Amanda Green, Mental Floss:

Ever feel embarrassed when you don’t know how to say a word? Don’t be. Even the most fluent English speakers—and, ahem, political figures—stumble. Besides, pronunciations change over time. See if you’ve been mispronouncing these common words.

When you read Dr. Seuss, you’ll soon have a choice, does his name rhyme with moose, or instead rhyme with voice?

Former Apple engineer, Don Melton, discusses the background of the Safari web browser - in particular its 2003 launch:

KHTML may have been a bigger surprise than Apple doing a browser at all. And that moment was glorious. We had punk’d the entire crowd.

The open source WebKit browser engine is still alive and well. It is the backbone of several well-known browsers, including Google Chrome and, of course, Safari.

(via: Ross Kimes)

Robert McMillan, Wired, on the government’s use of GitHub:

For the first time, the Consumer Protection Bureau was accepting a direct change to one of its internal documents not from someone inside the agency but from an average citizen somewhere across the country. The document had been published on the software code collaboration website GitHub, with the express idea that it could be hacked, commented on, and improved in public just like open source software.

Way of the future.

Sabrina Tavernise, writing for The New York Times, on a recent report from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council:

Younger Americans die earlier and live in poorer health than their counterparts in other developed countries, with far higher rates of death from guns, car accidents and drug addiction, according to a new analysis of health and longevity in the United States.

Researchers have known for some time that the United States fares poorly in comparison with other rich countries, a trend established in the 1980s. But most studies have focused on older ages, when the majority of people die.

The findings were stark. Deaths before age 50 accounted for about two-thirds of the difference in life expectancy between males in the United States and their counterparts in 16 other developed countries, and about one-third of the difference for females. The countries in the analysis included Canada, Japan, Australia, France, Germany and Spain.

Perhaps most surprising is that class and race don’t play a factor for many health indicators. Overall, the report paints a damning picture of health in the United States.

John Moltz on the rumored Office for iOS:

In the last 15 years, Microsoft Office has gone from a must-have product to largely irrelevant to the success of the biggest product category in technology: mobile computing. Derek Kessler believes that, by shipping Office for iOS, Microsoft could have furthered the impression that the suite is essential, but I think the shift is more fundamental

Microsoft let iOS and Android users become comfortable using mobile devices without Office for half of a decade. Jumping on board now would feel like a step backwards.

From the NOAA National Climatic Data Center’s State of the Climate for 2012:

2012 marked the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States with the year consisting of a record warm spring, second warmest summer, fourth warmest winter and a warmer-than-average autumn. The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3°F, 3.2°F above the 20th century average, and 1.0°F above 1998, the previous warmest year.

Other notable facts about 2012 in the United States:

• Every state had annual temperatures which were above average
• Nineteen states had record warm annual temperatures
• Twenty-six states experienced annual temperatures that were in their top ten warmest
• 15th driest year on record
• Every season had precipitation totals below the 20th century average
• The U.S. Climate Extremes Index indicated that 2012 was the second most extreme year on record

Good thing we didn’t waste time discussing climate change during the Presidential debates.

Dr. Seth Brown illustrates the power of math in solving serious real-world problems:

No one seemed to know exactly when my flight would depart and I was concerned that if I chose to eat at Custom Burgers I might miss my departing flight. There were only 5 flights ahead of me in the queue and I didn’t want to get stranded in LGA overnight nor did I want to miss eating at Custom Burger. This provoked an interesting question—how to estimate the probability that I could eat at Pat’s restaurant without missing my flight?

Peter Norvig redid Mark Mayzner’s 1965 study of letter frequency in the English language using Google books data:

My distillation of the Google books data gives us 97,565 distinct words, which were mentioned 743,842,922,321 times (37 million times more than in Mayzner’s 20,000-mention collection).

[…]

Enough of words; let’s get back to Mayzner’s request and look at letter counts. There were 3,563,505,777,820 letters mentioned.

It turns out that Wheel of Fortune is pretty spot on - R, S, T, L, N, E are all in the top ten.

Megan Garber, The Atlantic, on a little conversation between Captain James T. Kirk and Flight Engineer Chris Hadfield:

… basically, a fake starship captain just sent a tweet to a real-life space station engineer, who replied using the language of the fake starship captain … and all of us got to see it.

Jonathan Chait, writing for New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer, on the newspaper featured in Back to the Future:

I was struck by a recurrent plot fact that had never quite registered before: The local newspaper, the Hill Valley Telegraph, plays a major role in the plot exposition of both films. And the paper’s news judgment is exceedingly bizarre.