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The emoji picker dialog that Windows includes (use Windows + . to access it) not only allows you to insert emoji and smileys with relative ease, but also does GIFs. I find this distracting, and on top of that these are provided by an external service that the tool connects to automatically and without my consent.

There is no option to disable ( Read more... )

Just recently I noticed that while there are words such as elsewhere, anderswo and annarsstaðar, we don't seem to have the equivalents for other things one could want to talk about using appropriate adverbs, such as time, manner, reason and so on. Put more simply, there is no elsewhen, elsehow, elsewhy and so on; we have to resort to somewhat ( Read more... )

An interesting excerpt from an interview with Leigh Ann Henion about her new book, Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark, in the Christian Science Monitor:

An idea that intrigued me was this notion that people ask bigger questions in the dark. Why is that?

Consider the conversations that take place ( Read more... )

Today I learned that words that have different, opposite meanings are called contronyms (thanks Merriam-Webster). The example that MW give is sanction; other examples, from Wikipedia, include to clip (which can indicate both removal and fastening) and oversight. (Wikipedia actually lists a bunch more, several of which I find questionable, or even ( Read more... )

Here's another brief thought. It's sometimes asked why it's so difficult to learn a new language (even though children, all children, are really good at it ( Read more... )

A while ago I met a flying fox who had raised by humans after being rejected by both her mother and by the group of flying foxes at the zoo where she was born ( Read more... )

As seen/discussed on one of the several R mailing lists:

R version 4.4.1 (2024-06-14 ucrt) -- "Race for Your Life"
Copyright (C) 2024 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
[...]

> atan(1i)
[1] 0+Infi
> atan(1i)*2
[1] NaN+Infi

Oops. The reason for this is that apparently, when multiplying (or dividing) a complex number by a real number ( Read more... )

I was just looking at Albert's The World’s Most Difficult Constitution to Amend? (published in the California Law Review in 2005, and available in a more convenient form here). This states, at the very beginning of section I:

There have been roughly 12,000 attempts to amend the United States Constitution since its creation 235 years ago ( Read more... )