Central Intelligence [?]

From my brother, via comp.risks:

Privacy Notice
The Central Intelligence Agency is committed to protecting your privacy and will collect no personal information about you unless you choose to provide that information to us.

I might also note, from later in the same page:

Disclaimer of Liability
Every effort is made to provide accurate and complete information. However, with the thousands of documents available, often uploaded within short deadlines, we cannot guarantee that there will be no errors. The Central Intelligence Agency makes no claims, promises or guarantees about the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of the contents...

In light of our high-larious high-jinks in Iraq, this legal notice might have been nice to notice earlier, dammit.

[linguistics] snerk splorf - SpecGram

(Also posted to alphabet_soup and linguaphiles; apologies to those who get it thrice).
From Linguist List: The latest Speculative Grammarian has come out:

Volume CXLIX, number 3.

So That Explains It!--A Letter from the Managing Editor
Letters to the Editor
World's Linguistic Fundamentals Sound--SpecGram Wire Services
A Meta-Analysis of Article Length vs Quality--Alfraad vonn Güügënschnëchtën & Mo d'Qi
Infinity and Beyond: A Prolegomena--Bjorn-Bob Weaselflinger
Regular Isomorphisms of Categorization in the Apathetic Informant--Angus Æ. Balderdash, Esq.
The Original English Movement--Announcement

Hee hee. The Weaselflinger article is particularly snarky about UG and syntax.

The Whankydoodle Constraint (henceforth WC) requires that all sentences in strict-syntax contain the form 'whankydoodle' directly dominated by CP. Reinstating the form (reasons for its non-occurrence will be discussed below) would thus lead to sentences such as the following:
1

a. Whankydoodle I think that is a ferret.
b. We decided whankydoodle that it was a ferret.
c. Has whankydoodle he finished loading the catapult yet?

Even to a layperson, these sentences are transparently bad, so the Less Is More Axiom can be considered to be fully validated. For the analyst, the only tasks remaining are (1) accounting for the non-occurrence of whankydoodle in all other English sentences, and (2) accounting for the author's ability to include it in (1a-c).

phonoloblog, character coding rants

I'm pleased to see that Eric Bakovic has started a new phonology blog phonoloblog.

It shows promise, already gathering a growing collection of interesting semi-political commentary on the DNC. It's definitely worth a read. I'm also very pleased to see that it's published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. I look forward to tracking this blog, although it seems to have some technical growing pains right now (The RSS feed for phonoloblog (... there, now syndicated at phonoloblog) seems to be broken; it returns ill-formed XML has been fixed, and there's no helpful way to make comments other than signing up for an account of one's own).**

There's a nice post about [fǝˌnɛɾɪktɹænˈskɹɪpʃn̩] on the web. He writes:

It seems to me that what we need is one or more of the following, in ascending order of preference:

• Someone to edit the html ASCII code page to make it more useful for us phonologists.
• Someone to find a page in which the above has already been done.
• Someone to suggest and/or provide something better than having to type in (or copy-and-paste) ASCII codes for this purpose.

I’d also like someone to help me locate the ASCII code for IPA secondary stress, if it even exists … I ended up having to transcribe two primary stresses in this post’s title because I couldn’t find the secondary stress code.

My quibbles and comments:

• ASCII is a very old code. Its best descendant is Unicode character encoding, which is what's actually recorded on that "ASCII test page" you publish, and I'm sure you meant that instead. The Unicode and HTML guide is handy here.
• The amazing Wikipedia also has "the page in which the above has already been done": IPA in Unicode.
• Modifier Letter Low Vertical Line is I think what you're looking for in annotating secondary stress. It's u+02cc; I've used it in UTF-8 above in the link to your article on this subject.
• A page with lots of detail on the "funny characters" is here, for example the IPA Extensions. Here is the entry for LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA (ə).

**UPDATED: ( tech issues discussion )

I am weak -- del.icio.us

xaosenkosmos has conned me into looking at del.icio.us more closely. I am now hooked.

I'd be interested to know of LJ friends who are also users. I've found a few of you (several_bees, xaosenkosmos, moretea). Who else is out there?