I hate scrabble, but....

I like Clockwords! Found on Dictionary.com.





(No-one's paying me to say this. I am not a spambot.)

Perverting the course of poetry

"Let mit though hought lips com. If to rosy wheigh his ithought looks, But on heigh rosy looks, not is Adminders not is compests. Loveration th hought beark Thaken me mark Thakend wan ime's this neve removents. Loverief thought mar shat lov...ers ben."

"Let me no! it alters with his be edge of doom. If true marriage of doom. If though rosy lips and weeks, Or bending sickle's fool, the error and weeks, Or bends Admit is bends with his not with the star to remove alteration finds Admit although his thour"

- versions of Sonnet 116 via the Travesty Generator!

The Generator allows you to set the "travesty level" low, so there are only small changes, or high, so the words themselves are broken up. The second one was somewhere in the middle. I like the way the first one almost reads like dialect or archaic English - it looks like it makes sense if only you can figure it out! Like Robert Burns or Chaucer or something.

Rumour has it that They Might Be Giants and the Travesty Generator are jointly responsible for "Millennium hand and shrimp" in Terry Pratchett's Diskworld books.

Apologies to those who read this already when I posted it on Facebook!

Some geek humour

If you thought academic papers were required to be dry and humourless, try this neatly self-referential piece on rhythm in language from Cognition. For best effect, read it aloud. Thanks to RH for the link!

And if you liked that, you might also like the classic self-referential story This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself by David Moser.

And if you want something shorter, I love this limerick, courtesy of Wikipedia's Metajokes page:

There once was an X from place B,
That satisfied predicate P,
He or she did thing A,
In an adjective way,
Resulting in circumstance C.

That's the spirit!

'When the Times of London reported in 1837 on two University of Paris law profs dueling with swords, the dispute wasn't over the fine points of the Napoleonic Code. It was over the point-virgule: the semicolon. "The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm," noted the Times. "His adversary maintained that it should be a colon."'

Read more about these dangerous semicolons in this great story on Slate. Thanks to Jana for the link.

Dance dialects

Bees dance to tell each other where to find nectar. The dance is a coded representation of distance and direction, but not all bees do it in the same way: geographically separated populations of bees have slightly different dances.

Reasearchers in China have found that with practice, bees can learn to interpret the dances of foreign bees. Read the full story here.