May 12, 2012 @ 9:41 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and culture « previous post | next post » Yesterday, I discussed Joan Acocella's strange misreading of two essays introducing the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary ("Rules and 'rules'", 5/11/2012). John Rickford wrote that "the patterns of variation and change … are regular rather than random, governed by unconscious, language-internal rules and restrictions" — but Ms. Acocella took this defense of "vernaculars that are commonly regarded as lacking rules", from a scholar known for his defense of "Ebonics", as a stalwart affirmation of prescriptive standards. Steven Pinker tried to explain how false beliefs about standard usage, like No Split Verbs or No Final Prepositions, can become widespread — but Ms. ... Continue reading →

Google co-founder Sergey Brin sports augmented reality glasses at a charity event yesterday. April 4, 2012 12:13 PM PDT Photo by: Thomas Hawk | Caption by: James Martin Continue reading →

By David H. Freedman, a journalist who’s contributed to many magazines, including DISCOVER, where he writes the Impatient Futurist column. His latest book, Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—and How to Know When Not to Trust Them, came out in 2010. Find him on Twitter at @dhfreedman. Computer glasses have arrived, or are about to. Google has released some advance information about its Project Glass, which essentially embeds smartphone-like capabilities, including a video display, into eyeglasses. A video put out by the company suggests we’ll be able to walk down the street—and, we can extrapolate, distractedly walk right into the street, or drive down the street—while watching and listening to video chats, catching up on social networks (including Google+, of course), and getting turn-by-turn directions ... Continue reading →

Which do you see? http://t.co/IrrOkEue Continue reading →

Queens to Get its First Brewery in Decades Updated 39 mins ago SingleCut brewery is scheduled to open in Astoria this fall (SingleCut Beersmiths) ASTORIA — Watch out Brooklyn Brewery — Queens is getting a brew house of its own for the first time since the 1950s, sources said.SingleCut Beersmiths, scheduled to open this fall at at 19-33 37th St., will be the first brewery in Queens for decades, said Rich Buceta, the company’s president and head brewer, bringing hoppy goodness back to the borough.Several breweries dotted Ridgewood and College Point before Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 until 1933, when a constitutional amendment reversed the ban, according to Richard Hourahan, the collections manager at the Queens Historical Society."There were at least half a dozen breweries ... Continue reading →