The Lexicographer's Rules

“Balster and Chait have been in the forefront of those studying questions related to tolerance. In their work with rehsus and squirrel monkeys, they found that the animals did in fact self-administer larger doses of the drug. In the study of two rhesus monkeys, the subjects voluntarily adminsitered PCP by lever pressing, at any time during a 24-hour period, for eight consecutive days. After this time, the monkeys were limited to an administration period of only four hours per day. Yet, the subjects continued to administer doses equal to those of the 24-hour period compressed within a severly limited time. Also cited is a study in which repeated use of PCP as an anesthetic for juvenile chimpanzees and adult baboons resulted in a shortened period of effectiveness and eventually, ๋the animals required about 50 percent more drug to produce the same anesthetic effect initially obtained.‘“ (Source Link)

8 by 8 or 8 x 8 is a long-standing guideline for human water intake which recommends eight, eight-ounce glasses of water a day. Research by a professor at Dartmouth University could not substantiate this recommendation.

;The imbalance in links is far greater than relative numbers would suggest. Once again, if you assumed that links were completely independent of language, you would expect about 54% of all Icelandic links to point to English sites, and 0.9% of English links to point to Icelandic ones. Predictably enough, both languages have fewer links to each other because of the language barrier, but to a very different degree. Icelandic blogs underlink to English ones by a factor of about 4.5 (54% predicted,12% actual). But English blogs underlink Icelandic ones by a factor of 80. Just the fact that they’re writing in Icelandic makes these 3,000 bloggers eighty times less visible to us than an equivalent group of English-language bloggers would be. I propose we call this ‘underlinking’ coefficient the “Bennett Factor”, in honor of the great thinker who said “Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.” Our Bennett Factors to other languages remain astronomical. We continue to keep ourselves isolated from world opinion, which is particularly troubling at a time when our country’s politics are becoming more exceptionalist and unilateral. (Source Link)

;They overreacted to the boom, so why shouldn’t they overreact to the bust? (Source Link)

;When, years later, Manuel Roxas said in a speech, “I learned my ABCs at the knees of an American soldier,” he was speaking with gratitude and absolute sincerity. Thus might a Filipino of three centuries before have spoken of the missionary who had baptized him and his tribe. For if Spain had cemented its rule with the bonds of faith, now America cemented its rule with the one thing that Spain had been loath to provide en masse—education. If Filipinos could be ruled by the faith that made them subservient to the friars of the past, they could now be ruled by a glittering new faith—in the schoolteachers of the present. (Source Link)