It's been interesting how the prefix cyber has drifted in meaning over the years. Let's explore together.

I wrote two thirds of this article and then I discovered Annalee Newitz was way ahead of me and wrote about the same thing two years ago. Since my article has different details I decided to finish it and put it on my blog after all. There's plenty of room in cyberspace. But read Annalee Newitz's article too!

The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of online content by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.

The Nonsense Laboratory uses machine learning to let you poke at, mangle, and play with the spelling of words.

another "poetry with twitter" project

"the putative paranormal phenomenon in which a person is able to speak or write a language they could not have acquired by natural means."

“Eskimos, as the unimaginative would now interject, have all sorts of names for snow. This information is presumably intended to demonstrate the city dweller's blunted feel for nature. I have no sympathy for those who parrot this pedestrian theory. Eskimo languages are polysynthetic, which means that even seldom-used expressions like ‘snow that falls on a red T-shirt’ are combined into one word. It's so tiresome to have to keep pointing this out.”

"But you can make people laugh by caricaturing a text or conversation through self-referential descriptions of discourse functions and relations, abstracted away from specific content."

Bigrams or digrams are groups of two written letters, two syllables, or two words, and are very commonly used as the basis for simple statistical analysis of text.

"The Joking Computer, a kiosk-based installation running software made by artificial intelligence researchers at the University of Aberdeen. The software uses phonetic information about English words and semantic information from WordNet to generate pun-based riddles"

Internet Memetics and Fads

english -> babelfish -> english

set of building blocks to help children learn English

Sociologists must go through a lot of pants when they cruise the digital realm because subcultures are constantly spawning subcultures to the point there is a sort of electronic gravy made from all these people meeting online (...)

"Snowclones are a type of formula-based cliché which uses an old idiom in a new context. These are roughly ordered by known year of original usage."

"_____ is the new black" is a catch phrase and snowclone used to indicate the sudden popularity or versatility of an idea at the expense of the popularity of a second idea. It is also the origin of a snowclone of the form "X is the new Y"