island⁹⁴

It’s another election year which means that politics are flying.

From a story on NASA forcibly downplaying global warming:

The report did not directly accuse them of lying, but used more nuanced terms such as “mendacity” and “dissembling.” The space agency complained those terms were unjust.

And I enjoy how the New York Times describes a John McCain statement:

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain has steadfastly refused to set dates for withdrawals of troops and envisions a long-term American presence in the country. But last month, in the general election battleground state of Ohio, Mr. McCain did a semantic dance and said he expected that most American troops would be home from Iraq by 2013.

I’m very proud to be officially launching Panlexicon.com: a unique thesaurus. Using intuitive “tag clouds” to represent synonyms, Panlexicon makes discovering the word you want quick, easy and explorational.

Panlexicon’s current functions allow you to:

• First, perform a lookup on a single word and receive a weighted cloud of synonyms.
• Second, view synonyms that overlap across multiple words either by entering the words manually, or clicking on words already in the cloud to further refine your search.

For example, performing a search on “cool” provides a wide variety of synonyms from “chilly”, to “unimpassioned”, to “groovy”. Refining the search using cool and nifty provides more refined synonyms.

By varying the size of the typeface, like tag clouds do, the most relevant terms pop out at you allowing you to quickly scan through large lists of words. Also, because the algorithm is a little fuzzy, you may run across related words that provide better context.

Panlexicon was developed jointly with Rebecca who originally proposed the project and did much of the research on thesauri and helped develop the word relevance algorithms. …read more