Dave Holland's home page

Word of the day
11:39am, Thursday 25 January 2007

Ethnochoreology, the study of folk dance, through disciplines such as anthropology, musicology, ethnography, etc. See Wikipedia for more.

(It's not in the OED. So sue me.)

Weather
12:09pm, Tuesday 23 January 2007

It's snowing - but there's still patches of blue sky...

Massive deflation
2:53pm, Monday 22 January 2007

419 scams are getting seriously undervalued these days. This one just in:

From: Engr Patrick Mba
Subject: RE: SEEKING FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH YOU PLEASE

Hello,

I am Seeking for your assistance in transferring of (US$42) into your bank
account.

Nah!

Weird things about me
4:45pm, Thursday 18 January 2007

This is all Bob's fault. :-) But despite the fact that memes which tell you to challenge a number of other people with them bother me slightly (in a way reminiscent of chain letters) here are some weird or unusual things you might not know about me.

1. As a baby I had surgery to correct pyloric stenosis.
2. I used to be a qualified trampolining coach.
3. Last year I played music for a maths lecture in Cambridge ("Dancing with maths") which was relayed live to a school in America.
4. In the data centre in the building behind me there's about a petabyte of disk storage; I help to manage it.
5. I can't think of any more!

Words
1:51pm, Friday 12 January 2007 (Updated 1:57pm, Friday 12 January 2007)

How many English words are there which are anagrams of their ROT13'ed versions? e.g. bought ROT13'ed is obhtug.

Update: Hah. Someone else has already done it. Searching 56648 words from /usr/share/dict/words, there are 38 ROT13-anagrams: an, averting, baboon, boob, bore, bought, earn, earner, fan's, fans, fiver's, flyer's, flyers, garnet, gnat, lyre, naiver, near, nearer, nearly, paunch, prance, ravine, re, ref's, refers, refs, regret, rely, rive, robe, tang, thug, uh, vain, vainer, vainly, verier.