The Rockridge Institute, with George Lakoff as a founding member, tries to "reframe the terms of political debate to make a progressive moral vision more persuasive and influential." (via Language Log)

opensourcexperts.com: "Wouldn't it be great if, as in open source software development, several people could come together to fund the development of a feature?" Sure would. I hope this works out.

Nelson's Weblog: tech / semanticWeb: "Each of the individual applications using RDF I know of could have been done more easily with plain XML. What's the payoff for using RDF? Where are the fantastic semantic inference applications?"

languagehat.com: CHINESE NEWSPAPERS IN NYC.: "With more readers comfortable in English, the newspapers have revised their format, printing Chinese text horizontally, from left to right, rather than vertically, from top to bottom. That allows them to insert English phrases like "early decision" or "the official preppy handbook" into articles. (Reporters use English keyboards, writing Chinese characters by typing in a phonetic version of a Chinese word; this brings up a menu of possible Chinese characters.)"

Language Log: An abortion by any other name...: "There's a sharp terminological contrast in recent news articles about an abortion bill signed by President Bush. Proponents of the bill call the procedure "partial-birth abortion"; opponents tend to call it by its medical name, "intact dilation and extraction", or else refer to it by some other non-gruesome-sounding label." "Pro-life" vs. "Pro-choice" indeed.

(via Ben) WWT Swan Migration Satellite Tracking Project: Live tracking of swans migrating! It actually graphs each swan individually. Nifty.

(Via Matthew Berk, Forrester Analyst) Yahoo is quietly getting better fast. This is been out for a while - they implemented a new way of narrowing the selection of products, called SmartSort. It's an interesting interaction pattern that uses sliders to let users choose which facets are more important to them. There is also a FacetMap style range facet that lets you choose a price range.

So I saw the Matrix, and I liked it. Not the best movie ever, but alright. I've got a few lingering questions though:
(See inside - WARNING: SPOILERS)