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A List Apart
A List Apart Issue 252
Keeping Your Elements’ Kids in Line with Offspring
Alex Bischoff introduces Offspring, a JavaScript library bringing the power of advanced CSS selectors to browsers that can’t quite handle the real thing. Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!
The Rules of Digital Engagement
Jonathan Follett takes another trip down the "the long hallway":http://www.alistapart.com/articles/longhallway, looking at ways to collaborate, communicate, and manage conflict in virtual space. Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!
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Welcome
Amanda_chan's Xanga Blog
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Bible in a Year
Read through the entire Bible in one year on this schedule; set ?version= and ?language= in the feed URI to switch versions and languages.
Numbers 4-6
2008-02-18, day 49
Numbers 1-3
2008-02-17, day 48
Leviticus 23-27
2008-02-16, day 47
Leviticus 20-22, Psalm 95
2008-02-15, day 46
Leviticus 17-19
2008-02-14, day 45
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bwangiaLog
bwangiaLog - LiveJournal.com
How did the miraculous happen?
I just finished reading today's odb devotional. Its about the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Its a very interesting story . Jesus fast 40 days and 40 nights after being lead by the spirit of God into the desert. [ This would not be a significant verse if Jesus were not subject to the same hunger pains a regular man would have (i.e. if he used his God powers to reduce his hunger pains)] So Jesus is ridiculously hungry. I know how crazy i become after not having lunch .. Actually I once tried going a week without food ... it gets better after I miss both lunch and dinner then I started getting week on day 2 and on day three I got both soo weak and started feeling cold, at end of day 3 I was cold and could barely make it up the steps of my apartment and I decided to eat ... my little tale might not mean to much to some but I think Day 40 would be something doable for some but still quite ridiculous. Ok so Jesus is a man who is ridiculously hungry and the devil shows up to tempt him. In the Jesus movies the devil shows up as a hissing serpent but I know that no hissing serpent shows up when I get my temptations. So its more of an internal thing, I'll assume that its not just cerebral its also spiritual. Since Jesus was in tune with his spirit and his spirit is in fellowship with God, the reality of the devil tempting him in the spiritual realm would be very real. So the devil say turn stone to bread and given the spiritual power Jesus he can do this! I know its kind of mysterious for some how Jesus could do miracles but I think that its pretty simple. Jesus was a human just like me and you. He had a spirit just like you and I. He connected with God's spirit in intense ways and God granted him the communion and power to work miracles, access wisdom (aka the mind of God) and teaching (I think this is the reason he says, "38I am telling you what I have seen in the Father's presence") and all sorts of other heavenly goodies.We'll I think that every human being since Jesus has this power available! Why? Because we have a spirit just like Jesus' and because of Jesus death we have spiritual access granted by God. So why no such power is demonstrated in life today. One reason may be that we dont access because of our insistence on guiding our own spiritual path, what we will accept and what we wont, another could be because of lack of desire to access/have communion with the spirit of God, or lack of awareness of our spiritual selves and resources, other reasons may be our hearts have stored up in them desires or ideas from spirits other than the spirit of God. These are things we can work on to give God's spirit room.Well someone else may have honestly submitted to repentance, and God's leadership ... Well I think after that its up to God's desire to do stuff. But from Jesus' words that we will do more things than he did. I seriously doubt that God chooses not to use the willing and submissive. Its very exciting to me the amount of power to transcend the natural world that we live in that is available. We should do our part to access this power to deal with our temptations and other misnomers that we see everyday.God help us to be excited about what is available to us through our spirits connecting with yours and then help us to be committed to doing what we ought!Dont forget to check out my site http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~bwangia/ . The photo's page has some links to photo's from my wedding on April 23, 2005 in Santa Cruz, CA
Back from the honeymoon
Just a short note ...The wedding was fantastic ... yeah it was unbelievable. Later I'll get to talking about what it felt down inside to see K come down that aisle on Peter's arm ... the vows .. the communion .. the congregation ... kissing K for the first time ever!And boy ask anyone who was there about the reception! I danced and was sweating as if Id gone clubbing. Just to give an idea of how much fun happened ... picture a girl doing a flip ... my bride with one hand on one foot, the other behind her head and subsequent movement ... My sister Arlene and I doing the 'cooking spoon' dance in the middle of the circle ... picture three tall african men (my cousins) in black suits strolling through the circle floor waving little paper plates coz it was so hot! ... Picture guys chanting "Go Bradley! Go Bradley! Go Bradley! ... Go! Go! Go!"Dad danced, Mom Danced, Katee's parents, Chris, Shanee, Shanee's Mom Nancy, Charis, Evan, Neal Richarde freaking out in the middle of the circle (ps I think he is over 50 yrs old) ... I mean everyone you can think of was in the middle of that circle. You get the picture! All this happened at the churches hall, and who said church folk cant have fun.Then Katee and I drove down to Carmel and had the honeymoon of our life!We are just back to Santa Cruz from the honeymoon.I come back to Boston on Saturday morning and will probably update the journal after them. I'll probably put up wedding pictures right after then.K and I are doing great. Its never felt more natural to be married! I love it. Thanks to everyone for making our wedding just so great!
3 Days to go!
Wow! I leave for California today. 3 days to my wedding and the start of my life with K! I love her soo much (baby if you are reading this, I want the whole world to know).Its been a great ride. Lots of hope, lots of purpose, lots of patience, and most of all lots of love. Friday we have the rehearsal dinner. It will be awesome to be out in the hills in Santa Cruz with my Dad and Mom, Chris, Shanee, Little Nia-Lael, Arlene and the rest of my family and bring them to meet K's family and friends. Some of the boston crowd will make it to the dinner. Some of my Lincoln buddies are coming for the wedding Saturday.Saturday, we do it all. Its going to be a fun event! The mixture of everything. I heard the vows on saturday that Pastor R has prepared and my heart just started to lift as I felt the awe of covenant. In the day when all people want is 'self serving freedom' it has never felt better to place my intent, my will, my emotions, my love in the a vow that establishes covenant with K and with God. On saturday it felt like I was made to say those words; I mean I've never felt stronger about saying them.After Saturday, we'll be off to Carmel, CA start the married life!We'll be back in Boston on the 30th.Thank you Almighty God, My Creator for giving me K and this life I live. Glory to You.Todays ODB talked about God's unchanging nature. He does not destroy us even when we turn away from his way. Otherwise, the world would be gone by now. The circumstances of life dont change Him either. Its awesome to have this picture of God. To me its a picture of a God who sees it all and withholds his hand from punishment, and more often than not he stretches out and blesses even when we are on our own path.Mighty God, Mighty God .... Yes, you are a mighty God.
15 days to the big day!
Its 15 days till I get married and I’m feeling good. I got up today and was getting ready to go pick up K; when I realized that soon, I'll get to have her with me 24/7. We'll be together and won't have to go anywhere to see each other. It’s really a marvel the mystery that marriage is.We finished our marriage counseling yesterday and what an eye opener that was. As a single person, without realizing it you build up all these unhealthy hopes/expectations for your partner to fill that are all in your head. They are very burdensome to try and bring into a real living relationship. If you think about it would be really burdensome to live out someone else's expectations of you. It’s so much more refreshing to be yourself and have someone else discover the beauty of discovering your personality and also your quirks. Thanks God we got lots of warning on that.In general, I’m really pumped to be K's husband and later our kids’ father. I can't believe I get to set up a new family entity. Affecting my family with my actions and choices. It’s weird that by making great choices, I get to set up a home that is healthy and vibrant and I'll get to positively influence K, our relatives and friends, other visitors, and later our Kids.It’s funny that some of the guys tell me the count down with a tinge of "here it comes buddy; your in". But I just feel like I finally get to the finish line/or rewards line. Maybe for them, they got to do whatever when they were single/dating/engaged and so they had to come from that to full responsibility. But for the last few years I've been at full responsibility. So now I continue at full responsibility but I get to enjoy having someone to appreciate it, and someone to enjoy it with, have a strong reason for continuing this full responsibility. You don’t know how hard it is to do something hard when you’re constantly asking yourself, "Why am I putting myself through this? What is the big purpose in this?" But with marriage there is a big purpose to every little change that’s asked of you and making it yields some serious rewards. I’m looking forward to being married big time!Sure there are lots of other responsibilities coming up that I did not have to think about. But what’s new about that, when I had to leave my plush DuPont job for hard grad school that was new responsibility. When I had to make the adjustment to teaching tufts Kids in labs when I'd not done that before that was more responsibility, when I had to chart a new social life in a different kind of crowd at PT and grace street that was a challenge, when I had to leave PT and be at grace street full time that was a challenge. And as far as I can see on the horizon, challenges are lined up for me. But with marriage I get to enjoy big time; I get to be with someone else. It’s a challenge that has instant reward; life with K! I’m way stocked!And the wild card in all of this is its K! My baby's a lot of fun to be with. Everyone can tell by just how much fun people have interacting with her in public. But I come home to her everyday! Anyway, I’m writing too much ... I need to get to gradingToday’s ODB talks about a group that wanted to impose their religious practice on new converts just so that they could brag about this outward show. But also so that they would not face difficulty for going against the grain. Instead Paul says that their directives should be shunned and his boasts as a leader for the new converts are in the cross of Jesus Christ. The only change he's looking for is a change that gives a great reflection on what the death of Jesus has done for the new converts. Its quite awesome coz there's lots that people want to see in us that would make them feel better but is not in what Christ would like to see in us. I go with what Christ wants to see in me over what all the 'influentials' in my life want to see in me.
Sunday at Church
Yesterday a YWAM arts team out of tyler, TX came to gracestreet and did a dramatic performance that included lots of stats on abortion and the modern day problems that youth and family face. They went on to state that there was a bigger picture that framed everything. God created me he wants me to be fully alive. The enemy/satan is strongly opposed to me being fully alive. Because he hates people (me included) and he hates God. He will tempt, trick, confuse, and rid me of such things as faith, belief, compassion, trust, truth, hard work, love, hope, courage, service to others, in daily life and work hard to make sure that God's way of making these things happen for me, namely, faith that Jesus was God's son, that he was born, he died and he resurrected for me. For the saving of my spirit & soul (when I think of the spiritual), conscience and body (when I think of daily life on earth). The enemy will do everything to make me disbelieve this and also disbelieve that the teachings and practices that Jesus and his disciples taught will bring me and others full life on earth and after death.It was very clear to me that I had the choice of being fully alive! I could choose to be partially alive (believe in Jesus but not do his teaching or refuse to let him into my career plans) or I can choose to co-operate with God as he changed my thinking and practice so that I became FULLY ALIVE. Reached my full potential.I committed yesterday to choosing to be fully alive. For me that seems to mean a commitment to (Spiritual and possibly day to day) Priesthood (Ministry Work), Spiritual Knighthood (Prayer and daily living), and obedient to God living (day to day living). I feel very empowered by this choice. Today I came in to the computer science department and I power graded through 5 theory questions for my theory of computation class! I feel changes in my thoughts about my relationships. And I feel really encouraged about being able (with God's help) to live a life that obeys Jesus' teachings.Today's devotional talked about how people view Jesus and challenged me that if I viewed him as stated in the bible, I should respond to this picture with loyalty and love for him.
Long Time Coming
Hey,Ive been away form the journal for quite a while. School and other stuff got me seriously busy. Actually last week after studying about finite automata for the theory of computation class, I decided that the pressure of my current existance must have reduced me to a machine that could only address a finite number of input symbols. I remember going to class and not really comprehending/relating to what people were saying to me especially if that input was emotional; smiles, frowns ... You get the picture.However, stuff is really picking up. I ran the class this week and Ive been getting in a little bit after nine and leaving a little bit before nine. Im afraid I may not have been eating and relaxing well coz I started to fall sick yesterday. So its precaution time, the theraflu's, cough drops, lots of rest and relaxation and I will try and work some exercise into the schedule.Wedding planning is going well. I have one more guy to ask from my party and then Ill have to co-ordinate them. All in all I think my faith is the key in keeping sane in times like this. I read a passage today in the ODB devotional that showed a picture of the heaven's. I think picturing the heavens and hoping for that also makes sense to a lot of the struggle here. I dont know how Id take on this amount of change and responsibility without the knowledge that there was some purpose to it all. I know a lot of people are motivated by the money reward or happiness reward but a lot of those ring a little bit shallow for me. I want the big kahuna as motivation for daily life. Give me some heaven!
Turned 25 Yesterday
So I turned 25 yesterday.Birthdays are low key affairs for me (I even forgot) once growing up. But it was cool that people wanted to do something. The guys bought me dinner at picantes and K baked a cake and brought it in. D played a spanish birthday song on the accordion.Had a good time. Ive had so much happen in the last year. Since my last birthday and begun dating and got engaged to K. I got a masters degree, went home, begun research work, got my first niece, met in-laws- to be, have been to East Africa, California and Northern VT. Yay! Have had some wild times of personal and intellectual growth ...Someone said to me its just downhill from here ... meaning It should be easier going forward. Which is kind of true but I also think have serious challenges for my life.Yesterday I prayed that this marks not less than a quarter of my time on earth. Which made neurotic me think about taking better care of my bod if I wanted to be around for all that time and have fun being around!Its nice to be 25. Soon car companies wont discriminate against me for no reason. On a separate note, over the weekend I became quite resolute about my work as an academic. I was talking to a friend about how their corporate programming job was coming and I did not envy him one bit. I know I want to be excellent in academia and I know I have what it takes. So here comes nothing. As if to confirm this, I was asked to TA the Theory of Compuation class this semester and I will.Good to be 25!
Devotional: Life's Purpose
I competed for the Episcopalian scholarship that asked us to memorize some form of their creed and I remember that the first thing on the list was that Man's (and woman's of-course) chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Couple that with Jesus' "Love the lord your God with all your heart soul and strength and love your neighbor as you love yourself" and you the message of todays ODB.I tend to think about stuff so much and sometimes it gets me in a neurotic funk. At those times I question what life is for. Just to live doing what life demands and then die for heaven. Well thats as dry a thought as I can imagine. Its in stark contrast to obeying God and enjoying safe pasture in the land. Its in start contrast to Enjoying God forever. Its in stark contrast to love. To enjoying life and its challenges. Id rather think that Obeying God brings great pleasure and loving the people around me maximizes my sense of happiness, joy, and enjoyment of life. And it make perfect sense. If I disobey God and what is right and true and good. I feel apart from that good and true life, I feel the guilt of a violated conscience. Luckily God is so forgiving. All I have to do is come and say, Im sorry and I have a new lease on life. It turns out that enjoying God is more fun than resisting and disobeying him. It leads to better relationships with the people around. It leads me to enjoy my job and my existence and at the end of life, I have an even greater prize waiting for me!Someone may object that I am painting a rosy picture and that life has lot of sorrows and trials. I completely agree that life has sorrows and griefs and tragedies; but I would rather face those with the knowledge of God, his wisdom on dealing with them, and his comfort than without Him.It feels great to be a child of God today!
Devotional: Surrender and patience
Todays ODB can be best summed up by its last sentence, "Instead of trying to quell your fears with panic prayers, surrender yourself to God through a prayer of relinquishment, and see what He will do".I took comfort in the passage (Psalm 37:1-8)though.It talks about not worrying about people who do wrong and succeed because they will soon wither away. Instead we are to trust in God and do good; live and enjoy safe life.Vs. 5 strikes a chord in me because I feel like that is what Im currently doing with life.Vs. 6 is almost an untouchable because you are not supposed to dwell on self promotion. The speaker at church talked about this yesterday.The last line of the passage is a shocker, "Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; do not fret-it leads only to evil". I sometimes think that its my choice on whether I will worry or not but here it clearly states that fretting only leads to evil!
Devotional: Momentary vs future purpose
I guess I never understood todays passage from ODB. Esau, coming home from the outdoors swears an oath to sell his birthright to Jacob. I don't really think I understood this idea of birthright. It seems like a promised destiny not just for the individual but for his/her posterity.I feel like I have an inheritance/birthright in God and if I listen to him, I will come into it. Its almost already evident in some of the things that have happened to me. Winning a scholarship to come to the states, getting through lincoln, getting that Killer paying job at DuPont, getting into Tufts and getting my masters project done, going to Kenya in Nov needing both a passport and a visa to come back and I get it with no problem (student on legit trips have had months to get their visa's back), meeting and loving K, even my impending UCSC application. But it seems like the message here is that I can sacrifice all of that continued destiny if I give in to the pressures of the immediate. The pressure to have money to help with stuff, to drive a better car, live in a place I own, eat better ... just a better life! I could be unimpressed and step of the path of destiny! Disrupting all the blessing that was to come into being through me. I could opt for the ordinary in order to escape current pressures but I won't I will stick it out and change so that I can take on all my challenges. Then I will see all of God's blessing and will bring into this life everything God would use me to bring in plus some more! Yay!
Devotional: Gratitude
Todays devotional touched on something that has been on the fringes for me. Honest gratitude and thanksgiving to God for the things he does for me.This sentence from todays ODB is key, "Let's not think that because we can't repay God for saving us, we owe Him nothing.".Paul knew he could not pay God for the salvation that He gave him but he was so filled with gratitude that he gladly preached the gospel.What is it that prevents me from feeling the deepest sense of gratitude. Is it the little hardships that I suffer along the way that make me feel like I deserve the good I get. This sounds so ridiculous when written down but its actually what probably happens.I don't want to be a person who God has to take things away from so that he realizes that "its all God".What I can do to have more gratitude. Count my blessings and name them one by one Recognize my challenges as an opportunity to learn from God and the rules of life Appreciate the people around me Talk to God about his blessings...Hey google spider! Bradley WangiaI want to have more gratitude.
ODB Devotional: Count your blessings
Todays ODB was right on the money again.It encouraged me not to grumble about the tough things in my life because there are lots of blessings that I receive undeservedly. It tells the story of Arthur Ashe who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion that he received when he had heart surgery. Rather than grumble and ask why me? about his blessing, he was maintained a grateful attitude because he said he could also have asked why me? why did he win wimbledon, marry a beautiful woman and have a wonderful child ...This really mirrors my life. When I met some of my friends back at home, I asked why me. Why do I get to leave Kenya and have the great life that I am having in the US? Why am I about to marry this extraordinary woman (she's more than I could ever have dreamed off on my own). Why do I have all the favor that seems to be on my life while millions are deprived the same. Its really awesome the level of blessing I have.The devotional ended with the following phrase "With unwanted burdens come undeserved blessings." Awesome!In an effort to make the google spidey find me I paste this link Bradley A. Wangia
Devtional: Quest for Riches
Todays ODB came from James 1:9-11; James 5:1-6 and it contained warnings on riches for both poor and rich.It comes at a really time time for me as I move into my new place and I start to think about how everything is not perfect! I dont have the furniture I want in there, my car is not fixed, little house things and all of a sudden Im off to the races looking for stuff. Prior to getting the place in Waltham, i lived in a basement had no furniture, for a while used the bus to get to school and had almost nothing. For a while I was really bummed about that and I sought God harder. I had all the challenges I have today and I did fine ; actually I think I was quite concerned with purpose and mission and praying and all that. Now I head off to waltham and materialism and self comfort/indulgence is creeping on me. It seems to justify itself with you've had it tough so its time to start getting the necessities of life! But this stands in stark contrast to what Jesus said to his followers Matthew 6:24-34 About not worryng and trusting in God. Well, I need to do the same!In an effort to make spidey find me I paste this link Bradley A. Wangia
Devotional: Help! God!
Todays ODB came from Psalm 69:13-18 and its a cry to God for help in the times of trouble.I just liked that we have a source of refuge for the tough times. We often may feel like when really sad or hurtful things happen that we have been abandoned by God or that "he let this happen". Well I can't answer the later but I've known in the last few weeks that God is not my opponent in these time. So its good to know that he is not an innocent bystander either, he is THE source of help for the tough times.
Devotional: Testify
Todays devotional message (Proverbs 24:10-12 )spoke of seeing people's spiritual reality and the Christian's responsibility to help if that reality is not good.We can not feign ignorance once we know what should be done. However, witnessing, as it is called in different circles calls for wisdom. We cant force people to see things the way we do. We have to be respectful and humble as we explain what we think we should say and most importantly, we have to realize that God is involved in their well being more than we ever could.Thats why he provides for each of us, gives us life's goods, sent his son to die for us ... and he is the only one who can bring real change into peoples lives.I'll look out for opportunities to tell people about God and the eternal realities of our relationship to Jesus.
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CSS Vault Gallery
The Gallery section of the CSS Vault. All the pretty CSS sites the eye can see.
CSSVault Blog
Didn't know we have a blog? Yes we have! In fact it's been running for months already! <br/> Well enough about that introduction, but go ahead and subscribe through this link or just hop in and visit the Vault's blog.
Intacard
<img src="http://cssvault.com/images/intacard.png" /><br />Intacard Good site. This guy made intabill.com.au
Accessible Art
<img src="http://cssvault.com/images/accessible-art.png" /><br />Accessible Art Hello, It would be nice if you would list my newest Website in your gallery. Thanks, Jochen Gülden
Bostock Communications
<img src="http://cssvault.com/images/bostock_communications.png" /><br />Bostock Communications Bostock Communications is a web and graphic design firm based in Edmonton, Alberta focused on delivering functional, clean web sites which extend your brand onto the internet. Chad Bostock
Sam Rayner
<img src="http://cssvault.com/images/sam_rayner.png" /><br />Sam Rayner Playground and portfolio of Sam Rayner, a 17 year old web developer from Birmingham, UK.
Made By Elephant
<img src="http://cssvault.com/images/made_by_elephant.png" /><br />Made By Elephant So I'm going freelance, and this is my website. Tim Van Damme
Martini Lab
<img src="http://cssvault.com/images/martini-lab.png" /><br />Martini Lab Martini Lab designs web sites in Dallas TX.
Donald Miller
<img src="http://cssvault.com/images/donald_miller.png" /><br />Donald Miller Website of author Donald Miller
PhotoBooth Gallery
<img src="http://cssvault.com/images/photobooth_gallery.png" /><br />PhotoBooth Gallery PhotoBooth Gallery is a website which enables Mac users to upload and share their favourite PhotoBooth images which they create and render. The website works on a unique backend script by Garrett Bjkerhoel. The script allows you to validate images before they are showcased as a thumbnail on the home page. Possible new features and design implementations are in the works.
Linlithgow Golf Club
<img src="http://cssvault.com/images/linlithgow-golf-club.png" /><br />Linlithgow Golf Club Website for my local golf club. Includes a Wordpress driven back end to allow for staff administration and updating
Robbie Manson
<img src="http://cssvault.com/images/robbie_manson.png" /><br />Robbie Manson My portfolio site, clean and no nonsense!
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Photos from Chosetec
army guy
Chosetec posted a photo:
lumberjack!
Chosetec posted a photo:
Nelson Style
Chosetec posted a photo:
Nelson Style
Chosetec posted a photo:
Simmons
Chosetec posted a photo:
Cast iron
Chosetec posted a photo: Old rusty radiators, pipe fittings, all to be melted down and recast into sculptures
cool down
Chosetec posted a photo: the iron slowly cools down in the mold
filling a large mold
Chosetec posted a photo:
Molten iron flows into the ladle.
Chosetec posted a photo: the sparkles are burning droplets. Eye protection is recommended.
Liquid Hot Magma
Chosetec posted a photo: After cooking a while, the iron has completely melted. The plug is broken and it flows out with great speed.
Heat it
Chosetec posted a photo: The pre-heated furnace is stocked with iron and set to cook for 15 minutes or so.
Molds
Chosetec posted a photo: Molds with the wax burnt out.
Open top
Chosetec posted a photo: The furnace is regularly restocked with coal, iron, and flux.
Iron Casting, Mass Art
Chosetec posted a photo: John and his homemade iron smelter. Powered by a fan and burning coal, the furnace is able to reach the ~1200C required to melt iron. With the help of other Mass Art students, he runs an Iron Pour about once a month.
wear protection.
Chosetec posted a photo:
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clieu's Xanga site
clieu's Xanga Blog
Friday, February 08, 2008
clieu's entry on Friday, February 08, 2008 at (4 comments)
Sunday, January 27, 2008
clieu's entry on Sunday, January 27, 2008 at (2 comments)
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
clieu's entry on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 at (5 comments)
Thursday, January 03, 2008
clieu's entry on Thursday, January 03, 2008 at (5 comments)
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
clieu's entry on Wednesday, January 02, 2008 at (7 comments)
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Cooking For Engineers
Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!
Recipe File: Creamy Garlic Mashed Potatoes
Off Topic: Comments and Forums Back Online
I've put the Community Forums back online. I'll also be slowly reactivating the forum-based comments. Let's hope everyone plays nice this time around.
Cooking Tests: Bacon (Part II)
When I posted the first Bacon Cooking Test (October 2004), I knew that I would have to continue to test different ways to cook bacon. I was so sure that a second article would follow that I named labeled that first article as "Part I". Over half a year later, I've finally gotten around to writing up my latest experiments with cooking bacon.I look at three more techniques in this article (using a fourth cooking method, low heat pan frying, as a control): Microwaving with a Makin' Bacon dish, grilling, and slow baking.Method 1: Microwaving with a Makin' Bacon dishThere are many specialty dishes designed for microwaving bacon. Some are simply plastic plates with grooves cut in them to catch grease. This one, the Makin' Bacon dish (about $10), elevates the bacon on poles. As many as a eighteen strips of bacon (according to the manufacturer), can be cooked at a time on this apparatus (although I think my bacon must be wider than their bacon because only a dozen of my strips would fit).Since I was only going to be cooking a couple strips, I used only the center pole.Following the instructions on the Makin' Bacon box, I covered the bacon with a paper towel to reduce potential splatter.I then microwaved it on high for 90 seconds. The bacon at the top (where it bends over the beam, was thoroughly cooked (almost overcooked). However, some of the fatty parts were still soft and partially unrendered. The texture of the bacon was thick and crunchy (similar to the microwaved bacon from the first test). There was also a slight off flavor to the bacon indicative of heating the bacon to too high of a temperature. It is definitely a very fast way to cook and with the Makin Bacon dish, a reasonable number of pieces can be cooked at the same time.As advertised, the bacon grease dripped down into the plastic container. The instructions recommend pouring out the bacon grease but why waste a good thing? After the grease cools, simply spoon it out into a storage container and store in the refrigerator. The grease collected was fairly clean with some small pieces of bacon in it.Method 2: GrillingI prepared a grill with low heat (about 300-350 degrees) and laid out the bacon onto the cooking surface.Flipping the bacon every five minutes, they reached doneness in twenty minutes time.With this method, the meaty portions were chewy (but not overly so) while the fat was light and crisp. There were also no off flavors to the bacon. Because of the texture and flavor, this was Tina's favorite cooking method.Because the bacon grease dripped down into the grill, there was no grease to collect and save afterward; there was also no clean up required. Depending on the size of your grill, you can cook a great deal of bacon at once.Method 3: Baking at low temperaturesI seemed to have lost the pictures that accompanied this baking technique - but their not much to look at anyway, it's just an oven.I laid out strips of bacon onto a wire rack and positioned a wire rack on a foil lined half sheet pan. I placed the pan in an oven preheated to 200°F (93°C) and waited. The theory was that the low heat would penetrate the bacon slowly and as the bacon cooked the fat would render, but without increasing the bacon temperature to a level where the preserving agents of cured meat begin to react and form new compounds producing an off taste (and potentially carcinogenic substances - but more chemicals such as ascorbic acid or erythorbic acid are added these days to help mitigate these effects).Unfortunately, I do not know how long the bacon was in the oven because I forgot to look at the time and fell asleep. My best estimate is that the bacon baked for about 3 hours.The baking resulted in extremely straight pieces of bacon that I found to have exceptional taste and flavor as compared to the pan frying and grilling (the microwaved bacon's off taste was really apparent next to the baked bacon). The texture was crispy throughout. Since flavor and texture were great, this is my favorite cooking method. (Tina prefers a little chewier meat and still likes the grilled method the best.)The long cooking time means this method is best for cooking bacon in large quantities (multiple pans) and then bagging and refrigerating them for future use. The bacon grease collected from the half sheet pan was pure white and completely devoid of charred bits.Method 4: Pan fryingAs a control, I cooked the bacon in the same way as the "winning" method from the first bacon test - pan frying. I placed three strips of bacon in a cold pan and placed it over low heat.After fifteen minutes of cooking while turning the bacon occasionally, the bacon was done. The bacon was light and crispy with a little chewiness to the meat. The grilled method's results came closest to this bacon. The bacon grease remaining in the pan had a pale gray-brown color and was spotted with charred bits and pieces of bacon.ConclusionsIf you're in a rush, microwaving works - but for the best flavor and texture either grill or bake (in advance). If you own a propane grill, cooking bacon over the grill is easier and more convenient than doing it on a stove top. However, if you don't mind spending the time, baking produces the best results with pure bacon grease for use later (may I suggest clam chowder?).
Equipment & Gear: Hefty Serve 'n Store
A few months ago, Hefty released a new line of products called the Hefty Serve 'n Store tableware. There's nothing revolutionary about a set of plastic plates or microwavable storage containers - but the Hefty Serve 'n Store is definitely a clever improvement over its parents: the plastic disposable plates and the low-cost multi-use disposable plastic container. Each plate interlocks with another plate of the same design to form a resealable container. We tried them in our daily lives (and under some contrived tests) and they performed admirably.Pactiv Corporation manufactures the Hefty Serve 'n Store tableware in two varieties: Everyday Tableware and Party Tableware. The Everyday variant is white plastic with a matte finish that is supposed to be sturdy, easy to grip, and microwavable. The Party variant, as far as I can tell, is just a brightly colored version of the Everyday tableware. I tested the Everyday variant.TestingThe plates worked as advertised. The rims are ridged in such a way as to allow two plates of the same size to interlock together to form a storage container. The idea is to use the same plates you would use to serve food (or eat off of) to double as storage containers. Tina and I are big fans (or at least we use them a lot) of Ziploc brand food storage containers. They are low cost, convenient, and work great as lunch containers to take to work. But, a lot of the time, stuff doesn't fit conveniently in them, pizza slices, sausages, chicken marsala, etc. Plate-sized storage containers make storage of most meals fast and easy.Microwaving food in the plates was also convenient. I simply popped the top plate off and repositioned it so the interlocking tabs sat on top of each other, opening up a bunch of vents to allow steam to escape. Reheating occurred quickly and evenly since the contents of the plate were spread out without having too much content stacked on top of each other (a common problem I have when reheating lunches that I pack for work).The general feel of the plate reminded me of thick, heavy duty paper plates. The plastic has a matte finish that feels like you're holding paper, not plastic. It's also stiff and doesn't flex easily. Several other testers commented on how much the Hefty Serve 'n Store plates felt like a paper plate. One tester was so convinced the plates contained some paper that he didn't want "to take a chance with soaking the plate" for fear that it would rip or tear.As expected, the plates hold liquid without any sign of soaking (they are plastic after all). We also hand washed the plates which cleaned up easily and nicely. I received some information from Pactiv when I called to ask about washing the plates. Since the plates are designed to be disposable, there will most likely be some reduced performance in the interlock mechanism of the plates (i.e. they won't fit together as well) with repeated washing. Washing in a dishwashing machine is not recommended due to the high temperatures that a dishwasher reaches.I should also mention that the seal made by the interlocking plates is not water tight, but works pretty well to prevent liquid from escaping if it sloshes around a bit. Just don't fill it with soup and then tilt it.DinnerI brought over a stack of plates to a friend's place, and we grilled up a couple dozen burgers and sausages. Service was handled by the plates and they worked flawlessly. Most of the testers ate standing up holding their plate with one hand and accessing their food with the other. None of the plates bent or flexed under weight and the plates were deep enough to hold corn on the cob without the eater worrying about the corn rolling off the plate. The rims of the plates were both stiff and comfortable making the plates easy to hold.We then served up Korean BBQ short ribs and some of the testers used a metal knife to cut the short ribs. The plate held up to the cutting just fine. It seemed that the plates worked at least as well as other heavy duty plates from such companies as Chinet or Dixie.At this point, we tested the crux of the Hefty Serve 'n Store usage model: storage of leftovers. We took combined the leftovers from the plates we used for serving onto a couple plates and used the newly emptied plates to cover. At first we tried to shove too much food onto one plate, but the lid wouldn't close. After distributing a reasonable quantity of food onto the plate, the other lid snapped into place without a problem. After enclosing all the leftovers in the interlocking plates, they stacked on top of each other and went into a bag for easy transport back home to my refrigerator.We only had two "issues" with the interlocking plates. First, since the plates are opaque, we can't see what's stored in each container. Second, there is no physical mechanism that helps each pair of plates from slipping off each other when stacked (although the plates have a bumpy matte finish that increases friction).When we first heard about the plates, we thought, "Why can't we just use plastic wrap to seal the plates? Is it really necessary to use another plate to cover your leftovers?" Well, usually plastic wrap doesn't stick or seal well when used on paper or plastic disposable plates, so you have to wrap all the way around so the plastic will stick to itself. Also, once the plate has been wrapped, stacking plates doesn't work too well when the only thing separating the bottom of your top plate from the bottom plate's content is a thin sheet of plastic. The interlocking plates solved the problem for us and we efficiently stacked the leftovers without worrying about tilting plates or ill-fitting plastic wrap.ConclusionsAfter using the Hefty Serve 'n Store tableware for a couple weeks, we are convinced that the product lives up to its advertised promises - plus they're quite convenient and the plates are high quality for the price ($2 for a 24 pack of 9-in. plates). Also, the bowls interlock with the 9-in. plates to form deep dish storage containers. The plastic is solid and has a nice textured feel (as opposed to other brands with thin flimsy plastic that might not hold up to a hearty plate of food). These plates are an obvious choice to serve food from when you've got an informal party.The only downside to these plates are that some people may consider them plain (even the festively colored Party plates) and not as pretty as other disposable plates. Also, they aren't the cheapest disposable plates either (but not even close to the most expensive). For the quality of the plate, it's a good bargain since comparable plates cost the same but do not interlock to form storage containers.
Off Topic: Comments and Forums
So, I just got back from my honeymoon and discovered that not only did we have one of our cars towed, but someone decided to "hack" my forums. I'm in the process of trying to catch up on work, so this forums problem isn't going to be fixed for a little while. Since both the comment engine and the forums are based on phpbb, and someone exploited a hole in phpbb, I've been forced to shut down both for the time being in order to preserve the rest of the website. I do have the info backed up, but there's no point bringing them back online until I get a chance to update the forums with the appropriate patches. If anyone would like to point me in the right direction, feel free to e-mail me at cooking@cookingforengineers.com but I may not be able to respond immediately due to my work situation and general lack of free time.
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Creative Commons CC News
Share, reuse, and remix — legally.
CC0 beta/discussion draft feedback and next step
On January 15 we launched discussion of two new tools in a beta US version, both branded “CC0″ — a Waiver of all copyrights in a work, and an Assertion that there are no copyrights in a work. After taking account of your feedback (thank you!), a lot of internal discussion has led us to [...]
Songza
Songza, a beautifully designed music search engine and jukebox, recentlly launched with a chorus of praise concerning its design, implementation, and simplicity (read about the project here). Of particularly interest to the CC community is Songza’s commitment to CC-licensed music and artists, with Songza actively looking to promote and feature CC-licensed music through their Self-Promotion [...]
8bitpeoples
Today seems to be the day that unique, experimental, CC-licensed record labels show up on our radar. 8bitpeoples, “a collective of artists sharing a common love for classic videogames”, specializes in retro video game goodness, creating music that reflects a clear obsession with old NES soundtracks and the wonderfully brittle noises of the Commodore 64. Less [...]
Jahtari
Jahtari is a German dub/reggae web label that releases the majority of their music under a CC BY-NC-ND license. Specializing in what they call Digital Laptop Reggae, Jahtari focus on the collision between the free form aesthetics and rhythm of dub/reggae music and the inelastic nature of computer based electronica. Both stylistic movements focus heavily [...]
Lessig Library
Exact Editions, a company that “makes magazines, books and other printed documents accessible, searchable and usable on the web”, recentlly added CC CEO and founder Lawrence Lessig’s Future of Ideas, Code 2.0, and Free Culture to their database. This means you can now power-peruse Lessig-ology to your heart’s content. From Exact Editions: The books carry the [...]
OLPC + CC Hackathon
Check out the OLPC book & music drive and XO hackathon going on this weekend. From SJ: Share the love with One Laptop per Child, the Creative Commons, Textbook Revolution, and the entire world! We are collecting all the free books, movies, music, and other content that we can in the next five days! Then, on Tuesday [...]
