Pages from the interwebs

My feed reader has been playing up a little of late. Not really sure why, but it's annoying as I'm missing the latest instalments of my favourite bloggers. In other news, I'm not feeling too great or blogworthy at the moment, so this entry is just going to be a few links. So, without further ado, let's begin.

Wendi Momen recently returned from a trip to the Baha'i World Centre. The Led Zeppelin reference makes me smile.

Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman explains that authoritarian rationalism is not conservatism, especially in relation to linguistic prescriptivism. Wow, that sounds really boring. It's not, honest! Language Log frequently deals with the issue of prescriptivism, and what makes a certain grammar choice "right" or "wrong", and this article is both a good overview and a good discussion of some of the issues. Is "correctness" determined by populist rule, or, in Liberman's words, "the authority of a "rule" invented by a self-appointed expert, who has concluded that the world would be a better place if it were to be run according his prescriptions"? I hope you can determine from his tone on which side he (and the vast majority of today's linguists) stands.

Also at Language Log, Geoff Pullum ponders why the blog is banned in Iran. Being illegal in certain countries of the world does give the blog a certain punk-rock appeal that most contemporary linguistics lacks. The fact that Geoff Pullum spent a good number of years as a rock musician just makes it all the sweeter.

I recently discovered Vye Computers, and their new mini-v s37. I wants. (Maybe for extra geek points I should have said "do want", in a reference to badly-subtitled Chinese bootlegs of Return of the Sith?)

On the subject of small cool gadgets, the Nokia N800 looks pretty cool, especially because it runs Linux and is very customisable.

I'm not the only one who's been collecting links. Recently at Social Science++ there's a great post with a compilation of all you need to know on the race and IQ debate. (Philipe Copeland, over at Bahá'í Thought and Black America, has already given his thoughts on this.)

I also feel an urge to plug Desktop Tower Defence, a fun little tower defence flash game.