“On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.” — The words of a well-known adage dating back to a New Yorker cartoon from 1993 have been interpreted and re-interpreted, acting over the years as a starting point for debates on privacy and online anonymity. In Japan, a country wit...

The controversy caused by Georgia's Eurovision Song Contest entry seems to be over (or, depending on one's perspective, has reached its climax), now that Georgia has decided not to take part in this year's event in Moscow, following the European Broadcasting Union's demand that the l...

I'm currently setting up a new Hibernate project and finally getting around to trying out JPA annotations instead of using any Hibernate configuration or mapping files-- what the hell took me so long!!??! Anyhow, among the many gotchas I came across, one was how to deal with using Interfaces with Hi...

With the community-driven Translations effort leading to availability in dozens of languages, Facebook has already done a phenomenal job at ensuring that their popular social network continues its viral-like spread across the globe. Today Facebook’s map is expanding even more by making the sit...

It is no new theory that language evolves and that trapping changes in word meaning and word association lies at the heart of the phraseology employed by SEO firms to help target a website’s audience. But what’s more important in some respects are the bursts of attention that often precede chang...

"... who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship." Camille Paglia wants heads to roll: Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing ...

Scientific American Mind takes a look at the complex idea of embedded metaphors - the idea that many of our concepts are determined by the physicality of our bodies. This is not a new idea - George Lakoff has done seminal work in this area - and it was explored quite deeply (and slightly differently...

My latest column has been published in the Malaysia Star . ... Folks from those parts of the world—or even the parts of the United States—that have only known warm climates have a hard time getting a handle on snow, even after a few winters where snow is common. So it occurs to me—...

I was musing - as I wont to do - about the different definitions of the word heart. There's the muscle that beats every second or so, which helps circulate the blood, the one that's subject to attack. Then there's the romantic notion of love as represented by a symbol. Related, there's the center of...

Remember when I said I liked the folk process? Somebody said it was all called folklore when they took it in school, and yes, that's interesting, but no, what *really* fascinates me is the mere fact that things change, and looking at how different they are and figuring out why. Collecting different ...