go into a little more, so it's the scope of this entry.

Before I moved to WordPress on January 2, 2005, I wasn't using any particular blogging software to blog. I was manually writing posts on the main page, moving old posts to the archives, and adding items to the RSS feed one by one. It got tedious after a while, which is why I made the switch. But I never moved my old posts (except the post of January 1, 2005) to WordPress, where they could each have an individual URL and be tagged and commented on. That left 346 posts from 2003 and 2004 that don't quite fit in with the rest.

The most obvious reason for not adding the Original 346 was the issue of permalinks. They are supposed to be, as the name implies, permanent. Back then, I found it most convenient to use a permalink scheme unlike any known to man. Each monthly archive was on a single page (for example, /archives/200312.html) with each post's "permalink" being specified by a different fragment (the part after the #). The fragment was originally in the numeric format YYYYMMDDHHMM, but I later changed it to dDDHHMM. The letter "d" was added to the beginning because fragments should be specified by unique element IDs, and IDs may not begin with a number. I updated all the old permalinks and the posts that linked to others. Sounds pretty impressive, but it was just a matter of doing search-and-replaces in HTML files.

Anyway, to move the old posts to WordPress, I'd have to change these permalinks a second time, and it seems like the best way to do this would be to do 346 find-and-replaces on the database with PHPMyAdmin, a la these instructions. That doesn't sound too hard. I've done more tedious things. As for redirecting the old links, I wouldn't create hundreds of complex .htaccess rules to redirect old posts to their new permanent (?) URLs, but it would be simple to redirect them to their new monthly archive pages.

Those issues are technical. They can be solved relatively easily. But there's an editorial consideration that arises from technical conditions. WordPress allows you to set a single time zone for your blog. I have it permanently set to Eastern Standard Time, UTC -5. In the pre-WordPress days, things were different. From April 2003 to October 2004, I dated my posts with UTC because I was dumb. This means that I had a different definition of "today" than my environs indicated. I would write a post just after "midnight" describing the events of yesterday, but yesterday was actually that same day because "midnight" was 7:00 P.M. I thought that people in other time zones wouldn't understand EST but would understand their offset from UTC. Yeah, really.

The question remains: should I edit my old posts to reflect my local time? Should I change those old yesterdays to todays and the todays to tomorrows? This could have interesting consequences, such as having posts move from one month to another. It would also throw my old flashback "One year ago, two years ago" links out of whack. But it would make the old posts consistent and less confusing for readers.

There are a few other issues associated with moving the Original 346 to WordPress. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is that I'd have to remove the occasional formatting from post titles (example) as well as the "Plus:" subtitles that I used to use. No big loss there.

If I do move the Original 346, which sounds increasingly likely, I'll probably convert the blog's categories to tags and re-tag each of my posts. Categories are pretty hierarchical, and you tend not to create new ones except once in a great while. Tags are created on the fly and can be for the nonce, although they're most useful if they're used at least a few times. They can touch upon things that would be too trivial to merit creating a category. For example, if I wrote a post about going to a steakhouse with my friends, I could tag the post "friends," "dinner," "steak," the name of the restaurant, and so on. It sure would be interesting to look back on all my old posts that had to do with steak.

From the BBC: How not to do an American accent.

Here's a recipe for chocolate cake in 5 minutes. I haven't tried it. It might be disgusting.

More about Legos: A rare glimpse inside the Lego factory.