Items to share (21 January)

• Geoffrey Pullum on the demise of the apostrophe.

• ...and here on normal and formal language. I'm an ironic formalist; I know the "rules" and sometimes decide to break them (as does Pullum). It's not the same as not knowing the (sensible) ones.

• What is the ACI? 

• Lecture by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on impact of failures within systems; one of the few people who seems to see systems as they are, rather than as we would like to believe them to be.

• Be careful; there are 191 answers to this year's Edge question, and will take a l-o-n-g time to get through them.

• We know crows are bright, but who would have thought they went in for snowboarding? Thanks to Ben Goldacre for the link

• Need to write an article in a hurry? Send for Pootwattle.

• Abraham Maslow in context:

"Maslow had a nobler humanity in mind than the one our cult of the self produces in barbaric multitudes. [...] The prospect of a race of moral giants has issued in a breed of selfish twerps, with a sizeable proportion of genuine degenerates. How the highest democratic longing — to realize the best in one’s nature — has been debased into a pervasive complacency, even a widespread monstrosity, is more than an interesting question in intellectual history; it is a grave and ongoing public catastrophe."

• V S Ramachandran's quick tour of some of the most intriguing case studies revealing the powerful, adaptive potential of the human brain.