Community Testing for LiveContent 2.0 beta LiveDVD
A beta of LiveContent 2.0 is available for testing! We’ve got it up at the CC labs site (direct download) and the Fedora Spins site (torrent). Burn the DVD image to a disc and boot it up. The Creative Commons tech team has been working on an interesting content “autocuration” process for LiveContent 2.0, [...]
Freeing America’s Operating System
Last November Carl Malamud’s Public.Resource.Org announced an initiative to free 1.8 million pages of U.S. case law, publishing them online with no restrictions on reuse. Today the results of this initiative are available at http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/. From the press release (pdf): Today’s release covers all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on. The [...]
commons-research list
There’s a new mailing list spearheaded by Giorgos Cheliotis (see past posts concerning his research) has been set up for researchers critiquing, investigating, quantifying, or otherwise researching Creative Commons and the commons more broadly. Researchers from all fields are welcome. Visit commons-research to join (thanks again to ibiblio for hosting this and many other CC-related resources [...]
2008 Summer Internships
For all the students who have been patiently waiting, Creative Commons has posted summer internship positions. Please spread the word to interested college or graduate students. We are currently looking for a Community Development, a Business Development, a Technology, and a Development intern. Three full-time and one part-time (Development) positions are available in total. Applicants [...]
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More on privacy issues with Apple's DRM-less iTunes Plus
The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy There’s been more discussion of Apple iTunes Plus DRM-less music and its practice of embedded personal account information into the tracks that are sold without copy protection. I’ve earlier expressed my support for this accountability approach to copyright protection, as opposed to burdensome DRM systems. However, privacy complaints (BBC, Anger over DRM-free iTunes tracks) are appearing over the use of personal information in this way. Looking through Apple’s privacy policy (updated 23 December 2004) and iTunes terms of service (updated 30 May 2007 I found no mention of this otherwise hidden use personal information. The terms of service does say: (xii) iTunes Plus Products do not contain security technology that limits y our usage of such Products, and Usage Rules (iii) – (vi) do not apply to iTunes Plus Products. You may copy, store and burn iTunes Plus Products as reasonably necessary for personal, noncommercial use. Seems that this would have been a good place to indicate the new use of users information. A simple notice here that passing tracks, which appears to be permitted as long as it is for “personal, non-commercial use,” also results in having your personal information passed around. Perhaps I missed this or perhaps Apple plans to add it. I’m going to ask around to get clarification. Update: EFF and O’Reilly also report that the iTunes files may have individual differences (that could allegedly be used for individual tracking) even beyond the personal information that is visible.
A glimse of sanity in the online copyright arena
The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy With Apple’s announcement of DRM-free music downloadable through iTunes, it appears that we may actually be heading toward a sane, scalable approach to copyrighted commercial content on the Web. Tracks from EMI and other music publishers can now be purchased in two versions, a locked up version for the usual 99 cents or a higher-quality and DRM-free version for $1.29. I got an entire album (Jacqueline Du Pre playing the Dvorák & Elgar Cello Concertos with the Chicago Symphony) for a mere $9.95 in unlocked form. As several observers have pointed out, these DRM-free tracks do come with a catch — your name is embedded inside the MPEG-4 file so that if you decide to casually share these files around with your hundred thousand closest friends on the Net (exactly the result the DRM has tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent) then you’re at some risk of getting caught and of having personal information spread around the Net with your illegally-copied files. Following some instructions from an independent Apple news blog, I was able to verify that my name was put into these files upon being downloaded [Daniel-Weitzners-Computer:iTunes Music/...] djweitzn% strings *.m4a | grep name nameDaniel Weitzner nameDaniel Weitzner nameDaniel Weitzner nameDaniel Weitzner In addition to my name it appears that my .mac account id, through which I purchased the tracks, was also included. The big news here goes beyond just copyright. Apple has decided to jettison heavyweight DRM enforcement in favor of an approach that allows the free flow of data with back-end accountability. I believe this is just one step in a larger trend toward what I’ve been calling ‘accountable systems.’ An exclusive reliance on access restrictions such as DRM leads to technology and policy perspectives where information, once revealed, is completely uncontrolled. It’s like focusing all one’s attention on closing the barn door and ignoring what might happen to the horses after they’ve escaped. The reality is that even when information is widely available, society has interests in whether or not that information is used appropriately. Information policies should reflect those interests, and information technology should support those policies. In research we’ve been doing on accountable systems approaches to privacy and copyright, we seek an alternative to the “hide it or lose it” approach that currently characterizes policy compliance on the Web. Our alternative is to design systems that are oriented toward information accountability and appropriate use, rather than information security and access restriction. I think what Apple is doing here will come to be seen as the an early step in a large-scale transformation in how we approach a wide variety of policy issues on the Web. Watch this space for more.
Linked Data at WWW2007: GRDDL, SPARQL, and Wikipedia, oh my!
Last Tuesday, TimBL started to gripe that the WWW2007 program had lots of stuff that he wanted to see all at the same time; we both realized pretty soon: that's a sign of a great conference. That afternoon, Harry Halpin and I gave a GRDDL tutorial. Deploying Web-scale Mash-ups by Linking Microformats and the Semantic Web is the title Harry came up with... I was hesitant to be that sensationalist when we first started putting it together, but I think it actually lived up to the billing. It's too bad last-minute complications prevented Murray Maloney from being there to enjoy it with us. For one thing, GRDDL implementations are springing up all over. I donated my list to the community as the GrddlImplementations wiki topic, and when I came back after the GRDDL spec went to Candidate Recommendation on May 2, several more had sprung up.What's exciting about these new implementations is that they go beyond the basic "here's some RDF data from one web page" mechanism. They're integrated with RDF map/timeline browsers, and SPARQL engines, and so on.The example from the GRDDL section of the semantic web client library docs (by Chris Bizer, Tobias Gauß, and Richard Cyganiak) is just "tell me about events on Dan's travel schedule" but that's just the tip of the iceberg: they have implemented the whole LinkedData algorithm (see the SWUI06 paper for details).With all this great new stuff popping up all over, I felt I should include it in our tutorial materials. I'm not sure how long OpenLink Virtuoso has had GRDDL support (along with database integration, WEBDAV, RSS, Bugzilla support, and on and on), but it was news to me. But I also had to work through some bugs in the details of the GRDDL primer examples with Harry (not to mention dealing with some unexpected input on the HTML 5 decision). So the preparation involved some late nights... I totally forgot to include the fact that Chime got the Semantic Technologies conference web site using microformats+GRDDL, and Edd did likewise with XTech.But the questions from the audience showed they were really following along. I was a little worried when they didn't ask any questions about the recursive part of GRDDL; when I prompted them, they said they got it. I guess verbal explanations work; I'm still struggling to find an effective way to explain it in the spec. Harry followed up with some people in the halls about the spreadsheet example; as mnot said, Excel spreadsheets contain the bulk of the data in the enterprise. One person was even followingn along closely enough to help me realize that the slide on monotonicity/partial understanding uses a really bad example. The official LinkedData session was on Friday, but it spilled over to a few impromptu gatherings; on Wednesday evening, TimBL was browsing around with the tabulator, and he asked for some URIs from the audience, and in no time, we were browsing protiens and diseases, thanks to somebody who had re-packaged some LSID-based stuff as HTTP+RDF linked data.Giovanni Tummarello showed a pretty cool back-link service for the Semantic Web. It included support for finding SPARQL endpoints relevant to various properties and classes, a contribution to the serviceDescription issue that the RDF Data Access Working Group postponed. I think I've seen a few other related ideas here and there; I'll try to put them in the ServiceDescription wiki topic when I remember the details... Chris Bizer showed that dbpedia is the catalyst for an impressive federation of linked data. Back in March 2006, Toward Semantic Web data from Wikipedia was my wish into the web, and it's now granted. All those wikipedia infoboxes are now out there for SPARQLing. And other groups are hooking up musicbrainz and wordnet and so on. After such a long wait, it seems to be happening so fast!ﾠSpeaking of fast, the Semantic MediaWiki project itself is starting to do performance testing with a full copy of wikipedia, Denny told us on Friday afternoon in the DevTrack.Also speaking of fast, how did OpenLink go from not-on-my-radar to supporting every Semantic Web Technology I have ever heard of in about a year? I got part of the story in the halls... it started with ODBC drivers about a decade ago, which explains why their database integration is so good. Kingsley, here's hoping we get to play volleyball sometime. It's a shame we had just a few short moments together in the halls... tags: banff (photos), grddl, www2007, travel
IKL by Hayes et al. provides a semantics for N3?
One my trip to Duke, just after I arrived on Thursday, Pat Hayes gave a talk about IKL; it's a logic with nice Web-like properties such as any collection of well-formed IKL sentences is itself well-formed. As he was talking, I saw lots of parallels to N3... propositions as terms, log:uri, etc.By Friday night I was exhuasted from travel, lack of sleep, and conference-going, but I couldn't get the IKL/N3 ideas out of my head, so I had to code it up as another output mode of n3absyn.py.The superman case works, though it's a bit surprising that rdf:type gets contextualized along with superman. The thread continues with the case of "if your homepage says you're vegetarian, then for the purpose of registration for this conference, you're vegetarian". I'm still puzzling over Pat's explanation a bit, but it seems to make sense. Along with the IKL spec and IKL Guide, Pat also suggests: conference call on IKL, including a slideshow and even a recorded talk another slightly earlier powerpoint slideshow
Collaboration and crime at a distance at HASTAC, WWW2007
I went to the 1st International HASTAC Conference, April 19-21, 2007 at Duke University in Durham, NC, USA. My stated role was to tell the story of How the W3C Process Got Its Stripes to this humanities research community on a The World Wide Web Evolves panel that Harry Halpin arranged.After a short history of my role in the development of the Web and W3C, I noted that the Internet not only faciiltates remote collaboration; it also opens the door to crime at a distance. Extortion of the form "say... nice web site you got there; it would be a shame if something happened to it" is a reality. I'm interested in research into how much the Internet can tolerate before we see the tragedy of the commons.I noted the Proof-of-work proves not to work result by Laurie and Clayton in 2004 as a fairly surprising result based on what looks like fairly straightforward and unsophisticated economic analysis of spam, zombies, etc. Does the humanities research community have expertise in statistics and economics of preserving cultural values such as open communication? (Oh yeah... and I meant to encourage them to look at social/ethical issues around OpenID and distributed authentication, but I completely forgot.) While HASTAC is somewhat on the leading edge of the humanities community, I'm not sure their scope includes what I'm looking for.Meanwhile, at the Web Science panel at WWW2007 in Banff, Peter asked "Where are the cultural anthropologists?" I was pleasantly surprised that some of them were there. Again, at Harry Halpin's prompting.tags: HASTAC, Duke, RDU, digital+media
Updating network security community's understanding of privacy
The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy A few weeks ago a colleague reminded me of one of the early definitions of privacy in the computer security literature from Saltzer and Schroeder (The Protection of Information in Computer Systems): “The term “privacy” denotes a socially defined ability of an individual (or organization) to determine whether, when, and to whom personal (or organizational) information is to be released.” This view reflects the widely held view even today amongst computer security architects that the way to achieve privacy policy ends is to control the release of information. To this end, great effort has been expended to design systems that control access to and flow of personal, sensitive information. While there are certainly good reasons to do this, access control alone has not, and never will, be sufficient to achieve compliance with privacy, copyright or other information-related rules.
City of Boston Censoring Municipal WiFi
The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy Various people (including David Sheets, a student of mine at MIT, and Seth Finkelstein) have pointed out over the last few days that the ‘free’ municipal WiFi service offered by the City of Boston comes with mandatory content filtering that blocks all kinds of sites which are not even close to illegal nor are they sources of pornography that might be considered harmful to children. One the one hand it’s not hard to see why city officials want to avoid the headline: “Boston’s free network a conduit to porn for city’s children, foiling parents’ filtering software.” But does that mean that it’s either wise public policy or constitutionally-permissible for the city to offer wifi to the public with such sweeping and arbitrary constraints? If the City is allowed to do this, then they can block just about anything: Web sites operated by the opposing political party, critiques of the Big Dig, not to mention http://yankees.mlb.com/. One has to ask whether this is really a path that any city would want to open up for itself? As a constitutional matter, it’s not quite clear whether the government can require government-funded Internet service providers to filter content. In United States v. American Library Association, 539 U.S. 194 (2003), the US Supreme Court decided that the Congress could require libraries receiving federal Internet access subsidies (the e-rate) to filter out porn. However, it’s not clear whether this case applies to the muni Wifi situation. The Supreme Court explained: A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order to create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to provide a public forum for the authors of books to speak. It provides Internet access, not to “encourage a diversity of views from private speakers,” … but for the same reasons it offers other library resources: to facilitate research, learning, and recreational pursuits by furnishing materials of requisite and appropriate quality. For what purpose is muni wifi offered? It’s it precisely to create an expanded public forum to increase the flow of information and new web services around the city? This will be an interesting issue to watch.
The Mercurial SCM: great for lots of stuff, but not the holy grail
I have been tracking the mercurial project for a couple years now. First just a bookmark under python+scm, then after using hg to code on an airplane about a year later, I was hooked. I helped get the microformats testing effort using mercurial about a year later, and did some noodling on Access control and version control: an over-constrained problem? around that same time.Yesterday I played host to Matt Mackall as he gave a presentation, The Mercurial SCM, to the W3C Team. In the disucssion that followed, we touched on: fractal project organization (touching on PartiaClone and the ForestExtension) the toplogy of update flows in a large development system with overlapping communities with differentt access rights comparisons with Darcs hg hosting, large projects, user support It seems that hg scales to very large projects, as long as they're fairly uniform, but it doesn't support the sort of tangly fractal web of inter-project dependencies that would make it the holy grail of version control systems.
MP3 patent mess and lessons for standards making
The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy The New York Times reports (Patent Fights Are a Legacy of MP3’s Tangled Origins, Douglas Heingartner, 5 March 2007, C03) on the mess over patent licensing for MP3 technology. While most (including Microsoft) had assumed/hoped that if they paid licensing fees to Frauenhofer they’d have the patent basis largely covered, now Alcatel (armed with the former Bell Labs patent portfolio from Lucent) and others are showing up demanding licensing fees, too. Microsoft just got hit with a with $1.5 billion patent infringement judgment in the United States. Other vendors with MP3 as an integral part of their product are worried that they existing licensing arrangments may not insulate them from new demand for fees. Leonardo Chiariglione, chair of the MPEG group, declares that this is a bad for MP3 deployment: “I consider the situation in general not positive for the wide adoption of the standard, which is what I have been working on.” At the same time he laments the fact that there is little the standards body (ISO and MPEG) can do. Says that Times article: For those confused about where to turn to obtain an MP3 license for a new device or piece of software, he offers little solace. “The rule is that the MPEG working group is not allowed to consider patent issues in our technical work, so there is nothing I can do about it….” W3C’s Patent Policy takes a more activist approach to such matters. We won’t standardize any technology that cannot be implemented royalty-free, and if we find that there are threats to the RF status of a standard after it’s adopted, we can convene a special group to take action, including recommending changing or rescinding the standard.
US Congress Telecommuncations and the Internet Subcommittee Hearing on the Future of the Web
The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy Last week, the US Congress House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Telecommunications and the Internet had it’s first hearing of the year, the subject of which was the Future of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee was the sole witness at this hearing. The topic and witness choice were notable for a couple of reasons. This is the first meeting of the committee in the new session of Congress and the Chair of the committee, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), announced his intention to take a long range look at the larger issues facing communications policy in the United States. This, by itself, is a wonderful idea. The fact that he decided to start this series of hearings with the World Wide Web, as opposed to so many other topics he might have chosen, really speaks to the central importance that the Web has in our society. The fact that he chose Tim to testify was great, too, IMHO. The Committee covered a wide range of questions, including: how will the Semantic Web change science and health care? what are the key lessons to learn from the first phase of the Web about how to promote continued innovation? what should be done, technically or legally, about spam, pornography available to kids, identity theft? why did Tim decide to make Web technology available royalty-free? does support for royalty-free standards imply that content and services on the Web also have to be free? and even, a slighty sheepish question about whether teleportation might be possible in the future? I’ve been to a lot of congressional hearings, especially in my earlier professional life as lawyer and advocate for Internet civil liberties organizations EFF and CDT. This was one of the most positive, thoughtful and forward looking hearings that I’ve ever been to. Here you could see the Committee actually looking out into the future about the potential of the Web and trying to figure out what they could do (or not do) to help assure that it continues to grow and be available to all for commercial, political, cultural and personal use. Too often, Congress gets bogged down in its somewhat inevitable but short-sighted role as mediator amongst special interests. This was Congress at its best. It was great to be there. You can read Tim’s testimony on the Web. Ironically enough, though it’s easy to read the testimony, it’s not so easy to get an archived copy of the video feed from the hearing. Though most Congressional activity is recorded on video and much of it is streamed live by CSPAN or others, there’s no organized way to get achived copies of the video. Carl Malamud is engaged in a serious effort to try to remedy this situation, including trying to encourage CSPAN to make it’s archive of congressonal video public. In the meantime, Carl has kindly ripped the feeds from the hearing and put them up in 2 places (Google Video and archive.org) I’m certainly going to be following Carl’s efforts and looking to help out where I can. Update: C-SPAN has changed its policy and now provides public access with a Creative Commons license.
What is the Analogue for the Semantic Web? If the Web is like a Page+Links, the SW is like a...
This is the first entry for the breadcrumbs blog from what may be called the Interaction perspective on things Semantic Webbish. To that end, i've been mulling over what is the paradigm for the Semantic Web - more particularly what is the physical world analogue for this concept? In order to design an interface to support a technology, to expose its potential for what it can do, it helps to know what it is - or failing that - to have a model around which we can conceptualize what it is, what it does, and somewhat how it works. It's not unusual for a new technology or concept to be introduced via an analogue of a previous, familiar technology "it's like this thing - but for this new bit." This "like this, but for this new bit" is what i've been looking for, for the SW. What i'll propose (eventually) below is that one paradigm may be a notebook in the traditional sense of the term of the notebook as a place to capture work in progress. taken one step (a big step) further, i'll argue that if the Web paradigm is a Page + Links, the paradigm for the Semantic Web may be a notebook + the memex. The Web PAGE - it's a Page. With Links. We have a great model for the Web. It's the page: text with images. We're all familiar with concepts of the page. It's clear, easy to grasp. I'd postulate we need a similar construct or paradigm or analogue for the Semantic Web. We have a long history with read-only text, whether as official public communication, or as unofficial comment. We also have a long experience (400+ years) of experience of a particular technology's deployment of words and images in a page - whether as an illuminated manuscript, or an early printed text with woodcuts. The one new thing added in the Web to the notion of the page - the thing that makes it a Web page - is the hypertext link. The link is really the only core new concept introduced to the page - and more times than not, that link's job is to links to another page. The translation from one mode of non web-page to the Web page is not a terribly huge leap. The link as a concept is almost what we'd call "intuitive" in its use. This is not to say that there are not a myriad of design considerations for making that new page+link approach useful, usable and accessible. We have developed whole suites of conventions on how to deliver pages effectively and have gone through now several generations of "web design" to ensure that text, image and link work. Yet despite over a decade of technological evolutions in the Web technology, the paradigm for describing what we create with the Web is the same: it's a page. With Links. The Page as paradigm informs how we design the page, the way we design the page. It's not a spreadsheet; it's not a network diagram. It's a page. Even with Web 2.0, with RSS feeds, blogs, mash ups, we still have pages. The only model variant in Web 2 with location based mash ups is that the main image on the page is now a map. åAnd again, Maps are familiar technology that have been around for millennia, and are a technology most of us had some training in our education on how to use. It's amazing how much we use familiar technologies to model the representations for new ones, perhaps especially in computing. Bottom line, the web page as page is a clear model that rapidly communicates what the Web is largely about: enabling people to publish content, communicate ideas, and link into the myriad of other ideas available. The page is a powerful analogue for communicating this model, and it is, i would argue, because there is such a clear model, that there has been such rapid adoption of the concepts, and interests across disciplines in the technology. Analogue for the Semantic Web? So, if the analogue for the Web is the page, what is the analogue for the Semantic Web? And why is finding this analogue important? Part of the answer to that question may stem from whom do people in the Semantic Web community wish to attract to be involved as practitioners, innovators, creators, discoverers in this space? If it's the same range of passions and expertise that have brought so much to the Web from the arts, humanities, sciences, business and so on, then this question of model becomes critical. Consider for a moment how the Semantic Web is described in the new First Stop Shop for What is It, Wikipedia. The Wikipedia entry for the semantic web begins: The Semantic Web is an evolution of the World Wide Web in which information is machine processable (rather than being only human oriented), thus permitting browsers or other software agents to find, share and combine information more easily. It is a manifestation of W3C director Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange. At its core the Semantic Web consists of a data model called Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) that facilitate formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given domain. The burgeoning Semantic Web comprises newly created and/or transformed web data sources endowed with computer-processable meaning (semantics). Now, all that description tells anyone about the semantic Web is that it's for Machines. And i'm not sure i believe that the the end game imagined for the Semantic Web is to make data easier for machines to process. It would seem that that machine-processable stuff is a means to an end, but not the end itself. The end is still about people, and PEOPLE being able to build knowledge by moving through linked information. We might ask, then, if the Semantic Web has the same human-oriented goals as the Web, why not just use the same model for describing it: pages with links. I'd suggest that the page is not robust enough to support what more we get from the Semantic Web's far greater emphasis on the Link as opposed to the Page. Because of how it's structured, content in the Semantic Web can be richly associated. We can have the potential with the Semantic Web to explore things in new ways via these associations. For example Beethoven as a composer can be associated with Genres in Music, and to specific Recordings as instances, which associate with various artists, and recording companies or even with the politics of certain works being recorded or not. Beethoven is also associated with a particular period in History; with the interaction of styles in that period, and hence there are correlations between music and architecture and scientific thought at the time. All these associations branch out from Beethoven directly. One might even say that such branches constitute a graph, and the page cannot reflect these possibilities. But neither, David Karger and i have argued, does a raw graph, express that richness. For one thing, besides being illegible on a number of levels, these graphs present only things which are directly connected on the graph. The Semantic Web has a technical facility to support inferring connections between points according to the expression of rules. For instance, one might see a connection between a Beethoven work and the structure of a poem or an equation, and be able to express that connection such that a new connection among these points becomes available. Seeing, finding and drawing those kinds of connections is a primary attribute which the Semantic Web can enable. The page cannot readily contain that possibility. Beyond the Wikipedia definition for the Semantic Web, then, the Semantic Web's promise is to enable people to explore, associate, and connect information to build new knowledge. This sounds a lot like what V. Bush described in As We May Think as the Memex (see Chapter 2: Vannevar Bush and Memex, by Ronald D. Houston and Glynn Harmon in ARIST 41 for a fab overview of the perceptions of this paper since its publication). Drawing of Bush's theoretical Memex machine (Life Magazine, November 19, 1945) The key part of the Memex is making and sharing associations among divergent sources. Bush imagined professions of "trail blazers" (section 8 of As We May Think) emerging who would go about creating these inferences, and publishing them in new kinds of encyclopedias. il n’y a pas de hors-memex Bush's view assumes that there are encylopedias and then trails built with the memex through these encyclopedias. But what if there was only the memex? In a sense that's what the Semantic Web suggests with its emphasis on links and everything having its own unique id (uri). But does this idea of the Semantic Web as a vehicle that supports making associations - as a memex - get us closer to a readily translatable concept of the Semantic Web? I'd like to tease out a few more parts of the memex idea as a way to addressing that point. First is that bush imagined the Memex very much as a tool for scientists - as a way to help researchers to make sense of all the work not only they themselves, but their colleagues as well, would be doing. This focus on the researcher is particularly appropriate for this current exploration of possible paradigms because, because it focuses on the artefact of interest - the logbook - as an object supporting work in progress. Second, the memex took in not only textual notes but images of observations the scientist would literally take with a camera while working. The memex is very much a multimedia repository of not only others' extant work but of the scientists own work-in-progress. I think this notion of work in progress, of personal work log, is critical. This is distinct from the read-only model of the Web, and moves towards a writerly as well as a readerly medium (to use Barthe's terms). But more particularly, it adds a new dimension to linking from elements presented as finished pages to elements which are in the rough, personal. Which may or may not be (yet) meant for publication. There is something of this middle or transitional ground happening on the Web. This entry is an example of it. We see this writerly side in Blogs, rss feeds, tags, comments, ratings - all the places where Web 2 approaches are helping with more rapid publication and inter-commentary of content on the Web. But even this new writerly approach is not quite what the memex is also getting at with its model of something almost as familiar to us as the technology of the printed page in a printed book: and that is the scientist's notebook. Scientist's Notebook as first pass at Semantic Web Analogue. Notebooks can be the complete filling of pages; or of scaps of information. They can be used for the capture of formal studies like experiments, observations in field work, or notes for future reference. But they are all unlike what we think of as the Web in a particular way: the web is public; we use its protocols to publish work for others. Lab/note books are personal, idiosyncratic, and in particular, they represent works in progress. We may find that we use the semantic web technologies both locally/personally as well as distributed/publically. This *for the researcher* or for the researcher's work in progress as a model of part of the Semantic Web is very memex'y. It's also very different from what the web has become. I think this blending of personal use with the semantic web's potential for automatic association of external, associated resources is a significant shift in how most of us have been thinking about the semantic web. Let me frame that last statement. There have been projects thinking about the semantic web desktop - using the semantic web as a personal or local server layer for data. There have also been projects like myTea which have imagined using the semantic web technologies to maintain transparent context histories as a great enabler for a bioinformatics lab book that can automatically track and record bioinformatics experiments as they develop. i don't think however that anyone has previously proposed a paradigm, model, analogue for the semantic web as a researcher's notebook. with links. or, more properly, with memex, where the memex itself is an extension of the researcher's notes, observations, raw data, work in progress. I've already said that the page can't reflect the rich associative possibilities of what the semantic web promises so one may ask, how could the analogue of a researcher's notebook which is so idiosnycratic. One way is that it is possible in a notebook (or on a huge sheet of paper or on a whiteboard - other spaces of work in progress) to draw lines easily across notes to make connections. David Wang and i this past fall at UMD's MindLab were looking at a way to draw these kinds of lines between known points in an ontology to help create rules/inferences to make new connections in the knowledge base. Indeed, there may be a great deal more we can take from the qualities of a researcher's notebook to see as a design prompt to capture more of the semantic web. But one of the important components of this notion of the semantic web as notebook + memex is that it situates the Semantic Web conceptually within the realm of the human. It also situates the semantic web as something that can be part of a process that is engaged with the user. Right now, very few semantic web tools, whether mspace, haystack or tabulator to name a few, support direct authoring. The idea of seeing the semantic web be pull inable into a researcher's context, where the notebook is constantly seeking associations to support the researcher's process, seems to me a compelling kind of inversion of the usual models - instead of putting stuff out there, we are bringing stuff in here, working it. potentially sharing it. but first and foremost using it, munging it, creating with it to develop new knowledge. Process rather than end. Heterogeneous, Implicitly Structured, Implicitly Associated Data Capture Another notion of the notebook which seems interesting is that it also breaks the page as read-only, well structured, well presented information space. In the physical pages of the notebook, we see various forms of data entry where long exegesis is rare compared to short bursts of information, what Michael Bernstein calls "information scraps". These various uses of the page-as-surface, for a variety of forms of content , also demonstrates the personal, though frequently work-related, work-in-progress attributes of this popular form of content capture. Again, we do see examples of a kind of information scrap on the Web - these can be one-liner blog entries pointing to news or other ideas, to tags, to recommendations, to comments. Indeed, entire modes of communication have been built up around short messages like texts, or widgets that communicate only the weather. But these info bytes, if you will, unlike the info scrap, are again meant for publication - for someone else to be able to consume. Tags may be an interesting boundary object as they can be both personal markers - highly idiosyncratic - as well as group or public markers. But for the most part, the short bytes we find on the web are there for public consumption. Notebooks are workspaces, pre-publication resources, the working out of ideas. This is why for now, in any case, i'm focussing on the idea of the note book rather than the personal journal or log. The note book or lab book is a place for taking notes on ideas; it is not the final forum for the ideas, but it is the gathering place for them. Another similar kind of physical world analogue for this kind of working out process is the notecard stack. Indeed, one of the earliest hypertext systems, NoteCards, attempted to emulate this system of idea capture and reordering. Spatial hypertext systems like Tinderbox have also capitlized on the the affordances of moveable cards or small objects to capture ideas where these ideas can be spaced out, clustered, where space in the organization communicates a kind of meaning - at least to the author of the structures. The attributes of the notecard stack that i find particularly relevant are the usual purpose of the stack and the kinds of data the cards hold. When i was in highschool, we were taught a particular methodology for notecards as the way to prepare a research paper. There were idea cards, quotation/paraphrase cards, and bibliography cards. These cards could be created in any order as material was discovered or ideas occured "only one idea to a card; only one quotation per card," "only one reference per card" - the idea being of course that individual cards could be organized and reorganized spatially for getting a picture of the developing paper. Not all cards would be used. Gaps could be detected. The organized cards could then be put into one pile, and the paper written effectively from the turning over or laying out of a set of cards at a time (one exercise required us to generate an outline of the paper from the cards before proceeding to the paper-writeing). The relevance of the notecard model to the concept of the semantic web as personal work space with associated public data is the integration of personal ideas with external sources: the idea cards backed up with the quotations from external sources. In the case of notecards, these associations are either manually created by the researcher/author, or are presented by (and thus attributed to) another author. The goals are the same: building new knowledge by capturing ones own ideas, and working with others - whether these are ideas that come up in a conversation with others and are hastily jotted down, or are captured from a published source. there is an interplay here, a making of meaning. I mentioned spatial hypertext: Mark Bernstein's Tinderbox software as said very much follows the notecard paradigm to support just this kind of intermix activity: it enables links to be copied from the web into cards, and of course enables other kinds of data to be written into the cards. It blends capture of the external with capture of the personal. So do many digital notebook ideas, like the Circus Ponies one i'm using for drafting this entry - they don'thave the nice spatial affordances of Tinderbox, however - they are more locked to the paper metaphor. Something neither of these fine programs have that i think the notebook or notecard + memex could bring is the automatic discovery of association from both the personal and the external into the personal work space. This is an idea that Max Van Kleek, Michael Bernstein, David Karger (at MIT) and myself are pushing on right now from one angle in something called "doing" (pronounced "doyng"), and that the Rich Tags project is pushing on in an associated other space. We're interested in finding ways/metaphors/paradigms to support the capture of personal structured data (like Michael's information scrap of a number jotted down that is a phone number) so that it can be first associated with what Max has started grabbing - the local context - and from there look at drawing in appropriate associated external contexts. In a way the Haystack project modeled this eb and flow of personal information like calendar events with external information such as flight bookings. It created an integrated view of these information resources so that they would be concurrently available. No one knew they were working with semantic web data, and the opportunity to explore across contexts (like the bethoven example way at the start of this entry) was not there. I think this time we're asking the question what would this new thing look like from the moment the computer is engaged. How might input mechanisms change? how might representations across applications-as-contexts differ if there was this collective "data soup" from which these contexts could draw/share? For the moment, i'm imagining this context-rich interaction as the Semantic Web, and the way i'm thinking of it is as a researcher's Note Book (we are all knowledge workers at some point) of work in progress. A notebook. With the Memex. The reason that vision of note book + memex appeals to me particularly is that it foregrounds an active engagement with the data - both reading it, writing it, potentially sharing it for reuse. And i think that kind of in-process engagement with information - to have in work data and external data blending for the development of new knowledge is what the Semantic Web is about. (dig count added May Day, 2007). ﾩ m.c. schraefel, 2007, visiting fellow, DIG. The ideas in this exegesis were initially stimulated from various conversations at January's DIG face to face meeting, then explored later in Jan, 2007 as part of an talk on work in progress while i was visiting the iSchool, University of Texas at Austin.
A design for web content labels built from GRDDL and rules
In #swig discussion, Tim mentioned he did some writing on labels and rules and OWL which prompted me to flesh out some related ideas I had. The result is a Makefile and four tests with example labels. One of them is: All resources on example.com are accessible for all users and meet WAI AA guidelines except those on visual.example.com which are not suitable for users with impaired vision. I picked an XML syntax out of the air and wrote visaa.lbl: <label xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/01/lbl22/label" xmlns:mobilebp="http://www.w3.org/2007/01/lbl22/mobilebp@@#" xmlns:wai="http://www.w3.org/2007/01/lbl22/wai@@#" > <scope> <domain>example.com</domain> <except> <domain>visual.example.com</domain> </except> </scope> <audience> <wai:AAuser /> </audience></label> And then in testdata.ttl we have: <http://example.com/pg1simple> a webarch:InformationResource. <http://visual.example.com/pg2needsVision> awebarch:InformationResource. :charlene a wai:AAuser. Then we run the test thusly... $ make visaa_test.ttlxsltproc --output visaa.rdf label2rdf.xsl visaa.lblpython ../../../2000/10/swap/cwm.py visaa.rdf lblrules.n3 owlAx.n3testdata.ttl --think --filter=findlabels.n3 --n3 >visaa_test.ttl and indeed, it concludes: <http://example.com/pg1simple> lt:suitableFor :charlene . but doesn't conclude that pg2needsVision is OK for charlene. The .lbl syntax is RDF data via GRDDL and label2rdf.xsl. Then owlAx.n3 is rules that derive from the RDFS and OWL specs; i.e. stuff that's already standard. As Tim wrote, A label is a fairly direct use of OWL restrictions. This is very much the sort of thing OWL is designed for. Only the lblrules.n3 bit goes beyond what's standardized, and it's written in the N3 Rules subset of N3, which, assuming a few built-ins, maps pretty neatly to recent RIF designs.A recent item from Bijan notes a SPARQL-rules design by Axel; I wonder if these rules fit in that design too. I hope to take a look soonish.
She's a witch and I have the proof (in N3)
A while back, somebody turned the Monty Python Burn the Witch sketch into an example resolution proof. Bijan and Kendall had some fun turning it into OWL. I'm still finding bugs pretty regularly, but the cwm/n3 proof stuff is starting to mature; it works for a few PAW demo scenarios. Ralph asked me to characterize the set of problems it works for. I don't have a good handle on that, but this witch example seems to be in the set.Transcribing the example resolution FOL KB to N3 is pretty straightforward; the original is preserved in the comments: @prefix : <witch#>.@keywords is, of, a.#[1] BURNS(x) / WOMAN(x) => WITCH(x){ ?x a BURNS. ?x a WOMAN } => { ?x a WITCH }.#[2] WOMAN(GIRL)GIRL a WOMAN.#[3] orall x, ISMADEOFWOOD(x) => BURNS(x){ ?x a ISMADEOFWOOD. } => { ?x a BURNS. }.#[4] orall x, FLOATS(x) => ISMADEOFWOOD(x){ ?x a FLOATS } => { ?x a ISMADEOFWOOD }.#[5] FLOATS(DUCK)DUCK a FLOATS.#[6] orall x,y FLOATS(x) / SAMEWEIGHT(x,y) => FLOATS(y){ ?x a FLOATS. ?x SAMEWEIGHT ?y } => { ?y a FLOATS }.# and, by experiment# [7] SAMEWEIGHT(DUCK,GIRL)DUCK SAMEWEIGHT GIRL. Then we run cwm to generate the proof and then run the proof checker in report mode: $ cwm.py witch.n3 --think --filter=witch-goal.n3 --why >witch-pf.n3$ check.py --report witch-pf.n3 >witch-pf.txt The report is plain text; I'll enrich it just a bit here. Note that in the N3 proof format, some formulas are elided. It makes some sense not to repeat the whole formula you get by parsing an input file, but I'm not sure why cwm elides results of rule application. It seems to give the relevant formula on the next line, at least: ... [by parsing <witch.n3>]:GIRL a :WOMAN . [by erasure from step 1]:DUCK :SAMEWEIGHT :GIRL . [by erasure from step 1]:DUCK a :FLOATS . [by erasure from step 1]@forAll :x, :y . { :x a wit:FLOATS; wit:SAMEWEIGHT :y . } log:implies {:y a wit:FLOATS . } . [by erasure from step 1]... [by rule from step 5 applied to steps [3, 4] with bindings {'y': '<witch#GIRL>', 'x': '<witch#DUCK>'}]:GIRL a :FLOATS . [by erasure from step 6]@forAll :x . { :x a wit:FLOATS . } log:implies {:x a wit:ISMADEOFWOOD . } . [by erasure from step 1]... [by rule from step 8 applied to steps [7] with bindings {'x': '<witch#GIRL>'}]:GIRL a :ISMADEOFWOOD . [by erasure from step 9]@forAll :x . { :x a wit:ISMADEOFWOOD . } log:implies {:x a wit:BURNS . } . [by erasure from step 1]... [by rule from step 11 applied to steps [10] with bindings {'x': '<witch#GIRL>'}]:GIRL a :BURNS . [by erasure from step 12]@forAll witch:x . { witch:x a :BURNS, :WOMAN . } log:implies {witch:x a :WITCH . } . [by erasure from step 1]... [by rule from step 14 applied to steps [2, 13] with bindings {'x': '<witch#GIRL>'}]:GIRL a :WITCH . [by erasure from step 15] All the files are in the swap/test/reason directory: witch.n3, witch-goal.n3, witch-pf.n3, witch-pf.txt. Enjoy.
