Monthly Archives: November 2009
DotW: Langenscheidt Japanese
This well-worn Langenscheidt’s Pocket Japanese Dictionary is one of my favorite dictionaries. After more than 10 years on various shelves, it’s recently started hitching rides in my purse again. Hello, adorable yellow Dictionary of the Week! This is different from … Continue reading
new knitting project
I know, this is my work blog about science and dictionaries (and travel and music and whatnot), but I’m too excited and must blog about the knitting project I just started: Doesn’t it look cool on the needle? Oh, what … Continue reading
DotW: Collins Italian
I was inspired to start writing about dictionaries when I needed my Italian dictionary to check a word in something I was editing. So that little green paperback gets to kick things off as the inaugural Dictionary of the Week. … Continue reading
hubble instruments come to town
Nerdy excitement downtown: two instruments that used to be on the Hubble Space Telescope are at the National Air and Space Museum! And they’re not just any instruments, they’re instruments that made news. Remember when the Hubble first launched, and … Continue reading
arsenic in the well
In Bangladesh, millions of people drink contaminated water that’s contaminated with arsenic. This isn’t like in a mystery novel when someone gets poisoned with arsenic. You don’t keel over dead. Water with arsenic in it is lovely and clean and … Continue reading
word of the year
I don’t honestly know anything about the New Oxford American Dictionary or why I should care what they think – they’re not one of *my* 31 dictionaries – but I do like their word of the year, “unfriend.” As in, … Continue reading
dictionary of the week
Last night I needed the Italian-English dictionary off the shelf of language dictionaries on the other side of the living room. Not coincidentally, I also needed to do a little procrastinating, so I decided to find out how many dictionaries … Continue reading
throw some haggis on the barbie
I keep having this problem with foreign languages. I learned Norwegian – a little in Minnesota, a little in Oslo. Then I moved to Trondheim and discovered that nobody outside of Oslo speaks the nice standard Norwegian that you learn … Continue reading
babies in the news
Newborn babies might seem like they don’t do anything but cry, sleep, eat, and excrete – but there’s really a lot going on as that tiny human adjusts to a whole new world. Today for ScienceNOW I wrote about a … Continue reading
best sport ever
Oh, man. I can’t believe it took me until now to think to look for sumo videos on youtube. Yeah, that’s right, sumo. I lived in Japan for two years in the late 1990s and spent a substantial part of … Continue reading