life expectancy chart for Sperbers vs. the general public, from ancestry.com

My family has pretty much always known that our last name means falcon in German. But we were recently surprised and delighted to learn that Sperber is also a German nickname for a "small but belligerent person." How fabulous! To tell the truth, though, my diminutive size seems to come more from my mother's side than my father's. The belligerence, however, is pure Sperber.

Anyway, don't mess with me. I may be small, but am also quite feisty. Also, I'm going to live longer than you are (and my family was much more likely than yours was to own a beer saloon in 1880—not that anyone I'm actually related to did).

In case you didn't hear it first at times online, boing boing, tech dirt, or tech crunch, Wikia, Inc. is planning to launch a search engine, which is currently nameless, though I've seen it called Search Wikia and Wikiasari.

Confusion abounds regarding the precise mechanisms involved in this new search engine, but based on Jimmy Wales's comments to The Times, it sounds like the search engine's rankings will be based on user ratings:

…one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: 'this page is good, this page sucks.' Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.

But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.

When trying to imagine how all this would work, we have to differentiate between the types of searches that people make. I can certainly see user ratings doing fabulous things for purely informational searches, but keeping things neutral—and even defining what neutrality means—for goods and services searches in which the searcher does not have a pre-formed idea of exactly which particular brand of product or service she's looking for will be quite a trick.

For instance, Jimmy (as a resident of my home area, Tampa Bay) gave the example of searching for "Tampa hotels." Yes, ideally, the first few results would be non-biased comparisons of various hotels or means of booking any hotel in Tampa. But what comes next? At some point you have to put the website for one hotel above another.

For searches like that, I can't imagine any way to keep up with the programmatic output of spammers faster than a regularly updated algorithm. On the other hand, if anyone has the manpower to do puzzle this out and the tenacity to repeatedly undo vandalism, it's absolutely the Wikipedians.

Save the Internet has a new video with a clear, dump-truck-metaphor-free explanation of net neutrality. If, like, the CEO of AT&T, you're not sure what net neutrality means, have a look-see, then sign the petition:

Embedded video doesn't work in RSS so you'll have to go to the actual post.

Yes, that's right, it's the shortest day of the year: On one hand, we'll gradually get more sunlight hours and hopefully fewer symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder as the next few months progress. On the other, months of cold, wind, and generally unpleasant outdoor sensations still lay ahead.

Either way, some celebration involving presents and candles is surely in order. After all, as wikipedia reminds us, "In antiquity, the winter solstice was immensely important because communities were not assured to live through the winter […] Starvation was common in winter between January to April, also known as 'the famine months.'"

But honestly, isn't the Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa trope starting to get a bit passé? (With the marvelous exception of Smooth-E's new hit single, "Chocolate Coins" [via 92Y Blog].)

Why not take a wikipedia-sponsored gander at the truly underrepresented winter festivities?

HumanLight: If you're too staunch of a secular humanist for even the über-commercialized and non-religious versions of Christmas and Chanukah we celebrate in the U.S., why not wish your friends a Happy HumanLight, with warm wishes of "humanity, reason, hope," and completely fabricated holidays?

Dongzhì: This Chinese celebration of the winter solstice cannot be properly transliterated in valid xhtml characters and instantiates the famous yin-yang balance in the universe as a transitional day in the Chinese calendar.

circular calendar recording changing shadow lengths throughout the year

The wikipedia explanation of the correspondence between the winter solstice and the yin-yang symbol is slightly confusing. Chinesefortunecalendar.com explains that the yin-yang symbol itself originated from ancient measurements of the changing length and position of the shadow cast by a fixed pole over the course of the year, which were recorded on a circular representation of the year divided into four seasons marked by the solstices and equinoxes (and further divided into six segments each).

Anyway, on Dongzhì, which is represented at the bottom of the yin-yang, families get together and eat Tangyuan, balls of glutinous rice served in broth.

Yalda: Also not properly transliterated due to the egregious lack of support for macrons in xhtml, Yalda is the Persian celebration of the birth of the Sun god, Mithra—quite a logical celebration date for the birth of the sun, considering that, from the vantage point of the northern hemisphere, it gets progressively stronger in the ensuing days. Yalda was traditionally celebrated with bonfires, feasts, and, most interestingly, what Wikipedia calls "temporary subversion of order," in which masters and servants apparently switched roles; today it's a secular celebration featuring dried fruit.

image of the Norse fertility god Freyr

Yule: Yule, which is indeed the origin of "yuletide cheer," was celebrated by Scandinavian and German pagans with feasts and "the sacrifice of a pig for the god Freyr" (presumably only in Scandinavia, as Freyr is the Norse god of fertility). Wiccans and German Neopagans continue to celebrate Yule with food, gifts, and ritual sacrifice known as blót.

Soyal: The Hopitu Shinumu (more commonly known as the Hopi) celebrate Soyal to "bring the sun back from its long winter slumber" by making prayer sticks and opening sacred underground ritual chambers.

Saturnalia: The Roman commemoration of the dedication of their temple to their god Saturn was celebrated with sacrifices, gift-giving, gambling, and—again!—a temporary role-reversal between masters and slaves (Hegel would be so proud). The Romans also untied the statue of Saturn, which apparently was kept bound for the rest of the year.

Karachun: Slavic pagans celebrated Karachun as the day on which evil powers are at their peak, signified by the weakness of the sun—sort of the reverse of the logic behind Yalda. The Slavic sun god dies on the winter solstice and is resurrected the following day. His death was commemorated with feasts and bonfires in honor of dead ancestors.

There you have it. Forget Chrismakah, have a Happy Yuldongaldsoysaturnchun!

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round—
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

—Emily Dickinson, "#341″

Only when I imagined a hypothetical wordie-like site it was drab and boring—and this is in my fantasy, people! But when I heard [via fimoculous] that someone had actually made my hare-brained idea reality, I had to check it out, if only to make sure I was the first to add kenspeckle as a fave.

And, lo, wordie is about the coolest site I've seen in months. I could spend all night clicking around other people's pet words. And if the convenient multiple dictionary links for each word weren't enough, this has got to be the first social network actually made with yours truly in mind. Finally, I have a profile that includes my favorite word both as my user name *and* actually specified as my favorite word. (I'm still trying to figure out what my least favorite word is. That's a very difficult question.)

I mean, where else could I list myself as a retronym seeking an aptronym?