Modelling HTTP cache configuration in the Semantic Web
The W3C Semantic Web Interest Group is considering URI best practices, whether to use LSIDs or HTTP URIs, etc. I ran into some of them at MIT last week. At first it sounded like they wanted some solution so general it would solve the only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things , as Phil Karlton would say. But then we started talking about a pretty interesting approach: using the semantic web to model cache configuration. It has long been a thorn in my side that there is no standard/portable equivalent ot .htaccess files, no RDF schema for HTTP and MIME, etc. At WWW9 in May 2000, I gave a talk on formalizing HTTP caching. Where I used larch there, I'd use RDF, OWL, and N3 rules, today. I made some progress in that direction in August 2000: An RDF Model for GET/PUT and Document Management. Web Architecture: Protocols for State Distribution is a draft I worked on around 1996 to 1999 wihthout ever really finishing it. I can't find Norm Walsh's item on wwwoffle config, but I did find his XML 2003 paper Caching in with Resolvers: This paper discusses entity resolvers, caches, and other strategies for dealing with access to sporadically available resources. Our principle focus is on XML Catalogs and local proxy caches. We’ll also consider in passing the ongoing debate of names and addresses, most often arising in the context of URNs vs. URLs. In Nov 2003 I worked on Web Architecture Illustrated with RDF diagramming tools. The tabulator, as it's doing HTTP, propagates stuff like content type, last modified, etc. from javascript into its RDF store. Meanwhile, the accessability evaluation and repair folks just released HTTP Vocabulary in RDF. I haven't managed to compare the tabulator's vocabulary with that one yet. I hope somebody does soon. And while we're doing this little survey, check out the Uri Template stuff by Joe Gregorio and company. I haven't taken a very close look yet, but I suspect it'll be useful for various problems, if not this one in particular.
Is it now illegal to link to copyrighted material in Australia? NO
The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy There’s been a lot of coverage (Sydney Morning Herald, Copyright ruling puts hyperlinking on notice, 19 December 2006) about a recent copyright case from the Australia Federal Court. This is an important case but to my reading the decision itself, it’s a mistake to see it as a general rule against linking to copyrighted material, as some of the press coverage suggests. Of course, it would cripple the Web if it became illegal to merely link to copyrighted material. As virtually all Web pages are copyrighted by someone, a rule that any link is an invitation to engage in copyright violation would mean one could only link to pages with permission. That would, indeed, break the Web. But that is not was this case seems to say. From an admittedly cursory reading of the opinion, the Australia court seems to have tied it’s decision to that fact that: “…it was the deliberate choice of Mr Cooper to establish and maintain his website in a form which did not give him the power immediately to prevent, or immediately to restrict, internet users from using links on his website to access remote websites for the purpose of copying sound recordings in which copyright subsisted.” (41)* and the court went on to accept the trial courts finding that: “… Mr Cooper [the defendant and operator of mp3s4free.net site] benefited financially from sponsorship and advertisements on the website; that is, that the relationship between Mr Cooper and the users of his website had a commercial aspect. Mr Cooper’s benefits from advertising and sponsorship may be assumed to have been related to the actual or expected exposure of the website to internet users. As a consequence Mr Cooper had a commercial interest in attracting users to his website for the purpose of copying digital music files.” (48) To boil it down, though Cooper didn’t actually have the power to spot people from illegally copying the MP34 files to which he provided links, his intent was that people engage in copying he knew to be illegal and that he actually benefited from that behavior. The court also addressed the defendants argument that a ruling against him could also outlaw search engines in Australia. The court said: “Google is a general purpose search engine rather than a website designed to facilitate the downloading of music files” Copyright law has developed elaborate doctrine in order to try to determine when to punish those who have some role in enabling infringement as opposed to those who are the actual infringers. I’m not sure that that balance is always right, but this case, similar to the US Supreme Court case MGM v. Grokster is an effort to find a way to indicate when linking to copyrighted material goes beyond building the Web and violates the law. I’m not always happy about where that line is drawn, but it’s a lot more subtle than the simple technical question whether a link is provided or not. * note that the Australia courts have adopted the enlightened practice of using paragraph numbers to refer inside an opinion, rather than relying on page numbers which neither work well with digital copies (such as web pages that lack pagination) and which give certain legal publishes undue control over search/retrieval services for legal documents.
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Doc Searls Weblog
Same old blog, brand new place
Is Google selling out to the GOP?
… or is the GOP just buying stuff from Google and bragging about it? Marc Canter wondered the former with Is Google being played like a violin, which he wrote after reading this press release from GOPConvention2008.com. From the release:   As Official Innovation Provider, Google Inc. will enhance the GOP’s online presence with new applications, search tools, [...]
Quotes du jour
I believe the unbroken web is the source of creativity, something that belongs to all of humankind…I believe the arts belong to everyone and that artists should be revered in culture. They are not, especially in a world run by anti-creative, left-brained bean counters. I’m not sure it’ll ever be any different, and for me [...]
On the continuing end of broadcasting as usual
In The end of DAB is nowhere near nigh?, Russell Parsons says,   …this morning’s announcement from GCap’s that it is closing two digital-only stations, Planet Rock and TheJazz, and selling its stake in national commercial digital radio operator Digital One to Arqiva, strikes a rather more portentous tone.   With the UK’s largest commercial radio company running [...]
Probably not.
But worth waiting anyway.
Lobbying for Lessig
Larry Lessig isn’t running for the late Tom Lantos‘ congressional seat. But that doesn’t mean we can’t push him. Which is what’s going on through the Draft Lessig for Congress blog and Facebook group. Google has 99 results as of 2:37pm (Pacific) today. Google Blogsearch has 13. Technorati has 14. Here’s the graph: The Facebook group has 576 [...]
On toiling in Marketing Communications mines
My old friend Steve Lewis and I fell out of touch for almost a quarter century after college, leading almost entirely different lives in different parts of the world. We diverged on graduation in 1969, after having both been philosophy majors. I went on to careers in journalism, retailing, frozen produce wholesaling, ice cream truck [...]
UnAmerican Airline
Two days ago Jake McKee gave an amazing talk at There’s a New Conversation in New York. He came all the way from Dallas to share some of the great work he and his cohorts had done at the Lego Company, inspired in part by The Cluetrain Manifesto. I didn’t get the whole backstory on [...]
Late deliveries from the Gmail laundry
I love Gmail for one thing: it launders spam out of mail going to my searls.com address. I have things set up so Gmail picks it up from my server, and I pick it up from Gmail. Last I checked, there were over 22,000 spams in Gmail’s spam box. And the last I went through [...]
You too tube
Yes we can. No you can’t.
Remembering Tom Lantos
Andrew McLaughlin has an excellent tribute to my late former congresman, Tom Lantos. A sample:   During Committee meetings, he made a deep impression on me as a forceful orator, a sharp questioner, and a committed defender of due process and the rule of law. On the handful of occasions when I accompanied senior staffers to [...]
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Incoherent Contradictions
drnknmstr's Xanga Blog
Musical Moments (Friday, October 06, 2006 )
drnknmstr's entry on Friday, October 06, 2006 at (4 comments)
A Day(Jamz) in the Life (Sunday, July 16, 2006 )
drnknmstr's entry on Sunday, July 16, 2006 at (3 comments)
Return of the Space Cowboy (Saturday, June 03, 2006 )
drnknmstr's entry on Saturday, June 03, 2006 at (6 comments)
Thursday, August 25, 2005
drnknmstr's entry on Thursday, August 25, 2005 at (4 comments)
Monday, June 13, 2005
drnknmstr's entry on Monday, June 13, 2005 at (1 comment)
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Engadget
Engadget
Announcement of HD DVD's death expected in short order (duh)
Filed under: HDTV, Home EntertainmentWe know it looks like HD DVD's death is a foregone conclusion at this point, but it isn't official until Toshiba says it is, and Ars is reporting that a number of their sources have pegged the impending announcement for within the next few days -- not weeks. Apparently HD DVD's future was in serious jeopardy even before Netflix dropped 'em, and the holdup on Toshiba's part now comes from the company's need to formulate its plans to shut down production -- which is no small task given the volume of hardware and media they were geared up to move.Of course, out Tokyo way the party line's all the same. Our Japanese bureau checked in with Toshiba HQ, which was obviously on PR red alert since they responded to our query in nine minutes, and well well before business hours. The boilerplate response is about what you'd expect, though: "We are considering our future business policies and plans, and studying the market response [to recent developments]." Let's just get this thing over with already, okay Toshiba?[Thanks, Max] Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Motorized Madness is, in fact, just that
Filed under: Desktops You know, we're normally not very into the whole case mod scene, but every once in a while some whack job with way too much free time and talen comes along and completely blows our minds. In this case it's rendermandan's Motorized Madness, a vaguely steampunk reinterpretation of the PC replete with the usual complement of colored lamps and fans, as well as a full outfit of unnecessary rotating, extending, and moving external displays, switches, and toggles. Oh, and that thing up top is a turbine water cooler. Videos after the break -- you won't be disappointed.Continue reading Motorized Madness is, in fact, just that Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Hands-on with LeapFrog's new edutainment lineup
Filed under: Features, Gaming, Handhelds LeapFrog is virtually unchallenged in quite a few of its product lines, but that doesn't seem to be slowing them down any. The company was showing off bunches of new product at Toy Fair 2008, with most of it newly designed to hook up to the computer and help parents keep better track of what their kids are learning with all these "toys." Products like Tag -- a reading pen similar to the FLY pentop -- can tell parents what words kids are reading well, and how much time they spend with a book, while the new Leapster2 and Didj handhelds let parents track the curriculum the kids are running through -- with the Didj even allowing parents to work in custom vocabulary lists or other subjects into their kid's game of choice. Unfortunately, the LeapFrog2 suffers from same screen viewability woes of its predecessor, and both handhelds are quite chunky, but we did like the Didj's screen and software, and that $90 pricetag is quite palatable.Gallery: Hands-on with LeapFrog's new edutainment lineup Permalink | Email this | Comments
Guitar Hero Carabiner hands-on
Filed under: Features, Gaming, Handhelds Yeah, you know you want one. While we're rather skeptical about the "carabiner" aspects of this Guitar Hero Carabiner -- forget your keychain, we've owned cars smaller than this thing -- it certainly manages to bring enough of those Guitar Hero rock star vibes along with to make it worth the $15 (just think of it as your present to yourself for not seeing Jumper this weekend). The sound is decent for this type of handheld, and we had little trouble rocking out with the tactile buttons and cheap ass LCD, but we'd probably prefer the Verizon version of this experience just so we could hear some real songs. Video is after the break.Gallery: Guitar Hero Carabiner hands-onContinue reading Guitar Hero Carabiner hands-on Permalink | Email this | Comments
LeapFrog debuts Crammer Study and Sound player for students
Filed under: Portable Audio LeapFrog is moving on up the chain, and hitting 3rd through 8th graders with a new study aid, the Crammer Study and Sound System. Crammer works basically as a replacement for those annoyingly handwritten index cards, allowing you to enter data for each side of virtual "cards" and run through them on the 2.5-inch grayscale screen. You can also download study aids for a myriad of subjects, or use the included language tools to automatically translate and pronounce words for study. The built-in music playback is pretty straightforward, and lets kids relax with some songs or listen while they study. We spotted a prototype at the 2008 Toy Fair, and while it wasn't a functional unit, we got to see the iriver clix-style four-way screen clicking controls, which seem friendly enough. Crammer will be out Fall 2008 for $60, and includes 1GB of built-in flash memory.Gallery: LeapFrog debuts Crammer Study and Sound player for students Permalink | Email this | Comments
Verizon to offer unlimited voice, data, and messaging packages
Filed under: Cellphonesdigg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Verizon_to_offer_unlimited_voice_data_messaging_packages';We've gotten a flood of tips that the notoriously miserly Verizon is lining things up to offer unlimited calling plans. Starting Tuesday the 19th (of this month) should see the following plans sprout up: $100 - Nationwide Unlimited (voice) $120 - Nationwide Select Unlimited (voice, SMS, MMS) $140 - Nationwide Premium (voice, SMS, MMS, VZNav, VCAST, email) $150 - Nationwide Email and Messaging (voice, SMS, MMS, and data) $170 - Nationwide Global Email and Messaging (voice, SMS, MMS, and international data) $200 - Family plan with two lines, $100 per additional line. That's not all though. There are even more perks and benefits in store for premium-paying unlimited users: 5GB cap on data is out No contract extension for current customers Available on one or two year agreements All plans include Mobile Web 2.0 portal access (skip it) No roaming or long distance [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Permalink | Email this | Comments
Kurzweil predicts that machines will match man by 2029 -- bring it on
Filed under: Robots Famed technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil is on the record about human-machine intelligence parity: it's going down by 2029, so be prepared to get digital on entirely new levels. Apparently, machines "will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence" by then, but even if it's not in the form of meatbag-terminating cyborgs, Kurzweil thinks one future of intelligent machines is on the nano scale, with interfaces to enhance our own physiology and intelligence. Oh sure, this stuff is completely pie in the sky -- but it's still absurdly fun to think of what kinds of crazy crap the 21st century's going to hold.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
LED displays keep folks guessing at nightclub bathrooms
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets Interactive nightclubs aren't entirely unheard of, but we'll be sure to relieve ourselves just before prancing into any party scene with these displays on the lavatory doors. The small LED Matrix displays can be mounted on both male and female doors, and the image shown can be switched as folks enter and leave. Needless to say, such a setup caused quite a bit of hilariousness / confusion when caught on candid camera, so be sure and take a peek for yourself after the break.[Via Halfmachine]Continue reading LED displays keep folks guessing at nightclub bathrooms Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Elonex One: England's 100 quid laptop
Filed under: Laptops digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gadgets/Elonex_One_England_s_100_quid_laptop'; Everybody and their mother's got a super-budget laptop these days (see: OLPC, Eee PC, Cloudbook, Pixel Qi, etc.), and next at the table will apparently be Elonex, which intends to introduce the £100 (~$200) One on February 28th at The Education Show in Birmingham, England. Obviously the intention here is to sell to education markets, but the One is also going to be up for grabs for "adult learners, business users, people who are constantly mobile, elderly people and first time internet users." We don't have any better shots of the thing, but apparently this One (not that One, or the other One) will weigh "less than a kilo" (2.2 pounds), has a 7-inch screen, three hour battery, 1GB of flash memory, and runs on Linux. Apparently there's also a more expensive £120 model that has double the memory (2GB) and Bluetooth, to boot. Both will also have access to a service called ONEunion, which will "feature artwork and music for download, opportunities to get your own content added to the club as well as a range of competitions," presumably for the kids. More on this thing later this month, aye guv'na?[Via Times Online]Update: jkkmobile's got some additional info. Looks like the One could be a rebadge of a Fontastic A-View ultra-cheap Chinese "simple PC". Not that we're really surprised -- we mean, who the hell are Elonex to pop out of nowhere with this thing? Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Samsung ACE global smartphone, M520 go live on Sprint
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds Given the BlackJack's popularity on AT&T, it only makes sense that Sprint (among other carriers) would be looking to get in on that action. Indeed, as expected, Sprint has now launched Samsung's ACE (get it? like the really good card to have when you're playing blackjack?) that comes out swinging with Windows Mobile 6 Standard, 1.3 megapixel camera, microSD slot, stereo Bluetooth, EV-DO, and a SIM slot for hooking your globetrotting butt up with GSM service when you find yourself overseas; what it doesn't have is HSDPA, so don't look at this puppy as an apples-for-apples BlackJack II replacement. It's available now for $199.99 after the usual laundry list of rebates and contract discounts.Separately, Sprint has also gone live with the M520, an unassuming slider we've known about for a while now with GPS, a 1.3 megapixel cam, and tethering capability. This one comes in at a reasonable $49.99 after rebate on contract.[Via PhoneNews]Read - Samsung AceRead - Samsung M520 Permalink | Email this | Comments
Safe update for Apple TV v2, Safari HD hacks released
Filed under: Home Entertainmentdigg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/Safe_update_for_Apple_TV_v2_Safari_HD_hacks_released';There isn't (yet) a way to hack Apple TV v2 (aka take 2), but if you were patient enough to wait for the "safe" PatchStick upgrade on your hacked unit, Safari HD is ready to go. Good luck, and take care, after those weeks of waiting for the new update it sure would suck to brick that device.Read - Safe update for Apple TV v2Read - Safari HD available Permalink | Email this | Comments
T-minus one year till the US analog shutoff: are you ready?
Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/T_minus_one_year_till_the_US_analog_shutoff_are_you_ready_3'; Surely you knew what today was, right? No? Fret not, as Engadget HD has taken the time to consolidate the plethora of 2009 analog shutoff information into one handy guide. Are you ready for the DTV transition that will be going down exactly one year from today? Find out right over here. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Dell to release tri-core AMD business machine?
Filed under: Desktops TG Daily's reporting that Dell's on the verge of releasing a new OptiPlex called the 740 Enhanced with options for triple and quad-core Phenom processors. It won't be any big deal for the majority AMD-spurned end users, but if you're an AMD-loving systems buyer your ears probably just perked up a bit.[Thanks, Schnucki, Tom] Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Debunk: Revenge of Stuff's Sony Ericsson PSPhone mockup
Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming The gaming community is buzzing this morning from some supposedly leaked scans of a possible PSPhone would give it a full 480 x 272 display, mini-analog stick, and drop UMD in favor of playing full PSP games via M2. Turns out they're scans from Stuff magazine from months ago, which seems to have passed under everyone's radar (including our own, initially) because so few people seem to actually read it.[Via PSP Fanboy, with help from Engadget Español]Continue reading Debunk: Revenge of Stuff's Sony Ericsson PSPhone mockup Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
iCinema and projectiondesign collaborate on panoramic displays
Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment Oh sure, it's not like we haven't witnessed ginormous rotating panoramic displays before, but it seems as if projectiondesign and the iCinema Research Centre of Australia's University of New South Wales are taking their long-standing partnership even further with new applications for the AVIE 360-degree 3D multimedia display. Recently showcased at the International Sydney Festival, T_Visionarium will offer up "an all surrounding 3D spectacle of hundreds of video clips that the viewers can interactively sort and edit," and apparently, the duo is also gearing up to bring the somewhat similar iDome to various training facilities across New South Wales. Unfortunately, we have our doubts about such technology ever being home-bound -- for obvious reasons, of course. [Via AboutProjectors] Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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ejlim's Xanga
Latest Xanga weblog from ejlim
Rethinking the GIRs at MIT
At most colleges and universities in America, students are required to complete a prescribed set of courses which are expected to provide a solid foundation for specialized study and training within a particular field of interest. This core curriculum is officially known as the General Institute Requirements - or GIRs, for short - at MIT. The GIRs are divided into two major categories. The first is the Science, Mathematics, and Engineering (SME) requirement, in which introductory subjects in calculus, physics, chemistry, and biology are required, while additional subjects given from a range of electives in science and technology are also mandatory. The second is the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) requirement, in which a minimum number of introductory and advanced subjects must be completed from a collection of classes ranging from visual and performing arts to literary, historical, and social studies.In the 8+ years since I first arrived on the scene as a clueless freshman, some changes (such as the addition of communication-intensive courses within the humanities and one's specific major) have been made to the GIRs, but for the most part, MIT's core curriculum has maintained a near decade-long status quo. However, it appears that a more substantial facelift could be given to the GIRs, based on the recommendations of the MIT Task Force on the Undergraduate Educational Commons. In their 158-page report released last month, the committee proposed to strictly uphold the completion of some core courses within the SME and HASS requirement. However, the remaining previously required courses are either being eliminated or re-introduced within a broader, yet still somewhat specialized field of study, such as physical sciences, life sciences, humanities, and the arts. An additional component being proposed is the inclusion of "project-based first-year experiences," which consist of subjects in engineering and science that involve design or creation. While much of the committee's recommendations are both reasonable and necessary, I believe that further changes to the GIRs need to be made so that students can receive an undergraduate education that is more creative, yet still fundamentally sound. Two central ideas come to mind: 1) replacing the GIRs as a separate and comprehensive entity in favor of integrating essential GIR courses within the framework of a specific major, and 2) providing GIR "electives" that promote exposure to non-traditional career paths.A primary concern with MIT's undergraduate curriculum is that it's overall rigid framework limits the mobility of students to pursue multiple academic interests. This mobility is both beneficial and important in situations where students are: 1) undecided on a major and would need to take an introductory course in different fields in order to narrow down one's particular interest, 2) pursuing a dual degree, 3) studying abroad or doing a Co-Op, or 4) committed a specific major only to realize later on that a different path is desired. It would seem worthwhile to eliminate the SME and HASS requirements as stand-alone GIR components and instead include the essential SME and HASS courses within the overall curriculum of a particular major. For example, if one freshman was interested in pursuing an electrical engineering degree (Course 6-1), the core first-year courses might include 8.01 (Physics I), 8.02 (Physics II), 18.01 (Single-Variable Calculus), 18.02 (Multi-Variable Calculus), and 18.03 (Differential Equations). However, if another freshman was interested in pursuing a biology degree (Course 7), the core first-year classes might include 7.012 (Introductory Biology), 5.111 (Principles of Chemical Science), and 8.01. This integrated-GIR approach is attractive for several reasons. Rather than being forced to take irrelevant and unnecessary courses, students would take the introductory courses needed to continue on towards a specific degree path. One could thus expect that the quality of work from students would be at somewhat higher level due to an educational appreciation that is beyond a mere "get it over with" perspective. In addition, having integrated GIRs would streamline the first-year coursework, which would provide freshmen with the flexibility to either take the necessary prerequisite courses for multiple major paths or to get ahead in a specific major path. This means that freshmen who are undecided would not be penalized for exploring different degree options, while freshmen committed to a particular degree path would be able to take upper-level elective courses to gain additional breadth and depth in that path in preparation for the next phase of their educational experience, whether it be in industry, academia, or elsewhere. Another concern with MIT's undergraduate curriculum is that the often-intense workload discourages students from exploring and pursuing educational options that deviate far from a traditional post-graduate career path. One of the many hallmarks of an MIT education is that, in addition to possessing an impressive skill set, students learn how to think under pressure, both independently and collaboratively. While this may seem utterly trivial - and I mean no disrespect to other colleges and universities - I can't help but wonder how the global landscape might change if a significant percentage of every MIT graduating class was devoted to developing a new product, service, or program in the form of a start-up company, a non-profit organization, or perhaps even a think-tank. An initial attempt can be made to address this issue by incorporating an out-of-class GIR requirement that can be satisfied by the following options: 1) competing in a MIT-based start-up competition (i.e. 50K, Soldier Design, or Ideas), 2) developing an individual or group service project through the Public Service Center, 3) doing undergraduate lab research through the UROP program, or 4) studying abroad (i.e. Oxford or Cambridge). This requirement would be in lieu of previous GIR requirements, such as the Institute Lab or the HASS Concentration. The out-of-class GIR requirement would expose students to educational opportunities that transcend the usual regimen of problem sets and exams, and it would be especially useful to students interested in developing an idea but unable to invest time and resources into a project that might not necessarily be in line with their major degree requirements.The MIT Corporation, along with its faculty and staff, have worked admirably to ensure that an education of the highest quality is made available to each incoming class of students. While much of the undergraduate curriculum is fundamentally sound, certain changes need to be made, most notably in regards to the GIRs. The two ideas - integrated GIRs and out-of-class GIRs - presented here are not meant to serve as comprehensive solutions, nor is the implemention of these ideas trivial, by any means. However, a concerted effort in this direction can one day provide MIT students with the flexibility to pursue different career options, the means to delve deeper within a specific degree path, and an awareness of their ability - and with that, perhaps a selfless resolve - to change more than just the world around them.
A Redemptive Roar in Motown
With the clock approaching 7:30pm EDT, a collective roar could be heard in Detroit as Comerica Park and a nationally televised audience witnessed something that hadn't happened since I was in diapers - now that's when you know it's been a long time awaiting - the Detroit Tigers winning a playoff series, let alone making it to the post-season. They took yet another step in their march towards an improbable World Series championship by pillaging the Evil Empire (i.e. the New York Yankees) 8-3 as they won their divisional series, 3 games to 1. As a long-suffering Tigers fan - I live in Toledo, which has the AAA minor-league team for Detroit - it was immensely gratifying to watch mass pandemonium in Detroit that, for once, didn't involve overturned cars or riots in the streets. Now granted, the city still might go down in flames at some point during the postseason - win or lose - but at least for one day, Detroit can revel harmlessly in the fact that their Tigers are still on the prowl, while Georgie and his $200 million dollar band of overpaid henchmen are headed back to Gotham without a championship for a 6th consecutive season.That the Tigers won this game was significant for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it represented a near-revolutionary paradigm shift in regards to the level of play and the attitude of this team. Perhaps it was manager Jim Leyland and his staff, but starting from Day 1, this team took that approach that it was not going to accept losing, and that they would do whatever was necessary to become a competitive team. However, Leyland himself was to quick to admit that this team exceeded his expectations. Remember, this was a team that had lost an American League-record 119 games in 2003, a short 3 seasons ago. I certainly remember those horrid times, as I had the privilege (or misfortune, depending on how you want to look at it) of watching them in person at Fenway Park when the Tigers came into town to face the Red Sox. Even with my Master's Degree thesis due in 3 days, I made the trek over to Fenway Park the night before the first game of the series and slept on concrete sidewalk in hopes of snagging a pair of Green Monster seats the next morning. I was rewarded for my due diligence with a pair of seats in the 2nd row of the Green Monster that evening. Though I was ready to vocalize my support for my team on any good plays made at the plate or in the field, those moments were few and far between as the Red Sox pounded them 15-2. To add insult to injury, I most likely made it on the 11pm edition of Sportscenter that night for failing to catch a Manny Ramirez homer that came straight at me. The losing pitcher in that game was a rookie pitcher whom I had never heard of. But that changed quickly as the losses piled on, and by season's end, he had accumulated 19 losses (compared to a mere 6 wins). And the name of the pitcher? It was none other than Jeremy Bonderman. In that game, he was all over the place with his location, and because he was repeatedly behind in the count, Red Sox batters could let loose and tee off on his then-predictable pitches, as evidenced by the score. In the game against the Yankees, the Tigers sent one "Jeremy Bonderman" to the mound, but he wasn't the same pitcher that I saw at Fenway. This pitcher was focused, poised, and had good command of his pitches (he was perfect through 5 innings), and as he mowed down batter after batter in New York's vaunted lineup, you could sense his confidence rising to unseen heights. When Leyland pulled him with one out in the 9th, he walked towards the dugout to a spirited standing ovation from the 44,000+ appreciative fans in Comerica. This was the most important game of his life, a clutch post-season performance that could transform Bonderman into an established All-Star in the years to come. Keep in mind, he's only 23 years old and well over a year away from getting a Hertz rental car by himself.But today's game was meaningful for this most important reason - it was now fun again to be playing (and watching) baseball in the Motor City. You could see it in the players' faces all season long, and the stands had a spine-tingling buzz in October that was normally reserved for the late spring when the Pistons or Red Wings would make their traditional playoff push. While I certainly hope and pray that the Tigers pull off the near-unthinkable and celebrate a World Series title in Detroit this fall, regardless of where they end up, I'll be proud of how they carried themselves, both on and off the field. And speaking of celebrations, you know your team must be doing well when one of the players is wearing this: It's highly doubtful that Oakley will design a new product line of sunglasses based on Jason Grilli's post-game eyewear, but honestly, I could care less. I'll take substance over style any day.
Marathon Monday
It's almost a given that everyone likes holidays. The kids get a day off from school, while adults get to be away from the office and attend to other matters. While there are certain holidays that will always be of utmost meaning to me, such as Christmas and Easter, one of my personal favorites is Patriot's Day, also known as Marathon Monday. I think I enjoy this holiday even more than my birthday, and that becomes evident once you get to be my age. For the past three years, I've had the good fortune of qualifying for the Boston Marathon, but this year, it just wasn't meant to be. Injuries and other commitments kept me from putting in the training needed to re-qualify. So I had to settle for running a 5-mile race in the morning, after which I made my way to Kenmore Square to secure a good viewing location for cheering on my BAA teammates. I even put my appalling art skills on display by making a pseudo-motivational poster for the guys. As I waited for the first runners to come by, it dawned on me that today was the first time that I had ever been to a marathon as a spectator. I had been to 8 previous marathons, each time as a runner, so it felt a bit awkward being on the other side of the barricades. The weather was a bit chilly early on, with overcast skies, light winds, and temperatures in the mid-50's. Perfect weather for marathoners (for once), but not-so-hot weather for beer drinkers and BBQ grillers, no pun intended. As usual, the Kenyans took top honors in the overall men's and women's races, but it was a pleasant surprise to see Americans take 3rd, 4th, and 5th in the men's race. US distance running has improved significantly over the past couple of years, and it'll only be a matter of time before an American wins Boston, Chicago, or one of the other major marathons and hopefully usher in a new era of American dominance not seen since the days of Bill Rodgers and Alberto Salazar in the late 70's and early 80's. The performance of the elites was just one of many storylines headlining this year's Boston. For myself personally, I mostly cared about my teammates having a strong showing. While the weather seemed ideal for good race times, most of my teammates unfortunately had sub-par finishing times. Even as I tried to rally my teammates in spirited fashion, my heart ached a bit, because I knew that they were disappointed and in a whole lot of pain as they struggled to the finish. I had been in that lonely position before, so to some extent, I could feel their frustration. But even though I mainly went to Kenmore Square to watch my teammates run, my attention quickly shifted to the other runners, those whose names I didn't know and whose faces I most likely would never see ever again. While these runners would not win any trophies or prize money on this day, it was perfectly okay, because for many, they weren't running for personal glory or accolades. Rather, they were running in honor of or in memory of someone else. They were running for loved ones who were battling or had succumbed to cancer or other life-threatening diseases. They were running to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes and initiatives. They were running to instill hope in others that things previously thought to be impossible were in fact going to be accomplished 26.2 miles later on this glorious day. As I saw these runners courageously battle through the final mile of this race, I couldn't help but cheer and encourage these runners with reckless abandon. I gave high-fives to those running along the barricades. I called out runners who were walking and challenged them to finish strong on this last mile. I lost my voice yelling out whatever snippets of wit, humor, and motivational gimmicks that I could muster off the top of my head. Some laughed, while others gave me a thumbs-up. Still others ignored me and ran or walked straight ahead. But there were some who had previously walked who then gathered the strength and determination to start running again. And they were rewarded with a hearty roar of approval from the masses on Commonwealth Avenue. Patriot's Day is a special day, first and foremost because we celebrate and remember those who laid down their lives for our country's independence. But we also celebrate the Boston Marathon and the opportunities that it provides for those to put their passion and commitment to the ultimate test, be it to win the whole damn thing, to set a personal best, to raise money for charity, or to just do it for fun. Somebody once told me that the marathon is probably the only event where anyone can be a champion by race's end. That's the beauty of the marathon. That's the beauty of Boston.
A Photomosaic Hero
By now, I'm sure most of you have watched or heard of the show 'ER'. While I rarely watch the show much anymore, I used to watch it faithfully back in the day when George Clooney, Noah Wyle, and Anthony Edwards were playing leading roles. In all my years of watching the show, there was one episode that stood out amongst the others - the episode where Edwards' character, Dr. Greene, spends his last few days with his family before passing away. As the episode approached its final minutes on the air, it flashed back to highlights of Dr. Greene's life, with a guitar and Israel Kamakawiwo'ole singing a grainy yet soothing arrangement combining elements of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" with a touch of "It's a Wonderful World." I'll admit that I was a sap and shed a tear or two during the episode. Simply put, it was just too painful for me to see him suffer as he fought to stay alive during those last few days. When it's a struggle just to breathe and walk about, it certainly puts all of our other problems into perspective, doesn't it? This past weekend has been a humbling reminder of how, even when the crap hits the proverbial fan, you keep on doing what you love without complaints or discouragement, because your best, even if it's not perfect, can be good enough to make a meaningful contribution in more ways than you might ever know, and there's no guarantee that you'll wake to face another day. This past weekend presented a series of opportunities to improve my academics, my community service involvement, and my marathon training. On Saturday, I had a 5-mile road race and a final round interview for an international development scholarship, which would give me $5,000 to do medical field work in Rwanda for six weeks this summer. On Sunday was Stu's 30K race, an important tune-up for Boston, and today was my biochem exam. To make a long story short, I tweaked my hamstring during warmups for the 5M, which was enough to make me sit out both the 5M and the 30K race. I had a good interview only to find out from an apologetic committee member that I had just missed the cut for the award, and of course, the 12 hours of research and preparation for that interview could have gone to studying for the exam, which wasn't quite to my liking as well. I'll be honest that I was mildly upset and distraught all weekend, though I've tried my best not to show it around out in public. With all of this going on, plus the fact that my PhD advisor might leave in September for another job, my life has been somewhat in disarray. To not meet expectations and to live with much uncertainty is hardly a pleasant feeling. However, all of these "critical" problems and hardships quickly paled in comparison upon hearing that one of my BAA teammates had just passed away after a long battle with cancer. Dan Peterson, a 55-year old man from Beverly, had stage IV melanoma which resulted in his right arm being amputated, yet he still ran the Boston Marathon for the 24th consecutive time last year while enduring the effects of experimental treatment. I had the privilege of sitting next to him on the bus ride to Hopkinton for the 2004 race. I remember being immensely nervous before that race, because I was sponsored that year by Saucony (along with Dan) for personal contributions to the Boston running community and to society, I was raising funds for Children's Hospital, and I was running in Anderson's memory that year. Combined with 85+ degree temperatures and a slew of friends waiting for me in Kenmore Square, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I remember telling Dan about my overwhelming burden to succeed and to not disappoint all those who would be there to support me. With a big grin on his face, he told me to simply do my best, because the effort and the way in which you carry yourself would be more meaningful than a result taken out of context. He also said to take in the full experience and enjoy it, because you never know when it's all going to come to an end. These were the words of a man who would run the next-to-last Boston of his life that day. His words of encouragement were not empty, not in the least. In his final Boston last year, he had the support of a marathon entourage to protect him and help him along as he struggled to make his way through the six towns leading into Boston. He would courageously finish that race in 5:51, more than double his best of time of 2:42 set over 20 years ago. Despite the end result, he ran the race to the absolute best that his cancer-torn body would let him. In true "Dan Peterson" fashion, he and his marathon group stopped on Boylston Street, a mere few hundred yards from the finish, and tried to absorb the experience. [Taken from the Boston Globe article] "We learned that life is not about the finish line; it's about the journey," Peterson recalled, his voice a whisper. "We took a picture, shed a few tears, and hugged. Then we looked across the line and said, 'Let's go.' I think it touched every guy there." Rest in Peace - Dan Peterson, 1950-2006.
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The Google Weblog
new google news fast
Launch: searchmash, an experimental site started by Google
Uses Ajax and some other web2.0-ish features.
News: Google launches "Features, Not Products" initiative
Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."
Launch: Google Code Search
Google now lets you do searches -- including regular expression searches -- across public source code.
Preview: Google testing new site design
James Yu has a screenshot of a new design Google has been testing lately.
Launch: Google Pages, new Geocities-style site-building software
Google has released a new program that gives users 100MB of web space to make simple HTML pages in.
Launch: Google running AdWords in newspapers
Google is buying the leftover ad space in the _Chicago Sun-Times_ and filling it with AdWords ads related to the rest of the content. I wonder how they're going to charge advertisers. The domains posted are the real domains, so it can't exactly be pay-per-click.
Launch: Google Music, search for bands and albums
Story: Xooglers, Google's former Marketing Director tells his story
Some great stories about Google's early days, with more to come.
