Grinding Coffee

As I mentioned a while back, I now own a manual coffee grinder. countrycousin asked for my thoughts on the grinder, so here they are, under the cut.

( Grinder )

Medical Linguistics

Here's an interesting article on the use of computational linguistics to predict the likelihood of dementia - decades in advance! More study is needed, but this is definitely intriguing.

Shaenon Garrity

I thought I'd give a heads-up to anyone who a) is sad about the fact that Shaenon Garrity has finished off "Narbonic" and b) hasn't been by Websnark lately. There's an article on Garrity's current projects here. She's re-presenting "Narbonic" in toto, this time with commentary; it begins here. She's also writing two other strips, "Li'l Mell" and "Smithson". "Li'l Mell" is behind a paywall, so I can't comment on it, but I'm reading the archives of "Smithson". "Smithson" is rather more, er, restrained than "Narbonic" was; it doesn't seem (so far as I've read) to have the lunatic humor of the other strip, but it still looks pretty good. I'm not entirely pleased with the screen framing; almost every strip requires horizontal or vertical scrolling, and more than a few require both. (That's not as bad as it sounds; those strips are arranged either diagonally or in an "L" or inverted-"L" format.)

Give 'em a look, if you miss "Narbonic".