Binary

I have been poking around trying to find a good picture of the engraved gold plaque that was placed on the side of the Pioneer and Voyager space probes, which shows, among other things, the rough position of earth in relation to 14 pulsars (stars which pulse at a regular rate).

Eventually I found both a meduim sized and a large image of the plaque, but being finally able to see the image meant that I then had to figure out how to read binary so that I could make some sense of it.

I keep hearing this word around, and when I incidentally found it while perusing the dictionary the other day (“Hi…. my name is Dave, and I am a….. a… a linguaphile. It’s been 3 days since I’ve played the dictionary game, and at the moment I really need another hit..) I thought I should share it with the world.

Inshallah – “If Allah wills it”.

It does of course have a lot of associated islamic and religious bagage if you will, but I still like the concept.

Another cool use of language is one of the recent Penny Arcade posts, in which Tycho uses some really cool words. I want a vocabulary with as many perty and redundant words as that!

Toonin’ it up

During some random web-surfing procrastination yesterday I followed a link that lead me to a brilliant old comic that I frequently describe to other people, but which I hadn’t seen a copy of in years (as the only place I had seen it was in the back of a year 12/7th Form Calculus textbook), so here it is.