Couldn’t afford an MIT education? Couldn’t get in? No problem; now you can learn, MIT-style in the comfort of your own home. You don’t get the paper to hang on your wall (nor, according to their site, do you get “an MIT education”), but it’s about the learning, right?

McSweeney’s seems like it’s put together by the kind of people I’d like to hang out with. Or maybe I’d hate them. They publish a variety of stuff, from open letters to obscure poetry forms to lists, some of which are interesting, and/or amusing. Some of it is written by people you may have heard of.

From today’s OED Word of the Day:

knitting, vbl. n. […]

c. A girl or girls. slang.

1943 C. H. WARD-JACKSON Piece of Cake 39 Knitting, girl or girls. 1946 J. IRVING Royal Navalese 104 Knitting, girls in the plural. The singular of this is ‘A Piece of Knitting’. 1962 GRANVILLE Dict. Sailors’ Slang 68/2 Knitting, girl friend or girls collectively.

The rest of this entry is left as an exercise for the reader.

The tone of this story about aging and humor is very optimistic, but it has me wondering what sorts of crossword puzzle-analogs I have to do so that I’ll still find funny when I’m older the things I find funny now. I’d hate to turn 70 and suddenly be nonplussed by “You know what my favorite TV show is? Xena, Warrior Princess. They should just call it The Patton Oswalt Masturbation Hour. Big moon faced amazon with a stick, beating people up — what god did I please?”
Or, even worse, develop a fondness for the 3 Stooges.

Despite my nearly pathological avoidance of advertising, I was pleased to see Bob Garfield’s Ad Review. You don’t even have to watch the ads there, if you don’t want to; you can simply enjoy his criticism of them. My favorite review so far: Hummer, the Truck for Jerks. And why is Bob Garfield’s name so familar? I’m imagining he must be the guy NPR interviews after every Super Bowl to talk about the latest crop of stuff.

Rumor has it that the Grand Opening of the Fry’s Electronics in Renton will be the 29th of August. It’s the first one in Washington.

A couple guys got together and developed an algorithm to guess the gender of a writer from the writer’s text. Some other folks put together a web-accessible implementation of that algorithm. It thinks more than half of the Craig-written blog entries that I tried it on were written by a female. I’m too self-absorbed to have tried it with Sarah-written entries.

A moderately cool collection of recordings of many people from different places reading the same paragraph. The IPA transcriptions of the readings are pretty interesting, too.

The long-threatened conversion to Movable Type has finally happened. Sorry to all you search tool users who got here off the old GM links. If you’re interested in what we said about something, try a search from here.

Of the cool Friendster-backlash pages mentioned yesterday on memepool, The Onion’s is my favorite.