A thought inspired by Cliff's presentation at the SODA business meeting of keywords appearing often in accepted and rejected papers (with a lot of overlap between the two lists): someone should try teaching one of those Bayesian spam filters how to recognize good algorithms paper titles. I'm not suggesting that any of the papers I saw for the STOC PC fell to the level of spam, and I don't think any committee member would seriously think about using such a tool instead of their eyes, but it might be a useful early warning for authors that the committee is likely to be skeptical about their paper...

When you want to find out where some new catchphrase like "my hed iz pastede on yay" comes from, Google meme observatory looks like the place to go. Don't know how I avoided running into that site before. I've certainly wondered about some of these phrases but by the time they attain enough popularity to make me notice and wonder, they're also widespread enough that a simple Google search doesn't necessarily return much of use. So it's good that someone else has gone to the effort of tracking them down.

Apparently the color of geometry is a light pinkish beige. As opposed to math, which is more of a warm medium gray. So now we know.

Because it amuses me:

Kevin Wald's Early English Fragments
(especially the Queen one)

more at Making Light
(including everyone's favorite plum poem)

The New Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(with various related links)

ETA: Englisc
(found on old_english, which is however mostly too serious for my taste)