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Archive for the ‘Linguistics’ Category

This unique YouTube video, by Candy Spilner and Allan Rubin, captures some interesting aspects of epistemology, conversation, language, art and music. The video may seem pointless, even stupid — at first glance.

Look closer. Observe carefully.

It depicts the babbling bubbleheads who (having no deep understanding of the shortness and fragility of life) continue talking about nothing important — until suddenly (pop)  — life is over.

When was the last time you had a deep conversation about the meaning (and purpose) of life — with someone you love? Pop! Too late — your life is over. Babble, babble, babble … bloop! It mocks and ridicules post-modern foolishness, babbling bloggers, pontificating political pundits, promise-breaking politicians, TV talking-heads, shameless gossiping twitter-heads, and the continuing cacophony of all our careless conversations. In the babbling bubbleheads we see with penetrating perception – a reflection of ourselves.

γέγραπται γάρ· ἀπολῶ τὴν σοφίαν τῶν σοφῶν, καὶ τὴν σύνεσιν τῶν συνετῶν ἀθετήσω.

I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning will I bring to nought.

γεγραπται γαρ απολω την σοφιαν των σοφων και την συνεσιν των συνετων αθετησω.

I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE,
AND THE CLEVERNESS OF THE CLEVER, I WILL SET ASIDE.

Works of John Locke - page. 81 - Quoting the prophet Isaiah

לָכֵן, הִנְנִי יוֹסִף לְהַפְלִיא אֶת-הָעָם-הַזֶּה–הַפְלֵא וָפֶלֶא; וְאָבְדָה חָכְמַת חֲכָמָיו, וּבִינַת נְבֹנָיו תִּסְתַּתָּר

Joe McGlynn from CodeGear wrote a great article for Dr. Dobbs Journal.

He lists 10 reasons to love Ruby on Rails. The first reason really resonated with me since I’m a systems architect, and I understand the dangers of over-architecting solutions

“1. Many line-of-business applications do not require over-architected, complex and costly software systems to operate. Over-engineering applications increases costs, wastes time and dilutes competitive advantage. Rapidly-constructed software applications that deliver essential functionality with good scalability and low maintenance costs are easily achievable using Ruby and the RoR framework.”

Check out all 10 reasons in the DDJ article.

Seattle based podcast discovery and management service Pluggd is unveiling a major new feature at DEMO this weekend that combines speech recognition and semantic analysis to let users search for and skip to parts of an audio file that are related to topics of interest to them. It