A haphazard list of some of Dangerous Intersection’s more memorable posts

We recently received this comment from Scholar:

Erich or Grumpy,

May I please have some more links to the discussions here at dangerous intersections which you have found to be most interesting, *must read*, or highlights in general.

Thanks,
Scholar

I took Scholar’s request seriously and went back to review many of our posts.  I still can’t get over how many topics we’ve addressed in nine months, covering 592 posts! 

Rather than call these posts the “best of,” I would merely call them the more memorable posts to me, keeping in mind the triple asterisk that comes with the assembly of this list:  1) I simply didn’t have the time to review each of the posts again.  Therefore, this list is only representative, not complete.  2) It is difficult to determine any meaningful criteria on which to base such a list, other than (as I’ve already suggested) the idea that this list includes many of the posts I found memorable.  Other people will certainly have different ideas of what posts are worthy 3) Scholar’s request puts me in an awkward spot, given that I write for the blog

To the extent that I’ve included my own posts, then, it should be with the understanding that I am not trying to judge the writing so much as considering whether the ideas addressed are memorable to me, whether the ideas expressed therein seemed important or whether they moved me.  Here’s another way of looking at it:  if you want …

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What It Reminds Me Of

Watching the furor generated over Erich's post about Bart Erhman's book has been awesome.  I mean that in the strict meaning of the word.  It is awe-illiciting.  After watching the average responses to our posts rise and fall around five to ten each, with a few fetching somewhere in the…

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Thank you for being part of this blogging community

I have been accused of being a curmudgeon by more than a few people who know me well. Perhaps I deserve it, based upon the intensity with which I approach writing.  Also, I too often fall into the trap of seeing the world as a set of problems needing to…

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Oops! I Wrote as Though Blogging, to a National Magazine

I’ve gotten used to the world of email and blogging. Back in October I read a (typically good) short article in Smithsonian Magazine about Regional American Dialects entitled “Say What?” by Ulrich Boser.
The last line quotes University of Pennsylvania linguist Bill Labov commenting on linguistic drift:

“But it’s not really like biological evolution. No linguist believes that language gets better as it changes.”

To which my mind immediately snapped: “Say What?!?” I typed a quick reply commenting on the misapplied value judgment attributed to the course of biological evolution. I got an email this week advising me that the editors will print my “letter” in the December 2006 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

Oops.

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Bloggers Need FireFox 2 for Live Spell Checking in Forms

OMG! I just installed the FireFox 2 browser and noticed something. It spell checks form entries as you type! Just as Word and its ilk do in their documents. Since its inception, I'd been using FireFox just because of speed, safety and security advantages. I added the Google toolbar only…

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