m. c. de marco

Via Language Log: a Guardian story about former missionary Daniel Everett’s life-changing study of Pirahã, which cost him two faiths and a marriage:

“It’s wrong to try and convert tribal societies,” he says.

Via Daring Fireball: Election 2008 as seen in Mark Newman’s cartogram maps of the results. He also has a page about his cartogram software and related programs.

My own personal NaNoWriMo procrastination station is iDrops, an online/iPod/iPhone version of the classic SameGame. Despite much dropping of blocks, I still hit my goal of 2,000 words last night, for 6,000 total.

From NaNoWriMo’s Procrastination Station, a cool mind-mapping link: bubbl.us lets you mind-map online, then exports your mind maps to various formats. It’s free and doesn’t require registration, even though it looks like it does.

I’m starting NaNoWriMo a little late this evening, because I was out longer that I expected to be. Apparently there are about 100,000 aspiring novelists signed up for the 10th year of wild November drafting. My own plan is to write 2,000 words a day, to avoid the eternal question that plagues NaNoWriMos everywhere: Should I write 1,666 or 1,667 words today?

Via Daring Fireball: the FriendDA is an informal NDA for sharing Ideas with Advisors. That is, when you’ve dreamt up the next Big Thing and need a helpful friend to tell you whether it’s MacOS X (brilliant!) or Windows Vista (don’t quit your day job…), a FriendDA gives you moral protection from theft of your possibly brilliant idea.

But it’s only moral protection. For legal protection, you’d need a real NDA.

Once again, someone posted to the NaNoWriMo forums looking for mapping software, and I replied.