“Definitions of nonsense vary widely and often pay little attention to cultural context or the phenomenology of reading.” – explains Professor Alan Levinovitz of James Madison University, US in a Sept. 2017 article for the journal Comparative Literature. “After surveying the problems with these definitions, the article then redefines nonsense experientially, that is, as the […]
Tag: nonsense
Riding the Incongruity Wave (30+ years of brainwave research)
Try reading the following sentences : ”He took a sip from the transmitter.” – “I take coffee with cream and dog.” – “He planted string beans in his car.” Did you experience anything unusual? Probably not, but if you had been hooked up to a set of scalp-electrodes and an electroencephalographic analyser which was recording […]
Baloney, Bologna, and quibbling over a definition of “poor response”
The word “baloney”, which is just barely a word, is sometimes used by English speakers who want to say, emphatically, “Nonsense!”. The word may or may not be tightly related to the word “bologna.” Bologna is a kind of inexpensive sandwich meat, the name of which may or may not be derived from”Bologna”, the name […]
Nonword Generator OnLine
If it’s nonwords you’re after, you can very probably find everything you need in the ARC Nonword Database developed by professors Rastle, Harrington, and Coltheart in 2002. Details of which were published in ‘358,534 nonwords: The ARC Nonword Database’ (The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human Experimental Psychology, Volume 55, Issue 4) Should […]
Gibberish scholarship happily fills the cracks, again
Comes another reminder that some scholarly journals, like some people, are less careful than others. [Another way to put this: if the ONLY thing you know about a report is that it was published in “a scholarly journal”, then you know almost nothing about it.] Richard van Noorden reports, in Nature: The publishers Springer and IEEE are […]
Effect of 5th grade on 4th graders
Mike the Mad Biologist [that’s his name for himself] sees an apparent wee flaw in the way some educators [as they call themselves] evaluate things. M the MB writes: One of the supposed key innovations in educational ‘reform’ is the adoption of value added testing. Basically, students are tested at the start of the school […]
Stuff and nonsense, together at last!
Ladies and gentlemen, behold stuff and nonsense, together at last! The Creation Museum, in North Carolina, is also the Taxidermy Hall of Fame of North Carolina. Behold their logo: (HT Matt Shipman)
Cryptography Quiz: LibiGel language
Today’s Cryptography Quiz is a multiple-choice question: Is the following text (a) written in a secret code; or (b) nonsensically-randomized words; or (c) simple obfuscation; or (d) something else? The text is from the beginning of a press release issued by BioSante Pharmaceuticals: LINCOLNSHIRE, Ill.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– BioSante Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: BPAX – News) today announced top-line results from […]