The 2106 Attitudes to potentially offensive language and gestures on TV and radio, improved this year by “(i) including a larger number of words; (ii) involving a broader range of minority groups as participants; and (iii) considering potentially offensive gestures for the first time,” is fun and fascinating reading. See the full report (PDF) or the handy Quick Reference guide (PDF).

National Novel Generation Month always yields some ingenious results, but Liz Daly’s Blackout may be the best yet. Using Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as its source, Daly’s program created the short book of blackout/erasure poems The Days Left Foreboding and Water. Previously in Katexic Clippings: Daly’s 2014 NaNoGenMo project.

I have this Jabberwocky Diagrammed poster on my office wall. The oddly diminutive diagram of a sentence from Infinite Jest might make a nice companion piece.

“For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans […] the sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes.” → The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz.

Fascinating look at mining data from maps based on how they’ve changed over time. → He Collected 12,000 Road Maps—Now We’re Discovering Their Secrets.

Time Magazine selects The Most Influential Images of All Time.

Need a gift for your hard-to-please friend concerned about preserving our languages for our eventual alien overlords? The limited, numbered edition Wearable Rosetta Disk is just $1000. See also: a short video on the making of the wearable disk.

“One researcher the book cites clocks inner speech at an average pace of 4,000 words per minute—10 times faster than verbal speech. And it’s often more condensed—we don’t have to use full sentences to talk to ourselves, because we know what we mean.” » Fascinating stuff in the Atlantic article “The Running Conversation in Your Head: What a close study of ‘inner speech’ reveals about why humans talk to themselves”.

“Scientists have discovered a ‘lake’ in the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone, who enters this pool at the bottom of the sea will suffer horribly.”.

Today in 1942, James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix is born in Seattle, Washington, USA. Caught joyriding and forced, at 19, to choose between prison or the Army, Hendrix chose the latter, becoming a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne (the “Screaming Eagles”) before being honorably discharged as “unsuitable” just over a year later. Though he would die of an accidental overdose just eight years later, in that short time Hendrix would become one of the most influential and celebrated rock guitarists of all time, using the wah-wah pedal, distortion, feedback and the “piano style” of holding a bass note with his thumb while playing the melody (aided by his use of right-handed guitars turned upside down and restrung for left-hand playing) in new ways that would influence every succeeding generation, not to mention establishing himself as a premier instrumentalist in a part of music that was still almost exclusively populated by white men. Some classic listening: ►”The Star Spangled Banner” and ►”Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” both at Woodstock, 1969; an ►acoustic version of “Hear My Train A Comin’; the ►album version of “Hey Joe”. Some tasty but less well-known cuts: ►Jimi with Curtis Knight and The Squires, “Gloomy Monday”; ►Lonnie Youngblood and Jimi, “Goodbye Bessie Mae”; ►Little Richard and Jimi, “Hound Dog” (just for fun).