Launch: Click-to-Call AdWords, Google will let you call advertisers
(screenshot)
Update: Blind test reveals Google offers best results
The Search Engine Experiment gives you the results from Yahoo, MSN, and Google without saying which is which. Currently, 41% of those who have taken the test picked Google (33% Yahoo, 26% MSN).
Launch: Google Analytics, see the statistics on your website
A free version of Urchin, a company Google bought. (official blog post)
Announce: Google to unwire Mountain View, WiFi on street lamps
You could also buy equipment to extend it into your house. (proposal)
Launch: Google adds Creative Commons support
The Google advanced search page now lets you limit your search to CC-licensed results.
Launch: Google Local Mobile, get Google Maps and more on your mobile phone
Satellites, drag and drop, and more.
Preview: Google on the future of advertising
In a long <cite>New York Times</cite> piece, top Googlers speculate about the future of advertising, including Google selling TV ads, using more personalized information, and links to store inventory information.
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not a blogger
jlchen519's Xanga Blog
Spare the Air (Wednesday, August 29, 2007 )
jlchen519's entry on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 at (3 comments)
A+ (Wednesday, August 22, 2007 )
jlchen519's entry on Wednesday, August 22, 2007 at (7 comments)
Goodbye (Thursday, August 02, 2007 )
jlchen519's entry on Thursday, August 02, 2007 at (3 comments)
Pothead! (Wednesday, July 18, 2007 )
jlchen519's entry on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at
Trip! (Thursday, June 28, 2007 )
jlchen519's entry on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at (2 comments)
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Just be limberrrrr
karrot's Xanga Blog
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
karrot's entry on Wednesday, August 01, 2007 at (8 comments)
girls, pearls and .. whirls? (Thursday, October 19, 2006 )
karrot's entry on Thursday, October 19, 2006 at (17 comments)
Thursday, September 14, 2006
karrot's entry on Thursday, September 14, 2006 at (5 comments)
Disturbing reality (Wednesday, June 14, 2006 )
karrot's entry on Wednesday, June 14, 2006 at (15 comments)
Karen's Summer FUN in NYC Guide 2006 (Thursday, June 08, 2006 )
karrot's entry on Thursday, June 08, 2006 at (11 comments)
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MIT Campus News
Campus news headlines from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology News Office.
'Cycle-logical' bonding for students, professor
It's not unusual for MIT professors and their students to socialize outside the laboratory. But here's a word of warning to would-be members of Jeff Tester's lab: You might want to think about getting in shape.
Awards and honors
Recent achievements by members of the MIT community.
Inclusiveness, optimism among strengths of HST's Gray
Martha Gray, director of the Harvard-MIT Department of Health Sciences and Technology, displays an optimism that explains why, on an exceptionally snowy night in March, dozens of people flocked to her home to read poetry and to enjoy chance meetings.
Saving the rainforest with … toys?
Some villagers in Honduran communities who used to take part in the illegal trade in mahogany have turned to sustainable wood harvesting. But they need more markets. And that's where MIT Sloan School master's student Craig Doescher comes in.
Digitalk: Where IT's at
News from MIT Information Services and Technology.
Bustani lectures to feature Boutros-Ghali, Avishai
The Emile Bustani Middle East Seminar at MIT, now in its 22nd year, will present two lectures this spring on contemporary Middle Eastern affairs.
Sports, innovation share stage at Sloan event
A love of sports can lead to exultation and heartbreak. But it can also lead to technical innovation, a point emphasized in one of the panels during the second annual MIT Sloan Sports Business Conference, held Feb. 9.
Profiles in excellence at MIT
MIT is known for bringing out the best in its students academically, but that ambition also applies to athletics. MIT's volleyball teams have achieved stellar success, and much of the credit goes to Coach Paul Dill, who will receive a 2008 Excellence Award for Bringing Out the Best.
Suresh to receive 2008 Eringen Medal
The Society of Engineering Science has chosen Subra Suresh, Dean of the School of Engineering and Ford Professor of Engineering, to receive the A.C. Eringen Medal for 2008, in recognition of "sustained outstanding achievements in engineering science."
MIT to review U.S. energy technology innovation
A two-year, $2-million grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation will enable researchers at MIT to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the energy technology innovation system in the United States.
IAP 2008 in photos
A sampling of images of the diverse offerings in MIT's Independent Activities Period 2008, which ran from Jan. 7 to Feb. 1.
Application for IDDS 2008 now available
The International Development Design Summit (IDDS) 2008 will take place from July 14 through Aug. 8.
John Meyer, nuclear engineer, 76
MIT Professor Emeritus John Meyer, a nuclear engineer who spent more than 25 years at MIT until his retirement in 2001, passed away Jan. 11. He was 76.
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- updated: Feb 13 02:09PM
Marilyn's Xanga Site
wongmc's Xanga Blog
Saturday, February 09, 2008
wongmc's entry on Saturday, February 09, 2008 at
Saturday, February 02, 2008
wongmc's entry on Saturday, February 02, 2008 at (3 comments)
Engagement News (Thursday, September 14, 2006 )
wongmc's entry on Thursday, September 14, 2006 at
Saturday, October 15, 2005
wongmc's entry on Saturday, October 15, 2005 at (1 comment)
Thursday, September 29, 2005
wongmc's entry on Thursday, September 29, 2005 at (1 comment)
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elevation99's Xanga site
elevation99's Xanga Blog
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"ComingSoon.net - 20 most recent trailers"
Do you know what's coming?
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
added the international teaser trailer, which includes some minor differences from the North American version
WALLE
updated the vacuum vignette with High Definition QuickTime
Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns
we've got two exclusive TV spots from the dramedy
Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D
watch the new trailer for the sci-fi/fantasy action-adventure, with Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson and Anita Briem
Big Stan
added the trailer for the new Rob Schneider comedy
My Blueberry Nights
posted a Japanes trailer for the Wong Kar Wai film
Nim's Island
posted an international trailer for the fantasy-adventure
Transsiberian
added a new international trailer for the thriller, with Woody Harrelson, Ben Kingsley and Emily Mortimer
Love Songs
posted the trailer for Christophe Honore's dramatic musical
Pineapple Express
check out a Red Band trailer for the Seth Rogen and James Franco action-comedy!
Be Kind Rewind
linked to two clips from the comedy
The Signal
added a new webisode on the horror film
The Visitor
posted a trailer for the Thomas McCarthy dramedy
Roman de Gare
added the trailer for the drama, starring Audrey Dana, Dominique Pinon and Fanny Ardant
Priceless
updated the trailer with High Definition QuickTime
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Netflix New Releases This Week
New movies at Netflix this week
Chaos
With a gang leader (Wesley Snipes) holding dozens of hostages at an interrupted bank robbery, suspended cop Detective Quentin Conners (Jason Statham) is pulled back into action to negotiate. But when chaos erupts inside, the baddies escape. Now, Conners must pair with rookie cop Shane Dekker (Ryan Phillippe) to find the gang before they pull off an even bigger heist in this tense action flick directed by Tony Giglio.
Gabriel
In the long-standing fight between good and evil, Gabriel (Andy Whitfield), the lone surviving archangel, must engage in an epic last stand against the fallen angels to save the citizens of purgatory. Taking on human form, Gabriel wrestles with earthly emotions -- including a romance with a prostitute (Samantha Noble) -- and launches a fierce battle against purgatory's ruler (Dwaine Stevenson) in this dark actioner.
The Fists of Righteous Harmony
A group of motorcycle-riding ninja vigilantes known as the Fists of Righteous Harmony fear their days may be numbered when they learn of a conspiracy involving their nemeses the Dark Monk, assassin Franco Gungori and the menacing Black Mask gang. When a series of attacks land a little too close for comfort, the Fists are forced to go into hiding to learn the only technique they can use to defeat their emboldened enemies.
Curious George: Goes to the Doctor and Lends a Helping Hand
In this Emmy-nominated PBS show narrated by actor William H. Macy, a curious monkey -- George -- uses his inquisitiveness (and misadventures) to learn a slew of things about the worlds of math, science and engineering. Frank Welker voices George, and Jeff Bennett provides the voice for the Man with the Yellow Hat. Besides the eight episodes included, the video contains a pair of interactive games.
Disney's Little Einsteins: Race for Space
When Leo, June, Quincy, Annie and Rocket learn that the Three Little Piggies have lost control of their airplane, they blast off on an outer space mission to rescue their porky pink friends and guide them home. Then, the Little Einstein crew takes on the devious Big Jet and a group of the world's fastest flying machines in an exciting race around the planet.
Gadget Boy and Heather: Along Came a Spydra
Infused with the personality of the world's clumsiest bionic gumshoe -- Inspector Gadget -- Gadget Boy returns to thwart the elaborate schemes of the planet's most nefarious scoundrels. In this collection of episodes from the animated series, he's out to take down the villainess Spydra, who -- with assistance from her Russian flunky, Boris Vulture -- aims to unleash chaos and destruction on the globe.
Gadget Boy and Heather: Gadget Boy Saves the World
Gadget Boy -- the futuristic incarnation of hapless robotic sleuth Inspector Gadget -- returns for more adventures in this collection of hilarious episodes, traveling the globe to fight crime along with secret agent Heather and mechanized dog G-9. Every bit as bumbling as his legendary predecessor, Gadget Boy has a knack for missteps, but the myriad high-tech gizmos he has at his disposal save the day.
Handy Manny: Fixing It Right
Handyman par excellence Handy Manny (voiced by Wilmer Valderrama) puts his gang of talkative tools to work tackling the problems of the Sheet Rock Hills community in these episodes from Disney's popular animated series. Join the fun as Rusty, the monkey wrench, conquers his fear of heights to fix a jungle gym; handsaw Dusty figures out the mystery behind the disappearing socks; and hammer Pat devises a smart solution to a supersized problem.
Heathcliff: New Cat in Town
With a voice provided by the legendary Mel Blanc, Heathcliff -- the coolest feline on the block -- is back with another animated collection of hilarious high jinks and madcap adventures. Ever the prankster, impish Heathcliff always finds a way to escape the sticky situations that he creates for himself and for his cohorts.
Ready Set Learn!: Vol. 1: Try, Try Again!
Children learn the value of perseverance in this installment of the acclaimed Ready Set Learn! series. Paz the penguin encourages an optimistic approach to learning new skills and teaches the value of not giving up. Join Paz and his friends Wilbur and the Save-Ums as they guide children through one delightful adventure after another. When learning is this much fun, kids love to try, try again!
Ready Set Learn!: Vol. 2: Spring Fling
Learning emotional intelligence is loads of fun with this installment of the Ready Set Learn! series. Travel along with Paz the penguin and his buddies Wilbur and the Save-Ums as they tackle exciting new experiences meant to provoke children's natural curiosity. Crafted with a delightful mix of live-action puppetry and animation, these adventures encourage kids to encounter the everyday world with a sense of fascination and fun.
Sonic Underground: Sonic to the Rescue
This set of adventures based on the hit video game follows siblings Sonic, Manic and Sonia as they continue to thwart Dr. Robotnik's wicked schemes. The intrepid hedgehogs travel to Port Mobius, where they learn that ships are falling prey to a Mobian sea beast -- but all is not what it seems as Capt. Squeegee discovers that there's a scam afoot. Later, the trio stumbles upon a beautiful oasis that Robotnik may be monitoring.
The Land Before Time: Adventuring in the Mysterious Beyond
Loofah, Doofah and all the other lovable dinosaurs from the Land Before Time movies are back in four episodes of prehistoric adventures that will thrill kids even as they learn important lessons about friendship, loyalty and growing up. Memorable songs will also have youngsters on their feet dancing and singing, ensuring hours of fun. Also included is the "Egg-Citing Pattern Game" interactive feature.
Bugville
The insect world comes to life in this classic animated feature from Dave and Max Fleischer, creators of Betty Boop and Popeye. Hoppity the grasshopper returns to Bugville to find trouble in the form of the evil Bagley C. Beetle and his henchmen. Will Hoppity foil Bagley in time to save his garden paradise from ruin? This heartwarming tale will delight audiences of all ages with its timeless animation and charm.
Secrets of a Soul
The newborn field of psychoanalysis provides the backdrop for this 1926 German thriller directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. A tormented scientist (Werner Krauss) suffering from an irrational fear of knives and the irresistible urge to murder his wife seeks help in confronting his demons once and for all. The scientist's fantastic nightmares find brilliant expression in surreal sequences that mark this as a work of true cinematic art.
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The Big Noob
The Big Noob Feed
test
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MacOSXHints.com
Macosxhints.com RSS feed
Save selected browser text via AppleScript
I occasionally find myself wanting to save some text from a browser window. Usually I want to know where the text came from as well, so just dragging out a text clipping to the desktop is not a good solution. I wrote two AppleScripts (one for Safari and one for Firefox) to make saving a selected text, URL, and page title from browser windows easier. The scripts write the browser's selected text and other info to a text file that it creates on the user's desktop. (I don't like clutter on the desktop, so on my Mac, this file gets created in another folder. However, I wanted to provide example scripts that worked, so I chose the desktop). Below is an example of the script's output with the date, the URL, the page title and some text from a selection: Wednesday, February 6, 2008 8:40:11 PM http://some-url.com Photo of the Day ------------------- A deep-blue sky sets off a mass of yellow wildflower blooms along ... [snip] ... magazine ~~...
Create easy 'tracking' apps for iPhone via Google Docs
Since I've had my iPhone, I've found a few things that I wish I could do with it. I wished that I had a fuel-economy tracker app for my car, an expense tracker for work-expenses and others. I knew I could've set-up a custom web-page backed with a database, but it just seemed that there should be an easier way.It seems Google thought so too, as they've just released a powerful new Forms extension to their Google Docs app, Spreadsheets. Using Forms, you can essentially create a survey or email-based input form for a spreadsheet you've created. This has great implications for those needing to create ad-hoc surveys for your work-mates, friends, family and more. However, there's nothing stopping you from inviting only yourself to the form.To get started, go to Google Docs (sign-up if necessary), create a new spreadsheet. If you want, you can add a few columns with a header row to make things a little easier in the next step. Then, go t...
Microsoft Office spell check dialog shortcut keys
I like to use keyboard shortcut as much as possible to save my carpal-tunnelled mousing hand some work, so I was very frustrated not to be able to find the shortcut keys for the Microsoft Office 2004 spell check dialog anywhere in Word Help or on the net. I had a hunch that the Microsoft programmers would take the easy way out, and have them be the same as on the Windows version. So I searched for an image of the Windows spell check dialog with the shortcut keys underlined. This image showed me the following shortcuts: Ignore is Command-I or Return Ignore All is Command-G Add is Command-A Change All is Command-L Auto Correct is Command-R Options... is Command-O Undo is Command-U Check Grammar (check box toggle) is Command-K The only one that doesn't match the Windows version is the simple Change button, which requires a Command-E to mo...
Remove Gmail's All Mail folder in Mail from Spotlight index
A simple hint. Although we cannot remove the duplicate messages stored in the All Mail folder of a Gmail IMAP account in Mail.app -- we can't even unsubscribe from the folder -- at least we can add the folder to Spotlight's list of places not to index. Then searching will no longer show duplicate emails. In System Preferences ﾻ Spotlight ﾻ Privacy, add each user's All Mail Gmail folder, usually found here: ~/Library ﾻ Mail ﾻ IMAP-username@imap.gmail.com ﾻ [Gmail] ﾻ All Mail.imapmbox Not perfect, but no longer finding duplicates is nice.
10.5: View any PowerPoint document in Quick Look
Sometimes I would be able to view PowerPoint (.pps) documents with Quick Look, but sometimes I wouldn’t. This problem bothered me for some time, but I think I've solved it -- thanks to the helpful folks on this forum thread (in French). The solution involves editing the Office Quick Look generator file; read on for the how-to... Here's what I did: Navigate to /System ﾻ Library ﾻ QuickLook ﾻ Office.qlgenerator. Control-click on the generator and pick Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Then navigate to Contents. Create a copy of info.plist to use as a backup. Open info.plist with TextEdit or your favorite text editor. Scroll down to find the following text: ...
Avoid font display issues when installing Office 2008
More a tip than a hint: When the Microsoft Office 2008 installer tells you to shut down other running applications before installing, listen to its advice. I just installed Office 2008 and threw caution to the wind by leaving Safari open (I had a page open with an unsubmitted form that I didn't want to lose). After the installer finished, Safari seemingly lost the ability to display a significant number of consonants when rendering sans-serif fonts. Not exactly a system melt down, but it made Safari strangely unusable until I rebooted. [robg adds: As a counterpoint, I left tons of stuff running while I installed Office 2008, and didn't seem to have any font-related issues.]
Scroll through windows in Exposé's All Windows mode
I just noticed purely by accident that after invoking Exposé's All Windows mode, I can roll the scroll ball on the Mighty Mouse and the selection 'cursor' (the one showing which window will become active) moves about the available windows in a predictable, if not intuitive, manner.
10.5: Revert Help Viewer to 10.4-like behavior
For anyone out there who gets frustrated by the Leopard Help application being a background app (no Dock icon), and one that can't be hidden behind other windows, I have a solution for you. In other words, this hint will revert the Help application to the Tiger (and earlier) behavior. This hint requires the Apple Developer Tools (Xcode), and a hex editor such as HexEdit or similar. Read on for a smorgasbord of Interface Builder, Property Lists and hex editing! You will also require root access. Login via the login window, or login via the Terminal and launch your executables with sudo. [robg says: please back up Help Viewer before trying this hint -- see my note below for a quick way to do so!] Part 1: Disable background behaviour Open /System ﾻ Library ﾻ CoreServices ﾻ Help Viewer.app ﾻ [...
10.5: Create a custom Dock for the Guest account
If you're like me, you like Leopard's new guest account and how it is flushed of all data between logins. How nice it is for house guests to be able to log in while visiting, and have no remnants of their activity remain when they leave. But that darn Dock. What guests are going to want to use Address Book or Garage Band? And for my guests who have never used a Mac before (most of them), where's the Web browser? What does Safari do? How nice it would be for the Guest account's Dock to have only Firefox in it. But if I change the Guest Dock, the Leopard default Dock comes back the next login. Here's a way to set up the Guest account's Dock however you like, and have it automatically come up at each login -- and this doesn't involve hacking the System folder like some other hints floating around out there. Here's how to do it: Download and install the ...
Auto-fill FedEx forms in Safari via AppleScript
If you do a lot of shipping with FedEx, you know how annoying it is to cut and paste all the address information into Safari. There are expensive programs that will extract information, but most don't work with OS X or require Filemaker. Here's a quick hint I use quite often to autofill the FedEx forms. tell application "Safari" activate tell (make new document) to set URL to "https://www.fedex.com/ship/shipEntryAction.do?method=doInitialEntry&origincountry=us&locallang=en&urlparams=us&sType=&programIndicator=0" delay 2 set doc to document "FedEx | Ship Manager | Shipping" log (doc's name) do JavaScript "document.forms['domesticShipmentActionForm']['recipient.companyName'].value...
Change the screen saver's idle time via AppleScript
The settings in the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences panel are among several that don't stick when you move an OS X startup drive to a Mac that you've never connected the drive to before. These settings are at ~/Library ﾻ Preferences ﾻ ByHost ﾻ com.apple.screensaver.0011aa2233cc.plist, where 0011aa2233cc is the Ethernet ID of the Mac's primary Ethernet port (en0), also known as the MAC (Media Access Control) address, which is a number unique to each Mac. The ByHost folder will gather a collection of plists for other preference panes, applications, etc., all with names containing the Ethernet ID specific to every Mac it's seen. One purpose for this is to allow you to have your user folder stored on a network, letting you have different preferences for each Mac that accesses that home folder. However, this makes it inconvenient when you have a utility drive that you connect to any number of Macs that those Macs haven't seen before. For instan...
Combine Safari 3's Reopen Windows and Private Browsing
As a system administrator, I do a lot of research on websites during my workday. I often have many tabs and windows open at the same time. I am also sometimes constantly interrupted by people who need help, or sometimes I need a reboot. I have wanted to see a feature called 'Save this Safari session' for a long time -- so that I could quit Safari and return at a later time to finish what I was doing. (Finding relevant websites/articles is part of the work I do. When I have to quit Safari, in a sense, it's like a copy editor starting a new chapter over again.) Although Safari 3 didn't come through for me completely, they did add one feature that gets me part of the way there, and I have found more than one use for it. The History ﾻ Reopen All Windows From Last Session command is that new feature, and it's all we have for now. Beyond the expected uses (Safari unexpectedly quits with many windows/tabs open; or I have to reboot my system), here's a way to use it in conjunction...
10.5: Disable Space switching on Command-Tab in 10.5.2
The 10.5.2 version of the Dock has a new hidden preferences flag for Spaces. You can now set OSX to not automatically switch between spaces when you press Command-Tab. This is great for me, because I like to divide things by task, rather than by app. For a given task, I'll probably have a TextEdit window, a Terminal window, and maybe a web browser. By default, when I clicked on a given app, I'd be transported to that app's space, and have to go through a bunch of hoops to get the new window in the space I wanted. Now, I can just Command-Tab to the app I want, and create a new window in the current space! Here's the command in Terminal:defaults write com.apple.Dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NOAfter running the command, you'll need to restart the Dock (killall Dock). To undo, change NO to YES, or use defaults delete com.apple.Dock w...
10.5: Browse other Time Machine archives in 10.5.2
With the new menu bar icon for Time Machine introduced in 10.5.2, there comes a very easy way to browse through non-default Time Machine archives. Just click the new Time Machine menu bar icon, and hold down Option. When you do, the Enter Time Machine menu item will change to Browse Other Time Machine Disks.
Recover from a purple screen in Apple TV Take 2
If your TV screen goes purplish after installing the Apple TV Take 2 software update, there's no real problem; it's simply an incorrect setting. Your Apple TV is sending YPrBr, but your TV is expecting RGB. To fix it, go into Settings and choose Video, go down to the HDMI and click, and it will change.
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- updated: Feb 17 10:14PM
Official Google Blog
More types of gadgets for iGoogle
Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing ManagerGoogle Desktop lets you not only search your computer easily, but you can also personalize your desktop. From cultivating a virtual potted plant, to reading the latest news and checking the weather forecast, you can customize your desktop with a variety of gadgets and a sidebar. Some of you have asked if you can also put gadgets on iGoogle homepages next to your other gadgets. And starting today, the answer is yes.With Google Desktop 5.5 Beta, you can you now embed Google Desktop Gadgets right into your iGoogle homepage. Gadgets on an iGoogle homepage can have more advanced functionality, such as playing music from your computer. You can find them alongside other gadgets in the iGoogle Content Directory. We've also improved some of the other features; such as better looking Quick Search Box, support for multiple copies of a gadget, and improved Outlook search functionality. Read more on the Google Desktop Blog and check out these gadgets you can now add to your iGoogle homepage.
3 short weeks
Posted by Scott Petry, Founder, PostiniThree weeks ago today was the official close of Google's acquisition of Postini -- and what a three weeks it's been. "Official close" meant that integration work could legally begin, and so the Google Apps team and Postini team have been burning the midnight oil to get our services integrated. Now, Google Apps customers, Postini customers and everyone else can see the results.Postini security and compliance capabilities are officially part of Google Apps Premier Edition. Google Apps customers get these services for free. Postini customers get an extended trial period for Apps. New customers can choose their entry point: Apps (including Postini security and compliance) or any of the standalone Postini services.The benefits of software as a service are numerous -- that's why we're seeing a huge interest in Apps. Businesses of all sizes are asking for these services, and we need to help customers embrace Apps without loss of features, functions, or security. I'm proud that Postini plays a role in this offering.Postini was founded in 1999 with the vision of transforming how IT organizations consumed security and compliance products. We recognized the service delivery model brings huge leverage, and 36,000 customers around the world validated that vision. Google Enterprise is now scaling that vision. No one knows what the next three weeks will bring, but we're all excited to be part of it.
Got a blog? Help a student.
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn, Program ManagerWhen it comes to philanthropy, everyone’s got something different to give – some people have money, others have time, and bloggers have devoted readers. The creative folks at DonorsChoose have a few ideas about how bloggers can help students and teachers.In case you’re not familiar with DonorsChoose, it’s a site where teachers post needs they have for their classrooms, and donors fund those projects directly. If you’ve got a blog, a website, or even an email account, you can help by creating what’s called a challenge. Just pick some of your favorite projects and challenge your family, friends, and readers to fund them. If you’ve got a Blogger account, it’s easy to add your challenge to your blog in just a few clicks.To support their recent expansion to schools all across the U.S., the DonorsChoose team is holding a little competition, keeping track of which bloggers and webmasters drive the most funding to schools.We think this is a cool idea, so we want to help it succeed. We’re going to reward the winning bloggers with exactly what they gave to DonorsChoose, students, and teachers: traffic. The competition will remain open until the end of October - we'll then take a look to see who has helped raise the most money in each of the eight DonorsChoose challenge categories. We’ll post links to the winners’ blogs here, and we’ll also throw in a $500 gift certificate for each winner to spend on DonorsChoose.So here’s our challenge to you: go create a challenge on DonorsChoose.
International Cleanup Weekend: Think globally, clean locally
Posted by Steve Miller, Google Earth OutreachOn October 13th and 14th, Googlers and many people around the world will head out to clean up local parks, beaches, trails and other places close to home. We'll be planning our cleanups using Google Maps and sharing our plans with friends and families, along with an invitation to help. So far, Googlers have sent in almost 100 cleanup maps and proposed plans, and have invited more than 900 of their personal contacts to help.And since many small cleanups add up to one big impact, we hope you'll join in too. It takes just a few minutes to plan your own cleanup, make a map of it, and send your map to us -- we'll add it to a growing map of all the cleanups around the world. If you keep your cleanup small (groups of 6-10 people work best) and close to home, it'll be easy to organize and you can be sure that you're doing what's most important for your neighborhood. After your cleanup, share your work with the world by posting photos and videos to your map.If you'd like to join this global effort, you can get started here.
YouTube and Checkout for the non-profit world
Posted by Maryrose Dunton, Product Manager, YouTube, and Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager, Google CheckoutEver since YouTube first launched, people and organizations have been using it to broadcast their causes and engage supporters around the issues they care about. In that spirit, today YouTube unveiled its Non-Profit Program at the Clinton Global Initiative to help non-profit organizations more easily connect with the world's largest online video community. In the past few years, online video has emerged as a key tool for grassroots organizing on the Internet -- a short, simple video can demonstrate the impact and the needs of an organization in a uniquely compelling fashion. This program will enable non-profits to create dedicated YouTube channels for themselves, making it even easier for people to find, watch, and engage with the organization's video content. The initial participants are 13 organizations including the American Cancer Society, Friends of the Earth, and YouthNoise.One other thing the YouTube Non-Profit Program offers: the ability to collect donations directly from these channels using the new Google Checkout for Non-Profits. Checkout for Non-Profits -- which can also be integrated directly into a non-profit's site -- helps drive more donations for U.S.-based 501(c)(3) groups by making it possible for supporters to contribute quickly and securely. It also offers supporters the satisfaction of knowing that 100 percent of their contributions will be sent to the non-profit, as Google has committed to processing donations through Checkout for free through at least the end of 2008. This functionality is particularly exciting, as today's fund-raising is increasingly moving online -- and Checkout for Non-Profits makes the entire process even easier. You can learn more here.
Our testimony on Google-DoubleClick
Posted by Pablo Chavez, Policy CounselYou may have read that a U.S. Senate committee in Washington is holding a hearing today looking at online advertising and our acquisition of DoubleClick. Check out our Public Policy blog for more details about Google's testimony.
A new caffeine-free way to stay alert
Posted by Amy Wu, Associate Product Manager, and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product ManagerSince new videos are constantly appearing all over the web, it's difficult to keep tabs on all of them. But now Google Alerts will make it easy for you to add video to your other Alerts: News, Web, Blog and Groups.Video Alerts enables you to specify any topics or queries of interest so we can deliver interesting and relevant videos on a daily, weekly, or as-it-happens basis (your choice) to you via email. To start receiving Video Alerts, you can visit the Google Alerts homepage directly or set up the alert during your normal video searches. Videos may come from Google Video, YouTube, or many other video sources on the web.What are you waiting for? Stay up to date with the One Laptop Per Child program. Find the latest videos on the Lunar X-Prize. Impress Grandma by updating your scarf-knitting skills.
Search privacy and Personalized Search
Posted by Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy CounselOnline privacy isn’t always an easy thing to understand—or to explain. When I recently joined the company, I was happy to learn that Google was continuing with the effort to make our privacy practices (and your choices) even clearer and more accessible. We are using YouTube to post videos that explain how, when, and why we collect information about searches, and how you can protect your privacy while using our search engine.If you watched the first privacy video, you learned about some of the information we collect (IP addresses, cookies, and search queries) and how we use this information to improve your search experience as well as prevent against fraud and other abuses. We appreciated all of the feedback we got in response to the first video.In response to your requests for more detailed information, in our second video we're offering a closer look at personalization and the privacy tools available when you choose to personalize your search. Personalization has been an area that raises concerns about privacy, and we want you to understand how we personalize search results while protecting your privacy.As the video explains, search algorithms that are designed to take your personal preferences into account, including the things you search for and the sites you visit, have better odds of delivering useful results for you. So if you’ve been checking out sites about the Louvre and you search for [Paris], you’re more likely to get results about the French capital than the celebrity heiress. The privacy tools we’ve designed — such as “pause” and “remove” buttons — help put you in control of personalization.So sit back, take a look, and then tell us what you think about this video (and the earlier one too). We look forward to hearing from you.
It's all about today
Posted by Niv Efron and Eyal Molad, Google Trends Engineers, Tel-AvivA lot of us love video games, and everyone here has their favorite from the latest generation of consoles. We have a game room in our building that happens to have all three of the latest systems: Artem loves Microsoft's Xbox 360, Niv can't part with Sony's Playstation 3, and Corey is hopelessly addicted to the Nintendo Wii. After some serious work organizing the world's information, we like to kick back with a round of Wii Tennis or a trip to Rapture. The problem is that there's only one TV in the game room, and of course only one system can be played at a time. In true Googley fashion, we look to data to decide which console gets first dibs. For that, we used Google Trends, which lets us see what the world is searching for.Take, for example, a comparison across the systems:Looks like a pretty tight race. Let's take a closer look at 2007.Wow, they're definitely neck and neck (and neck) -- the top console could change anytime. Fortunately, Google Trends is now updated every day with the latest information. (Until now, Trends was only updated once a month.) Now we can follow the console race (or any other topic) every 24 hours, whether it's The Office vs Heroes or the candidates for the next presidential election.In addition to daily updates, we've also created an iGoogle gadget and a feed for Hot Trends. If you have ever wanted to know what the Internet was thinking right now, Hot Trends can tell you just that. Hot Trends shows you what the fastest rising search queries are on Google. Now you can keep track of Hot Trends three ways: by visiting the site, adding the gadget to your homepage, or subscribing to the feed by adding the feed URL to Google Reader or your favorite feed reader.We'd love to hear about any interesting trends you've discovered. Please send them to us at cooltrends@google.com. We'll feature the best ones in a future post.
Pour on the pedal power
Posted by Dan Reicher, Google.orgYou may already know that we're working to reduce our impact on the environment in a number of ways. We opt for locally-grown food whenever possible in all of our cafes. We've covered our roofs with solar panels. We offer a rebate on our employees' fuel-efficient car purchases. When it comes to getting people to the office, we offer round-trip shuttle service to our Bay Area Googlers, as well as incentives for creative commuting, from walking to biking and even to kayaking (depending, of course, on where the office is).Over at Google.org, the RechargeIT project is collecting data on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) in an effort to accelerate commercial adoption of the cars as well as vehicle to grid technology. To the same end, we just issued a $10 million request for investment proposals to encourage companies and individuals to develop sustainable transportation solutions.And now, we encourage all of you to get your wheels spinning to offset climate change. Google has teamed up with Specialized and Goodby Silverstein & Partners on the Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine Challenge, to give you problem-solvers a chance to show us with a YouTube video how you harness pedal power in innovative ways. In January, you could win $5,000 in cash and Specialized Globe bikes to keep up your commitment. We're doing our bit to support new solutions. Are you feeling inspired?
iGoogle tackles the Rugby World Cup
Posted by Thomas Gayno, Associate Product Marketing Manager, FranceSalut! You may have heard by now that France (relieved after our recent win over Namibia) is currently hosting the sixth Rugby World Cup, which is a gathering of the best rugby teams from around the world competing for the coveted Ellis Cup. You Yanks should imagine the Super Bowl, but held only once every four years, with 20 teams from around the globe -- and without padding or helmets!Four years ago, when England won the last Rugby World Cup, we French Rooster fans began planning for the next global matchup. Meanwhile, our French superstar Sébastien Chabal -- otherwise known as The French Beast, The Anesthetist, Attila or the Caveman -- has grown longer hair, a longer beard and bigger muscles. And he's back for this year's World Cup! To help track The French Beast's team's (or any other team's) progress towards victory, we created an iGoogle tab complete with a variety of gadgets that puts you in the middle of the action. The tab features live scores, group standings, a map of the venues, fan videos from YouTube, and a fun "make some noise" gadget that lets you cheer on your favorite team. With the iGoogle Rugby World Cup tab, you can experience the action in an entirely new way. Even if you've never used iGoogle before, you can add the tab here. Alternatively, type [rugby] into the Google search box and click on "add to my Google page."In line with the international aspect of this sporting event, this tab is available in the following countries: USA, Canada, Portugal, Ireland, UK (Wales, Scotland and England), Romania, Georgia, Namibia, South Africa, Japan, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, France, Italy and Argentina. Whether you're a fan of Sébastian Chabal, Dan Carter or Stirling Mortlock, use the iGoogle Rugby tab to keep track of the action. And if these names don't mean anything to you, tune into the Rugby World Cup and they soon will!
Google Reader goes multilingual
Posted by Kevin Systrom, Product Marketing ManagerI've been traveling a bunch in the past few days, and the one thing I've noticed is the variety of newspapers you're offered on every flight in Europe. In London, where I am now, my hotel has between 10 and 15 newspapers in the lobby from around the world in different languages. So I started thinking about how news plays an increasingly important role across the world.Of course, blogs have also become an international phenomenon. They're not constrained by language or nationality — in fact, blogs have become an important way to bring rise to independent reporters and writers. And there are more and more people who wish to read blogs in other languages. Up until now, our blog and news site service, Google Reader, was only available in English. As of today, it supports these languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, English (UK), Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, and Korean.With this announcement (you might enjoy this take from the Reader blog), I'm also happy to tell you that we're removing the "Labs" label from Google Reader. It's a small textual change, but we believe it solidifies our commitment to make reading blogs and news sites easier than ever. So try Google Reader and get all your blogs and news sites in one place.Update: Added Dutch, which is now live.
Our feature presentation
Posted by Attila Bodis, Software EngineerIn April we announced that we were working to bring presentations to Google Docs. (Astute readers may recall learning about this even earlier, which caused a bit of excitement around here.) And today we're unveiling the new Google Docs presentations feature and invite you to try it at documents.google.com. Maybe more than any other type of document, presentations are created to be shared. But assembling slide decks by emailing them around is as frustrating as it is time-consuming. The new presentations feature of Google Docs helps you to easily organize, share, present, and collaborate on presentations, using only a web browser.Starting today, presentations -- whether imported from existing files or created using the new slide editor -- are listed alongside documents and spreadsheets in the Google Docs document list. They can be edited, shared, and published using the familiar Google Docs interface, with several collaborators working on a slide deck simultaneously, in real time. When it's time to present, participants can simply click a link to follow along as the presenter takes the audience through the slideshow. Participants are connected through Google Talk and can chat about the presentation as they're watching. Not wanting anyone to feel left out, we've made the presentation feature available in 25 languages; Google Apps customers can also access it as part of Google Docs.We hope the millions of people who already create and share documents and spreadsheets will find presentations a welcome addition to the Google Docs family, and we can't wait to add even more features and enhancements.If you're new to Google Docs, watch this video to learn more about creating and collaborating on documents (and now presentations!).
