OpenCourseWare

Melissa pointed me to OpenCourseWare on IRC just now. Looks interesting.

Basically, MIT making course material available to the public.

Edit: Here's Melissa's journal entry about OCW.

Speedera vs Akamai

I read Brad's recent news item and decided to read up on Speedera a bit.

One thing that amused me a bit was a snarky press release jabbing at Akamai.

Basically, they are saying "Hey, Akamai is making a good offer to Speedera customers; sucks to be an existing Akamai customer though and having to pay overpriced fees". Go read the release, though :)

Edit: Speedera seem to have removed the press release (or simply moved it?) in the process of redesigning their site. But you can ask the WayBack machine for an archived version of the press release.

Random funny for physics geeks

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=80615&cid=7102051

(Via alister)

The things you learn: Japanese rendaku and Lyman’s Law

Japanese rendaku and Lyman’s Law (Ito & Mester 1986)

iro ‘color’, kamí ‘paper’, iro-gami ‘colored paper’
ike   hana (*pana) ‘flower’, ike-bana ‘flower arrangement’

Lyman’s Law: in Yamato vocabulary voiceless consonants freely combine while voiced do not: futa ‘lid’, fuda ‘sign’, buta ‘pig’, *buda

kámi+kaze -> kami-kaze, *kami-gaze ‘divine wind’
onna+kotoba -> onna-kotoba, *onna-gotoba ‘woman’s speech’

Essentially, what I gather is that if there is already a voiced obstruent (is that the same as a stop or plosive?) in the second word, the initial consonant will not undergo rendaku on combination. Never knew that before.