tl;dr I decided to take interest in something that lots of other people do so I could talk to them.
I remember reading an article about the British show Bullseye that pointed out that the blue-collar workers shown in the 80s episodes actually knew more about current events at the time than some educated people might today. It was expected as common knowledge and things you would talk about. These days, sport is still the key cross-section.
And I'm pretty sure that football transcends class in the UK these days (I know to be at least a little interested in Sunderland and NUFC games due to moving here, just as every Kiwi worth their salt knows at least a little about rugby).
A comedy channel in the UK decided to rename the channel a few years back. They bandied names around, then someone said. "How about Dave? Everyone knows Dave, Dave's your mate." Dave it was. As it turns out, David has been in the top 3 names from 1954-1994, so reality is if you're a Boomer, Gen X, or Gen Y, you really do know a Dave. (Stats table here: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.h...)
Gah, I hate stats that a) don't say where the information comes from b) don't say which part of the world they're talking about (US sites are particularly prone to this). I'm assuming this is from US census data, but it's not particularly obvious. There's a rest of the world, you know....
[EDIT: looking at the app, maybe it is worldwide? Still, referring to things like "Republican" doesn't inspire confidence that it's international]
OK, I missed that, but still, that suggests two US links (not that I can see the actual data, it just links to the homepage), and ... Wikipedia? What does that mean in terms of a data set?
It does, but it only points to the websites of FEC, SSA and Wikipedia, without really mentioning what data was used. That's barely more useful to me than "Source: Internet".
The real problem with Wikipedia redesigns is that they don't address their real issue: editing. Wikipedia have serious considerations encouraging a wider audience of editors, and to do so in a verifiable and generally professional manner. Show me a good means of encouraging people to edit and use Mediawiki, then I'd be interested.
Case in point: I had an edit war on Guy Fawkes' since one person refused to let me include information about Australia and NZ celebrating it but only in organised displays due to fire concerns (with news references and all), as they considered it 'irrelevant'. Started off an entire battle about it.
When I started working on my thesis, I immediately set up my entire document directory for it to be in Dropbox. At the time I paid extra for versioning but now I think it'd built into even the basic model. This also saved my friend when she was in writeup and someone stole her Macbook.
A pattern library is normally a collection of best UI practices: see the Yahoo UI pattern library http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/ or http://ui-patterns.com/ for the two most well known examples. (It comes from Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language and it being adapted to object orientated programming by the Gang of Four in 'Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software'). The ALA version is a bit odd as it's more style-guide like (you normally have more options).
… though as someone who's done conference reporting, it can get pretty exhausting fast (though for me I usually did the writeups that night and had to have them up the following morning. I used to go home after the conference and basically sleep for a day!)
Note that Pullum is also the one who's probably written the most about this on LL, but certainly that's a nice consolidated case instead of a scattering of examples - thanks! :)
Virtues: A lot of the style rules are great guidelines.
Limitations:
minor:
Style rules shouldn't be followed when they make things awkward or harder to understand; that's more a problem with some readers than the book, but it's something to keep in mind...
less minor:
A lot of the grammar proscriptions are confused at best (and not followed by the authors themselves, in that work or others). Language Log has oodles of examples: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll
I remember reading an article about the British show Bullseye that pointed out that the blue-collar workers shown in the 80s episodes actually knew more about current events at the time than some educated people might today. It was expected as common knowledge and things you would talk about. These days, sport is still the key cross-section.
And I'm pretty sure that football transcends class in the UK these days (I know to be at least a little interested in Sunderland and NUFC games due to moving here, just as every Kiwi worth their salt knows at least a little about rugby).