December 30, 2010
Posted by William
Julian Barnes has been a favorite author of mine since I borrowed stole Metroland from my friend Mark last winter. Reading Barnes makes me wish I knew some French, since he drops sentences, phrases, and occasionally passages of it, sans translation, into everything he writes, or at least everything of his that I’ve read. But [...]
December 21, 2010
Posted by William
December 17, 2010
Posted by William
Google’s new toy, ngrams, graphs the relative frequency of words and phrases occurring in books published over an arbitrary time period from 1500 to 2008. Let’s go. (All search the English Fiction corpus from 1908 to 2008 except the last, which searches American English, 1858-2008.) shot through,stippled,dappled,limpid,limned ashamed,abused,forgotten,determined i love you she cried,i love you [...]
December 10, 2010
Posted by William
Congrats to my friend Mark Polanzak, who won the 2010 Pint and Pen Contest. The contest rules: Type up (and print out if you must) a story that includes the words PINT, PEN, BUKOWSKI and HARPOON. Entries must be typed, in reverence to the brilliant Charles Bukowski. The word count must be between 500 and [...]
December 5, 2010
Posted by William
In my old dog, new tricks post, I mentioned that, though I used to blog, what you’re reading now represents my first use of WordPress. Was it hard to set up? No. It doesn’t hurt that I have a computer science background, including an undergrad degree in the field. Of course, when I was in [...]