Australia readies itself for a Google election
Posted by Julian Sonego and Rob Shilkin, Google AustraliaLooking from down under, the long U.S. election cycle ensures that there is no shortage of political headlines generated more than a year out from the actual Presidential election. Many of you may not realise that Australia is also readying itself to enter campaign mode. A federal election is anticipated to be held before the end of the year. You can be sure as the Australian parties get out on the hustings, babies will be kissed, doors knocked and hands vigorously shook -- but this election campaign is already a lot different to others, with digital media playing a new and important role.Today, in Sydney, we announced the launch of a Google Australia election website, so that Australian voters can have an intimate look at the parties, candidates and election issues, all in one Google location. These services, spanning Search, Maps, News, video, Earth, Trends, and iGoogle, enable voters to organise, find and share Australian election information more easily than ever.We created a Picasa Web Album to showcase all the elements, and we're pleased to offer these world-first tools that were developed in our Australian office. Here's hoping Australians will find them useful and even fun. It's our view that democracy on the web works -- and the web can work for democracy.
We've officially acquired Postini
Posted by Dave Girouard, Vice President & General Manager, Google EnterpriseAs of today, Postini becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Google, and we couldn’t be happier about it. (Here's the FAQ.) Since July 9, when we announced the agreement to acquire Postini, plenty of businesses have told us how much they respect Postini and how the acquisition makes sense for customers of both companies.We view this as welcome news, but also a sign of things to come. With the more than 100,000 businesses on Google Apps, 35,000 businesses and more than 10 million users of Postini products, we see great potential on both sides. We're committed to continue to deliver the type of innovative and useful business products our customers have come to expect. And we plan to announce even more product offerings in the very near future.Separately, both companies shared a vision for what the world of hosted applications can become for businesses of all sizes. Together, we look forward to achieving it.
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- updated: Oct 07 06:23AM
Pepys' Diary
Every day an entry of Samuel Pepys’ 17th century London diary.
Friday 17 February 1664/65
Up, and it being bitter cold, and frost and snow, which I had thought had quite left us, I by coach to Povy's, where he told me, as I knew already, how he was handled the other day, and is still, by my Lord Barkeley, and among other things tells me, what I did not know, how my Lord Barkeley will say openly, that he hath fought more set fields --[Battles or actions]-- than any man in England hath done. I did my business with him, which was to get a little sum of money paid, and so home with Mr. Andrews, who met me there, and there to the office. At noon home and there found Lewellin, which vexed me out of my old jealous humour. So to my office, where till 12 at night, being only a little while at noon at Sir W. Batten's to see him, and had some high words with Sir J. Minnes about Sir W. Warren, he calling him cheating knave, but I cooled him, and at night at Sir W. Pen's, he being to go to Chatham to-morrow. So home to supper and to bed.
Thursday 16 February 1664/65
Up, and with Mr. Andrews to White Hall, where a Committee of Tangier, and there I did our victuallers' business for some more money, out of which I hope to get a little, of which I was glad; but, Lord! to see to what a degree of contempt, nay, scorn, Mr. Povy, through his prodigious folly, hath brought himself in his accounts, that if he be not a man of a great interest, he will be kicked out of his employment for a foole, is very strange, and that most deservedly that ever man was, for never any man, that understands accounts so little, ever went through so much, and yet goes through it with the greatest shame and yet with confidence that ever I saw man in my life. God deliver me in my owne business of my bill out of his hands, and if ever I foul my fingers with him again let me suffer for it! Back to the 'Change, and thence home to dinner, where Mrs. Hunt dined with me, and poor Mrs. Batters; who brought her little daughter with her, and a letter from her husband, wherein, as a token, the foole presents me very seriously with his daughter for me to take the charge of bringing up for him, and to make my owne. But I took no notice to her at all of the substance of the letter, but fell to discourse, and so went away to the office, where all the afternoon till almost one in the morning, and then home to bed.
Wednesday 15 February 1664/65
Up and to my office, where busy all the morning. At noon with Creed to dinner to Trinity-house, where a very good dinner among the old sokers, where an extraordinary discourse of the manner of the loss of the "Royall Oake" coming home from Bantam, upon the rocks of Scilly, many passages therein very extraordinary, and if I can I will get it in writing. Thence with Creed to Gresham College, where I had been by Mr. Povy the last week proposed to be admitted a member;<sup id="fnr1-1665-02-15">1</sup> and was this day admitted, by signing a book and being taken by the hand by the President, my Lord Brunkard, and some words of admittance said to me. But it is a most acceptable thing to hear their discourse, and see their experiments; which were this day upon the nature of fire, and how it goes out in a place where the ayre is not free, and sooner out where the ayre is exhausted, which they showed by an engine on purpose. After this being done, they to the Crowne Taverne, behind the 'Change, and there my Lord and most of the company to a club supper; Sir P. Neale, Sir R. Murrey, Dr. Clerke, Dr. Whistler, Dr. Goddard, and others of most eminent worth. Above all, Mr. Boyle to-day was at the meeting, and above him Mr. Hooke, who is the most, and promises the least, of any man in the world that ever I saw. Here excellent discourse till ten at night, and then home, and to Sir W. Batten's, where I hear that Sir Thos. Harvy intends to put Mr. Turner out of his house and come in himself, which will be very hard to them, and though I love him not, yet for his family's sake I pity him. So home and to bed.<ol> <li id="fn1-1665-02-15">According to the minutes of the Royal Society for February 15th, 1664-65, "Mr. Pepys was unanimously elected and admitted." Notes of the experiments shown by Hooke and Boyle are given in Birch's "History of the Royal Society," vol. ii., p. 15. ↩</li> </ol>
Tuesday 14 February 1664/65
(St. Valentine). This morning comes betimes Dicke Pen, to be my wife's Valentine, and come to our bedside. By the same token, I had him brought to my side, thinking to have made him kiss me; but he perceived me, and would not; so went to his Valentine: a notable, stout, witty boy. I up about business, and, opening the door, there was Bagwell's wife, with whom I talked afterwards, and she had the confidence to say she came with a hope to be time enough to be my Valentine, and so indeed she did, but my oath preserved me from loosing any time with her, and so I and my boy abroad by coach to Westminster, where did two or three businesses, and then home to the 'Change, and did much business there. My Lord Sandwich is, it seems, with his fleete at Alborough Bay. So home to dinner and then to the office, where till 12 almost at night, and then home to supper and to bed.
Monday 13 February 1664/65
Up and to St. James's, did our usual business before the Duke. Thence I to Westminster and by water (taking Mr. Stapely the rope-maker by the way), to his rope-ground and to Limehouse, there to see the manner of stoves and did excellently inform myself therein, and coming home did go on board Sir W. Petty's "Experiment," which is a brave roomy vessel, and I hope may do well. So went on shore to a Dutch [house] to drink some mum, and there light upon some Dutchmen, with whom we had good discourse touching stoveing and making of cables. But to see how despicably they speak of us for our using so many hands more to do anything than they do, they closing a cable with 20, that we use 60 men upon. Thence home and eat something, and then to my office, where very late, and then to supper and to bed. Captain Stokes, it seems, is at last dead at Portsmouth.
Sunday 12 February 1664/65
(Lord's day). Up and to church to St. Lawrence to hear Dr. Wilkins, the great scholar, for curiosity, I having never heard him: but was not satisfied with him at all, only a gentleman sat in the pew I by chance sat in, that sang most excellently, and afterward I found by his face that he had been a Paul's scholler, but know not his name, and I was also well pleased with the church, it being a very fine church. So home to dinner, and then to my office all the afternoon doing of business, and in the evening comes Mr. Hill (but no Andrews) and we spent the evening very finely, singing, supping and discoursing. Then to prayers and to bed.
Saturday 11 February 1664/65
Up and to my office, where all the morning. At noon to 'Change by coach with my Lord Brunkard, and thence after doing much business home to dinner, and so to my office all the afternoon till past 12 at night very busy. So home to bed.
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- updated: Feb 18 01:23PM
Taegan Goddard's Political Wire
Clinton Seen Leading the "Edwards Primary"
The Associated Press: "The couple has been impressed with Clinton, who has more effectively courted them since the 2004 vice presidential nominee dropped out, people who talk to the Edwardses say. Obama has been less attentive, they say, and some of those close to the Edwardses have been annoyed that Obama has continued to ridicule him for once saying his biggest weakness is that he has a powerful response to seeing pain in others."
Clinton To Leave Wisconsin Early
Sen. Hillary Clinton "has scaled back her Wisconsin campaign schedule by a full day, and is now planning to leave the state after Monday morning instead of Tuesday morning," according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. "The move suggests the campaign does not think it can overtake rival Barack Obama here. Obama has already campaigned in the state Tuesday night, Wednesday, Friday, and today. He also has single events planned for Sunday and Monday." Wisconsin's primary is on Tuesday.
Obama Secretly Meets Edwards
Sen. Barack Obama "paid a secret visit to his former rival, John Edwards, in quest of his endorsement on Sunday," The Politico reports. "The meeting in Chapel Hill, N.C., where Edwards lives, is the latest effort by Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) to win 'the Edwards primary' -- the heatedly sought endorsement of the third-place finisher in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination." Like Clinton's visit earlier this month, Obama managed to pull off his without the notice of the national press corps. However. WTVD-TV claims to have video of the visit which it will air later today.Mark Halperin explains why Edwards' endorsement matters.
ARG Poll: Clinton Leads in Wisconsin
A new American Research Group survey in Wisconsin shows Sen. Hillary Clinton leading Sen. Barack Obama, 49% to 43%. Key findings: "Obama leads among men 48% to 42% and Clinton leads among women 55% to 39%. Clinton leads among white voters 52% to 40%, Obama leads among African American voters 85% to 9%, and Clinton leads among Latino voters 50% to 44%." On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain leads Mike Huckabee 46% to 42%.
Quote of the Day
"They need to send him out of the country for a long, long time. I am angry at Bill Clinton and I think there are other Hillary people who are angry at Bill, who felt that she was running a very good, solid campaign -- she wasn't the exciting one, but she was the solid one -- and then he came in and made it nasty, and single-handedly pushed away black voters." -- A superdelegate supporting Sen. Hillary Clinton, quoted by the Baltimore Sun, adding the former president "has screwed this thing up for her big-time."
Obama Takes National Lead
Sen. Barack Obama enjoys his first statistically significant lead in the Gallup tracking poll, 49% to 42%, over Sen. Hillary Clinton. Additionally, the 49% support for Obama represents the high point for him in the daily survey. On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain leads Mike Huckabee, 54% to 28%.
Quote of the Day
"I told President Clinton that I thought it was really important that pledged delegates be the deciding factor. And he agreed with me." Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK), quoted by Tulsa World.
Gore May Act As Power Broker
Al Gore and a number of other senior Democrats "plan to remain neutral for now in the presidential race in part to keep open the option to broker a peaceful resolution to what they fear could be a bitterly divided convention," the New York Times reports. "The signs that party elders are weighing whether and how to intervene reflects the extraordinary nature of the contest now and the concern among some Democrats that they not risk an internal battle that could harm the party in the general election." In a related article, CQ Politics notes some Democratic superdelegates "say they have little incentive to choose sides early if the presidential nomination fight may not be decided until, or just before, the party’s convention in August."
Lewis Not Talking
Sen. Barack Obama "had not spoken with Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) as of Friday morning. Neither had Hillary Clinton. Lewis and his staff weren't returning calls," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. "That lack of communication left a vacuum in Friday's political spin cycle after the overnight bombshell report that Lewis planned to drop Clinton and cast his superdelegate vote for Obama at the Democratic Party's national convention in August." "Lewis' spokeswoman would only say that the New York Times report that Lewis would back Obama was 'inaccurate,' but provided no details and did not respond to requests for more. Jeff Zeleny, the Times reporter who interviewed Lewis on Thursday, later told CNN that Lewis 'unequivocally' said he would support Obama."
Quote of the Day
"It would be a problem for the party if the verdict would be something different than the public has decided."-- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle, on how superdelegates should vote at the Democratic National Convention.
R2000: Obama Leading Clinton in Wisconsin
A new Research 2000 poll in Wisconsin, shows Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential race, 47% to 42%, with 11% still undecided.The Wisconsin primary is on Tuesday.
ARG Poll: Obama Leads in Texas
A new American Research Group poll in Texas finds Sen. Barack Obama ahead of Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential race, 48% to 42%.Key findings: "Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama among self-described Democrats 47% to 42%. Obama leads Clinton among self-described independents and Republicans 24% to 71%. Obama leads among men 55% to 29% (47% of likely Democratic primary voters) and Clinton leads among women 54% to 42%. Clinton leads Obama among white voters 51% to 40% (53% of likely Democratic primary voters), Obama leads Clinton among African American voters 76% to 17% (22% of likely Democratic primary voters), and Clinton leads Obama among Latino voters 44% to 42%."Update: The Burnt Orange Report shows two other polls today that have Clinton in the lead.
Rasmussen: Obama Slightly Ahead in Wisconsin
A new Rasmussen Reports survey in Wisconsin finds Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. Hillary Clinton, 47% to 43%. Key finding: "Nearly one-fourth of the voters say there’s a good chance they might change their mind. Five percent (5%) of those who currently support Obama and Clinton say there’s a good chance they could change their mind before voting."
Obama Snags Key Union Endorsement
Sen. Barack Obama "is expected to rack up more labor backing on Friday," the Wall Street Journal reports. "The Service Employees International Union, one of the most politically active unions, is expected to announce a national endorsement for him, according to people familiar with the matter. The move would give him organizational support in Ohio and Texas in March."
Superdelegates Get Campaign Cash
A new study finds Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama have been making campaign contributions to superdelegates. "And while it would be unseemly for the candidates to hand out thousands of dollars to primary voters, or to the delegates pledged to represent the will of those voters, elected officials who are superdelegates have received at least $890,000 from Obama and Clinton in the form of campaign contributions over the last three years, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics."
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Reason Magazine - Hit & Run
Eddie Lee Howard: Mississippi's Next Exoneration?
Now that Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks have been freed, the Innocence Project is calling for a criminal investigation into Dr. Michael West. Peter Neufeld is asking that every case in which West has ever testified be reviewed. The linked article notes that there are 20 or more Mississippians in prison right now due at least in part to West's testimony.West still stands by his testimony. He's now saying that even if Brooks and Brewer did not commit the two murders a third man has since confessed to committing, his testimony wasn't incorrect: Brewer and Brooks still bit those little girls. To believe West, you'd have to believe that in two cases that occurred at about the same time, two men living just miles apart coincidentally each repeatedly bit a little girl in their care just hours before a third man unknown to either of them abducted, raped, and killed said little girls. Alternately, you could believe that Dr. West is a quack who makes shit up. I know which theory my money's on. The next case involving the unholy triumvirate of West, Hayne, and District Attorney Forrest Allgood that may embarrass Mississippi is that of Eddie Lee Howard, currently on death row in Parchman for the gruesome murder of an elderly woman. The assailant stabbed the woman to death, then set her house on fire and left her to burn. Dr. Hayne testified at trial that the woman was also raped, though no semen or second-party blood or pubic hair showed up in the rape kit. Hayne did not find any bite marks. The victim was buried. In a now-familiar pattern, Hayne then brought his buddy Dr. West onto the case. Three days later, the police detained Howard without a warrant, then immediately took him to Dr. West's dental practice, where West took an impression of Howard's teeth. Police then exhumed the victim, at which point West once again claimed to find bite marks no one else could see. He then noted there were similarities between Mr. Howard's dental impression and the bite marks he said he'd found on the burned body. There was no biological evidence linking Howard to the crime scene. The sole evidence against him was West's testimony and the testimony of a police investigator who says Howard basically confessed to him, though the investigator never asked Howard to sign a statement of confession, nor is there any recording of it.Eddie Lee Howard clearly has some psychological problems. The Mississippi Supreme Court granted him a new trial in 1997 after finding the trial court improperly allowed Howard, who is mentally ill, to represent himself in his own murder trial. Howard was convicted in the second trial, too. In 2006, the Mississippi State Supreme Court upheld the second conviction, and explicitly refused to throw out Dr. West's testimony. This was well after West's credibility had been thoroughly dismantled in the national media, after DNA proved he'd been wrong in the Kennedy Brewer case, and after he'd been thrown out of several professional organizations.Bizarrely, the court determined that it was Howard's fault his attorney didn't call an expert witness to rebut West's testimony but that, at the same time, the fact that his attorney didn't didn't amount to ineffective assistance of counsel. After acknowledging that Howard's new lawyers filed piles and piles of affidavits from experts explaining that Dr. West is basically a quack, the court awkwardly came to this conclusion:Just because Dr. West has been wrong a lot, does not mean, without something more, that he was wrong here. If Howard is cleared, it will be the fourth (that I know of) murder exoneration involving District Attorney Forrest Allgood. Three of those people were sentenced to death. It will be the third (that I know of) involving Dr. Hayne and Dr. West. I'm investigating several others. The Innocence Project chapters in Mississippi and New York are, too.
John P. Morgan, RIP
John P. Morgan, a physician and pharmacologist who has played a prominent role in the drug policy reform movement for many years, died on Friday at the age of 67 from acute myeloid leukemia. I saw him at the International Drug Policy Reform Conference in early December and had no idea he was ill. Perhaps he didn't either; this disease is often rapidly fatal after the symptoms are first detected. Morgan, a professor of pharmacology at the City University of New York from 1977 to 2004 and a longtime adviser to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, brought to the anti-prohibitionist movement the deep knowledge, openness to argument, and calm and measured manner of a careful scholar. These traits were evident in what he said (see above for an example) and in what he wrote. Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts, the 1997 book he co-authored with Queens College sociologist Lynn Zimmer, concisely and authoritatively debunked the major themes of anti-pot propaganda, but it's really not a pro-pot book. It could more accurately be described as a pro-science book. Morgan emphasized that every drug has its hazards but insisted that they be assessed dispassionately, without regard to the drug's current legal status.Sometimes that's tricky, because making a drug illegal has a way of enhancing its dangers, a phenomenon to which Morgan frequently drew attention. In a 1990 speech at the Hoover Institution, for instance, he used the experience with adulterated ginger "jake"during alcohol prohibition to illustrate four features of drug prohibition:1. Prohibition engenders criminal enterprises and criminal subcultures.2. Prohibition generates more potent forms of the forbidden substance.3. Prohibition enlarges drug toxicity by contamination and adulteration.4. Those poisoned by interdicted substances in their potent or contaminated forms are blamed for their disabilities, or even their deaths, because they were engaging in outlawed conduct.My last interaction with Morgan occurred at the conference in December, when I participated in a panel on methamphetamine. My presentation dealt with responsible, controlled use of amphetamines, a topic I broached with some trepidation, since meth has a bad rap even among critics of the war on drugs and even among illegal drug users ("Speed Kills" and all that). During the question-and-answer session, Morgan said he agreed that concern about the "methamphetamine epidemic" had made it difficult to talk about the drug's legitimate uses, which do not necessarily require a doctor's prescription to validate them. He said he had personally found methamphetamine tremendously useful during his education and career, calling it one of the safest drugs around when used responsibly. Coming from most people in most contexts, this would have been a startling admission. But coming from the eminently reasonable Morgan and delivered in his usual matter-of-fact tone, it cut through the hysteria and introduced a much-needed alternative perspective. Morgan made a career of doing that, and his well-informed skepticism will be sorely missed. [via Celebstoner]
The Friday Political Thread: Get Ready for President's Day Edition
Sometime tomorrow I'll be on the America's Future Foundation podcast, right here.The Week in Brief- Barack Obama and John McCain swept the Virginia, Maryland and DC primaries: Only McCain had any trouble, winning by only 9 points in the commonwealth.- In Maryland, Republican Rep. Wayne Gilchrest and Democratic Rep. Al Wynn were defeated, by surprisingly large margins, by challengers more in step with their parties.- Mitt Romney endorsed John McCain; John Edwards' circle let slip that the ex-candidate might endorse Hillary Clinton. Larger IssuesThe Big Lie. I'm not counting Hillary Clinton out of the presidential race, but it's sad what her apparatchiks have been reduced to. Unless they romp in the March 4 primaries, they'll have to count on unelected superdelegates to erase Obama's lead and secure the nomination for her. And voila: Lanny Davis, a longtime Clinton friend and spinner, writes at the HuffPo that superdelegates are the best thing to happen to the Democrats since Bill Clinton gave his first stemwinder. The superdelegates were necessary, Davis says, because the ultra-open reforms of the 60s wrecked the party. It did not seem entirely coincidental that the nominees since the Democratic Party reforms -- Senator George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter for reelection in 1980 -- suffered landslide defeats.We were also reminded that before these reforms, the "smoke-filled rooms" of Democratic Party leaders had led to the nomination and election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. Not bad.There are two problems with this. One is that Jimmy Carter was also nominated in 1976 and, obviously, won. So the Democrats had a 1-2 record in the pre-superdelegate era and, so far, a 2-4 record in the Glorious Age of Lanny Davis.The other problem is that Roosevelt and Kennedy were actually nominated via primaries. Few states held primaries in 1932 and 1960, but the CQ Politics blog has the rundown on both races.1932: Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, the governor of New York, outpaced his nearest rival by a ratio of more than 2 to 1 in the overall primary vote en route to winning his first of four nominations and elections for president.1960: Sen. John F. Kennedy, a little less than two months short of his 43rd birthday, established himself as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination by winning the April 5 primary in Wisconsin — the first after the New Hampshire contest March 8, which Kennedy, of neighboring Massachusetts, won easily. Kennedy appeared to be at a regional disadvantage in his one-on-one matchup with Minnesota Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey, making his 13 percentage-point victory margin even more impressive. The contest was captured in the well-regarded documentary film “Primary.” Kennedy went on to another impressive win, and effectively ended Humphrey’s hopes for the nomination by winning easily in West Virginia, overcoming doubts that the state’s overwhelmingly Protestant electorate would go for Kennedy’s bid to become the nation’s first Roman Catholic president. Kennedy faced competitors at the convention — including Texas Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, who would become Kennedy’s vice president and ultimate successor — but clinched the nomination on the first ballot. It's possible that FDR would have been nominated in a smoke-filled room, but not a sure thing. The rules were different in 1932 (you needed 2/3 of all delegates to secure the nomination) and party insiders might have fretted about FDR's handicap, while voters didn't realize how severe it was. It's less like Kennedy would have been nominated in 1960—he badly needed to win those primaries to prove that a national Catholic candidate could win (or in the case of West Virginia, buy) elections in Democratic states. Again, I'm not counting Clinton out, but there's an argument to make for reforming the primaries and changing the role of the great unwashed. This isn't it. James Robbins has a snarkier take on the same thing.Below the Fold- Holly Yeager combs through data and sees Barack Obama stealing Hillary Clinton's base.- Ben Smith asks what happened to Clinton's support in the right-wing media.- Brian Beutler wraps up the career of Tom Lantos.No special theme for Politics 'n' Prog: Just Lemmy, a space woman, and a whole lotta riffin'.
Being in Congress Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry...
Rep. Henry Waxman, the mastermind behind the latest waste of congressional time (and taxpayers' money), says that he's sorry about this week's idiotic foray into whether Major League Baseball players, most notably Roger "The Rocket" Clemens, used performance-enhancing drugs.Then again, it's not the Congressman's fault:"I'm sorry we had the hearing. I regret that we had the hearing. And the only reason we had the hearing was because Roger Clemens and his lawyers insisted on it," Waxman said.Clemens' lawyer says that Waxman is dishing junk:Clemens' lawyer, Rusty Hardin, disputes Waxman's claims, calling the congressman's statements, "unbelievable, disingenuous and outrageous.""He is the one who created this circus in the first place," Hardin said.More here.And some recent reason stuff on the matter here.Here, Matt Welch raises the question of why Congress was wondering if Clemens' buttocks ever hosted a "palpable mass," which sounds like something that happens between confession and Easter services
I'm Dreaming of a Libertarian Obama
Jeffrey Rosen pens a short essay in The New Republic arguing that Barack Obama can be, in Rosen's words, "the first civil libertarian president."After Obama was elected to the Illinois state Senate in 1996, he defended individual rights in a way that might have marginalized him: He joined only two other senators in voting against a bill to forbid convicts on probation from having contact with street gangs, and he voted against a bill to expand the death penalty to gang-related murders. But Obama nevertheless won the respect of police and prosecutors in Chicago by building those "alliances of consent." One of his greatest legislative triumphs was a bill to require the videotaping of all confessions and interrogations in capital cases. Initially, police, state prosecutors, and the newly elected Democratic governor were strongly opposed, some death-penalty abolitionists viewed the bill as too moderate, and legislators were afraid of being soft on crime. But Obama led daily negotiations (without reporters) during which he emphasized his opponents' common values. At the end, the bill had the support of all parties, passed unanimously, and today has been adopted as a model by four states and the District of Columbia.There's more recent stuff and a hashing-out of how John McCain would attack Obama on this front. Rosen expects Obama to parry better than Dukakis did versus Bush; I agree, and I think the criminal issues that sunk Dukakis have less salience than the war on terror issues that inflame the gonads of the McCain Right. I heard way too many arguments that the PATRIOT Act vote would sink Russ Feingold or the wireless wiretap debate would save Denny Haster's job to take that line too seriously.But what about those other liberties? Aswini Aburajan reports from Obama's last presser, which came after the NIU killings.Asked to comment on Cheney's decision to add his signature to a brief supported by 55 senators and 250 congressmen to have the Supreme Court overturn a ban on handguns by the District of Columbia, Obama said he wasn't familiar with the statements made by either the Vice President or members of Congress.However, he went on to defend the right of municipalities to establish their own handgun laws. "The city of Chicago has gun laws, so does Washington, D.C.," Obama said. "The notion that somehow local jurisdictions can't initiate gun safety laws to deal with gangbangers and random shootings on the street isn't born out by our constitution." Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty is an endorser of Obama.Asked to elaborate on his understanding of what the second amendment actually means, Obama said that he does believe the second amendment "speaks to an individual's right." But he said that right could be "subject to common-sense regulation just like most of our rights are subject to common-sense regulation. So I think there's a lot of room before you [sic] bumping against a constitutional barrier for us to institute some of the common-sense gun laws." So: Obama is a civil libertarian, except when he is not.
The "Brown-Black" Race Card?
Over at Politico, "libertarian Democrat," former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, and occasional reason contributor Terry Michael writes about whether Hillary Clinton is exploiting tensions between Hispanics and blacks in the Donkey Party:Stipulated, I am a partisan of my fellow Illinoisan Obama, who I believe is transcending race in this campaign. But, putting on my media critic hat, I would urge those whose business it is to interpret our politics, the press corps, to carefully observe how Clinton Inc. plays the "brown-black" race card as the campaign moves toward Texas. That extra scrutiny was earned by trash talk from the Supreme and Un-Fireable Manager of Clinton Inc. (our "first black president") between Iowa and South Carolina. All of this could have been predicted for a political party (I lament it is mine) that has been playing identity politics with a vengeance for the past several decades. With an unfortunate focus on granting entitlements based on tribal affinity rather than celebrating the rights, liberties and personal responsibilities of individuals in a pluralistic democracy, strengthened by civic cultural assimilation, we Democrats have been courting racialist warfare for a long time. More here.
New at Reason
In "Rodney King's Children," reason Managing Editor Jesse Walker talks with a leader of a human rights group that is fighting oppression and torture by posting video on the web.Read all about it here.
Internists Endorse Access to Medical Marijuana
In a new position paper, the American College of Physicians (ACP) "urges review of marijuana's status as a schedule I controlled substance and its reclassification into a more appropriate schedule, given the scientific evidence regarding marijuana's safety and efficacy in some clinical conditions." It also "strongly urges protection from criminal or civil penalties for patients who use medical marijuana as permitted under state laws." The ACP, which represents 124,000 internal medicine specialists and publishes Annals of Internal Medicine, is the second largest physician group in the country. (The American Medical Association claims about 244,000 members, of which some 135,000 are practicing physicians, according to MedPage Today.) The Marijuana Policy Project calls the ACP's position "the most significant organizational endorsement of medical marijuana access in the field of medicine and science."I discussed such endorsements in November, when the Assembly of the American Psychiatric Association unanimously urged the federal government to stop interfering with the medical use of marijuana in states where it's legal.
A Purge Too Far?
GOP blogger guru Patrick Ruffini wants to boot Ron Paul from Congress.Chris Peden is a traditional conservative Republican candidate for Congress in Texas’s 14th Congressional district...Here’s what Ron Paul says about TX-14: “If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee.”Give what you can. Ron Paul is running scared — using his Presidential campaign’s donors’ money to subsidize a desperate last-minute attempt to save his Congressional seat.The source for that claim is a paraphrase of Mark Elam... I'm going to assume the campaign isn't actually defying federal law and is using its new, rEVOLution-enhanced donor list to raise TX-14 money. UPDATE: Patrick Semmens from the Paul campaign responds:Patrick Ruffini is wrong, as no money from the presidential campaign is has been transferred to the congressional campaign. As you correctly note, doing so would be a violation of federal law.The only way funds from the presidential campaign could go towards Dr. Paul's congressional race would be for Paul to end the presidential run and close the committee. He has made it very clear that he has no plans to do that.I've e-mailed Ruffini for a response.This isn't Ruffini's first call to support a GOP insurgent. Last year he rattled the tin cup for Jim Ogonowski, an underfunded Republican who made a manful effort in an open Massachusetts House seat. (Sadly, Ogonowski passed on another run in favor of a nine-month beatdown by John Kerry.) Maybe a depressed GOP online base will overcome the McCain malady by chucking coins at Chris Peden. Peden could use it: He could sleep a little easier about the $150,000 loan he's given his own campaign. And he could use it to overcome the $315,000 Paul's raised since the start of the quarter.If the campaign gets close, though, it won't be because of money. It's all about the war—and that makes me skeptical of the purge. Peden isn't sending around flyers about Paul's newsletters or his have-cake-and-eat-it-too earmark policy. He's claiming Paul "blames America for 9/11" and "votes against our troops." (He is attacking Paul on his votes against free trade agreements, so, partial credit.) That's the oxygen for his campaign.One problem with this campaign that I don't think the joiners have thought through... what does Ron Paul do the day after he loses a congressional primary? His only firm, titanium-strength committment not to run third party came when he... was appealing to donors to save him in TX-14. If the Libertarian Party calls a defeated Rep. Ron Paul on March 5 and offers him its nomination on a silk pillow, does anyone think he tells them to go away?
Imad and Me
A couple of things struck me about the New York Times coverage of Hezbollah leader Imad Mugniyah's assassination. First of all, in this publicity shot from the Hezbollah Media Office, Mugniyah looks like a an older, pudgier, camouflage-wearing version of me: I gather this picture was taken before the plastic surgery he supposedly had. Despite his Semitic looks (I know, I know: Arabs are Semites too!), this was a guy who considered blowing up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires a legitimate tactic in a war with Israel. In his view, killing any random Jew, anywhere in the world, was just retaliation for wrongs committed by the Israeli government. Yet I was still surprised to see the Times unambiguously call Mugniyah, who headed Hezbollah's Islamic Jihad Organization, a terrorist.The headline over the main story about Mugniyah's death, "Bomb in Syria Kills Militant Sought as Terrorist," equivocates a bit, but the text calls him "one of the most wanted and elusive terrorists in the world." A sidebar summarizing his murderous career calls him "perhaps the world's most feared terrorist" before 9/11 and notes that "the list of those who might seek justice or revenge against him was a lengthy one." By contrast, the Times usually calls Arab terrorists who target Israelis "militants." The Times story about last week's suicide bombing at a shopping center in Dimona, for instance, called the Fatah-affiliated Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which initially claimed responsibility for killing an Israeli woman at the shopping center, "militant groups." (It also called the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades a "militia.") Later, when the Qassam Brigades took credit for the murder, the Times described that organization as "the military wing of Hamas," which it called a "militant Islamic group."So what exactly does it take for a "militant" to be recognized as a "terrorist" in The New York Times? Evidently he needs to target Jewish civilians not only outside Gaza and the West Bank but outside of Israel, preferably on a different continent. I think it also helps if he attacks Americans, as Mugniyah repeatedly did. The Times does not seem to be squeamish about calling Al Qaeda "a terrorist group." If Osama bin Laden had crashed a plane into a building in Tel Aviv instead of New York City, would he be merely a militant?
Robert Jastrow, R.I.P.
Physicist Robert Jastrow, founder and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Mount Wilson Institute which manages Mount Wilson Observatory in California died last week at the age of 82. Jastrow, an excellent popularizer of science, was the author of Red Giants and White Dwarfs and The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe.The New York Times' obituary correctly notes:“He had a deep sense of the need to interpret science and make it available to the public,” said Albert Arking, a former student of Dr. Jastrow. As an ambassador of science, he was a natural, Dr. Arking recalled, saying, “His enthusiasm for science was infectious.” Besides being a fan of his books, I got to know Jastrow in the mid-1980s when I was working as a television producer for the PBS foreign policy program American Interests. We had him on as a guest to debate the feasibility of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative a number of times. I later encountered him as a skeptic in the debate over the seriousness of man-made climate change (he was the head of the Marshall Institute which has published numerous reports highlighting defects in climate models, temperature data sets and the politicization of climate change science). Ironically, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies is now home to cllimate modeler James Hansen, one of the biggest proponents of the argument that unmitigated global warming is likely to be catastrophic. Setting aside those scientific controversies, I will always fondly remember Jastrow for his generosity in taking me on a personal tour of the Mount Wilson Observatory several years ago. I got to see and touch the 100-inch Hooker telescope that enabled astronomer Edwin Hubble to discover in the 1920s that Milky Way was just one of billions of galaxies and that the universe was expanding. That was a moment of true awe for me.The world will miss this happy warrior for science.
President of Mississippi State Medical Association Denounces Dr. Hayne
I just spoke on the phone with Dr. Dwalia South, president of the Mississippi State Medical Association, the state branch of the AMA.Coincidentally, Dr. South has been working on an editorial for the organization's newsletter raising questions about why the state medical examiner position in Mississippi has been vacant since 1995. In doing some research, she found my personal blog, contacted me, and we chatted this morning."I don't know why Dr. Hayne is still a member of our organization," she says. "I'm going to try to get him booted. I can't believe he is allowed to take the stand and use our organization's name to boost his credentials. That isn't right. I'm going to do what I can to change that. I'm going to do what I can make people care about this."Dr. South has firsthand experience with Hayne and with Mississippi's broken forensics system. She was once the elected coroner for Tippah County, and one of the few county coroners who bucked Hayne's grip on the system. That might have something to do with the fact that unlike most of the state's coroners, she's an actual physician. The state requires only a high school diploma to run for coroner. "We had all sorts of people in that office. Farmers, morticians, a really diverse group of people for that kind of office. The guy I replaced couldn't read or write. Can you believe that? An illiterate was in charge of this county's death investigations. He was letting the families of the deceased fill out the death certificates. Really unbelievable. When I heard that, I decided, well, I'm going to run. I did, and I won."One of the reforms implemented by Dr. Lloyd White, who was a state medical examiner in Mississippi before Hayne and his allies drove him out, was that the coroners at least had to take continuing courses in death investigation. According to Dr. South, many of those classes are, perversely, taught by Dr. Hayne."He's actually a very good lecturer," she says. "At least when it comes to his style. Very charming. The coroners loved him. He really owned them."But South wasn't in office long before she started to learn about Hayne's practices. "I was hearing some really horrible things about him," she says. "The more I learned, the more troubled I was. What he's doing is unethical and unprofessional. it's malpractice. If the truth was known about him, there would be an upheaval in our penitentiary system, because there are probably a lot of people he's helped put there who don't deserve to be there.""I'm really blown out of the water by this," she says. "One of my goals when I became president was to shed some light on this. Mississippi doesn't need this. There's got to be something that we as a group of doctors can do to blow the whistle on this guy."The Mississippi State Medical Association's next board meeting is in three weeks. My reason feature on Dr. Hayne here.
New at Reason
In the latest edition of Friday Funnies, Scott Stantis sketches the wacky adventures of kid John McCain.
