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Marc Andreessen’s New York Times Deathwatch

I love The New York Times, but like the rest of the newspaper industry it’s being decimated by the Internet. Marc Andreessen has a great post* outlining just how badly things are going for them.

He’s at his scariest and funniest when he lists the members of the Time‘s board, on which, he points out, not a single Internet luminary sits.

The Times has a great web site, but they need to transition from being a newspaper company with a web site, to being an Internet-focused new media company, one that treats their newspaper business like the legacy app it is. To make that transition they need people who’ve led successful Internet companies in senior management and on the board.

Not being an Internet luminary I don’t have any brilliant ideas, but one thing they could do is significantly beef up their online classifieds for jobs and real estate, two specialized areas unlikely to be completely devoured by Craigslist.

* On his consistently fantastic blog. Who knew Andreeseen was such a great writer?

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Punctuational Outburst

A friend in academe sent me a paper on the evolution of language, from this month’s Science. I’m reposting it here, so you can read it for free. Academic journals are a racket.

Even free, I’m not sure you want to bother. “Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts” is boring and largely self-evident*. But mostly just boring: If real language was as dry and devoid of life as most academics make it, I’d give it up. I’d stop reading, stop talking, and just grunt.

The authors lead with an implied claim that American English emerged abruptly as a language when Noah Webster introduced his first dictionary. You could say that publishing a dictionary is a sign that a language has emerged–that dictionaries are symptoms of language. But they insinuate that Webster published his dictionary and, ipso facto, the American Language was created. I can’t imagine the authors actually believe this, but it’s how their forced analogy comes out.

They then present the thesis that, basically, language evolves more rapidly during times of social upheaval. Sure, but how did they discover this? It was “inferred from vocabulary data,” and in a footnote they say their “materials and methods are available on Science Online.” Their methods would have been more interesting to me than their conclusions, and I wish they’d included at least a precis of them in the paper*.

I have no idea of the actual merit of “Punctuational Bursts.” I am, clearly, totally ignorant when it comes to, among other things, linguistics, and in general the academic side of language and words. But wadding through academic writing like this makes me want to cry tears of vomit. Can anyone recommend an intro to or overview of linguistics that’s actually pleasant to read?

* UPDATE: Maybe I was a little gassy or something when I wrote this. I just reread the paper, and yes, it’s rather dry, but I think that’s almost a requirement to get published in a fancy journal like Science. And I wasn’t previously aware of some of the limits imposed by them. See the comments for a response from one of the authors, and yet another lame, arm-flapping mea culpa from yours truly. Note to self: work on impulse control.

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Who Gives a F*** About An Oxford Comma?

That’s the question posed by New York band Vampire Weekend in a song of the same name, and posed in turn to a bunch of wordie types by Michael Hogan of Vanity Fair.

The panel included Grant Barrett of Double-Tongued (answer: “a little bit”), V.F.’s own copy editor, Peter Devine (“a modest-size fuck”), and David Rose, a V.F. writer and actual Oxford grad. Perhaps not coincidentally, Rose was vociferous, ardent even, in the comma’s defense, professing to also give “a damn and a bean.”

Vampire Weekend’s lead singer, Ezra Koenig, says “the song is more about not giving a fuck than about Oxford commas.” But Ezra, it’s just so rare that anyone outside of our tiny world even knows what an Oxford comma is. Yours is almost certainly the first song ever to mention it. Even if you are using it as a metaphor for small-minded failure to see the forest, please, let us have this little moment.

Vampire Weekend is having an extended moment, and their new record is great, laced with Afro-pop and ska beats, twinkling guitar and piano parts, and lyrics that are literate without being all Professor Von Schmartzenpanz about it. The band themselves claim to be “specialists in the following styles: ‘Cape Code Kwassa Kwassa’, ‘Upper West Side Soweto’, ‘Campus’, and ‘Oxford Comma Riddim.'”

Fred Wilson, blogging about their record release show last night at the Bowery Ballroom (funny that they’re just getting around to releasing a CD), has posted an MP3 of “Who Gives a Fuck About An Oxford Comma.” I don’t want to hotlink him, but it’s worth heading over for a listen.

