Anthology of Ideas

It started with a post on Aardvarchaeology which was then linked by Pharyngula and responded to with a post on Uncertain Principles. Martin Rundkvist, of Aardvarchaeology, declares that US Politics Have No Left Wing which was quickly responded to by Chad Orzel, of Uncertain Prinicples, who retorted that it could just as easily said that European Politics Have No Right Wing. I agree with their base statements: Europe is left of America which is right of Europe, Europeans and Americans both got where they are through trial and error, and that many American politicians are very right-wing, but…To argue that higher taxes are fundamentally better than lower ones, and that certain political positions are better than others, and that religious politicians — regardless of how they publicly use their religion — are inherently inferior to their counterparts is a little too broad for my tastes.

Wow, I just felt a stampede of people from Digg over that one, guess I’ll be able to retire soon. Nah, I wish. Actually I expect that my readership will drop a little bit every Thursday, but for the rest of you, I hope you will enjoy a delightful change of pace — even if every post doesn’t enthrall you in its grasp. We will be floating around romantic and enlightenment literature from both sides of the Atlantic with stops at Whitman, Poe, Wordsworth, Byron and more.

The following was sent to me by a friend, the original source is unknown, and google wasn’t much of a help. The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as ‘Euro-English’.

The best of my feeds today. Are Bloggers and Blogs Ruining the English Language? Anyone who has had to read Shakespeare in high school knows that the English language is organic. As such, it changes over the decades and centuries. Many words fall into disuse and many new words are added. Back in the late 1980s, researchers suggested that the average adult in North America knew had a vocabulary of at least 100,000 words.

Oh yay…yippee…It seems that lately most everything that I post — especially posts about WordPress — are being auto-scraped and ending up displayed in “feed-reader” websites that are just the next generation of splogs. So what am I doing about it to protect my WordPress blog? Simple. I’m adding more links to my past posts. The sites claim that they aren’t doing anything wrong, and I do have to give their arguments credit, so here is the catch: if they remove the links, then they are modifying my content and aren’t “just another feedreader”, so I can report them, if they leave them in, I can get a little more traffic and “google juice” — although the later is falling in importance and relevancy —, or if they notice this post and remove my site from their list, I get what I really want.

On my home page and in my archives, I use a custom category template to display asides and news articles. This is very easy to do and it only takes a couple seconds of work to create custom category templates in any WordPress theme. The first step is to add the following to your current theme’s index.php loop after the line that looks like <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>, but before any other code.