Set of five one-pagers by June Thomas on her recent travels to meet Japanese artisans.

On the art of crafting sentences, a discussion that will refresh your reader's eye and deflate your writer's ego. From the webzine 'The Believer'.

Quoted: (...) The words of the sentence have in fact formed a united community. Or, rather, if the words don’t manage to do this all by themselves—because maybe they mostly won’t—you will have to nudge them along in the process. (...)

Neat blog entry on language learning.
ReFaved from Mike.

Quoted: attain conversational fluency (here defined as 95%+ comprehension and 100% expressive abilities) in 1-3 months

From the Pink Tentacle blog.

Various Backus-Naur-Form grammars compared. Ugh. Pick a standard, any standard.

Quoted: In Japan, women and men speak different versions of the language. How's a guy to learn the difference?

This is a really good explanation of the formative thinking behind the DRM clauses in the GPLv3 drafts.