'First week, first time at the checkpoint, at the passage between the Palestinian area and a street where only Jews can go. Those guys have to stop, there's a line, then they hand you their ID cards through the fence, you check them, and let them through. This guy with me yells: "Waqif! Stop!" The man didn't understand and took one more step. Then he yells again, "Waqif!" and the man freezes. So the soldier decided that because the guy took this one extra step he'll be detained. I said to him: "Listen, what are you doing?" He said: "No, no, don't argue, at least not in front of them. I'm not going to trust you anymore, you're not reliable." Eventually one of the patrol commanders came over, and I said: "What's the deal, how long do you want to detain him for?" He said: "You can do whatever you want, whatever you feel like doing. If you feel there's a problem with what he's done, if you feel something's wrong, even the slightest thing, you can detain him for as long as you want." And then I got it, a man who's been in Hebron a week, it has nothing to do with rank, he can do whatever he wants. There are no rules, everything is permissible.'
Yitzhak Laor. In Hebron

Why does this remind me our moderating on JavaRanch all these last months...

For quite a long time I wondered why sometimes when I copy a piece of text from PDF file and paste it into, say, M$ Word, all the "fi"s are getting replaced by some strange symbol. What is so special about this letter combination?

Turned out, the reason is purely aesthetical.

Using the experts Adobe sells a number of expert-set typeface collections. These collections contain many of the less frequently used characters that add a professional look to your documents, including old style figures, small caps, ornaments, and ligatures. For example, you can use f-ligatures, which eliminate awkward character combinations. Compare the ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl ligature combinations in the second line with the individual characters in the first line.
Use the right character

The last time it happened, "awkward character combinations" was replaced with a true delight for any aesthete, Latin capital ligature Æ.

My further investigations were not futile: the culprit was discovered, the culprit is Donald Knuth.

This phenomenon is referred to as "shifting" of the ligatures and is due to the manner in which the font family designed by Donald Knuth differ in encoding scheme from those produced by the Adobe corporation. When the font family is switched from a Knuth font such as Computer Modern (cmr), to an Adobe font such as Times Roman (ptm) the encoding difference is incorrect accounted for in DVIPS version prior to 5.90. This results in the strange behavior.
http://physics.wm.edu/~norman/latexhints/ligatures.html

Knuthian shifting, though, used to replace ugly "fi"s with good-looking pound signs.

Network map of political book for 2004 by Valdis Krebs. We had a great discussion about his previous map in Meaningless Drivel in April 2003.

Via Lurking and Social Networks by Ton Zijlstra, in connections with "echo chamber effect.

Iranian Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi has a blog.

This was the latest entry when I came across his site: July 1, 2004.

The pencil

I asked the pencil
Write what you think,
That the majority of people
Are in need of.

The pencil moved so surely
On the paper
And wrote:

I love you all.

From the book: "I asked the pencil to write"

I still like it.

Three... um, new neoblogisms to my collection were recently found in writings of Prof. Liberman:

So I hereby suggest that blognomen should be used as a term for the "trevor at kaleboel" style of blogger reference. Blognomenclature might be used to refer to the study of such references and their alternatives.

Blogonym is already in pretty wide use for the pseudonyms or nicknames chosen by bloggers: "Jane Galt", "Wonkette", "Kos", "Dr. Weevil", etc. But that's a different thing.