12.21
In December in the US, perhaps the only thing that competes with what one of my friends referred to as “the explosive force of an American Christmas” is year-end list building. Or decade-end lists, in this case. A few I’ve noticed so far this year are BuzzSugar’s Top 20 Favorite Movies of the Decade, Time’s Top 10 Everything of 2009, and The Pollywog Blog’s Best and Worst Brand Names of 2009 (don’t be shocked if I have more to say about this last one in a later post).
February 2010 will mark a year since my first few posts on Semantic Argument, but in the spirit of the season, now seems like a better time to do a “year” in review. According to PostRank, here are the top five posts on this blog, in order:
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11.10
When I was a kid I got bored a lot (and whined about it, I’m sure). Presumably to shut me up, my parents kept a box of “activities” for me—little creative projects for kids, torn out of magazines or jotted down on scraps of paper. I specifically remember being 4 or 5, sitting at the top of the stairs at our house in Dartmouth (UK, not MA), and yelling something like “Can I do an activity?!”
I hope this isn’t a window into my childhood that I’ll later regret publishing.
Anyway, I can’t remember what the activities were now, but I still have that insatiable urge to make things. Combined with a really short attention span, this urge sometimes draws me to useless little projects, so I’ve started creating a list when I hear such projects mentioned. In essence, I’m making my own box of activities. Can’t rely on Mom and Dad’s ideas forever, y’know.
So far I’ve mentioned two such activities on Semantic Argument:
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06.26
I have several complaints about the recently announced expansion of the best picture nominees from five to ten.
- Confusion. Our short term memory only allows us to consider about five to nine items at once, making ten too many by at least one. It’s relatively easy to think of five things and choose your favorite. Ten requires you to do something like write them down and assign scores to each. Is the Academy unaware of integers between five and ten?
- Faulty logic. One of the main reasons cited for the change is that the Academy has been perceived as “elitist” in recent years for ignoring crowd favorites. But isn’t this the point of a professional critique—to choose the elite? Crowd favorites can easily be determined by looking at the box office returns, or the number of tickets sold—or by letting anyone vote instead of just Academy members.
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04.20
Are you a fireman, astronaut, or ballerina? Odds are against it, but if you have kids who look up to you, you may have sometimes wished you chose to do something a little more…inspiring. Thanks to a soon-to-be-published book by the founders of Taproot Foundation, your workaday career may have a shot at capturing your kid’s imagination after all.
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03.18
Here’s a fun online app that lets you create custom “word clouds.” The site is Wordle.net, and the image above was created by extracting words (based on frequency) from Semantic Argument. You can also input text from a website, a song, a speech–anything you like. Then it lets you edit the font and colors, along with some other properties, and save it to their gallery.
Just one more way to waste some time online! Thanks to Mom for pointing this one out to me.
