James Tauber
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jtauber.com
James Tauber
@jtauber.com
7K followers 2.5K following 2.9K posts
Using computers to better understand languages, texts, and music

OG Web, Python, Corpus Linguistics, DataViz, Philology, Ancient Greek, Music Theory, Tolkien, Space, Health, Retro Computing

Perseus, Greek Learner Texts, @digitaltolkien.com
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finally...
screenshot of Bluesky's Trending with "Cloudflare Outage"
November 18, 2025 at 2:27 PM
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Comic strip Frame 1: NG-2 on the launch pad. Speech bubble from the payload: "Let's light this candle" Frame 2: Rocket assending. "Woohoo! We're on our way!" Frame 3: Second stage above the earth. Payload exposed showing two probes. One says "Mars here we come!" Frame 4: Second stage in space. Second probe says "Apparently we have to stop at L2 first." Frame 5: The two probes alone in space. "We're at L2! Now what?" "I guess we wait. Shouldn't be long!" Frame 6: Headed "One Year Later..." Same probes. The first just saying "..."
November 14, 2025 at 5:52 PM
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New arrival! @ninabegus.bsky.social
Book cover NINA BEGUŠ ARTIFICIAL HUMANITIES A FICTIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE IN AI
November 4, 2025 at 3:27 AM
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This is pure CSS (and HTML and SVG)
October 24, 2025 at 12:41 AM
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Excited to be in the WHOOP Advanced Labs beta
screenshot of iPhone app showing a plot of HbA1c levels over the first half of the year dropping from 11.8 on Feb 3 to 5.6 in Jun 9.
October 14, 2025 at 9:29 PM
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Good call! I'd say so.
log-log scatter plot, mostly following a straight line until the tail end
October 10, 2025 at 3:53 AM
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Shell prompt reading: uv python install 3.14
October 8, 2025 at 6:27 AM
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Green highway marker reading: BASIC: THE FIRST USER-FRIENDLY COMPUTER PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE In 1964, Dartmouth College math professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz created one of the first user-friendly computer programming languages, called Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. BASIC made computer programming accessible to college students and, with the later popularity of personal computers, to users everywhere. It became the standard way that people all over the world learned to program computers, and variants of BASIC are still in use today. 2019
September 29, 2025 at 6:31 PM
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A dream I’ve had for 44 years! Dartmouth was the first university I ever heard of!
Me in sunglasses standing in front of a plaque that reads: IEEE MILESTONE The BASIC Programming Language, 1964 Beginer's Alpurpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) was Created in this building. During the mid-1970 and 1980s, BASIC was the principal programming lamguage used on early microcomputers. Is simplicity and wide acceptance made it useful in fields beyond science and mathematics, and enabled more people to harness the power of computation. February 2021 IEEE
September 29, 2025 at 2:09 PM
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Ghostty 1.2.0 does this to windows occasionally until focused.
A terminal window with distorted, unreadable characters
September 17, 2025 at 7:31 PM
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This is the tentative result...
for page_file in sorted(PAGES_DIR.glob("*.md")): pipeline = path(page_file) | load | markdown(frontmatter=True) | collect_tags ryland.render_pipeline("page.html", f"{page_file.stem}/index.html", pipeline)
September 12, 2025 at 2:33 AM
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And also Susan Hunston’s latest, available as an open access PDF
Pattern, Construction, System A Unified Approach to Grammar and Lexis
September 10, 2025 at 11:09 PM
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Arrived! @timbl.bsky.social
Me holding a book whose cover reads This Is for Everyone The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee
September 10, 2025 at 10:55 PM
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I’ve now visited all 50 US States!
Bespectacled man in jeans and t-shirt holding up a 5 and 0 and standing in front of a sign reading “Welcome to North Dakota. 50th State. Best for Last Club. Fargo, ND”. T-shirt has the same design as the sign.
August 31, 2025 at 3:08 PM
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Look what just arrived
The book “THE COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH a corpus-based approach EDITED BY Roger Garside Geoffrey Leech Geoffrey Sampson”
August 12, 2025 at 12:29 AM
jtauber.com
A little experiment...
A chart titled Rate of Vocabulary Introduction in Thucydides Books 1–3 There are two logarithmic curves. One is red and a little bumpy. The legend says it's "actual text order". The other is fuzzy and grey and the legend reads "shuffled (100 runs), There is also overlaid a bar chart and the legend reads "rate of introduction (per 200 tokens)"
August 4, 2025 at 10:38 AM
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It is annoying that -webkit-text-stroke works differently on Safari (left) and Chrome (right).
A large letter A with an outline that is thicker on the left side leading to a more 3D effect. A large letter A with a thick outline that even all the way around.
July 29, 2025 at 8:25 PM
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I was a physics crackpot in high school too
A pile of papers on the first of which is written in large letters in pencil: ASSORTED PAPERS ON RELATISTIC (sic) QUANTUM GRAVITY and PARTON/LEPTON UNIFICATION IN SUPER-SYMMETRY Researched, Devised and Written by GERALD YONG S.T. Rsc., F.E.R.S. and JAMES K. TAUBER Rsc., F.E.R.S.
July 16, 2025 at 3:30 PM
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Post a ten year old pic of yourself
A younger but chubbier me, with less grey hair, smaller metal-framed glasses, a collared shirt and blazer sitting at a restaurant in a daylight outdoor setting.
June 10, 2025 at 3:03 PM
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Here's the scan...
Scan of an extract from a old, yellowed book with musical figures floating within the text
May 26, 2025 at 1:46 AM
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or the OG...
Poster for the movie WarGames featuring the (imagined) NORAD screens
May 2, 2025 at 11:17 PM
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Exciting book arrival today!
C.S. LEWIS'S OXFORD Simon Horobin
April 11, 2025 at 12:19 AM
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Cartoon by Kliban titled More than Coincidence? #9 Fig. 1 Anglo Saxon Fig. 2 Angled Saxophone
March 30, 2025 at 7:14 PM
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I went for Tintin style
March 26, 2025 at 11:43 PM
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Screenshot of Amazon page showing Mark Monmonier's How to Lie with Maps with "You purchased this edition on June 29, 2009.
March 11, 2025 at 2:50 AM