A strangely hypnotic video of the Gecko engine (the one behind Firefox) rendering a Wikipedia page. It’s far more complicated and dynamic than I would have imagined from watching pages load in a browser normally.
CamelCase
Compound words which have no spaces but capital letters within the word (common in software and website names like MySpace) are said to be in CamelCase, due to the ‘hump’ in the middle caused by the capital. There’s plenty of interesting history and usage of this case in the linked Wikipedia article. I can’t imagine that it’s going to be that long before a word in this case gets into the OED (assuming there’s not one there already), and I look forward to reading angry letters written by Daily Mail readers bemoaning the state of the language on the day this happens.
I have a pet theory (for which I happily offer no evidence whatsoever) that the names of people and their usernames will begin to merge in the next century or so as the Internet becomes more and more hard-wired into daily life: as such, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing names in CamelCase before too long, such as RichardHolden (or, as my first child will be called, LOLHolden). In all honesty, I can’t imagine how this wouldn’t happen.
The worst human ever
This Nazi racist paedophile terrorist may well be the worst human there has ever been. I imagine he also listens to music on his mobile phone loudly on the bus. The bastard.
Wait, Leeds has a CTU? When did they become real things?
Link [via Owen]
The evolution of English
Some interesting speculation on what might happen to the English language in a world where native speakers only total 15% of those who use it:
English will become more like Chinese in other ways… Some grammatical appendages unique to English (such as adding do or did to questions) will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored. Expect to be asked: “How many informations can your flash drive hold?”
I do hope that this will create make the new edition of the OED into an even bigger project. That would be just great.
At least on the Internet it’s only *photos* of cats
Entertainment was different in the eighteenth century:
How to make Sport with a Cat… Get a Cat and put her Head betwixt your Thighs, and hold her four Feet fast in one Hand, and with the other Hand hold up her Tail near the Fire, and she’ll piss such abundance, that she’ll quite quench the same.
There’ll be no LOLs from that cat. A quote from a c1751 publication called Hocus Pocus by John White, a ‘Lover of Art and Ingenuity’. A self-description which definitely seems apt.