More Fun with Price Controls
It was with astonishment that The Economist surveyed Hugo Chávez's first five years in office: "In the five years to 2003, Mr Chávez's performance was disastrous. The proportion of households below the poverty line increased by more than 11 percentage points...It was the first time since data were collected that poverty rose even as the oil price did too." But in the past few years, the Venezuelan economy has undergone significant growth, with an influx of oil money resulting in 18 percent growth in 2004 and 10 percent in 2005 (though the economic expansion has tapered off in recent months). Back in 2006, Latin American studies Professor Michael Shifter, who is somewhat sympathetic to the Chavism, said that while the economy has improved, and "record oil profits...are funding social spending, [Chavez's] initiatives have yielded only very modest gains." In a previous piece on the caudillo of Caracas, I quoted former chief economist of the Venezuelan National Assembly Francisco Rodriguez on the much-heralded decrease in poverty: "It's normal for poverty to decline during economic expansions and that the decline under Chávez is not unprecedented—indeed, it is smaller than the decline observed during similar periods in the past." And despite oil hovering at around $100 a barrel, the economic situation seems to be getting worse. This is what one must endure if one wants to buy "subsidized food" in the city of San Antonio de Tachir:The New York Times' excellent Latin America correspondent Simon Romero has a must-read (well, for those interested in such things) on Chavez's eroding popularity. A sample:While Mr. Chávez remains Venezuela's most powerful political figure, his once unquestionable authority is showing signs of erosion. Unthinkable a few months ago, graffiti began appearing here in the capital in January reading, "Diosdado Presidente," a show of support for a possible presidential bid by Diosdado Cabello, a Chávez supporter and governor of the populous Miranda State.Outbreaks of dengue fever and Chagas disease have alarmed families living in the heart of this city. Fears of a devaluation of the new currency, called the "strong bolívar," are fueling capital flight. While the economy may grow 6 percent this year, lifted by high oil prices, production in oil fields controlled by the national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, has declined. Inflation soared by 3 percent in January, its highest monthly level in a decade.Add to this Exxon's court-approved freezing of $12 billion in PdVSA (Venezuela's state oil company) assets and widespread food shortages (those pesky price controls again!) and it looks like Chavez's Bolivarian revolution is, at long last, in decline.
Judges Create Sex Toy Rights
Activist moonbat judges deem sex toys legal in Texas. Weep for democracy! The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Texas law making it illegal to sell or promote obscene devices, punishable by as many as two years in jail, violated the right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."Just as in Lawrence, the state here wants to use its laws to enforce a public moral code by restricting private intimate conduct," the appeals judges wrote. "The case is not about public sex. It is not about controlling commerce in sex. It is about controlling what people do in the privacy of their own homes because the state is morally opposed to a certain type of consensual private intimate conduct. This is an insufficient justification after Lawrence." Alabama and Mississippi residents, alas, still risk prosecution every time they brandish a dildo.Reason on why we love activist judges here, sex toys here. Hat Tip: Rick Davis.
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Ryan's Journal
Ryan blathers incessantly
A B C D E F GMail
GMail has been throwing mail away originating from me to the junk mail bucket, since at least the last weeks of January. It might be just one recipient. It might not. Watch out.
Super Bowl Pandas
There was some awful game a while back. I don't really remember it. Something about sacking Tom Brady repeatedly. I've blocked it out. I do remember this little cartoon ad with pandas. Some people will claim varying degrees of offense or perceived offense at racial ster...
Open Letter to KFSM
Edit: They are now running a new story about the Arkansas Dept. of Health debunking the misinformation from the first story, which is laudable. Unfortunately, that first story has disappeared from their site, instead of redirecting or otherwise assisting a multitude of site...
Cinematic Marketing Strategy
How do you get people into theaters in this age? First, there's those pesky pirates, video camming and making torrents for the interested and capable to acquire without profit. An international release, which may suffer a problematic delay with that same Internet distribut...
Food as Industry
Does this sound like an appealing meal to you? You're eating the offspring of the same steer and cow that fed your great-grandparents (the exact same, from a species whose natural lifespan is considerably shorter than ours), bred in a test tube, fed on corn, which it can't ...
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The SIMILE Blog
Blogging about the SIMILE Project
Timeplot Fans: IE Joins the Club
And you don’t need to change a thing. It gives me great pleasure to inform you that your existing timeplots should simply function, now, when you browse to them in Internet Explorer 6 or 7. Go ahead, go and look, maybe give it a shift-reload to clear that now-untrue incompatibility message. Or [...]
Web App Makeover - A Complete, Automated Scraping Scenario
Our project offers quite a diverse toolkit of more than a dozen tools. And these tools are at different levels of maturity. Consequently, sometimes it can be hard for people other than our team to understand how all of these pieces fit together into a coherent, compelling story. Once in a while, we need to [...]
Exhibit on the OLPC XO
Yesterday I got my hand on an OLPC XO and I tried to load Exhibit onto its browser. And it worked! That’s the Presidents exhibit running with both map and timeline views! This would be pretty delightful if kids can generate these visualizations themselves about whatever topics that interest them, or whatever issues that are pressing in [...]
Wibbit 1.0 beta (MediaWiki extension for Exhibit)
Gabe and I are happy to announce the availability of Wibbit 1.0 beta, a MediaWiki extension for creating exhibits inside wiki pages. http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Wibbit Please try it out and let us know what you think! - Margaret and Gabe
MiniZeitgeist Released
MiniZeitgeist is a plugin for WordPress that tracks your daily Akismet spam comment activity and plots it out for you using Timeplot, similar in appearance to the overall Akismet Spam Zeitgeist. Visit the MiniZeitgeist page for more on how to obtain and install the plugin.
Piggy Bank 3.1 and Appalachian 1.6 Released - Together
I’m happy to announce the release of the latest versions of Piggy Bank and Appalachian, now bundled together for your convenience. This latest revision of Piggy Bank begins a shift in architecture to separate out browser components from storage components by moving the ‘Publish’ action into the browser; see the wiki for details. [...]
Exhibit 2.0 (beta)
On behalf of the Simile team, our summer Haystack interns, and our contributors, I’m happy to announce the availability of Exhibit 2.0 (beta): http://simile.mit.edu/exhibit/ Check out the examples to understand the significant changes in this version. Useful links: What’s new: http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Exhibit/2.0_Release Migrating from 1.0 to 2.0: http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Exhibit/2.0/Migration
Timeplot 1.0 Released
The SIMILE development team is happy to announce the availability of Timeplot, a DHTML Ajaxy widget use to plot time series. Timeplot extends our existing Timeline widget to provide the ability to overlay time series over existing Timeline event data. Follow the link to the Timeplot home page to see several examples of that. Timeplot is based [...]
Potluck (beta)
On behalf of the SIMILE team, I’m announcing the availability of Potluck (beta) for trying out. Potluck allows casual users to mash-up data on the web using direct manipulation and simultaneous editing techniques: http://simile.mit.edu/potluck/ Please try it out and send us your comments. Note that Firefox is the browser of choice and IE support is limited. This [...]
New Great Audio/Video Tutorial for Exhibit Available
There are times where it’s a little frustrating to see all your tools used and very little to come back, but today is not one of those days. Tom Woodward (a former english and history teacher) has produced an incredibly detailed audio/video tutorial to bring teachers up-to-speed in using Exhibit in their classrooms and we were [...]
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Sandro
Sandro - LiveJournal.com
Obama++
If you know me, you know I'm fairly reserved about endorsing anything.But I strongly suggest people vote for Obama.There's an excellent post from Cos which offers links to the key reasons.The Call To Renewal speech (from 2006) (text, video) is, as Cos says, worth it.)
British vs American English
I just came across wikipedia's list of words having different meanings in British and American English.I only made it through A, B, and C, before I got tired of it, but in just those letters I came across quite a few surprising ones. There are lots I didn't really care about, or which seem clear enough from context, but there are a fair number of words which could be used in the same context but mean something different!I knew that "chips" were different foods in the US and the UK, that "buzzards" were different birds, and that "awesome" and "brilliant" had rather different senses.Some of the words I should have known, but didn't: apartment, asian, athlete (athletics), biscuit, bureau, candy, cookie, cowboy, davenport, and (police) commissioner. With each of these, it would be easy to have a sentence in one dialect which has a perfectly reasonable and significantly different meaning in the other dialect. Actually, I had some sense of confusion about "apartment", "biscuit", "bureau", and "davenport", but I hadn't realized it was just a British vs. American thing.With some work, one could probably make a pretty good LJ poll around this.(I'm reminded of my first stay in Ireland, some years back, when I was told that the unit of currency (in those days, the Irish Pound, sometimes written "punt") was pronounced to rhyme with "bank manager". I got the joke, but was somewhat surprised (even though the president of Ireland was then a woman) that managing banks was seen as a woman's job. This table corrects me about how that particular bit of slang is used.)I have some professional interest in this because (a) I work with lots of non-Americans, and (b) I'm currently wandering around in "Extensibility Theory", where language conflicts like these ("false friends") are a particular danger to be avoided.)
vacation ("OK")
So, last week I took the kids on a vacation to Oklahoma. (If you've followed the news, that sentence should get your attention. If not, imagine serious dramatic music under the word "Oklahoma".)My dad and step-mom (Margaret) and one of my sisters (Brenna) live there, and my kids had never been there. Most of them have never met this sister. It was kind of a last minute thing; I'd been thinking about it for a few weeks, then got serious about it about three weeks ago. The best tickets we could find had us leaving Boston at 7:05am (Monday, Dec 10). It's an interesting time to get one's self and four children onto an airplane, but we managed. Each kid had a carry-on with their clothes, snacks, some activities. I had a carry-on with my laptop, books, snacks, etc, and checked a suit-case with my clothes, camera, and various extras like swim stuff. (I also moved B's PJ's from her carry-on to my suitcase, without her permission, to make room for her snacks -- a fact she seems to never tire of harassing me for.) There are no direct flights from Boston to Oklahoma. This one went through Dallas. By the time we got to Dallas, American Airlines had decided to cancel our connecting flight on to Oklahoma City. They rebooked us on a flight the next day. During the night there had been an ice storm in Oklahoma, coating trees and such with about .4 inches of ice. I don't know why this closed the airport. This kind of ice only forms in perfect conditions so a little salt will prevent it, and the roads (and I assume the runways) were fine. Maybe the plane overnighted at OKC and was coated in ice too thick to de-ice; maybe some of the equipment was too coated in ice to function. Anyway, I called my dad -- he said the power was out, but the roads looked okay except for an occasional downed tree. We agreed I'd rent a car and drive up; it's about three hours, and I've driven it before. The airline said it was not practical to extract my suitcase and the car seats from the thousands of bags en route in Dallas. They said they could put in a request, but it might take five hours and they still wouldn't find it. So I borrowed car seats and figured my suit case would show up on the flight I was supposed to be on. As it turns out, the car seats did -- they were at baggage claim the next day when I went to exchange rental cars -- my suit case is still enjoying an extended tour of north america.Driving north in I35, about 25 miles from our destination I suddenly noticed the trees and grass and cattle fences looked odd. They were all coated in ice and laden with icicles.We arrived safe and sound mid-afternoon. The power was out for several blocks around their house, closing nearby businesses. There were some branches down, but not as many as I expected. I saw something like this once in upstate NY, and the forests there looked like they had been through a blender, with branches and twigs and whole trees ripped the shreds and scattered across the landscape. This was not like that (yet). Instead, everything was simply covered in ice. Smaller trees and plants were bowed down, at odd angles. (You could tell, because of the angle of the icicles, that the icicles came first, then the additional weight on the branches bowed them down, making the icicles end up horizontal.)Margaret is a landscape architect. Her garden, as we arrived, looked like a fairy tale scene where there's a castle that's been abandoned for 100 years and the briars have grown up to be impenetrable wilderness. In this case, I gather, it was all about the weight of the ice. A grand archway of plants over the path to the door had collapsed. Other tall plants were laying down, or just splayed on the ground. Some branches had fallen from the trees above.Inside, there was a nice fire going, etc. Ironically, they had just converted from purely wood heat (as they'd used for 25 years) to electric (heat pump) and hybrid -- a fireplace with a system which forced air through it to heat the house. Alas, without electricity, the fireplace was much less efficient. With that and a wood stove in the back bedroom it was possible to heat the house, but it wasn't cozy. With no long johns or sweaters or anything, I ended up keeping my coat on most of the time. (The kids had more clothing options, but a chilly house doesn't seem to bother them anyway.) As it turns out, electricity didn't come back until just after we returned to Boston.Margaret was making a stew for dinner over the fire (it has a swinging hook for hanging a pot!) but the general preference was for going to a restaurant, so we went out for Indian. It was good.Of course, the nice aerobeds they planned for us to sleep on use electric fans to inflate. They also had a couple of normal camping air beds, which turned out to be fine.(That's about it for my writing energy right now. Maybe I'll post more or expand this later. Short version is: flights back delayed a day by weather elsewhere in country, my luggage arrived in Oklahoma after I got back to Boston, and kids & me got a stomach bug [carried from Boston, presumably] and there was considerable vomit cleanup work.)(The whole 'State of Emergency' thing makes sense for financial reasons, but the basic sense there was that this was all just an incredible nuisance and/or a fun adventure and/or a trajedy for the trees. The only talk of real danger was from people doing foolish things to keep warm, like bringing their charcoal grill into the house. It was rather a bit like Pennsic. Similarly, as I recall, someone died at Estrella once from using a propane heater in a tent.)
Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:21:31 GMT
Two of the three young children of a colleage of mine died over the weekend.children die in house fireChime (pronounced chee-may) has always been friendly and helpful and done top-quality work. I couldn't say I know him very well; I don't think we've met in person. But, still, I liked him a lot.I have no idea how to process this except to cry.
Lucky / Unlucky
I had some trouble finding my cordless phone handset this morning. It took me four or five calls to it to locate it. It turned out to be deep inside the big garbage bag (of garbage collected from around the house), which I had left sitting in the dining room an hour before! I *think* one of the kids left it sitting on a dinner plate and it absently got swept into the garbage, ... but I can't really tell. Crazy.I can't figure out if I was very unlucky it ended up in the garbage, or very lucky that the garbage hadn't quite made it outside yet. It's a dichotomy that I'm often aware of, and am never sure what to make of. (Sort of the optimist/pessimist dichotomy.) I guess it's the budhhist thing again -- the joy or pain in life (the lucky or unlucky) is all about our perception and narrative, not about life itself.
Restaurant in Cambridge...?
I'm looking for a nice/very-nice restaurant to take a dozen co-workers, more or less within walking distance of the Cambridge Hyatt (where Arisia was last year), tonigh. Any suggestions?
No End In Sight, Charles Ferguson
I saw No End In Sight tonight. It wasn't the sort of movie I usually go to..... I try to pay attention to Iraq, but it's also quite wearying. Anyway, a fascinating movie.What really got me to go, though, was that it was written, produced, and directed by Charles Ferguson. Some of you may remember me writing about my grandmother dying, about two years ago. She would have been bursting with pride over this movie, if she were alive to see it. Charles had been a student of hers (he wrote a nice comment on her memorial web page) and he was also the son of the woman who probably my grandmother's best friend. She was always holding him out to me, conversationally, as role model. She would never be so crass as to say I should be more like him (or that I was in any way inadequate), but the hint was there.After years of doing cool technical and political things that didn't really make an impression on me, he did one thing that did: he founded a startup to make web-page editing software quite early, and sold it to Microsoft for a boatload of money. (They rebranded it "frontpage".)On the personal front, I heard n-th hand a story that he and his mom were with my grandmother in the hospital, perhaps six years before she died, when a doctor told her something like "there's nothing more we can do for you." According to this story, Charles took the doctor into the hallway and proclaimed something about having more money than god, being a total son-of-a-bitch, and being willing to do whatever was necessary to keep this woman alive. According to the story, this somehow motivated the doctor to figuring something out and curing whatever the problem at the time was. Someday, I'd like to find out what truth might lie behind this story.Anyway, I thought I should see his movie, and I'm glad I did.
Tue, 31 Jul 2007 01:31:08 GMT
Anyone know of a way to get a pass to see Stardust in Revere tomorrow?(Google only suggests one way and I don't think that'll work for me. :-)
youtube at its best?
One of my relaxing Sunday things to do is surf YouTube. Today I came across a vlog (Brotherhood 2.0) that I think pretty well captures the best of the genre. It's human and smart and ... jokes.Here are four recent videos. One which got featured on the front page of YouTube, and then the three daily postings for the days after that happened, dealing with it.[Hank] Jul 18th: Accio Deathly Hallows (No Spoilers)[John] July 25: July 25: Brotherhood 2.0's Youtube Comments Are Answered![Hank] July 26: The Price of Fame[John] July 27: How Nerdfighters Drop insults
video editing software?
I'd like some video editing software that G could use. Linux or Windows XP. Anyone have any suggestions? My web research suggests Adobe Premier Elements (on XP) is probably my best bet, but before I invest $100, I figured I'd ask around a little.
google street view
In the Cool New Stuff department, try looking at the San Francisco bay area in google maps. There's a new Street View option. Very, very, very cool. (And a little scary, of course. :-)(I spent a few minutes in a meeting this afternoon virtually wandering down one of the streets in my home town, looking at how it's changed.)
more travel for work
My job takes me to all sorts of awesome places. My job is also quite challenging, so I rarely find myself experiencing the locations more than peripherally.But the peripheral experience is hard to ignore, sometimes.I took this picture of a colleague during a teleconference we were both attending in one of the many spectactular rooms of the Banff Springs Hotel. I understand this hotel has been offering supreme luxury in the midst of spectacular wilderness since about the time there was first a railroad through the Canadian Rockies.There are some other pictures I took, but it's not a great set.
another milestone at work
I suppose it's not surprising that developing international standards is slow work.I wrote about 16 months ago how my year-long project to launch a W3C Working Group (starting in this protected post) was done and the group was underway. Today, the group published the first draft of its technical specification. Man, that took a long time.Getting from First Public Working Draft to Recommendation will also take a long time, if we can even do it, but this is still a nice milestone to have reached. (And Recommendation isn't even the end of the game, but it's the biggest single milestone in the entire process.)(meanwhile, no particular milestones or change in my family situation. i'll probably post something vague and cryptic here when/if something changes.)
where in the world?
Guess where I am?Hint: it took about 22 hours door-to-door, which is pretty close to optimal.Hint2: /me waves to scholargipsy
Saturday
Hmmmm. Looking for things to do on Saturday, soaking up the last of the decent weather. I bet it's about apple-picking season....
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So sue me
Jon Lech Johansen's blog
C# developer needed at DoubleTwist
We have an opening for an experienced C# developer at DoubleTwist: Should have 5+ years experience in software development Should have 3+ years of experience with .NET, C# and web services Should have a degree in Computer Science or related field Experience developing digital media applications is a plus Experience with .NET under Linux (Mono) is a plus You will be [...]
Monkeys needed at DoubleTwist
If breaking down proprietary barriers and empowering consumers sounds like your cup of tea, send us your résumé. If you know of someone who might be interested, please forward this to them. Opening: Reverse Engineering Monkey We’re looking for a code monkey to work on our DRM interoperability technology. Must possess strong skills in the areas of [...]
Apple TV hacks
What else to do when jet lagged than to unpack my brand new Apple TV? I wonder if the Apple TV is powered by a nuclear reactor because it runs fracking hot! Has anyone determined which photo they’re referring to? My unmodified Apple TV running vanilla MacOS X off a USB harddrive: I enabled SSH and then installed [...]
EMI goes DRM-free at higher pricepoint
EMI has been rumored for months to start licensing DRM-free tracks at a higher pricepoint. From today’s press release: London, 2 April 2007 — EMI Music today announced that it is launching new premium downloads for retail on a global basis, making all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing [...]
Apple TV first impression
I dropped by the Apple Store the other day to check out the Apple TV. I was disappointed with how the Apple TVs were demoed in the store. They were sharing the same Internet connection as all the Macs and due to the bandwidth being completely saturated by people browsing the web, it took several [...]
New notebook?
I’m in the market for a new notebook. I’ve only ever owned ThinkPads (except for a brief fling with a PowerBook a couple of years ago). My current ThinkPad T42p has served proudly in the DRM wars and is entering retirement. It still does its job, but I want a notebook that’s not as heavy. I’ve been [...]
Tumi Sucks
On a recent trip to San Francisco I bought a Tumi Vista Super Light 20″ Wheeled Carry-On. On the way back to Oslo, having completed the SF-London leg, this happened: It weighed 10 kgs (they weigh all carry-ons at Stansted) and I mostly used the wheels. I had heard good things about Tumi and their reputation [...]
Chocolate Mousse
Note: Bumped this old post for all of you chocolate lovers out there! Ingredients 4 dl cream 4 eggs 100 g sugar 300 g dark (70%) chocolate 100 g butter cognac Directions 1. Melt the chocolate and butter together. 2. Whip the cream until stiff. Put it in the fridge. 3. Whip the egg whites until stiff, adding half the sugar slowly at the end of [...]
DAAP Licensing
DAAP (Digital Audio Access Protocol) is a protocol defined by Apple and used for iTunes streaming. Apple has licensed the DAAP protocol to at least one company: Roku. Their SoundBridge product is a networked music player that streams music from your computer. Thanks to Bonjour and DAAP the SoundBridge can stream music from an iTunes [...]
Steve on licensing FairPlay
This is the 3rd and last post about Steve’s “Thoughts on Music” However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can [...]
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Star Wars - The Official Site
The official Star Wars website.
Feature: Star Wars Insider #98 Online Supplement
Go beyond the pages of the magazine, exclusive to Hyperspace members!
News: The 2008 Membership Kit: A Closer Look
Check out some sharper images of the 2008 membership kit contents!
News: Acme Archives' Key to the Original Trilogy
Acme Archives releases the Han Solo Character Key and discusses their collaboration with Gentle Giant Studios.
News: Star Wars Exhibits Open in Philly and Belgium
Two great Star Wars exhibits open in Philly and Belgium.
News: Coming in March: Bantha Tracks in Printable PDF!
Download and print the newsletter of the Official Star Wars Fan Club.
What is this?: A Head for Computers
Feature: DIY Star Wars Valentines
Star Wars artist Grant Gould has one-of-a-kind DIY Valentine's Day cards.
News: Hasbro's Star Wars: The Clone Wars Collection
Hasbro reveals its plans for Star Wars: The Clone Wars!
News: Indy Thrill of the Chase T-shirt at StarWarsShop
StarWarsShop's got an exclusive new Indiana Jones t-shirt!
News: The New Indiana Jones Teaser Trailer
On May 22... the adventure continues.
Feature: Recon & Report
The Empire is in disarray and Imperial forces are scrambling to protect themselves and their resources.
News: Submit Your Fan Movie by May 27th!
AtomFilms and Lucasfilm Ltd. are once again calling for submissions for the Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge.
News: John Alvin Remembered
Artist John Alvin, creator of numerous classic Star Wars illustrations, passed away last week
What is this?: Tatooine or Bust
Video: Introducing Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Behind the scenes of the new series.
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The Escapist : Featured Articles
Future Tech Today
"Science fiction has a robot fetish: robots that make your breakfast, robots that make war and yes, robots that make love. But while ASIMO may be able to do your taxes and pour a mean Tom Collins, it has the romantic appeal of a vending machine. And not those sexy vending machines in airports that sell overpriced iPods." Joe Blancato and Jordan Deam draw a line between now and then, stopping along the way for lasers.
Adjacent Data
"In the preface to William Gibson's Burning Chrome, Bruce Sterling said science fiction writers are like court jesters, able to speak truths without offense. 'We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless.' "Science fiction is able to make indictments against us palatable. We can choose either to accept them as truths or dismiss them as empty fiction. Star Trek, we know, wasn't saying that hundreds of years in the future we'll see racism as a social flaw. It was saying that it should be recognized as such back then in the '60s. Every comment on the Prime Directive, every mention of how the people of Earth solved their society's problems, were not speculation on what the future might bring but arguments that something was wrong in the present."
My Own Private Outer Space
"NASA sprang into action, showing young people science could be fun, using space as the carrot, communist invasion as the stick. As a result, millions of American children got their first taste of space - real space. Careers were launched and dreams brought into being, built on the foundation of science taught in classrooms, but for me these classes had the opposite effect. Real space wasn't spacey enough for me. As an ex-girlfriend would later put it, I was more in love with the idea than the reality."
Anomalous Materials
"To its credit, Valve's writing staff appears to be fully aware of the humor inherent in Gordon's highly low-tech exploits. In HL2, for example, Barney jokes about Gordon's education while the player performs the difficult task of flipping a switch. But beneath this running gag, the Half-Life series (and its crazy little sister, Portal) betrays a kind of warm ambivalence toward scientific pursuits." Thomas Wilburn dissects the science reds of Half-Life and Portal.
What Happened To The Last Starfighters?
"Suhr theorizes that the genre started to fade from the marketplace at a point in time when gameplay shifted toward simpler controls and away from realistic schemes, which included those of airplane simulators. Many of the classic space sims can be tricky to figure out how to pilot well. "'Most space sims are more complex [to play] than games like Doom 3,' says Suhr. 'I do think they are harder to access. Some people prefer it that way, but it really is an obstacle for a lot of people.'" Howard Wen tracks the demise of the space sim.
Confusion on Infinite (Virtual) Worlds
"Alvin Toffler, the futurist, told us this would happen. He predicted that post-industrial societies would fragment into numerous subcultures based on their own niche lifestyles. He was right. Some of those subcultures' lifestyles are lived on virtual worlds orbiting television series like suns."
Dreamcraft 101
"The ETC brings together students from around the world with diverse academic backgrounds, ranging from art and computer science to business and psychology . . . The "boot camp" semester pushes students to learn new skills, hit deadlines and learn to work together in multidisciplinary teams."
All Glory is Fleeting
"The entire Anonymous situation has to do with the cult of the incognito, the idea that if you give a man a mask, his true personality is unveiled. Anonymous can be said to represent the darker, feral side in all of us - they lash out with the slightest provocation, and they are many against few. Their own credo is they do not forgive, they do no forget and they are legion."
Go Virtual, Young Man
"From UO onward, MMOGs have been home to exactly the sort of behavior one might expect in the Wild West. To be sure, there may be more griefers in WoW than there were bandits in Dodge City, and just about everyone makes his way as a cold-blooded killer for hire (of mobs if not Apaches), but nevertheless, focusing on the negative elements of MMOGs is ultimately not the most productive way of understanding those communities."
What If Everyone Could Make Videogames?
"The actual creation process is somewhat a black box; how does a novice create a game? When I was young, the barrier to entry was more dependent on how much code I wanted to copy than it was trying to figure out the process, but these days development is much more challenging. There are a handful of efforts to simplify the development tools and process, but even the simplest game development tools at this point are complicated. "But what would happen if we could make game development simpler? What if everyone could make videogames?"
The Virtua Corps
"What's surprising is the rigor with which the communities themselves select and train recruits for their virtual wars. 'Some teams will require you to beat the game environment with only bits of the GUI,' says my soldier sim insider. 'Applicants can use the in-game compass, read maps and have to navigate to a set destination in a certain amount of time ... if you can't go on maneuvers, then you're probably not going to be on the team.'" Jim Rossignol joins up for the Virtua Corps
Hey Kids, Let's Make a Movie: Machinima
"They didn't start very complicated. In the early 1990s, Doom allowed users to record their play sessions. At first players swapped clips to compare and study matches and speed runs, and when Quake followed with more advanced recording tools, player clans began to do it wholesale. The Quake community produced the first widely viewed machinima in 1996 … the videos were known as 'Quake movies' at first, and it would be a few years until machinima earned its proper name." Cat Rambo dissects machinima.
Raph Koster: The Escapist Interview
"The idea of Metaplace is to really make MMOGs work the way the web does, and what that means is making it so that it is very easy for people to set up their own MMOG. It's very easy for these MMOGs to link to one another, it's very easy for these MMOGs to interact with anything else out there on the web, to provide kind of a technology platform ... it's really kind of the equivalent to Blogger, but for virtual worlds." Dana Massey interviews Raph Koster.
A Bug is Just an Undocumented Feature
"Glitches, anomalies and bugs can indeed hamper a game, but in the hands of the right player, they can be a lot of fun, too. Is leaving these bugs in a reason to get mad at the developers? Perhaps, but there are some players out there who want to thank them." Philip Miner explores exploits and the gaming of the game.
The First Steps to the Holodeck
"As technology leaps forward every day, the doors to a completely immersive play experience fly open. While the Star Trek holodeck is probably a ways off, currently existing technology can get us pretty close. It's just a matter of whether or not the entertainment industry can make it affordable enough to be realistic. Then again, if you own a PS3, maybe you're already willing to drop exorbitant amounts of money on games." Jon Sanderson wonders: Are we there yet?
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- updated: Feb 18 12:15AM
The Smoking Gun
The Official TSG RSS Feed
The Not Rick James Batch
This installment of our end-of-the-week mug shot roundup raises a few important questions: 1) Guys still wear those "I'm Rick James..." t-shirts? 2) Women can pose for their booking photos without tops?
A Slave To "Research"
When radio talk show host Bernie Ward was arrested last year on child pornography charges, his lawyers downplayed the federal rap, saying that his client was merely doing research for a book when he accessed and distributed illicit images.
Probation For Anthrax Hoaxer
The California man convicted of sending threatening letters containing a white powder to public figures like David Letterman and Jon Stewart has been sentenced to probation and ordered to check into a halfway house, where he will be required to take medications recommended by doctors.
Slanderous Kook: I'm a Slander Victim
Ratcheting up the crazy, the Minnesota man who last month posted a YouTube video in which he claimed to have engaged in a sex-and-drugs party with Senator Barack Obama has filed a federal lawsuit against the presidential candidate and the Democratic party.
2 Guys, 1 Bucket
Meet Chad Hacker and James Schwartz. The two Cincinnati men were arrested yesterday after they allegedly dumped a bucket filled with vomit and feces on a 20-year-old woman.
The Usual Suspects
You know the routine by now: We've reached the week's end, so it's time for our mug shot roundup, an assortment of favorite new booking photos.
Heidi Fleiss Busted
Former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss was arrested by Nevada cops and charged with drunk driving, illegal possession of prescription drugs, and driving without a license.
Roger Clemens's Stash
Lawyers for Brian McNamee, the trainer who has accused ex-client Roger Clemens of using performance-enhancing drugs, today released photos purporting to show syringes, blood-specked gauze pads, and drug vials used by the embattled baseball star.
"Jena Six" Member In School Arrest
One of the "Jena Six" defendants was arrested yesterday for allegedly assaulting a fellow student at a Texas high school.
"Bobby The Jew," 61 Others Indicted
Dozens of reputed Gambino crime family members and associates were named today in a racketeering indictment charging the New York-based Mafia family with most of the felonies covered in the United States Code.
Heath Ledger Death: Accidental Overdose
Heath Ledger died of an accidental drug overdose, according to autopsy findings released today by the New York City medical examiner.
Rap Rap For Florida Man
A 19-year-old man was arrested Sunday night for singing the lyrics to a profane rap song as he walked on a Florida street.
Britney's Mom Seeks To Stop Osama
As if anyone needs another glimpse into the lunacy that is Brtitney Spears's life (and that of her assorted footmen and paparazzi cohorts), the singer's mother has filed a court declaration purporting to describe how her troubled daughter came under the sway of a manipulative manager who drugged the pop star and drove her further from reality.
Beer Before Babes
When cops pulled Tina Williams over for erratic driving Sunday afternoon, they discovered that the 46-year-old Florida woman had her seat belt priorities scrambled.
Super Mugs
Our end-of-week mug shot collection features a Giants fan, a Patriots fan, and a monkey-with-a-big banana t-shirt.
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- updated: Feb 18 03:16AM
Thoughts From Eric
Things that Eric A. Meyer, CSS expert, writes about on his personal Web site; it's largely Web standards and Web technology, but also various bits of culture, politics, personal observations, and other miscellaneous stuff
Manhattan Problem
It’s not every day I uncover a case involving the botched theft of information about nuclear weapons. Here’s how it went down: in the infosthetics feed was an entry about a video regarding nuclear stockpiles around the world and the effects of a nuclear explosion in New York City. The video was produced by Chimp [...]
CSS Tools: Reset and Diagnostics
I’ve hinted and teased and promised, and I’ve yet to make good on any of it. I’m sorry. Can I make it up to you? Okay, then, here you go: a permanent home for my reset styles. It takes up residence in a new “CSS” subsection of the Toolbox section of the site, [...]
Non-Quotidian Problems
After I published the latest iteration of the reset styles, Paul Chaplin pointed out that my simplification of the quote-suppressing rules actually broke the intended effect in Safari, Gecko variants, and so on.
Cleveland Web Standards Association
Ladies and gentlemen, the Cleveland Web Standards Association. Specifically, its brand-new web site, courtesy a small band of association members who worked together to design and develop it. It’s a lovely little semantic number, chock full of microformats and member content aggregators. In case you hadn’t heard about the CWSA yet and are wondering [...]
Almost Target
I’d like to tell you a little story, if I may, from way, way back in 2002. (The exact date is lost to the mists of time, but the year is pretty solid.) Like a lot of stories, it’s little bit long; but unlike some stories, it’s true. As the engineering staff at Netscape [...]
Version Two
So yesterday was interesting. In a whole lot of ways. As I expected, there were some widely varied reactions (there’s a good list over at Digital Web, if you’d like to taste the rainbow) and many of them were in opposition to the whole idea. The opposition was fine, but the tone taken by [...]
Targeted
If you have anything to do with web development, there's news of a coming change that you absolutely need to read.
Structured Timeline
I wasn't going to do it. It would take too long, draw too much energy and attention. Too many other things needed to be done first. But it tasked me. It <em>tasked</em> me!
In-Flight Commentary
Herewith I present the latest in what can only now be called a series of travel-tip posts.
Browser Version Timeline
Sharing a timeline showing major releases of a selection of web browsers, from mid-1996 through the present.
Resetting Again
I've been pondering reset styles over the past few months, and come to a bit of a shift in my thinking. Here's the result of that thinking.
Access Switch
Or, how to not appreciate your existing customers. Back in April of 2001, I was preparing to start work at Netscape. I’d be working from home, so I needed high-speed access, and DSL was my best option. Eventually, I decided on Earthlink. It took a bit of effort, as there were some physical [...]
Speakers Galore
I know it was only yesterday that I mentioned the opening of registration for An Event Apart New Orleans and the other 2008 shows, but there’s already more to share: later that same day, we announced the speakers for the other three shows of 2008. Incredible lineups, every one. We’re beyond excited. [...]
An Event Apart 2008 Lines Up
Announcing the speakers and schedule for An Event Apart New Orleans 2008 <strong>plus</strong> the opening of registration for all four shows of 2008.
Bad Timing
Opera comes out with guns blazing for Microsoft over standards support, which is about the least constructive thing I can imagine right now.
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- updated: Feb 14 12:23PM
tJoY0103's Xanga
Latest Xanga weblog from tJoY0103
Super Bowl
We hosted our first ever party at our house for the Super Bowl this year. Francisca, Kitty and I slaved away and made lots of goodies! We made popcorn shrimp, Main crab cakes, honey BBQ wings, Thai wings, pizza, honey roasted nuts, guacamole, and garlic sausages. It was yummy!Then, as the boys watched the football game, we sat down with Kenny to play Mah-Jong, Cantonese style. Since I am not familiar with this kind of playing, I was the biggest loser of the night. But no matter! The Giants WON!!!!! We rule! Go New York!
Risks
Are you a big risk taker? What do you consider a big risk? 50/50 chance? 75 positive/25 negative? 25 positive/75 negative? How much are you willing to gamble? Does your willingness to take risks change as the stakes change? Would you bet the same amount of money? What if it was your health? Your job? Your relationship? Your life? How would you even begin to calculate the "rate of return"? It's almost the same when you think about regrets. Do you want the regret that you did it and it blew up in your face? Or, would you rather the regret that you never tried so you never knew? Either way, life will always be ever so slightly different,... Lately, I find myself ruing the "would've, should've, could've" regrets more. This is not to say that I don't think about and kick myself for making some of the mistakes of my past. But somehow, the "would've, should've, could've" regrets seem to make me just that much more melancholic. I wonder,...
Waiting
I've always sucked at waiting. I want instant gratification. Even if it is bad news, I want to know now. At least when I hit bottom, I know there is nothing but solid ground to go up from. I despise having the rug being pulled out from underneath me.Patience is a virtue I have yet to learn.
Crazy Chinese parties
Saturday night was my cousin's engagement party. Only thirty people, and we still managed to drink up 5 bottles of red, large bottle of Goose, and two-three bottles of X. O. Hennessey cognac. Needless to say, the men who were drinking (and the one lady) were all in pain the next day. Since Baby is half-Irish, they designated him as the "Pinch Drinker."Now we have the September gig to look forward to. That is going to be INSANE with 300+ people. Cousin has asked Baby to be part of his "Drinking Team."
Wisdom Teeth
I had three of mine removed this past Tuesday - two impacted, one not. Surprisingly, it turned out much better than I expected! I even managed to make it to work today! The Vicodin makes me very woozy, so I've been trying to stay off it. However, I am absolutely famished, so I chew on my poor gums anywayz. Two seconds later, my gums are screaming for some pain relief. There goes my "not taking Vicodin" out the window. All in all, I do have to say, my experience has been extremely pleasant, especially compared to some of the other horror stories I've heard. I'm not even that swollen, minus the egg shaped thing on my left cheek. And that is what makes it so weird! I only got one removed on the left side!!! Why is it more swollen than the right?
