oldbloke's mutterings

http://www.silversurfer.org.uk/awards.html

Can you think of anybody over 50 who's had a big impact on the nation's computer use?

How about me, antivirusman for about 50000 people here? Just to demonstrate how stupid it all is

Or perhaps the people who invented the damn things, who are all over 50 (or dead) ?

The whole concept is deeply flawed... and I've mailed them to say so.

Found in Zen's monthly newsletter, and copied here chiefly so I don't forget to tell k425 about it. Or, rather, so that I don't have to remember to...

'Far From the Madding Gerund' is a collection of articles, written by two professional linguists and posted on their Web site, the Language Log. The theme of the site is grammar and correctness in English. They bewail the abandonment of grammar teaching in American schools (a view echoed in the UK), in particular being alarmed at errors of grammar in official examiners' answers to recent SAT practice questions. They debunk the popular notion that Eskimos have 80, or 150, or more words for types of snow, and there's a wonderful deconstruction of the first few paragraphs of that dreadfully written book, The Da Vinci Code. In the section 'Learn your grammar', an article on misplaced modifiers includes this example quoted in the Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage: "Although widely used by the men, Bashilange women were rarely allowed to smoke cannabis". The book, which borrows its title from a blog reader's post, is an example of what looks like a trend: the conversion of blogs into books, or blooks. Every article is still available on the Language Log. So why would anyone pay money for what they can read online for free? Only the publisher’s sales figures may ultimately answer that question, but it does suggest that the no-batteries-required, go-anywhere format of the printed book still has some life left in it.
http://www.languagelog.com