AlternaScrabble

Seen on BoingBoing: someone has created Scrabble tiles with numbers on them so that you can use 13375p33|< in your Scrabble games. Sadly, the FAQ does not describe how they came up with point values or how many of each new tile to include in the set, although they claim "[o]ur letter distribution has been extensively tested to provide the most challenging gameplay experience".

Secretly, I dream that they did an exhaustive statistical analysis of several years' worth of IRC transcripts, but they probably just guessed, tested it out, did a few iterative revisions and called it good. I've been thinking for a few years now that it would be neat to determine an English phoneme-frequency distribution so that linguistics geeks could play IPA Scrabble, but I have been too lazy to look one up or do the research to figure it out on my own.

hipster-ier than thou

I just submitted a proposal to O'Reilly Emerging Tech for a talk on my Summer of Code project. The title: "Some of These Things are Just Like the Others."

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go scrub my brain with Listerine.