Fantasist's Scroll

Okay, this is kind of self-referential, but…

According to this article on AustralianIT, the fine people who make the Opera web browser, are making a blog browser. Sort of an interesting idea, I thought, considering how popular blogs are getting these days.
But, when I read the details it turns out that what they’re doing is incorporating Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, into their web browser so that users can have new items from blog RSS feeds that they subscribe to come in as individual messages in Opera’s mail client, which is packaged with the browser. Which is still not a bad idea. Interesting article, anyway.

(And, yes, this first appeared at my other blog!)

I finished Describing Morphosyntax : A Guide for Field Linguists this week.

I wish I could reccomend it whole-heartily and without reservation, but I just can’t. First, it is a very techinical book. When this book was reccomended to me, it was with the idea of learning various aspects of language so that I could create a more realistic conlang. And, it will do that, I have to admit, but it will help me as a reference book. So, imagine reading a dictionary of linguistic terms with some examples, primarily in languages that you’ve never heard of before. (Well, okay, that part is actually cool. Some of those languages were really interesting!) Not the easiest thing to read.
Second, it reads like a textbook, which, of course, it is. At least, of a sort. The author intended this to be a guide for amatuer linguists in the field trying to save dying languages. And, I’m sure it serves that purpose quite well, if those linguists have a fair amount of linguistic study under their belt already. This is definately not for the first time linguistic reader. I have read several books on linguistics and I still found myself overwhelmed more than once.

So, while it was certainly a challenge for me to get through, I will absolutely refer back to sections of this book while working on conlangs. It really presents information and ideas that no other book on linguistics seems to touch. A little dry at times, but worth the effort.
In short, Describing Morphosyntax is not for the begginer, but the dedicated amatuer linguist or conlanger (conlinguist?).

Now, this strikes me as really interesting.

The estate of author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Arthur Conan Doyle went up for sale recently. Mainly it was a lot of his story notes and personal papers. For a biographer, or publisher, it could be a really big deal to get, but it’s a fairly specialized area of interest.
What really struck me about the article on MSNBC was the “mysterious death” of one of the people associated with the sale. Apparently, he was quite an afficiando of all things Conan Doyle, and wanted the papers to stay together and available to the public for research. He was found strangled and surrounded by stuffed animals. The death, however, was ruled a suicide. Sounds like a Sherlockian mystery if I ever heard one!

A different kind of fun…

Once I remember reading that William Gibson said that he didn’t need to make up science-fiction, he just had to describe down-town Tokyo, or something to that effect. Well, imagine my excitement then, when I found this Tokyo MoBlog! (A moblog, by the way, is a MObile weBLOG, get it?) So, here’s a whole bunch of inspiration for science-ficiton: random pictures of Tokyo.

All joking aside, some of these are really lovely pictures of a city that I may never visit. Tokyo, and Japan, is as close to an alien society as a Westerner like me can get in our lifetime. It’s as alien to me as anything in Star Wars, but it’s right here on Earth.

Anyway, have fun with the pictures….

Desgined to kill it’s own kind…

According to this article on Wired News, two scientists have engineered a virus that attacks HIV and keeps it from becoming AIDS. It’s still in the test stages, but it works in a petri dish. Their next step is animal testing.
Apparently, they came up with this nasty, little bug, or anti-bug, with a computer simulation. Though, I have to admit, that seems like an enourmous simplification. Anyway, it’s an interesting development in science and medicine. Imagine a series of designer “killer” virii designed to hunt down other “bad” virii. Think of what that kind of technology could do in the Third World.
But, the scientists who came up with this have already thought of the potential down-side, too. Imagine what this technology would do for the military. Or, worse, terrorists. The implications are, well, terrifying.

On the bright side, though, think of all the science-fiction plots!

Frankly, it doesn’t look good.

First of all, there was the brouhaha about pricing. Then, there was the whole issue of licenseing. Now, frankly, it’s a matter of simple existance.
People kept posting on their blogs to go look at this interview with Ben and Mena Trott, because it would explain so much about what’s happening with MovableType. Well, it did, at least to me:

Mena Trott: IT’s not going to scale. Movable Type will have to cease to exist in terms of development because it doesn’t pay its operational costs. And it will be interesting.

Hmm, that pretty well says it all, doesn’t it? Yes, that was actually Mena Trott in the aforementioned interview. Time to find a new blog system!