Overview: URL Shortening, in TechEncyclopedia - 'Converting a long URL name into a short one. Also called "URL redirecting," there are many free URL shortening services on the Web that take a long URL, convert it to a short name and perform the redirection for the user when the short URL is clicked. URL shortening can be used when sending extremely long URLs in e-mail messages or chat rooms, because the URL is often broken up by the time it reaches its destination. The single string of characters is turned into multiple lines and no longer serves as a clickable link.'* an item in My Annotated Tag Cloud (A-List»): High-level topics / tags, that are important to me, that are linked to individual documents, on that subject. Sort of like having a personal Wikipedia - a subsidiary of My_System»
URL Shortening in the Yahoo! Directory, an example of Redirects, in Google Directory's Redirects(in PageRank order)
- url tagged items, at my del.icio.us - examples:
(shortcut: is.gd/xyz)
avatar tagged items, at my del.icio.us - example: www.gravatar.com
Robert A. Heinlein originally coined the term grok in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a Martian word that literally means "to drink", and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for Earthlings to understand because of our assumption of a singular reality.According to the book, drinking is a central focus on Mars where water is scarce. Martians use the merging of their bodies with water as a simple example or symbol of how two entities can combine to create a new reality greater than the sum of its parts. The water becomes part of the drinker, and the drinker part of the water. Both grok each other. Things that once had separate realities become entangled in the same experiences, goals, history, and purpose. Within the book, the statement of divine immanence verbalized between the main characters, "Thou Art God", is logically derived from the concept inherent in the term grok.
Heinlein describes Martian words as "guttural" and "jarring". Martian speech is described as sounding "like a bullfrog fighting a cat". Accordingly, grok is generally pronounced as a guttural "gr" terminated by a sharp "k" with very little or no vowel sound (a narrow IPA transcription might be [ɡɹ̩kʰ]).
(Grok. (2008, June 12). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:36, July 6, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grok&oldid=218959127)