My Last Name
I changed my name when I got married for some unknown reason. When I was filling out the marriage certificate, that's just what I put down - Baby's last name.Ever since, I have gotten shit from so many people for doing so! "Did feminism die with the previous generation?" "Why did you change your name?" "But you're not white!" It's so annoying! What are these peoples' problem?!?!That got me thinking - it seems, to me, at least, Americans seem to have a sense of entitlement where they feel justified in telling others what to do. We've even proclaimed ourselves to be the World Police and meddled in many international affairs. Why? Where did this come from?My friend argued that Britons are the same! During her year of self-selected celibacy, so many people berated her, almost to the point of verbal abuse, about why she wasn't out "shagging."Geez. Get a grip people! Don't you have your own life to worry about
Life,...
A friend was up for a visit, and I somehow strolled down memory lane. We spent the weekend exploring Boston sites, and also went back to Wellesley for a brief visit. We saw an interesting, albeit in our opinion, wrongly labeled exhibit (original is "Global Feminism" though it seemed the art work related more to "Gender Identity" or "Female Body") and that invoked much non-PC talk. I never realized how much I missed that. Now, my life is burdened with endless nuances such as working to earn money, working to pay bills, working to pay mortgage, working, working, working.Life is so different now. She and I only graduated two years apart from one another, yet it seems our worlds are oceans apart. She is in graduate school; I am living the "American Dream." Why is it then that I feel like part of my soul has died?
Sex and the City Movie
The news just broke that Sex and the City movie has started filming in NYC - and they gave away a plot! They said that Carrie, Big, and Charlotte was having a meal somewhere and Charlotte's water broke! I didn't want to know that! Now I'm sad,... except, now I really want to see it too. I am a Sex and the City addict.
Mindless Muses
I have been told by others of my sister's astonishing memory, particularly if it pertains to preferential treatment, but I have never experienced it first hand. Until now.I was talking to my sister the other day, and she complained that no one remembered her birthday last year, and it was her 18th. She hoped that people would remember her birthday this year. I complained, naturally, because not only did Baby and I remember, we also sent her a gift! So she said, yeah, aside from us.Taking the hint, I proceeded to call all family members to forewarn them about her upcoming birthday (this Saturday) so that they can all remember. But this incident did surprise me - why did she wait a whole year later to tell me? If it were me, I would've been on the phone complaining to people the day after! I often have to do that anywayz, since my birthday is SO inconveniently always on the first day of school back from Christmas vacation. No one (family not counting) ever remembers,...Speaking of school, I am absolutely going cuckoo. My students this year are very immature and I can foresee it to be a L-O-N-G year,... *sigh* No wonder I keep aging - when I cut my hair, my students asked, "Did you cut your hair so you can look younger?"
Double Standards
If there is anything that gets me more upset than something else, it is people who exercise double standards - hypocrites. I try not to get upset at others who do something that I would do myself, or have done in the past because that is just incredibly unfair.Ever since the fall out with my in-laws, I have been labeled the black sheep in that family: no one talks to me, people will walk around the house to avoid being in the same room with me, and I actually have been verbally assaulted. It's been over a year, and there has been no peace offering gesture. Frankly, I am tired of being the punching bag, so for the next upcoming family function, I put my foot down and said, "No, I am not going."I am getting berated by one of my brothers-in-law for not going; "What else could be more important than your nephew's birthday party?" Well, let's see - Isn't a brother more important than a nephew? Isn't a wedding more important than a birthday? A birthday comes around every year, but a wedding is only once in a lifetime. If family is really that high up in your books, then why weren't you at your own brother's wedding (also my wedding)? Now you think you are in a position to give me shit?While we are on this topic, this particular person gave Baby shit too. We did not attend one of their childhood friend's wedding because this childhood friend bitched me out publicly (a whole other story) nor did we send a gift, for obvious reasons. Baby's brother nagged and nagged him for ages about sending the wedding gift.Again, I ask - Where is my wedding present? I am married to one of your two brothers. This is just a friend's wedding, and you're getting all your panties into a knot. By your own standards, shouldn't you be killing yourself now for not being at the wedding, and no acknowledgment of the wedding afterwards?I hate people who cannot even live to their own standards.
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- updated: Feb 18 01:23PM
Virtual Threads
Web serving on the cheap
Have you ever wanted to set up a small web server at home that can handle a small but reasonable amount of traffic? Perhaps you have a pet project or a home business and can't justify the cost of professional hosting. Maybe you have a fetish for low powered servers on small internet connections. Or possibly you just want to see if a Slashdotting of your home DSL line will trigger a call from your ISP. In any case, here are some tips on how to get the most out of a small setup. Understand your limitations If you don't have a large budget, then you obviously are going to have two big problems: A lack of CPU power A lack of bandwidth Any effort to improve the performance of your small web site should be directly aimed at alleviating one of these two problems. I'll discuss each of these two issues below. There are other issues, such as a lack of RAM or disk space or disk performance, but usually your CPU and bandwidth will dominate the situation. I'll also ignore the most obvious solution to these problems, which is simply to buy a better processor and a bigger tube. Bandwidth More often than not, bandwidth will be your biggest hurdle, especially if you're running your server on your home internet connection; most home connections have terrible upstream speeds, which really hurts you when you're a content producer and not a consumer. In addition, some connections, like DSL, will have high latencies. To mitigate your lack of speed, you're simply going to need to push fewer bytes down the pipe. Look at your web pages and appreciate all of those pretty pictures while you can, because they're the first thing to go. A typical image can be anywhere from 10 to 200 kilobytes, which is simply too large for a small connection, especially if you have 20 of them on the front page. If you can stand it, remove every single GIF, JPEG, and PNG from your site. You may need to redesign your site around the new image-less paradigm, but you won't regret it in a few weeks when you get your bandwidth bill. Next, move to a CSS-based design instead of a pure HTML one. You should be able to slim down your HTML this way, which will make it that much faster for a user to download. For an added bonus, you should put all of the CSS commands into a separate file. This will slow things down a tiny bit for the user's first visit to the site, but it also means that the same CSS file will be cached on every subsequent page view. Finally, you should go for the biggest savings of all: compressed web pages. The idea is simple: the web server compress any text files before sending them to a user and the user's web browser will automatically decompress them before reading them. Every modern web browser supports compressed web pages, and you can see immense space savings from using it. Page compression can be a tricky thing to get right, especially if you're short on CPU power, because it obviously takes some effort by the web server to compress things. There are a few ways to get around this, one of which is to pre-render compressed versions of frequently accessed pages and then dish those out to users. You need to experiment with compression to see how much it affects your server's CPU. CPU If you're on a budget, then you most likely have an old computer with an outdated processor. This isn't necessarily a problem -- even very old computers can saturate a small internet connection -- but you're going to need to code your site correctly if you want to prevent it from being your big bottleneck. The very first thing to go is the database. Sure, a database like MySQL is nice to have and does provide some convenience, but it can totally kill your web server's performance. Obviously, not everyone can do this, but many people can; it's usually a waste to store every page of a small web site in a full-fledged database system. Many small web sites could eliminate MySQL completely if they just stored data directly in files instead. For those that absolutely must have a database, you will need to at least remove any direct database query on your front page. Sometimes you can even just keep a copy of a MySQL query in a file and have a program update that file every so often. Another way to avoid making database calls or any other expensive operation is to pre-render entire pages. If you know that your home page is only updated a few times a day, then why dynamically generate it every time someone views it? Just take the rendered page's HTML and save it in a file; the next time a user requests that page, just throw the rendered copy at them. You need to be careful to not give users stale pages, but it usually isn't too hard to figure it out on a small site. This concept ties in well with the previously mentioned tactic of saving pre-compressed copies of pages. Finally, try to avoid web scripting in general. It is usually hard to avoid, given how much power it provides, but a poorly coded PHP or Perl page can chew through your CPU and RAM; it is best to use it only when it is truly needed. If you manage to free yourself of scripting on all but a few pages, you can even take advantage of a new class of lighter and faster web servers like lighttpd or tux; you'll still need to run a heavier web server process for those few scripted pages, but most of your traffic will hopefully run through the fast and light web server process.
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- updated: Jan 17 12:15AM
Web Standards Awards
Matija Turcin
I'll admit, I have no idea about anything on this site, not even what language it's in (Polish, Czech?), but it's a beautifully crafted piece of work. I just hope they're not selling used cars. Unlike most book metaphor designs, the content on this site scales quite nicely at larger font sizes, particularly given the intricacy of its background and container.
Noodlebox
Don't ask me why a web design agency is called Noodlebox -- mostly because I can't read Belgian -- but they've got a nice little site. It has a nice openness to it; content isn't pressing in from all sides, and the titles do a good job of dividing everything up. The usage of sIFR really carries through the branding and personality of the site, however I think they could have provided some alternative content for their logo, as without Flash it loses all identity.
Breaker Design
It's really only a one page design, but what a design! Tyson Rosage uses his graphic design chops to create a beautiful amalgam of photography and illustration. Sure, the slant makes me dizzy, but in a good way :)
Kutztown University Communication Design Department
One of the keys of great design is the use of the right idea at the right time. Kutztown University's design department seem to have hit this mark precisely with their scrapbook-inspired website. All of our judges were impressed at how the tangible textures and well-worn artwork evoke so well the craft and tradition of design which often seems to be missing in our digitally-defined world, and yet still balances this intrigue with a usable interface. An excellent blend of form and function.
Decibel Magazine
You want proof that you can make a CMS site with plenty of content completely Standards compliant? This site is it. The folks at Pixelworthy have beaten the Ektron Content Management System into submission, allowing them to produce this hard rockin' magazine's site entirely in XHTML 1.0 Strict validating code. And the design's pretty nice too: good whitespace for actual reading, just the right amount of angles, and some decent photography. However, that doesn't necessarily save the writing :P I'm still trying to figure out whether this guy liked the album or not.
Matt Brett
The recent CSS Reboot produced a lot of action in our submissions box, but I would have to say that Matt Brett's site was the most polished and well constructed out of all of them. He continues the dark/grunge revival that's being supported by this latest batch of awardees, but he's hotted it up with the latest hip fluorescents. Probably one of the most intriguing features of his site is the hover states on all the various content areas. They provide a good bit of focus for your cursor, particularly against the dark background. Another highlight is the way he's jigsawed all his interests into the layout -- flickr, blog entries, comments, currently-listening-to, video games, etc. Very tight.
Elan Snowboards
When I first saw this site, I *so* wanted to award it, but a look under the hood revealed pretty much all divs. I'm pretty certain the semantics have now been updated (or maybe my standards have just fallen in the interim) but now the code resembles something respectable. But that's all by-the-by. What you really get here is a fine execution of grunge to the nth degree. And where better than on a snowboard site? The Subtotal team have really created a coherent experience that mightn't be your cup of tea, but should hit the bullseye for the target market. There's the usual Flash validation errors, and also a strange reluctance to put input tags inside a fieldset. But don't worry guys, I'll award now and let you correct later :P
Twintype
I'm not going to say much about this site (which some of you might be thankful for) except to say that: 1. Inline JavaScript rollovers by Macromedia suck<br /> 2. It's really up to you what order you put your source in, but this one's slightly weird Other than that, it's a nice, sharp little portfolio that Owen Johnston has put together here.
Designchuchi
Believe me, I've seen quite a few bad desktop-and-sticky-note site metaphors come through these doors, but Designchuchi's is perhaps one of the best. I think it succeeds where some other fail because it doesn't take realism to the nth degree -- it creates a nice sharp layout which is clearly illustrative and highly polished, but doesn't belabour the point with gritty textures and photo-realistic objects. If you're every going to use this scrapbook style, it's probably most appropriate for a design firm. The way that Designchuchi incorporates and allows you to explore their portfolio just goes to show this. Make sure you've got plenty of bandwith, though.
Zimmer Twins
If you don't have Flash on you'll miss a chunk of this site, but it's still great Standards development. This site is a perfect case of designing for your target audience. Here, the bullseye is kids aged 5 - 13, and the site caters for them perfectly by deftly using elements from the source material and combining them into a bright and lively interface. As its focus is a children's animated series, the use of Flash throughout the site is warranted, but not overused; giving the kids enough interaction to get them hooked and make the site an extension of the TV series, rather than an afterthought. A few validation errors, mainly because of the Flash inclusion method, but that's as good as you're going to get.
Poptones
Remember when you were a kid and you liked to dress up and pretend that you were someone else? It doesn't really matter what you pretended to be, perhaps a fireman or a cowbody. Perhaps a superhero? (Perhaps you liked dressing up in your sister's clothes? It's OK, we won't tell.) Now, I want you to cast your mind back and do some more pretending today. I want you to forget that you find the subtle nuances of XHTML and CSS interesting. I want you to forget that you think that you know all there is to know about markup and semantics. I even want you to forget that there is this stuff we call code underneath what you see on screen and just look in awe at a terrific design. Poptones, one of the most distinctive site designs I have encountered in a while, and by UK based designer Simon Collison and the team of talented chaps at Agenzia.
Sony UK
When this site came to my attention this week I was keen to see how a major brand like Sony had implemented a new site with standards based methodologies.
Stonewall
I am quite digging the sparse-yet-complex feel that Stonewall's new site has going for it. It has a very strong grid feel, similar to Khoi's Subtraction, but is in no way derivative. They have made good usage of in-built CSS styling to contrast headers, highlight and create separate spaces for everything, and the Flash feature panel adds that touch of spice that you need. (Although its absence is sometimes notable if you have Flash turned off) The only thing I could say is that perhaps the header whitespace is a touch extravagant :)
A List Apart
Just getting back into the swing of monthly awards, so we had a few candidates dating back to August for this round ... and it seems that experience wins out over youthful exuberance once again. I don't think there's one of us that hasn't felt the effect of A List Apart in our work. Whether it lead us down the path of Standards, crystalised a web design principle in our minds, or simply showed us how to make a print stylesheet, its influence is far reaching and more than helpful. So it's fitting that an institution like this should have a design worthy of its stature. The Jason Santa-Maria/Eric Meyer/Jeffrey Zeldman super team have produced a much talked about site that does what a good design should do -- make the content even better. Condolences to the team behind the Elan website (runners-up), but there's no stopping this juggernaut!
Kev Adamson Animation
It was a well placed comment left here on the <abbr title="Web Standards Awards">WSA</abbr> that led me to Kev Adamson's site and I am glad I went, it is a visual treat. Amongst all the super slick and shiny sites of today, it's nice to see something so effortlessly scruffy but oozing style and attention to detail nonetheless.Perhaps a little predictably, the decider for me was the liquid layout and Kev has tackled it superbly well, it's virtually unnoticeable. I have to admit, I found the <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr> to be a little bit on the scruffy side too but it validates, so I'm not going to hold it against him, he's the one who has to maintain it after all.I was also a bit disappointed to find that the Talking of design section is Blogger, rather than it's own <abbr title="Content Management System">CMS</abbr>. As this is such a small part of the site though, and something that could so easily be changed, I didn't let it put me off. Web standards aside, Kev certainly has some talent when it comes to illustration and animation and I have a feeling this won't be the last we hear of Mr. Adamson.
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- updated: Apr 28 10:43PM
World Wide Words newsletter
The World Wide Words newsletter discusses word histories, new words, the background to words in the news and problems of English usage. Some items are added to the Web site seven days after they appear here.
575-1: Feedback, notes and comments
Franglais Colin Thornton was one reader of a number who commented on the special case of French-speaking Canada: “Mon ami. I live dans la capitale mondial de Franglais. Shediac, New Brunswick, is a small town on the east coast of Canada. Half of this province is French and half English. So too is the day-to-day language. People ask questions in French and answer in English, switch languages halfway through sentences and add French endings to English verbs. Purists are upset about this because it’s a sign of assimilation. To my ear, however, it’s delightful. Examples: ‘Worry pas ta brain, bébé’ (chill, baby); ‘Pile on le bois sec’ (let’s move!); ‘Quelle belle shortcut’ (an unexpected dead end) and ‘Quel drag’ (uncool);. I could go on and on, but it’s been snowing all day and l’homme’s just arrived to plower mon driveway.” Twaddle As an aside on this word, Andy Ibbotson pointed out that degrees Twaddle is an arbitrary scale that measures the specific gravity of liquids denser than water. I presume that this is named for a man with the surname Twaddle rather than asserting the scale is nonsense, though I’ve not been able to confirm this or find out anything about him. (He appears sometimes spelled Twaddell, but this would seem to be an error.) Updates Recent comments in these columns about the cricket term sledging and the Australian word of the year 2007 from Macquarie Dictionary, pod slurping, have led me to create permanent Web-site items about them. I’ve also written a summary of all the selections for Words of the Year 2007 and have updated the pieces that refer to them. All these are linked from the home page.
575-2: Weird Words: Verecund
Modest, bashful, shy. The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for this word, published back in 1916, doesn’t suggest it’s obsolete or even rare. It isn’t quite obsolete yet, although it has never been common. You need to have learned Latin in your youth, once standard for educated writers of earlier generations, of course, to have been likely to include this word in your prose. Its heyday, insofar as it ever had one, was roughly in the half century after 1850. It turns up in an article penned by an erudite columnist in the issue of The Marion Weekly Star of Ohio dated 17 February 1912, in a comment that can only make us marvel at how times have changed: What this country needs is men who are not afraid to proclaim to the public their virtues of mind and character. There is too little of the projection of self into the arena. Our politics is speckled with men who are so diffident and verecund they never say a word about themselves or their achievements. The only example I can find from modern times is in Translations by the Irish playwright Brian Friel, first performed in 1980, though set in 1833. In the play, characters speak in Irish, Greek, Latin and English. So an obscure Latinate word fits perfectly: “He speaks — on his own admission — only English; and to his credit he seemed suitably verecund.” The word is from Latin verecundus, which derives from the verb vereri, to revere or fear.
575-3: Recently noted
Downman Michael Hocken wrote in to query this term, which turned up in a BBC Scotland news report last Sunday in connection with a security alert on a North Sea oil rig. It was new to me. Anthony Massey, a BBC news producer, also e-mailed me to point it out: “One of the curiosities of working in the BBC newsroom is that every now and again a completely new word swims into your ken.” It seems to be a jargon term of the oil industry and means “evacuation”. It appeared in a press release from the oil rig’s operator: “Britannia Operator Ltd can confirm that the precautionary downman initiated today from the Britannia field has been halted.” It transpired that the partial evacuation was the result of a bomb scare provoked by an over-realistic dream by a person on board. I’ve found a very few examples of the term, the earliest from 2003 in connection with an incident on a Nigerian oil rig. It appears in The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology in 1998, in which it refers to laying off workers, a sense related to downsizing. This didn’t seem to fit. Matters became clearer when Michael Hocken found an example of the associated verb in a CBC report from 1999: “As a precautionary measure, we’re going to down man the rig today and tomorrow.” Down here is indeed in the sense of “reduce the size or number of something”, hence the verb downman means to take men off a rig, either temporarily or permanently. The noun then followed. Genius wordmaker John Milton’s 400th birthday is being celebrated by an exhibition at his alma mater, Cambridge, for the next six months. Gavin Alexander, a fellow of Milton’s old college, Christ’s, argues his contribution to the language as a creator of new words and new word forms is greater than any other writer in the language, including Shakespeare. He points out in an article available online that the Oxford English Dictionary credits Milton with adding 630 words. Shakespeare has only 229. Without Milton’s multilingual background and substantial powers of invention, we might not now have such words as love-lorn, liturgical, exhilarating, debauchery, besottedly, cherubic, far-sighted, depravity, dismissive, unhealthily, embellishing, fragrance, terrific, padlock, didactic, irresponsible, or unprincipled.
575-4: Questions and Answers: Butterscotch
[Q] From Peter Zilahy Ingerman: “If I’e managed to get it straight (a dubious proposition at best, of course), caramel is the result of pyrolising sugar syrup. I was under the impression that butterscotch was similar, but made from honey (though the definitions I can find seem to suggest it’s actually butter and brown sugar). This leads to two questions: a) what is butterscotch, and b) why is it called that?” [A] Don’t look to me for culinary advice — I can burn boiled eggs. My books say that butterscotch is indeed a form of caramel, but made with butter and brown sugar, as you describe, plus a touch of vanilla. That’s the limit of my expertise. Unfortunately, I can’t do that much better with your second query. Nobody seems to know. Some argue that the second part is actually scorch, from the manner of its making. The Collins Dictionary says that it may have been called that because it was first made in Scotland. Neither suggestion is supported by evidence, though the Scottish link seems plausible because Keillors of Dundee was one firm that made butterscotch commercially. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation (indeed, its only citation) is from 1865. It’s not hard to take that back a while: the first example I can find is from The Boy’s Autumn Book of 1847. Although that was published in New York it quotes a British itinerant seller of sweets. It’s worth quoting at some length for the period flavour (to coin a phrase): Well, you know, next morning I put my things in my cart, ready for Nottingham goose-fair: the brandy-balls here, by themselves—the butter-scotch there—the tuffey in this place—the black-jack in that; then I filled in with cure-all, and hard-bake, and peppermint pincushions: really it was beautiful to look at, I’d done it so nicely. Wikipedia states that the first maker of butterscotch was Samuel Parkinson of Doncaster, in 1817. The firm certainly did make it during the nineteenth century and Doncaster became famous for it. However, I’m suspicious of the Wikipedia article, since it cites no sources and claims that Queen Victoria used Thomas Crapper’s famous water closet on a visit to Doncaster in 1851; this would have been hard, as Crapper started his business, in London, ten years later. The Parkinson papers are deposited at the Doncaster Archives, from where Dr Charles Kelham tells me they begin only in 1848, although an article published in The Doncaster Review in September 1896 asserts that “It was on the 11th of May 1817, that the late Mr. Samuel Parkinson commenced the manufacture of butter-scotch.” If he did so, it seems unlikely, from the lack of written evidence before 1847, that he called it by that name. Other writers argue that the sweetmeat has no link with Scotland. Charles Earl Funk noted in Horsefeathers in 1958: “All directions for the preparation of this candy after it is properly cooked close with some such statement as: Pour upon oiled paper or well-buttered pan and when slightly cool score with a knife into squares.” He points out that one sense of scotch was to score or cut a shallow groove in something. This seems more reasonable than to assume it was originally Scots, especially in view of the known early history of its manufacture in England. But, as often with word histories, it can’t be proved.
575-5: Topical Words: Unclarity
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Rowan Williams, plunged into enormous controversy by saying last week in a radio interview and a lecture that it is inevitable that some aspects of sharia law will have to be incorporated into UK law to accommodate our Muslim population. The lecture, at the Royal Courts of Justice before an audience of members of the legal profession, was a detailed and subtle academic argument, hard for a layperson to understand. Leaving aside the issues he raised and the reasons for the immense criticism he has since been subjected to, his half-apology to the meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England this week raised a linguistic issue. He said, “I must take responsibility for any unclarity and for any misleading choice of words that has helped to cause distress or misunderstanding among the public.” Unclarity? Every journalist, broadcaster and cartoonist who quoted that sentence has focused on the word through some sort of emphasis. This may have been because it is rare. But why didn’t he use confusion or obscurity? Was it a scholar’s diffidence or was he trying to euphemise his error by means of a terribly British type of negative? I’m sure that it was the former and that he undoubtedly meant unclarity literally, an utterance that lacked clarity. But its history suggests its users often prefer it to retain a penumbra of imprecision. It was employed in the sense of a deliberate attempt to confuse by hoaxer Alan Sokal, who wrote the famous spurious article Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, published in Social Text in 1996. He was quoted in Scientific American in March 1998: “‘It took me a lot of writing and rewriting and rewriting before the article reached the desired level of unclarity,’ he chuckles.” Unclarity has a longer history. It’s recorded in Webster’s Dictionary in 1934 and would therefore seem to be even older still in the US. Though it is most frequently encountered in the academic environment in which Dr Williams is most comfortable, it turns up surprisingly often in popular fiction. John Le Carré used it in Smiley’s People in 1980: “‘Vladimir telephoned the Circus at lunch-time today, sir,’ Mostyn began, leaving some unclarity as to which ‘sir’ he was addressing.” Another example is in Ghost Ship by Diane Carey, a work from the Star Trek fiction franchise, dated 1988: “To offer unclarity in place of another unclarity — to replace ignorance with ambiguity — is this my only service?” That might be a message for Dr Williams.
575-6: Sic!
• In the 11 February edition of The Oregonian, a description of the movie Kings appears: “A tale of disenfranchisement and the search for identity in which six friends from the west of Ireland reunite after thirty years at a wake.” Scott Jamieson suggests that, after thirty years, you might as well declare the wake perpetual. • Peter Zilahy Ingerman found a headline on an AP wire story, which has been widely reproduced in newspapers whose sub-editors don’t have time to think about such things: “Water Drops From Air Used on Sugar Fire”. Dr Ingerman commented, “I’m not entirely sure how many different ways I can read this, but it’s certainly at least three!” • Department of non-sentient hairdressing. In Murder at the Opera by the late Margaret Truman, Miriam Raphael records, she describes a gala opera ball in Washington: “Later, as whiskey and wine and heat and humidity loosened lips and lacquered hair”. • The Guardian Travel section last Saturday (9 February) included an item on the new winter sport of air-dating, which is speed-dating on ski lifts. The author wrote, “The après-ski cocktail party is outside a bar called Fantastique. As I walk there, past people on crutches and small dogs, I can hear the pounding Euro music.” • Menachem Vinegrad was sent an advertising e-mail with the subject line, “Celebate Valentine’s Eve”. He feels that that is the last thing anyone would want to do on St Valentine’s Eve.
575-7: Copyright and contact details
World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2008. All rights reserved. You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites or blogs requires prior permission, for which you should contact the editor. Comments on anything in this newsletter are more than welcome. To send them in, please visit the feedback page on our Web site. If you have enjoyed this newsletter and would like to contribute to its costs and those of the linked Web site, please visit our support page.
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- updated: Feb 16 01:48AM
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
Web design news and insights since 1995
Lord of the Rains
I saw the bus doors closing. I saw a strange lady taking my daughter away.
Facebook, Twitter, and Bird Flu
If "Our Broken Borders" should someday turn into a ratings loser for CNN's Lou Dobbs, perhaps he can switch to "The Dwindling Productivity of the American Worker: Is Facebook Sapping Our National Vigor?"
Happy fourth birthday, real world semantics
Four years ago today, Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks gave a presentation on real-world semantics. Working backwards from HTML extensions like XFN (created by Tantek, Matt Mullenweg, and Eric Meyer), the paper showed how designers and developers could add semantics to today's web rather than starting from scratch or waiting for a "purer" markup language.
ALA 252: New library, long hallway
Keep your markup clean with DOM scripting and learn to play nice in the long hallway.
All Bits on Deck!
We're as pleased as pale punch to welcome web designer, CSS whiz, microformats monger, icon designer, outstanding public speaker, and best-selling CSS-design-book author Dan Cederholm and his freshly redesigned SimpleBits site to The Deck, our advertising network targeting web, design and creative professionals.
In defense of version targeting
We knew when we published this issue of <cite>A List Apart</cite> that it would light a match to the gaseous underbelly of standards-based web design, but we thought more than a handful of readers would respect the parties involved enough to consider the proposal on its merits. Alas, the ingrained dislike of Microsoft is too strong, and the desire to see every site built with web standards is too ardently felt, for the proposal to get a fair viewing.
Not your father’s standards switch
For seven years, the DOCTYPE switch has stood designers and developers in good stead as a toggle between standards mode and quirks mode. But when IE7 "broke the web," the quest was on to find a more reliable ensurer of forward compatibility. Is version targeting the answer?
The no-access road
A stranger and I just helped a disabled lady in a motorized scooter mount the inaccessible curb adjoining the treatment center for disabled people in wheelchairs and scooters. The medical center has been there for probably thirty years. And for probably thirty years, the inaccessible curb has barred the way for people seeking treatment.
Girl. Dog. Night. Day.
A series of incidents.
Usability problems with .Mac sync
I'm afraid this is another of those entries outlining bizarre design decisions and perplexing usability quirks in the otherwise brilliant world of Apple computers and phones
Everything that can be iPhonelike, will be
The iPhone is too great a leap forward in interface design to be confined to, well, the iPhone.
An Event Apart New Orleans
An Event Apart, the design conference for people who make websites, kicks off its 2008 season with An Event Apart New Orleans, a monster, 19-hour, two-day creative session. Join us April 24–25 at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside for two intense, 9.5-hour-long days of learning and inspiration, featuring twelve of your favorite web design authors.
Self-publishing is the new blogging
When you've flown this far from Gutenberg, the only place to travel is back.
Morning has broken
A technological lament in eight Tweets.
Let me hear your standards body talk
Jeremy Keith's "Year Zero" beautifully explains why the W3C needs our backs, not our bullets.
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- updated: Feb 18 01:23PM
Boing Boing
Jasmina Tešanović: Kosovo
Ed. Note: the following essay is by periodic BB contributor Jasmina Tešanović; as I format this post and prepare to hit "publish," Jasmina sends a second email: "Update: groups of hooligans have thrown stones on American and Slovenian (presiding country of EU) embassies, on police members and journalists...several people are hurt ...they are cruising town now here in Belgrade but police are controlling them...reporters are following up..." Image: "Orthodox Church," cc-licensed photo from Flickr by decafinata. - - - - - - - - - - The Sirens :: 02.17.2008 It's starting again: the language of war is the daily bread in Serbia. The sirens of nationalism are turned on again, as if nothing had changed in the eight years after Milosevic was toppled. Or as if nothing had changed since the year 1389 and the mythic battle of Kosovo: a myth is a myth, a dictator who uses the language of myths is squandering people s minds as well as their lives. Today, 17 February. at 15 hours Kosovo province unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia. It been ten years now since I wrote my "Diary of a Political Idiot," a book that started with riots in Kosovo. Although I've tried to stop writing that book, I have never been allowed to. The Balkan disorder became the model of world disorder. I can hear the voice of my dead mother, who passed away in 1999 after the NATO bombings, with her last words: "take care of Kosovo." She didn't mention her granddaughter, my daughter, whom she loved more than herself or me. She instead scolded me, the traitor, severely: Kosovo is not yours and you cannot give it away. You and your similar traitors don't have pants on their asses and you are giving Kosovo, our heritage, away. Last week in Geneva, I talked to a young Albanian blogger. He told me: this time "independence" will be declared for real, because it is not our independent decision but that of the world community. Nobody asks us anything anymore. They just give us orders and set rules....<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=cddbc300acd1aa0e678b6e324f25b69e" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=cddbc300acd1aa0e678b6e324f25b69e" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Ellen Forney of Lustlab
Susannah Breslin writes, Ellen Forney is a Seattle-based artist, cartoonist, and illustrator who has a new book out, Lust: Kinky Online Personal Ads from Seattle's The Stranger, from the boys at Fantagraphics. (Her last book, I Love Led Zeppelin, was nominated for an Eisner.) Lust brings together three years worth of Forney's "Lustlab Ad of the Week" series in which she creates comic works inspired by real ads that appear in the Stranger's personal ad section: Lustlab. For the second installment of Fast and Dirty, I interviewed Forney about what it's like to bring the secret fetishes of Seattle freaks to life. Buy your own copy of Lust here. Read Susannah's interview with Ms. Forney here....<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=d68798a6ce2eaa05cdaf4856008f24d4" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=d68798a6ce2eaa05cdaf4856008f24d4" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Balloon Man visits a nursing home.
