cryptolinguistics – well said!

From Matt Blaze’s blog:
We often say that researchers break poor security systems and that feats of cryptanalysis involve cracking codes. As natural and dramatic as this shorthand may be, it propagates a subtle and insidious fallacy that confuses discovery with causation. Unsound security systems are “broken” from the start, whether we happen to know about [...]

“Political Correctness” and English Grammar

My all time favorite comment, regarding usage of indefinite pronouns, appears at the bottom of this article:
“All right, I’m only going to say this once: ‘He’ is the singular indefinite pronoun in English (“if a person drinks too much, he will likely experience a hangover”). ‘He’ also happens to be the masculine personal pronoun.
‘She’ is [...]