People will play anything!

Just discovered BlogShares, a fantasy stock market site where the "companies" are weblogs. To my surprise, this very blog is worth $1k in fake money. It would probably help if somebody was, y'know, linking to me. Makes me think of the Hollywood Stock Exchange - my husband used to play that religiously, and accrued quite a bit of virtual wealth by investing in things like X-Men 2 many years before it was made. There's actually a HSX stock ticker along a street in Los Angeles - amused me greatly when I saw that.

Currently reading a most excellent book by Stephen Pinker called The Language Instinct. It explores mankind's natural tendency to develop language, something that's always fascinated me. He has such a wonderful way of explaining things - he doesn't dumb it down, but describes a theory and offers examples in such a way that you feel you understand it. Some aspects of it I'm already familiar with from his other books or from computer science, such as generative grammars; much of it is new to me. I'm actually finding some of it to be an exciting read because I've wanted to know about some of it for so long. What I'm really looking forward to is learning about how we developed language in the first place; how did we first agree that a particular sound means a particular action or object? Oh, the suspense.

More blog-related musings: I am starting to feel slightly limited by Blogger, knowing that MoveableType's TypePad offers features like post categories and TrackBack. Blogger, however, is free. At one point they had a pay feature, but they seem to be doing some re-evaluating and it's not available any more. I'm not sure I'd really want to pay for it, come to think of it, given that I already have a few domains that I could use... but those extra features sure would be nice.

By the way, here's my Furl archive, if you're interested.