According to CNN, this morning Obama spokesman David Wade called Sarah Palin a “leviathan of forensics.”

I can't get those words out of my head, and I'm beginning to think it's the best phrase anyone has ever uttered. I almost pissed myself laughing when I first heard it, and Wade now occupies a special place in my heart.

Contrast the austere pomposity of “leviathan”—the Bible, Hobbes, Melville, Auster—to the person he's describing. Coupled to the near-obsolete use of “forensics”—he wasn't talking about CSI: Miami—and it's perfect. Perfect!

Politics can be so ugly, it just warms my heart that this guy pulled such a ludicrous phrase out of his ass. He's my new hero. And it has nothing (well, very little) to do with partisan politics, or ill-will to Palin. Her recent PR troubles notwithstanding, she really isn't bad at, er, forensics, if you check her past debates on YouTube. And Biden is a well-known loose cannon, so it could go either way.

But “Leviathan of Forensics,” it's just too good. Here's the full quote from CNN's politicalticker:

“She's very skilled and she'll be well-prepared,” said Barack Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod Sunday night, flying with Biden back to Delaware to help him get ready.

“As you saw at the convention she can be very good. So, I think it would be foolish to assume that this isn’t going to be a really challenging debate. We're preparing for that, on that assumption.”

Taking it one step farther, Biden spokesman David Wade later added, “He's going in here to debate a leviathan of forensics, who has debated five times and she's undefeated.”

Labels: Auster, best, David Wade, forensics, Hobbes, leviathan, Melville, Sarah Palin

Another cool experiment in typography: the Word Clock, by Simon Heys. It's a screen saver for the Mac or PC, which displays the time, beautifully, in text. It allows fine-grain control over typographic attributes like leading and kerning, and has two modes: linear is displayed in the screenshot at right; check the web site to see what rotary looks like (the video is worth more words than I'm willing to type).

There's also an iPhone app, which I hope gets released eventually through iTunes. From the looks of it, the current app requires you to jailbreak your phone.

Like so many of the cool design items on Errata, Steve sent this one.

Labels: Simon Heys, steve, typography, word clock

Dinosaurs! They're teh alesome, as any 8 or 38 year-old will tell you. In an ongoing effort to highlight brilliant Wordie content*, I present chained_bear's completely over-the-top collection of dinosaur and dinosaur-related lists:

Dinosaurs
Not a Dinosaur
Words of Dinosaurology
Archosaurs
Pterosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, and a Coupla Placodonts 'R' Us
Prehistoric and Extinct Mammals 'n' Stuff
Living Fossils
Prehistoric and Extinct Birds
Dinosaurs that weren't, but should have been

These comprehensive lists are well-tagged, so they can be sliced and diced by, among other things, geologic age:

Jurassic
Paleozoic
Pleistocene

and Linnaean classification:

Therapsid
Sauropsid
Plesiosaur

Some related lists you might also enjoy, if you're in a Jurassic mood:

Geological time scale, by mollusque
Dinosaur Comics, by AbraxasZugzwang

Plus there's the fearsome tyrannosaurus reesetee. And last but not least, there's our pal pterodactyl.

Kudos and thanks to chained_bear, this is a prodigious effort and well worth exploring. At least one of these is an open list, so if any budding dinosaurologists* want to contribute, or flesh out info on the dinosaurs and not-dinosaurs in the comments, have at.

Oh, and be advised: it pays to turn on image search when browsing dinosaur lists.

* Such posts will henceforth be tagged 'teh alsome' for your convenience.
** Or paleontologists, if you stand on formality.

Labels: AbraxasZugzwang, chained_bear, dinosaurs, mollusque, pterodactyl, reesetee, teh alsome

A new feature launched this weekend: private notes on words. On any word page, where it says "Leave a comment, citation, or private note", click on "private note" to leave a postit-style note for yourself.

This is kind of like writing in the margins of a book--if there's something you'd like to remember about a word, or you want to leave yourself pronunciation tips or study notes or a comment-in-progress or whatever, and it doesn't seem appropriate to make it public, write yourself a note.

I'm hoping students in particular find this useful, and also people using Wordie to create glossaries or dictionaries. I've corresponded with a few folks who have expressed an interest in such a use, and the combination of tags, private notes, and comments seems like a good emerging toolkit. One could use tags to aggregate the words in question (there are already a bunch of good de facto glossaries on Wordie as a result of tagging, like demon, archery and beer), then private notes while collecting definitions or usage notes, with the final result ending up as a citation in the comments.

Or, use it however you want. Any suggestions for improvements or additions are, as always, welcome.

Labels: dictionaries, features, glossaries, private notes