Blather and Nonsense

Biggest. Dork. Ever.

My new toy arrived yesterday, and it goes by the name Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Fifth Edition. This is it kids, the nearly plus ultra of dictionaries. Not only are pronunciations given using IPA, but as the Economist points out in its review, this is the first OED variant to be compiled using an electronic corpus of citations for greater fidelity to the English language (as opposed to some Johnson-esque prescriptive lexicon). As with its elder, the 20-volume OED, each entry in SOED provides etymology and many entries include citations illustrating the word's usage, nicely set apart by a gray background. The design is gorgeous, too. My only complaint is that the dust covers are atrocious but fortunately very easily removed.

This is then

Two excellent movies that were filmed in San Francisco way back when have web pages sussing out their filming locations: Vertigo and Bullitt. The former is more interesting to people who haven't seen the movie as it includes shot-by-shot comparisons, but the latter is just such a cool movie, yo.

Bonus link: a short explanation of the fabled zoom dolly shot invented for Vertigo. The same type of shot can also be found at the very end of David Fincher's Panic Room.

I didn't quite catch that

Jason Kottke linked to a message from Donald Norman that says, in part:

I am surprised he likes the Napoleon map so much because it has, in his terms, superfluous chart chunk - those drawings of soldiers.

To which I can only rejoin: huh? What drawings of soldiers? The map in question (lo-res version here) doesn't depict any soldiers, only the movements thereof. Norman also writes:

Sometimes chart junk (his term) helps in the understanding of a chart by providing mnemonic aid to the symbols.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Maybe I've been taken in by the preaching, but I agree with Tufte completely: chart junk is the opposite of data. Tufte doesn't claim that charts shouldn't be explained, he claims that charts should be honest and not obscure their data. Chart junk is, by definition, ink that conveys no data. Explanatory text is secondary data, not chart junk.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that Tufte can get overly preachy. But Norman's message completely misses the point.

Now, the rest of the story

Wired's recent article on the visual effects to be found in the upcoming Matrix movies referenced the Campanile movie by Paul Debevec, which can be found here.

Not to put too fine a point on it

Just today I discovered the fun that is reading Dahlia Lithwick's Supreme Court dispatches on Slate. You may be asking yourself: "Self, how fun can reading summaries of Supreme Court proceedings be?" To which I can only reply: "Very." For example, in explaining Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, Lithwick writes:

The key to comprehending this Clash of the Constitutional Titans is to imagine the 11th Amendment as the Loch Ness Monster and the 14th Amendment as the Abominable Snowman. Over the last 10 years, the Rehnquist Court has insisted that states are immune from suit under federal laws, even when those federal laws seek to correct for national civil rights abuses. The Loch Ness Monster won every fight. Thus, state workers were denied the right to sue for age discrimination in the 2000 case of Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents, and state suits under the Americans With Disabilities Act were likewise deemed toothless against the 11th Amendment in the 2001 case of University of Alabama v. Garrett. There is one way the Loch Ness Monster could be stopped. The Supreme Court says that where Congress is acting under an explicitly constitutional grant of power, it can abrogate state immunity from suit. In other words, if Congress, in enacting FMLA, were acting under its 14th Amendment power to remedy gender inequities, it might raise up an Abominable Snowman capable of finally taking Nessie out. The question in Hibbs is whether FMLA was enacted to combat gender inequity in the workplace, or whether it's a piece of gender-neutral labor legislation. If the latter is true, the Loch Ness monster would ride again.

(There is a better-than-even chance that this metaphor will not make it into the court's opinion in Hibbs.)

See? It's educational and fun!