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Loose Climate Change

Bill Safire, my nemesis, writes about change in his most recent On Language column. He leads with an overview of politician’s perpetual calls for it, from Dewey in ’48 through Obama (“Change We Can Believe In”) and Romney (“Change Begins With Us”) seeming to almost quote each other.

He then heads for shakier ground with the term “global warming” and how it is being slowly supplanted by the phrase “climate change.” He speculates it may be a desire to be “less judgmental,” then decides it’s part of the inexorable march (or ensorcelling, as he puts it) of “change.”

In fact there is a scientific basis to the shift. According to Dr. Kristina A. Dahl, a scientist at Rutgers’ Climate and Environmental Change Initiative (and my wife), on average global temperatures are indeed warming, and fast. But “on average” is the key, since conditions in a given place can change in a number of ways: changes in temperature (almost always upward), but also in precipitation, storm patterns, or conceivably, in some areas, cooling (though the emerging consensus, she says, is that there is so much CO2 in the atmosphere that Europe and the Northeastern U.S. won’t cool much, if at all, even if thermohaline circulation shuts down. There will be no Day After Tomorrow). Safire finds citations for both “global warming” and “climate change” at least as far back as 1957. The recognition of other types of related climate change in addition to warming led to the related coinage global weirding in 2002.

So the use of “climate change” is preferred by scientists to “global warming” because it is more accurate. This is born out anecdotally by job searches for each phrase. A search for “global warming” generally returns activist and advocacy-type jobs, which often make scientists shudder. “Climate change” tends to return jobs of a more technical or scientific bent, fields where technical accuracy is more valued.

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Donald Rumsfeld: "Pods are there"

UPDATE, 2/21/08: I was sent the audio of this speech, and Rumsfeld does not say “pods,” he clearly says “blogs.” My apology for the error. The point about lumping email and talk radio still stands.

After lying low for a while America’s premier linguist is back. Here he is, as quoted by Sharon Weinberger of Wired’s defense blog, Danger Room, speaking at a conference on network centric warfare:

“There are multiple channels for information . . . The Internet is there, pods are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there.”

Yes, the pods! Seed pods, perhaps. Connected by a series of tubes, no doubt. Lumping talk radio together with email, all I can think of that unites these things is that they transmit words, and require electricity. By that measure we might as well throw in intercoms and bullhorns. All of this makes more sense when you remember it’s coming from a 75 year old man who apparently doesn’t have an email address.

The quote is part of a talk in which Rumsfeld proposes a successor to the U.S. Information Agency (now part of the State Department) and the ill-fated (and ominously named) Office of Strategic Influence. The full Wired post is worth reading.

This one is making the rounds; perhaps my favorite commentary so far is by Spencer Ackerman of the recently-launched Washington Independent.

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New York, What Are You Smoking?

An item in today’s NYTimes City Room blog, on a proposal to tax illegal drugs, makes parenthetical mention of an earlier story on the official New York State misspelling of pot. In New York you get busted for smoking marihuana, not marijuana.

In the earlier story, former High Times editor Steve Bloom speculates the odd spelling is because “someone just spelled it wrong, and it stuck.” The ‘h’ spelling, though, appears to be common in American jurisprudence. An early anti-drug law is titled the “1937 Marihuana Tax Act,” and to stay consistent with that law, it is often so-spelled in modern laws relating to marijuana, according to Wikipedia.

Perhaps it’s a vestige of a time when Americans were even less aware of non-English spelling and pronunciation (in this instance, the Spanish pronunciation of ‘j’ as a breathy ‘hw,’ as in ‘juanita’) than they are now. If you can imagine that even being possible.

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Incubus, the first movie in… Shatneranto? Shasperanto?

Have you ever wondered what spoken Esperanto sounds like? Have you ever wondered what it sounds like spoken by Bill Shatner, in an expressionistic black and white fantasia of an arthouse horror movie?

Of course you have, so you need to see Incubus, made in 1965 by Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens and written entirely in Esperanto. The plot is heavy handed in a moralistic, Bergmanesque sort of way–it’s plainly inspired by The Seventh Seal. But the cinematography was done by Conrad L. Hall, who later went on to win best cinematography Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, American Beauty, and Road to Perdition, and many of the shots are disarmingly beautiful.

The acting isn’t too bad either. While his later tendency to overact is sometimes apparent, young pre-Star Trek Shatner is, dare I say, rather dashing.