• Thou Shalt Not Be Colloquial: why the King James Bible endures (New York Times)
• Sadat Shami: “Awesome overview of the New York Times’ R&D Lab’s Project Cascade – a tool to explore the life stories in social spaces” (Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard)
• @StartupJesus: “Googling ‘Torture + Friday’ used to return hits about Good Friday, my day of torture on the cross. Now you just get hits for Rebecca Black.”
• My heart goes out to the victims of the tornadoes in the South. What a horrible disaster. redcross.org

• Sadat Shami: “Giving up tenure… and getting happiness in return? Reflections from someone who did” (The Scientist via Nick Diakopoulos)
• I think I’ll get a standing desk (New York Times)
• Jeffrey Bigham: “How languages may have diffused from Africa, modeling phonemes” (New York Times)
• Boris Smus: “Allow me to explain sorting algorithms through interpretive dance” (YouTube via Pamela Fox)
• This collaboration of cellist Yo-Yo Ma and street dancer Lil Buck is amazing (YouTube)
• Looks like the folks at Red Hat are creating their own JVM language called Ceylon (Ars Technica)
• Sandra Kogan: “Walmart’s $1.85 billion mistake. They relied on what customers said in a survey versus what they actually do.” (Phil Terry)
• Dilbert creator Scott Adams: Forget art history and calculus. Most students need to learn how to run a business. (Wall Street Journal)
• Mugizi Rwebangira: “How to fool yourself into working harder” (Dextronet)
• Impressed by Ovi Maps 3D. Besides buildings, trees and overpasses in suburban Silicon Valley are also 3D.
• Republicans paying $575 an hour to defend Defense of Marriage Act (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Sadat Shami: “Google Map Maker allows you to add your local knowledge to a map [currently for the United States only]”
• Kayur Patel: “1998 Onion article on streaming video. It’s more interesting than funny in today’s Netflix age.”
• Frog Design and design innovation in China (Forbes via James Landay)
• Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice? (St. Petersburg Times via Lynn Wu)
• John Regehr: “‘Facts have no meaning on the Internet.’ —Thomas Jefferson”
• Boyce Avenue not only covered Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” they subtly changed some of the lyrics: YouTube video
• Intrigued by Hyde, a static website generator in Python and Django by Lakshmi Vyas. Boris Smus switched his blog to it.
• xkcd: Seismic Waves
• Mike Lee: “So busy bitching about iPhone location logs I forgot to check in on Foursquare”
• The joy of mapping a 2D image on to a 3D terrain model (The Map Room)
• Cities build airport cities — ‘aerotropolises’ — for growth (USA Today via Sara Galligan)
• Sadat Shami: “BO.LT is a web-based tool that enables people to quickly, without code, remix the content presented on a website” (Huffington Post)
• Madhu Prabaker: “Interesting new approach to metered parking in San Francisco. sfpark.org”
• Sadat Shami: “Recommendation service Hunch revisits the Mac vs. PC debate with this infographic based on their users”
• The Onion: ‘The Economist’ To Halt Production For Month To Let Readers Catch Up

You may have heard of Engrish.com, which showcases the bizarre ways English is often used to “look cool” in Japan and China. Well, two can play that game: Tian Tang was inspired by Engrish to set up Hanzi Smatter, which is dedicated to the bizarre ways Chinese characters are used to look cool in Western culture (especially tattoos, heh heh).

In English, word order is really important. Consider the following:

• I don't really like Celine Dion.
• I really don't like Celine Dion.

Personally, I agree with the latter. (Substituting "Michael Bolton" doesn't change this.)

Are the Winter Olympics being held in Turin or Torino? Yes. Different media outlets are using different conventions: the Chronicle says “Turin,” while NBC and CBS Radio say “Torino.”

I find “Torino” to be a little jarring. We don’t usually use the local name for a city if it has a different English name: we don’t say Firenze or Köln or Moskva. Swedes don’t expect us to say “Göteborg” (pronounced something like yohtuhboree) instead of Gothenburg. Indeed, there was no reason to switch from Peking to Beijing, except that the Chinese government wanted us to (although I admit I like “Beijing” better).

And it turns out there’s another wrinkle to Turin’s name. According to Wikipedia, the area around Turin speaks not only Italian but another Romance language called Piedmontese. And in that language, Turin is called… Turin.

Even though the Japanese are polite and want to help you, it can be hard to communicate with them because their English is quite bad. Now, I don’t expect the entire country to be fluent in a foreign language. But, for example, Yodobashi Camera is a gigantic Japanese electronics store that makes Fry’s Electronics look like Radio Shack. They have announcements in English and Spanish, so they know they attract visitors from all over. But we were hard pressed to find one service person who could speak decent English in a store with six floors.

Taiwan isn’t that great either, but my Mandarin helped me out, so I didn’t notice it as much. In Hong Kong, you can get by in English without much problem — I consider it the world’s largest “Chinatown.”

By the way, before the trip, I thought I would be most comfortable in Japan and least comfortable in Taiwan, from a language standpoint, because I’m not “supposed to know” Japanese and I’m “supposed to know” Chinese. But it didn’t end up that way. I had failed to learn even the simplest words in Japanese, like “sorry,” “excuse me,” and “where is the…?” And since I am Asian, the Japanese would expect me to be able to say something, not my white friend Matt, who did more of the talking.

Meanwhile, in Taiwan, my Mandarin helped me out greatly, even though it’s very rudimentary and rusty. In fact, I was praised twice on the same day for my Chinese. It must have been my pronunciation, because they complemented me after they saw me forget very simple words (like “pork”). And I could finally communicate somewhat with my uncles and aunts, most of whom can’t speak English well. They all said how my Chinese had improved over the last time I was there (in 1997), and even my dad said it was better. If I were there for a few months, I’m sure it would get that much better. But I’d still watch CNN or the Discovery Channel in Taiwan anyway…

New York Times: Classes in Chinese Grow as the Language Rides a Wave of Popularity

With encouragement from the Chinese and American governments, schools across the United States are expanding their language offerings to include Chinese, the world’s most spoken tongue, not to mention one of its most difficult to learn.

Nothing deep here, just some stuff that interests me:

• The Golden Ratio: The Story of Φ, the World’s Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio. An entertaining account of the golden ratio, the author spends some time deflating the myths surrounding it, and then talks about its true significance and beauty.
• Language Visible (hardcover), aka Letter Perfect (paperback), by David Sacks. How did V and W develop from U? Why is tire spelled with a y in the UK? Did you know ye as in ye olde was actually pronounced “the”? Why does English have C, K, and Q when only one of these letters would have been enough? David Sacks does a wonderful job unraveling these and other mysteries of the English language and alphabet.
• Subway Style: 100 Years of Architecture & Design in the New York City Subway by the New York Transit Museum. Anyone who knows me knows this is my type of book: a richly illustrated design history of New York’s subway system that covers just about everything, including the stations, the trains, lighting, metalwork, signage, and maps. And not only transit geeks need apply: anyone with an interest in design and architecture will enjoy this book.
• America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction by the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Formatted in the style of an elementary school textbook, this is the funniest civics and history lesson since Dave Barry Slept Here. What a riot! Not for the easily offended.

I don’t remember how I came across this, but… Singaporean English, or “Singlish,” has various particles derived from Chinese that are sprinkled throughout conversation, like, “You see my husband’s not at home lah,” or “There’s something here for everyone lah.” Even many Singaporeans can’t explain when they use it, but Mr Brown makes a valiant attempt. The English language is more diverse and complicated than I imagined.