The symbol ☞ is a punctuation mark, called an index or fist. Though rare today, this symbol was in common use between the 12th and 18th centuries in the margins of books, and was formerly included in lists of standard punctuation marks. Its typical use is as a bullet-like symbol to direct the reader’s attention to important text, having roughly the same meaning as the word “attention” or “note”… Other names for the symbol include printer’s fist, bishop’s fist, digit, manicule, mutton-fist and pointing hand. (Wikipedia)
This joins “homonculus” and “animalcule” in my growing collection of “favorite cule words.” Cule = most hilarious Latin root.
An awesomely comprehensive essay on this symbol: Toward a History of the Manicule. (Sadly, the etymology of the WTF-worthy “mutton-fist” seems to be lost.)
THE POINTING FINGER FROM OPTIMALITY THEORY HAS A NAME!!!1ELEVEN!!! (which I will now ignore, instead calling it the mutton-fist)
Hey look, not only did linguistics get its own category, it’s listed ahead of math, physics, chemistry and biology (but crucially, away from the books on drugs).
The most adorable spambot killer ever - Ars Technica
“Enter Oli, and his moment of “thinking outside the text box.” While computers are getting better and better at optical character recognition, one thing that they still have great difficulty doing is recognizing the contents of pictures… So he came up with KittenAuth, a test that requires the user to identify which three out of nine pictures contain kittens.”
I forget why, but this came up during discussion section while talking about vector spaces and dimensionality reduction. Im in ur intarwebs, cleenin out teh spam.
Awesome map, “abandoned avenues”
“No Public Transit Zone” is perfect.
My first response was, “Shut up, Sapir!”, but this cover is pretty awesome.
You may have hugging kitties, but you’re still a creepy retweeting bot.
Cats are a lot more ambitious than dogs.
See also: List of cats, Categories: Famous cats
