I'm having a bit of a discussion (in a locked post) about the connotations of the word girl. So I shall post a poll, because that's always fun. Feel free to expand or criticize or whatever in the comments!

( more on language and gender )

I'm not sure what inspired me to ask this question, but now it's come into my head I'm quite curious.

( another of my language usage polls )

As usual, if you want to talk about the subject, comments are good. And yes, I was mean and used radios instead of ticky boxes. That's mainly because I get more comments that way, from people complaining that they don't like being forced to choose only one option!

Some conversations I've been having recently have led me to wonder what sort of connotations the term geek has. So of course I obviously had to make a completely unscientific LJ poll, which won't tell me the answer but might be interesting anyway.

( clicky clicky )

If you don't like my options or have further comments, that's what the comments are for. I don't want a lot of interesting thoughts in the poll where I can't reply to them easily.

No, I'm not dead, just completely snowed under right now. I'm submitting this week, which means the end is in sight, but it also means I absolutely have to finish a lot of work in a short time.

Anyway, I saw a link in a comment on another LJ discussion to the Open mind AI project. I really badly do not need another source of displacement this week, but it's kind of an interesting concept so I thought I'd pass it on.

Much as I like this kind of distributed information building (I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia and I used to do a lot of volunteering for various open directory projects in the days before there was Google), this particular effort does seem a bit implausible to me. But it's interesting, both in outline and in detail. It's surprising how hard some of the questions are, actually; I was really stumped by exercises such as 'Describe in not more than five sentences what you need to know to understand the statement: The dog was straining at its leash'.