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http://www.edwardtufte.com/some of you may already be aware of this guy; I discovered him from a mention on the MacFixit forums, when Powerpoint presentations came up. it's not words per se, but it is some fascinating stuff. the "Ask E.T." section has some great discussions going... 
formerly known as etaoin...
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Deep stuff shrdlu ... considering I just spilled apple juice on the keyboard. I think I'm too "right-brain" to follow it all.
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Are you sure that's not Bill Murray? It *looks like Bill Murray.
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I despair of my ability to learn anything new. I am a primitive.
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Worth quoting: "A pangram is a sentence that contains all letters of the alphabet. Less frequently, such sentences are called holalphabetic sentences. Interesting pangrams are generally short ones; constructing a sentence that includes the fewest repeat letters possible is a challenging task. However, pangrams that are slightly longer yet enlightening, humorous, or eccentric are noteworthy in their own right. By far the most well-known pangram is, "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog." Frequently this is the sentence used to test out new typewriters, presumably because it includes every letter of the alphabet. Curiously, this sentence is often misquoted by changing "jumps" to "jumped." The past tense version, lacking an s, is not a pangram. Often, too, it is misquoted as "the lazy dog" rather than "a lazy dog." This error is not as grievous; the sentence remains a pangram, just a slightly longer one. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there are no particularly clever 26 letter pangrams in English. Constructing a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet once and no more -- essentially an anagram of the alphabet -- seems to require the use of acronyms, initials, and strange punctuation. The most interesting I've seen is, "Glum Schwartzkopf vex'd by NJ IQ." Also note the section on autograms, as that contains some autograms (sentences that self-document their letter content) that are also pangrams." http://rinkworks.com/words/pangrams.shtml
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Bill Murray
formerly known as etaoin...
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That is very cool, wordwind, about the pangrams, and the autograms.
Now, about those Mayan codices (am having some trouble locating their whole shebangs online for free, in color, big, etc.): One of them -- the Borgia codex? is apparently meant to be read "in a meandering manner, from right to left." This strikes me as "just plain interesting," and therefore belongs in this thread.
It struck me when looking at an excerpt and thinking about the meandering manner that "This is what happened to me" (or to you, or us, or them) is what's taking place. Obvious, perhaps, but! how to present it? What to tell, what to leave out, and in what order?
So there we are with information display, Mr. Shrdlu ...
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I will, on occasion, read(attempt) by "meandering"; left to right, then right to left, etc. it makes it interesting to store future words while you're reading things that actually come first. maybe I just create too much free time for myself...
formerly known as etaoin...
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I don't think there is any such thing as too much free time, but there might be such a thing as too much information. Or is it how it's presented? Hey, can you get Edward Tufte to be a visiting lecturer here?
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