Part 1. Pre-vaccination. Jan 2020 – April 2021 Back in early April, when people in Ireland still couldn’t sit down for a cup…
![‘The best shit job’: my [former] life as an English language teacher in Ireland.](http://a2dez.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMAG0518-660x577.jpg)
Above: some of my Omani students on their National Holiday in 2014 December 2018 In solidarity with the teachers in Grafton College who have abruptly…
Why are the words two, to and too spelt differently, even though they sound the same? What about meat and meet? Or catarrh and Qatar? Or OutKast and outcast? And why do greet and great not rhyme? The answer lies…
Warning: This is a first draft, so bear with me. Busy busy. The plot is busy. Very very busy. That’s because English spelling is…
0937, January 2, 2021. A nothing Saturday, if ever there was one. I’m writing on a bench in Stephen’s Green. If I didn’t have a…
coronavirus_death_rates_5-4-2020
AClick for interactive view and focus on any one (or more) countries. Click autoscale to expand lines within each region / box.covid_deaths_per_captita_7-4-2020 …
During the autumn I was engaged in a machine-learning project, trying to predict pronunciation from English spelling, but I took the uncharted approach of seeing…
This is just a short note from some graphs I’ve been creating this week: The above plot shows like 60,000 bisyllabic words and names of…
The problem This weekend, as soon as soon as Ireland had been dispatched from the rugby world cup in Japan, I kept seeing the word…
Ireland are playing Samoa in rugby tomorrow and I had expected that Samoa would be the word of the week. Unfortunately, the pre-match build-up has…
Update: Now that Scotland have dispatched of Samoa, Ireland’s fate is back in their own hands, but here is a table outlining the permutations: Ireland’s…