A balloon artist visits a nursing home, shapes crazy hats and bracelets and geegaws out of balloons, and makes a lot of elderly people very happy for a while. That's it. No catch, no irony. Video link. (thanks, nirvan) Update: From the comments thread, nirvan adds: The balloon artist is Addi Somekh. All of Addi's YouTube videos are pretty amazing. The music is by The Evangenitals....<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=7146a4a4e0ad3958afbec1ad383ee109" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=7146a4a4e0ad3958afbec1ad383ee109" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Another success in Homeland Security's War on Babies
A 14-day-old Samoan infant died in DHS detention at Honolulu airport earlier this week, and American Samoa's delegate to Congress is calling for an investigation: The baby had been flown to Honolulu for emergency heart surgery. He died while detained inside a customs' room at the Honolulu airport with his mother and a nurse. Link (thanks Nithya)...<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=a137c459779e666a88ad26bcb7d66310" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=a137c459779e666a88ad26bcb7d66310" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Objectivism in Bioshock
Kotaku has a doozy of a post up today -- Yaron Brooks, the president of the Ayn Rand Institute, talking about the use of objectivism in the first-person-shooter game Bioshock: BioShock may have been conceived as a study in nuance, a place for gamers to discover and explore at their own pace, but its dip into the ethical morass of Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophies has brought her beliefs back into the mainstream spotlight and even piqued the interest of the Ayn Rand Institute's president, Yaron Brook. Brook, a former member of the Israeli Army military intelligence and award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University, first took notice of the game when he discovered his 18-year-old son playing it. It's a fact that didn't bother Brook despite his son's objectivist beliefs and the game's not so positive take on the philosophy. "My son has to find his own way in life," he said. "There are certain games I wouldn't want him to play, like Grand Theft Auto, games that celebrate criminality. But a game that might lead him to think and have him challenge his ideas, I'm fine with. "Luckily for me he doesn't agree with the game, he still seems to believe in objectivism." Link (thanks, Brian Crecente!)...<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=575be737ad005fe09d38f23e2d0e57ec" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=575be737ad005fe09d38f23e2d0e57ec" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Submersible car
The Rinspeed sQuba is an amphibious electric vehicle inspired by the submersible Lotus Esprit that Q gave to James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me. There's only one sQuba in existence and it cost more than $1.5 million to engineer and build. "For safety reasons, we have built the vehicle as an open car so that the occupants can get out quickly in an emergency," said (Rinspeed CEO Frank) Rinderknecht, 52. Passengers will be able to keep breathing underwater through an integrated tank of compressed air similar to what is used in scuba diving. The sQuba's top speed on land is about 77 mph, but it slows down to 3 mph on the surface of the water, and 1.8 mph underwater...."We always want to do cars that are outrageous, which nobody has done before. So we thought, 'Let's make a car dive,"' said Rinderknecht, whose innovative company has made transparent, flying and voice-activated cars in previous attention-grabbing displays at the Geneva Auto Show. Link to CNN, Link to Rinspeed (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)...<br style="clear: both;"/> <a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=09cc468409e25fcfaee7d12631d5aafc"><img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=09cc468409e25fcfaee7d12631d5aafc"/></a> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=09cc468409e25fcfaee7d12631d5aafc" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Warren Ellis: Freak Angels
Freak Angels: the latest from Warren Ellis, with Paul Duffield, version 0001 is now online and it's lovely....<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=9f6907a3ca6ec7e7084901df67b9d7b9" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=9f6907a3ca6ec7e7084901df67b9d7b9" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Cambridge University's secret porn stash isn't
The Cambridge University Library's tower has long been rumored to be packed with vintage pornography books from the Victorian era. Now, a million dollar grant is funding the online cataloging of the 170,000 publications in the 17 floor tower. Turns out, the closest thing to erotica up there are titles like "A Golden Guide To Matrimony" and "Flirting Made Easy." They're mixed in with the likes of "How to mesmerize" and "Wasps have stings; or, beware of tight-lacing." (Shhhh... I heard they moved the real hardcore stuff to the library's sub-basement.) From The Telegraph: Students of pornography can take heart, however, because more recent erotica is kept there thanks to its copyright library status. (Vanessa Lacey, the manager of the Cambridge University Library Tower Project,) said: "There's plenty of pornography in the library which is more recent. "People can come and have a look at it - for their research. But there's nothing terribly racy from the 19th century. What we found is the Mills and Boon of the era." Link to The Telegraph, Link to the Cambridge University Library Tower Project (via Cabinet of Wonders)...<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=3649ec50a8256ee289fe24d61ffdf8b6" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=3649ec50a8256ee289fe24d61ffdf8b6" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Julian Cope's Japrocksampler blog
COOP says: I've been enjoying Julian Cope's highly-recommended new book on Japanese 60's/70's freak/psych/noise rock very much, and I'm just beginning the process of tracking down some of the music therein (and so far, it is just as crazy and interesting as described!) For someone with a 20-year+ music addiction, it is a great thrill to be turned on to a whole chunk of great stuff that you previously knew nothing about. Anyway, I just noticed that Mr. Cope has a companion website, with a full A-Z encyclopedia of artists and albums. If the sight of all those crazy LPs doesn't whet your appetite, you deserve to listen to the new Britney Spears CD instead! Link to Japrocksampler blog, Link to buy Japrocksampler book...<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=63d03195ae4e2c6633689bc2cae359af" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=63d03195ae4e2c6633689bc2cae359af" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Truth about teleportation
Scientific American's JR Minkel interviewed CalTech physicist H. Jeff Kimble about quantum teleportation. In the article, Kimble explains in simple terms why recent experiments in quantum teleportation have nothing to do with the Star Trek transporter. As Minkel sums it up, the phenomenon "turns out to be more relevant to computing than to commuiting." From the interview: Scientific American: What's the biggest misconception about teleportation? Jeff Kimble: That the object itself is being sent. We're not sending around material stuff. If I wanted to send you a Boeing 757, I could send you all the parts, or I could send you a blueprint showing all the parts, and it's much easier to send a blueprint. Teleportation is a protocol about how to send a quantum state—a wave function—from one place to another. Link...<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=fa79e58931382b020b0fc30705286ab5" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=fa79e58931382b020b0fc30705286ab5" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Graphic novel recommendation: Casanova Book 1: Luxuria
In Casanova Book 1: Luxuria, the people of Earth are under the control of E.M.P.I.R.E.'s (Extra-Military Police Intelligence, Rescue, and Espionage) Cornelius Quinn, a tough-as-molybdenum son-of-a-bitch with a huge body, a little head and not much more empathy for his charges than the enemy he's sworn to defeat, W.A.S.TE. (an acronym that changes meaning at the whim of its insane bandage-faced leader, Newman Xeno). Quinn has a loyal daughter, Zephyr, and a ne'er-do-well son, Casanova, a partying lothario who resembles a cross between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Zephyr is a respected agent of E.M.P.I.R.E., while twin brother Cass has worked as hard at making his father disappointed in him as he has at being a creep-for-hire. Shortly after Zephyr dies on a mission, Xeno kidnaps Cass and inserts him into an alternate space-time where his sister is the black sheep and Cass is was good son (who got killed on a mission, just as his sister did back on the other Earth). Xeno orders Cass to destroy E.M.P.I.R.E. while making it look like he's still on their side. It's not as easy as Cass thinks at first, what with the torture his sister enjoys inflicting on him and the hard time his father gives him for suddenly becoming into something of a screw-up. (After all, the Cornelius Quinn in this dimension doesn't know that his good son has been replaced by this work-shirking hustler from an alternate universe, who's trying his best to keep up the ruse.) Plenty of freakish and fun villains (my favorite is the Kirby-esque Fabula Berserko -- "a big mutant brain... three monks that practiced some form of occult Zen for so long they fused together in a wad) and weird scenes, like an island where sexual orgone energy fuels non-stop orgies with sentient sex robots and humans, give this darkly-humored science fiction a quirky kick. It also introduced me to the respectable talents of Matt Fraction (Author) and Gabriel Ba (Author). (This edition collects Casanova #1-7.) Link...<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=b3facbdc104595f4792176e33d7e9ffd" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=b3facbdc104595f4792176e33d7e9ffd" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
New Jim Flora Print
Our friend Irwin Chusid has released a new Jim Flora print, and it's lovely. Jim Flora Art LLC has produced a limited-edition, archival-quality fine art print of a 1954 Jim Flora hand-tinted woodcut entitled Manhattan. The cityscape depicts New York in its 1950s glory, including a number of gotham landmarks such as the Empire State Building, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Madison Square Garden, the Statue of Liberty, famous theaters and legendary musical bistros, Washington Square arch, subways, taxis, horse-drawn carriages and tourists. Only twenty-five (25) prints of Manhattan were produced for this edition. We are offering five (5) prints (#21/25 through #25/25) now on eBay. After these five prints are sold at the asking price, prices will increase for the rest of the edition. Link...<br style="clear: both;"/> <a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=954df4f37cfcd2e19b3cdb2cb8f611b0"><img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=954df4f37cfcd2e19b3cdb2cb8f611b0"/></a> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=954df4f37cfcd2e19b3cdb2cb8f611b0" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Worn Free's vintage tees made famous by rockers
In the discussion following Xeni's post about Yoko Ono yesterday, Shawn Wolfe referenced having just bought one of Worn Free's "Yoko Ono" t-shirts, just like John Lennon used to wear. I checked out Worn Free and they have a very cool business idea. They recreate obscure vintage t-shirts famously worn by rockers, like Lennon's "Working Class Hero" tee, Iggy Pop's "I Wiped Out The 60's" tee, Debbie Harry's "Punk" tee, Frank Zappa's "Rental" tee, Joey Ramone's "Capitol Theatre" tee, and a slew of others. My favorite is the "Yoko Ono" and Joey Ramone's "Punk Magazine" tee. Link...<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=014e0ef6a96741ec8a2b084cf42839a7" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=014e0ef6a96741ec8a2b084cf42839a7" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Boing Boing tv: Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets
Web 2.0 meets Marxist (Foucaultian?) economic theory in the latest video hijinks from Austrian subversive art collective monochrom. Meet an online porn monster ("iPhone? noooom nom nom nom") and learn how Google-y eyed neo-liberalism screws over the proletariat in "Kiki, Bubu, and the Shift." Link to Boing Boing tv post with comments thread and downloadable video. More monochrom episodes on Boing Boing tv: * Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical * Monochrom: Campfire at Will * Monochrom: Falco Stairs * Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial * Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor * Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig Update: monochrom has the longer-form, uncut director's version up on their site....<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=d731be44f6d2239bd2993ec3b3a8010c" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=d731be44f6d2239bd2993ec3b3a8010c" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
Color the brain's fear system
(Click on image to embiggen) I went to the California Science Center with my four-year-old daughter and they had a great exhibit called Goosebumps: The Science of Fear. One station shocked kids at random intervals, another station made it seem like you were sticking your hand into a terrarium filled with poison snakes and spider, another one had a device that you strapped yourself into to simulate falling. I liked this handout for kids to color the brain's fear system. Link...<br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=fa0507cb91aa802019c8b5db97d27a67" height="1" width="1"/> <img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=fa0507cb91aa802019c8b5db97d27a67" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
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swords - insects - frustrations - funnies - art - amber - more swords
chosetec's Xanga Blog
age (Monday, April 09, 2007 )
chosetec's entry on Monday, April 09, 2007 at (2 comments)
Thursday, February 01, 2007
chosetec's entry on Thursday, February 01, 2007 at (2 comments)
Silly Sperm-Spam Subject Slogans: (Tuesday, November 28, 2006 )
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Friday, November 03, 2006
chosetec's entry on Friday, November 03, 2006 at (5 comments)
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
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dpark's thoughts
because all the cool people blog.
Dae han min guk
A few scattered thoughts... Korea's first ever win in a World Cup match on non-Asian soil! They'll need to get less sloppy though if they want to do well against their much stiffer competition down the road. Listening to heavily accented Irish on ESPN2 is almost as fun as watching Univision... well.. almost Though I happen to [...]
The Next Generation
After a little over a week, Susan and I are back in town! Still catching up on stuff... will have pictures to post later.. in the meantime, I have something very important to poll the audience out there for... Question: if you had to pick the top 10-20 episodes (out of 178) of Star Trek: [...]
too hot to handle
I got a first batch of pics in from our primary wedding photographer. I managed to print most of them okay, except a couple which ended up being kind of tricky with the color profile conversion. Here's what he said when I asked him for advice/help: converted straight to sRGB in [rawshooter]....hopefully this'll be [...]
Red Sox v Yankees at Fenway
Susan and I have hit our 1-month mark ... and we spent it at Fenway. My first Sox-Yankees game ever! It actually wasn't as bad / rowdy as I thought it would be. We even had a dressed up Yankees fan a few seats down from us, and no beer or peanuts [...]
Ken “the Falconer” Mortimer
Last night I saw an incredibly inane SNL skit that was strangely very very entertaining to me... to the extent that I've been searching around youtube and google to try to relive the moment, but sadly, I cannot find it. Ken 1: Who are you? Ken 2: I'm Ken "the Falconer" Mortimer! Ken 1: But I'm Ken "the [...]
Uninformed opinions
That title refers to myself by the way. Inspired by James. I guess the popular national-level political topic of recent months has been that of immigration--or more pointedly, illegal immigration. I guess I've had my own thoughts on the topic, but as I see all these opinions and articles and viewpoints and pundits and [...]
rain
I, like many others, feel like I have some slight form of S.A.D. Constant rain, in particular, can make me feel either down or, more recently, angry. This past week wasn't all that bad.. just felt like a minor inconvenience. But now, as I look ahead to the coming week's forecast (which [...]
honeymoon
It's been a while since I wrote, but I thought I'd just say a few things. - I'm married now! - I'm back from the honeymoon (pictures follow) and most importantly - haha all you xanga suckers! a whole day of server downtime for you. Funny that that's what inspired me to post. Actually, gloating (for [...]
blue waters
It's nice here. Cancun is nice. See ya later suckas!!!
ph33r m4h 5k!11z
I got Linux up and running on two new little boxes at the new apartment earlier this week. All in two nights' work. Let me introduce you to them.
Another one bites the dust
People just keep getting married huh? Congrats to Judie! Lighting here was much dimmer and tougher to work with. Metering tricked me a lot too... why do weddings always have such bright white things next to dark black things? That last one was just for 'droo. Cause I know he loves it when I [...]
Big-D’s big day
Dennis is all growns up now... Lenses borrowed from Kawika and Derwin. I feel like I'm losing a lot of faster shots (like candid & action shots) to out-of-focus problems. I should probably quantify the actual percentage over time. I'm sure I can improve my technique there, but I wonder whether people with [...]
pondering
anyone out there have the motorola V360? (or even the v330 predecessor)? let me know your thoughts... -edit, per request, here are links and pics- Motorola product page Amazon product page T-Mobile product page Basically, I think the primary important things to me are bluetooth & speakerphone (and that it works with T-Mobile). That pretty much limits [...]
old fashioned
my trusty cell phone seems to refuse to turn on. random. small portable electronics like cell phones and laptops just aren't made to take too many years of physical wear and tear. if you need to reach me by phone, please try my landline, my work line, someone else's cell who i might be [...]
Blink, blink
... already? 2005, by far, zipped by faster than other years for me. I think the best phrase to describe my life right now is "relativisitic time dilation." As life accelerates, I in fact, go slower. Hopefully it doesn't actually get to the point where the universe ends by the time I snap out of [...]
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- updated: Jun 13 08:48AM
joyce's chalkboard
joycelin's Xanga Blog
Sunday, May 18, 2003
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Thursday, May 15, 2003
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maboyden's Xanga site
maboyden's Xanga Blog
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LOVE
myssbond's Xanga Blog
a little therapy (Saturday, February 16, 2008 )
myssbond's entry on Saturday, February 16, 2008 at (1 comment)
goalllssss (Thursday, February 14, 2008 )
myssbond's entry on Thursday, February 14, 2008 at
update on the rooster (Tuesday, February 12, 2008 )
myssbond's entry on Tuesday, February 12, 2008 at (1 comment)
Real Music. (Monday, February 11, 2008 )
myssbond's entry on Monday, February 11, 2008 at
aaaand....what. (Saturday, February 09, 2008 )
myssbond's entry on Saturday, February 09, 2008 at (1 comment)
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The greatest love that anyone could ever know
shinday's Xanga Blog
Saturday, October 13, 2007
shinday's entry on Saturday, October 13, 2007 at (3 comments)
Sunday, June 03, 2007
shinday's entry on Sunday, June 03, 2007 at (5 comments)
Monday, October 09, 2006
shinday's entry on Monday, October 09, 2006 at (10 comments)
Thursday, November 17, 2005
shinday's entry on Thursday, November 17, 2005 at (47 comments)
Thursday, July 14, 2005
shinday's entry on Thursday, July 14, 2005 at (12 comments)
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spideyblue's Xanga site
spideyblue's Xanga Blog
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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter
Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977
Pink forﾠOctober
As you may have noticed (if you're viewing this site in a standard browser), I've ditched orange in favor of pink, and things will stay that way for the rest of October. I'm doing this, along with many other sites, to support Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Sidebar Creative Interviewed by DigitalﾠWeb
Matthew Pennell of Digital Web Magazine recently sat down with the boys from Sidebar Creative for a group chat about our little design collective.
Interviewed by DesignerﾠInterviews
'Tis the season for being interviewed—this time I sat down (virtually) for some Q&A with Helen from Design Interviews, and now the fruits of our labor have been published for your enjoyment.
Customize your iPhone:ﾠSummerBoard
Learn how to customize your iPhone's home screen, plus add your own custom wallpaper and dock background using SummerBoard Themes.
Customize your iPhone:ﾠDockSwap
Learn how to customize your iPhone's dock to look like the new iPod Touch, complete with reflections and a Photoshop template file so you can create your own.
Customize yourﾠiPhone
Introducing a series of simple tutorials to help personalize your iPhone UI.
Interviewed byﾠAdii
It's always nice when someone shows interest in your background, and I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Adii a few weeks ago, and the result is now online.
Setting up IMAP in AppleﾠMail
It has been brought to my attention that a surprisingly large number of people don't know all the steps involved in properly configuring an IMAP account in Apple's Mail.app. Though this has been covered elsewhere I'm sure, I thought I'd share the steps in a quick-start way to help reduce the frustration that results from assuming some things are done by default.
Web 2.0ﾠCultists
Lately I've found myself having the following "discussion" (I prefer "heated debate" myself) regarding ‘Web 2.0’, usually with someone who has consumed a certain amount of Web 2.0 Kool-aid...
OMG I’mﾠNaked!
So, I had this dream last night, and I was standing in front of the entire internet <em>totally naked</em>, and when I woke up, I realized <strong>it wasn't a dream!</strong>
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yopenguin
Peace Corps!
Paragliding at my finest
Note I am posting for events back in Peace Corps. Got to get caught up after all. So this past Sunday, close to Easter 2006, I went paragliding with some friends. This took place around an hour from Huaraz. The details are fuzzy, but basically we went up ...
Peace Corps article
Peace Corps: The Hardest Job Youll Ever Love Hello Peru Peace Corps! Let me just give a short description of why I chose to join Peace Corps and how I have chosen to live my experience. So for two years prior to joining Peace Corps, I worked in a highly compensated, ...
Home Sweet Home
About time eh? Okay okay. I know I have been delinquent and I feel very sorry about my behavior. In my defense, I have been traveling all around South America and have had little time to write. In addition, it costs money to be on the internet and ...
Santa Cruz Trek
This was an excellent trek that Ryan, Seth and I did in 3 days and 2 nights during Easter. We carried our own packs, so no donkeys or guides. It was a very beautiful trek and I must say the preparation that we did was amazing. For ...
Can I Be A Good Father
This may seem like a strange blog, but I have been preoccupied that I will be a terrible father. I am no where near having a kid, heck I do not even have a girlfriend. So why am I focusing on such an event that seems so remote? To ...
Carnival in Rio
Let me just start off with this trip was awesome. I spent a ton of money, but it was well worth it. I went to Rio for Carnival, the biggest party in the world. Why did I take this trip in the middle of my service? ...
General
3 quick funny stories
1st story: Today was my first day seeing a pig get castrated, first animal for that matter! The pig is already pretty good sized. I think it has to be about 2.5 feet tall and four feet long. It probably weighs close to 150 pounds. So both ...
Mancara Trip
What an exciting trip this was. This was basically a group birthday and get out of rainy season trip. In February, we had the following birthdays: Drew, Marta, Garrett, and mine. We decided to celebrate at a beach house close to the border of Ecuador. So ...
Arequipa trip
Let just say this trip was very educational. For those of you who know me, I am quite the planner and one of my mottos is always be prepared. Now I have also been called a living contradiction. This is another instance where I demonstrate this characteristic. ...
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Ars Technica
New BotSniffer better able to detect foul stench of botnets
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have unveiled a new program they call BotSniffer. The application is designed to detect botnet activity through an analysis of IRC and HTTP traffic rather than using signature-based detection.Read More...
Study: familiarity often breeds votes for the next president
Never mind debates over candidates' policies or their ability to lead. A series of Stanford studies suggest that our votes may come down to how much a candidate can be made to look like us.Read More...
Report: implementation flaws hound wireless security
Security firm Codenomicon has released a report detailing its findings when testing the robustness of many current wireless security devices. The implications of the firm's findings (if upheld) are troubling for any user or IT administrator considering the use of any wireless technology.Read More...
Intel writing massive check for Sprint-Clearwire WiMAX deal
Intel is reportedly preparing to pump $2 billion into a joint venture between Sprint and Clearwire that should give WiMAX some much-needed exposure by year end.Read More...
Great firewall of China may hinder blogging Olympians
The International Olympic Committee has given athletes the green light to blog from the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, but bloggers will have to make sure their posts can make it through the great firewall of China.Read More...
Can an IPv4 stock market stave off address depletion, IPv6?
Today, obtaining IPv4 addresses is an administrative procedure, one that will end around 2012 as we run out of IPv4 address to give out. Proponents of an IPv4 "commodities market" believe that it could keep IPv4 viable for a few more years, but skepticism remains over that's a likely outcome.Read More...
HD DVD death still not official; what they're mulling
Toshiba has made no (zip, zero, nada) official announcements about killing off HD DVD, and today they're still defiant. Here's a picture of what we understand is going on in the HD DVD camp.Read More...
ISP blunder exposes entire domain's worth of e-mail to FBI
A report obtained by the EFF under the Freedom of Information Act reveals that an unnamed ISP accidentally coughed up e-mail for an entire domain to the FBI even though access was only authorized for a single address.Read More...
Labels want piece of the ad-supported music market
Major labels are reportedly in talks over a joint venture with MySpace that would give the labels an equity stake in the ad-supported music business. But will the new service offer DRM-free downloads or just online-only streams?Read More...
ICANN panel questions Network Solutions on frontrunning
ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee investigated user-submitted cases of domain name frontrunning and says that there hasn't been a single shred of evidence to prove that it's actually happening. So why is Network Solutions engaging in controversial domain practices to protect customers against frontrunners? ICANN wants to know, too. Read More...
Researcher maps out plan to target BitTorrent uploaders
A security expert helps out the MPAA by suggesting a mechanism for blocking BitTorrent movie downloads and possibly identifying individual users. Ars looks at whether the plan is feasible and likely to be adopted by the motion picture industry. Read More...
Booty call: Music has-beens line up to sue The Pirate Bay
Justice or money grab? Bands are lining up to sue The Pirate Bay now that the Swedish government has indicted the site's owners, but the plans could backfire as the promises of sunken treasure give way to reality.Read More...
Netroots seek to send legal scholar Lessig to Congress
Lawrence Lessig is a crusader for copyright reform and a major influence on thinking about the relationship of culture and content. Now, thousands want him to run for Congress, and Lessig even tells Ars he's considering it.Read More...
Tagoo, you're it! New MP3 search engine unfazed by IFPI
As you read this, the IFPI is likely preparing to pick up its mallet again. A new mole in the form of a music search engine just appeared that makes searching for and downloading MP3s easier than ever.Read More...
First look: latest Google Android SDK a big improvement
Google has announced another prerelease version of the Android SDK. We took a close look at how it performs and found that Google is listening to feedback—the new SDK is a solid improvement over its predecessor.Read More...
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Moreover Technologies - CNET
CNET - more than 340 categories of real-time RSS news feeds
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Ad - www.Shopping.com Feb 18 2008 9:28PM GMT
C|Net reviews
CNET Feb 18 2008 9:28PM GMT
Olympus E-3 (body only)
CNET Feb 15 2008 9:40PM GMT
2008 Honda Fit Sport
CNET Feb 15 2008 9:40PM GMT
Cambridge SoundWorks i765
CNET Feb 15 2008 7:34PM GMT
Loco for NTT DoCoMo superphones
CNET Feb 14 2008 11:24PM GMT
What IT can learn from botnets
CNET Feb 14 2008 11:10PM GMT
Dell Inspiron 1525 (Intel Pentium(R) Dual Core T2330 1.60GHz, 80GB HDD, 512MB RAM)
CNET Feb 14 2008 9:40PM GMT
Hasta Luego to GSMA
CNET Feb 14 2008 9:28PM GMT
Loco for NTT DoCoMo super phones
CNET Feb 14 2008 8:42PM GMT
Dell Inspiron 1525 (Intel Pentium(R) Dual Core T2330 1.60GHz, 120GB HDD, 512MB RAM)
CNET Feb 14 2008 8:41PM GMT
Battle of the trade shows: Why Europe rules
CNET Feb 14 2008 6:04PM GMT
2008 Audi A4 2.0T Quattro Turbo 6M
CNET Feb 14 2008 5:38PM GMT
2008 Infiniti G35 Journey
CNET Feb 14 2008 10:44AM GMT
Sins of a Solar Empire (PC)
CNET Feb 14 2008 10:44AM GMT
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CNN: World
Real time updated news from the first worldwide TV channel specialized in world information (By http://www.newsisfree.com/syndicate.php - FOR PERSONAL AND NON COMMERCIAL USE ONLY!)
Admiral: Al Qaeda in Iraq killing former allies
Video provided to CNN shows an al Qaeda in Iraq firing squad executing one-time allies -- fellow Sunni extremists -- who were not loyal enough to the terror organization, coalition military analysts said.
More homes raided in German tax-fraud probe
Read full story for latest details.
Rice demands 'real power sharing' in Kenya
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in Kenya to support efforts to reach political reconciliation, said Kenya's opposing factions must form a "grand coalition" that provides "real power sharing."
Al Fayed gives evidence in Diana inquest
The father of Princess Diana's boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, was expected to testify Monday for the first time at the inquest into their deaths more than a decade ago.
Cyclone besieges Madagascar
A cyclone with sustained winds of 69 mph swept across Madagascar on Sunday, knocking out power in some areas and making damage assessment difficult.
Bush promotes health solution in Africa
President George W. Bush focused on a low-tech way to save the lives of African children Monday as he and first lady Laura Bush toured a Tanzanian clinic.
Serbia takes Kosovo anger to U.N.
The U.N. Security Council will meet Monday to discuss Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia amid bitter divisions over the future of the Balkan territory.
Bush promotes U.S. role in war on malaria
Read full story for latest details.
Pakistan polls open amid violence
Pakistanis cast their votes in parliamentary elections on Monday amid fears of violence, accusations of vote-rigging and surveys indicating opposition parties could fare well.
Surprise result in Cypriot elections
Read full story for latest details.
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CNET News.com
Tech news and business reports by CNET News.com. Focused on information technology, core topics include computers, hardware, software, networking, and Internet media.
GoFish out to hook youth marketers
The company is bundling dozens of smaller kids sites to build one big marketplace in an effort to appeal to advertisers.
Adobe goes after game developers with 3D engine in Director 11
Company says new version will make it easier for designers to create more realistic 3D images.
U.K.'s Elonex readies low-cost Linux laptop
Aimed at the education sector, the laptop will feature, among other things, a flash-based hard drive and a "wireless music server." But, the company says, it's "not really about the specs."
A YouTube for artists
DeviantArt, which hosts a wide range of user-generated artwork, may well be the most popular site you've never heard of.
Images: A deviant art collection
Here are just a few of DeviantArt.com's 50 million submissions, ranging in medium from photography to computer graphics to traditional paint-and-canvas.
Help! How should I store photos while traveling?
CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland is going on vacation for a month, and he's lugging an SLR. What's the best way to keep pictures safe on the road?
Future of video game industry taking shape at GDC
At this week's Game Developers Conference, industry's leaders will talk about where they're going, how they can work with Hollywood, and how to become more mainstream than ever.
Move your e-mail out of Outlook and into the folders of your choice
Organize and safeguard your messages by storing them in separate folders on your hard drive or other local storage device.
Sprint announces world-roaming Samsung Ace
Sprint introduces the Samsung Ace smartphone. Similar to the Samsung BlackJack, it offers dual-mode functionality for world roaming.
Hacking public information kiosks
A researcher at ShmooCon demonstrates how browser hotkeys can expose the internal network running behind a Citrix presentation server.
Hacking the lobby telephone
Two researchers demonstrate how unprotected, public VoIP phones could expose the internal network of a company or organization.
Exploiting QuickTime flaws in 'Second Life'
Researchers show how objects with multimedia attributes within Second Life can unleash malware on unsuspecting users.
Batter Blaster offers quick pancakes from a spray can
Video: Batter Blaster offers quick pancakes from a spray can. First came spray cheese, then whipped cream. Now, pancake batter? Batter Blaster already has a legitimate following on blogs and YouTube, but CNET's Kara Tsuboi and Jennifer Guevin weren't convinced. Bite for bite, they taste-test this spray-on, organic batter versus real, homemade batter from scratch.
With improvements, e-voting could be good, says researcher.
Researcher who found vulnerabilities in California's e-voting systems looks ahead to better auditing.
Photos: Top 10 reviews of the week
Here are CNET Reviews' 10 favorite items from the past week, including tax software from H&R Block and Intuit, a sub-$400 eMachines desktop, and Yamaha Bluetooth speakers.
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Christian Science Monitor | World
Brazil alcohol ban hard for retailers to swallow
Government tries to limit TV advertising and sales along highways
Lebanese turmoil withers 'Beirut Spring' optimism
But many young activists are still struggling to maintain the movement that followed in the wake of Hariri's death.
Angry opposition youths oppose Kenya compromise
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Kenya Monday to press for a power-sharing agreement.
Thai leaders spar over autonomy for south
The interior minister says it could calm the insurgency-racked south. Opponents see a step toward secession.
Reporters on the Job
After declaring independence, Kosovo looks to cautious next steps
President Bush hailed the controversial move, as the EU and UN met to form their responses.
Young Kosovars hope to shape newly declared state
Many educated, under-30 Kosovars are eager for the possibility of an independent country.
In Africa, Bush touts aid efforts, basks in popularity
Mr. Bush has been generally well-received so far on his five-country trip to Africa.
Pakistan: No bombs, but plenty of tension as polls close for counting
Election observers have reported few instances of fraud, a key concern as officials begin tallying results.
India claims success against Maoist rebels
Indian officials search for Naxalites responsible for Friday's attack amid skepticism about rebel group's threat.
Venezuelan FARC victims to Chávez: 'What about us?'
Many families of those kidnapped near the border with Colombia say President Hugo Chávez has neglected them in favor of high-profile Colombian victims.
Two Beirut rallies. Two visions for Lebanon.
Supporters of both pro-Western factions and Hizbullah militants honored their respective slain leaders.
In Pakistani election, a big swing vote
In Punjab, which picks 148 of 272 parliamentary seats on Feb. 18, many remain undecided.
A Congo warlord – arrested for crimes against humanity – explains himself
Our correspondent remembers Mathieu Ngudjolo as 'disconcertingly reasonable.'
Spielberg helps spoil China's hope for a politics-free Olympics
The Hollywood director resigned this week as artistic adviser to the Beijing games to protest China's Darfur policy.
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kuro5hin.org
technology and culture, from the trenches
The Origin of Valentine's Day
The herstory of Valentine's Day can be traced to St. Valentine of Jerusalem, the first priest of the Catholic church. Saint Valentine was, conicidentally both born and martyred on February 1st. It might be difficult to understand how this man's life gave birth to the rather later holiday we know today, but there is a connection!
Apples to Oranges
Much criticism is thrown in the direction of teacher unions. Steve Jobs, one of the recent critics, blasts ""I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."
eavier's guide to enjoying straight pr0n in the company of other heterosexual males.
While sitting in the company of three male friends last weekend watching Hustler's "Campus Confessions" (excellent btw), it came to me that enjoying porn with and in the company of other men is a delicate business. One wrong move can ruin, what was up until that point, a spotless heterosexual record. First off, watching porn in a male pack is a weird act. But it happens. Somebody inevitably will think it a good idea to bring an adult DVD to watch after the game. Disagreeing to watch or a sudden show of hesitancy will only get your friends questioning your heterosexuality. Secondly, you will in no way enjoy the porn as much as you would watching it by yourself, or with your significant other. In all likelihood, the pack porn party, if everyone is honest, is way too structured for anyone to have any fun at all. But they happen, and here's ten pointers to keep yourself "straight" in everyone's mind after the "fun" is over.
Million Dollar Pinball: Part I
In the early 1990s, Los Angeles' area Commerce Casino was a hot bed of activity. At the time, the casino was just a card room where low and high stakes poker was played. Off to a side room, the last dying breath of high-stakes Backgammon was still being played, and mostly by some of the top players in the world including "Action" Dan Harrington. The casino was very popular and a lot of top players would play there when they were visiting the LA area. This caused a problem - lines for games, especially Poker, would get too long and players would get impatient. The owner of the casino, a man I've never met, came up with a brilliant idea: install several pinball machines to keep the waiting list happy.
Skinhacking: A DIY Guide to Facials, Laxatives, and Moisturizers
I have dry skin. Heating systems at home, school, and work all conspire with the general dryness of Zone 5 Winter to leave me with a flaky, sensitive epidermis that not only feels papery and prone but, in some areas, cracks or reddens. To combat this I began using, for the first time in my life, commercially available moisturizers like Aloe & Chamomile Advanced Therapy Lotion (St. Ives) and Norwegian Formula Body Moisturizer (Neutrogena). After becoming wary of their exotic additives and unpronounceables, I decided to try making my own in order to ascertain what's really responsible for rehydrating my skin.
Demonology '08
In the new year the Berkeley Software Distribution family of Unix-like operating systems is growing at a phenomenal rate and excitement over the possibilities for this operating system family is in the air. After unprecedented development and adoption as well as major shifts in the marketplace, it's time to take a look at what's new with this demonic family of operating systems. Don't fear, the word demon means Unix goodness at just the right price.
Your Army Of Dupes Should Be Quaking In Fear!
13-year old Megan Meier, after being cruelly taunted by a "Josh Evans" on MySpace, hung herself in her closet with a belt. Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan's former friends, admitted in a police report that Josh Evans was really her, but later denied it. The police investigated, but were unable to find any crime they could charge Mrs. Drew with. The state of Missouri is proposing to outlaw internet harassment, but under the US Constitution, such a law could not apply retroactively. But Federal prosecutors may have found a way to prosecute Mrs. Drew...
How I met the Queen in a Canadian cornfield
In the summer of 1973 I hitched a series of rides from Boston through Maine and New Brunswick to my mother's house in Pictou County Nova Scotia. It's hard to describe the location any better than that because she originally lived in a hamlet called Poplar Hill ... until the Poplar Hill School, a one-room schoolhouse across the street from my mothers house, closed. From there her address wandered from RR2, Meadowville to RR2 Scotsburn and finally to RR2 in the unincorporated county of Pictou. Civilization had abandoned Poplar Hill. All my mother would say was that she was four miles up the Tony River road between Tatamagouche and Antigonish.
Scoop is Bringing Down the Right!
RedState is apparently failing because all Scoop developers are liberals so they couldn't get any support for Scoop which crashes all the time so they abandoned Scoop and their website sucks and I think that's funny and rusty should maybe consider fixing Scoop but it's not really his problem because Bush is the devil and we know how saintly rusty is and he wouldn't work for the devil.
Jalapeno Eyewash and the Suicide Attemptress
If you have ever fixed nachos with fresh jalapenos, it only takes one time to figure out that you don't pick your nose, take a piss or rub your eyes...especially you don't rub your eyes. Doing cunnilingus after eating jalapenos is out of the question too...doing so is a mistake you make only once.
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Plastic: Most Recent
Politics, Culture, Point Of View
House Lets Defense Of America Act Expire
Plastic::Politics::Terrorism: US Congress Refuses to Service Bush On Valentine's Day; White House Now Especially Cranky
Controversially Blocked Medical Checklist Unblocked [Updated]
Plastic::SciTech::Health: In a move unsurprising to observers of this administration, the Office for Human Research Protections moves to "protect patients" by forbidding the use of a checklist that has saved thousands of lives, and millions of dollars.
Debating Science Agendas
Plastic::SciTech::Politics: 23 Nobel laureates, 32 government leaders (Democrats and Republicans), 31 major business leaders, 89 organisations, 44 college and university presidents, and lots of editors and journalists are among the 13,000 people who have joined in the call
Breaking News - U.S. Recognizes Kosovo Independence
Plastic::Politics::International: Kosovo's parliament declared independence on Sunday, pledging to establish a "democratic and multi-ethnic" state.
A Problematic Spy Satellite
Plastic::SciTech::Military: The U.S. has decided to shoot it down before it can reenter the atmosphere.
Monorail To Nowhere
Plastic::Work::Travel: sounded like such a great idea at the time. Las Vegas built a $650 million monorail system on the Las Vegas Strip entirely with private money.
Dying To Kick The Habit
Plastic::SciTech::Medicine: How badly do you want to kick the tobacco habit? Bad enough to experience anxiety, nervousness, depressed mood and some stray thoughts of suicide?
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Slashdot
News for nerds, stuff that matters
Using the Ruby Dev-Tools plug-in for Eclipse
Mark Newport's Knitted Heroes
Fortune Takes a Look at Bram Cohen
Datels 4GB Hard Drive for PSP Reviewed
IMDb Turns 15
PTO Eliminates "Technological Arts" Requirement
The Perl Foundation Gets New Leadership
Jack Thompson Rescinds Offer
Interview with Tony 'Say No to Windows' Bove
New Hopes From Sun's Idea Factory
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Wired: Top Stories
The best of Wired.com, as it happens.
Doctor Urges Creation of 'Science of Healthcare Delivery'
While treatments have multiplied, the operations and processes for delivering those medicines haven't kept pace, slowing health improvement in developing and developed countries. Alexis Madrigal reports from the AAAS annual meeting in Boston.
Highlights From the Floor of the AAAS Annual Meeting
Alexis Madrigal reports from the AAAS annual meeting in Boston on the goings-on on the convention floor, where the booths are filled by scientific projects and resources doing their best to illuminate or explain some corner of the universe, body, or planet.
Jargon Watch: Agrichar, Passive Obesity, iBricking
Keep up with the latest in Wired words. Make sure you don't socially advertise your passive obesity.
World's Longest Accelerator Probes Universe's Tiniest Particles
Tech-hungry photographer and reporter Dave Bullock tours the particle-physics labs at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.
Negroponte Keynote: Electronics Are 'Obese'
Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of both the MIT Media Lab and the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, delivers the last keynote at the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting, focusing on the groundbreaking work of the OLPC, which has delivered thousands of laptops to children in the developing world. Alexis Madrigal reports from Boston.
Inside the Bizarre World of Japanese Pickup Schools
In Japan there are night schools for everything, including how to pick up women on the streets. Lisa Katayama reports from Tokyo.
Gallery: Students of the Pickup School for Geeks
The Pickup School for Men Who Can't Get Any promises to turn any awkward geek into a womanizing pro. Meet the school's founder and some of his top students.
Feb. 18, 1913: 'Isotope' Goes From Greek to Geek
The Greek word for "at the same place" suits Frederick Soddy very well, for he has just identified disparate elements with something very big in common.
Eliot Van Buskirk's Listening Post: Major Label Fights Google-ization of Music With SeeqPod Lawsuit
Rather than attacking SeeqPod, a popular music search engine, the major labels should view it as a template for how to make money on the internet, which isn't going away any time soon.
Burn, Baby, Burn
As part of a session called "Seeing Science" at the 2008 AAAS conference, Chris Johnson, director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, presents examples of the cutting edge visualizations being produced by his group. Greta Lorge reports from Boston.
Space Crews Bid Emotional Adieu
The crews of the space shuttle and station say a teary farewell after more than a week of working tirelessly together to build a bigger and better scientific outpost in orbit. Atlantis is scheduled to undock early Monday, its load considerably lighter than when it arrived Feb. 9 with Europe's premiere space laboratory, Columbus.
The Chinese Government's Plans for Nanotechnology
UC Santa Barbara researchers present their findings on the state of Chinese nanotechnology at the AAAS annual meeting. China aims to leapfrog the United States in technological development with substantial investment in nanotechnology, but whether those efforts will actually pay off is still unclear. Alexis Madrigal reports from Boston.
The Future of the Global Food System
What is the future of the global food system? In this speech delivered at the AAAS annual meeting, Cornell Professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen, argues that the food system is broken and needs to be fixed. Alexis Madrigal reports from Boston.
Scientists Break Down Baseball, Find Jeter Does Suck
A scientist at the annual AAAS conference presents a new statistical method for evaluating fielding performance in baseball. The Spatial Aggregate Fielding Evaluation uses a probability model to fit a smooth curve for entire teams, particular positions or individual players. Greta Lorge reports from Boston.
The Other Carbon: Reducing Black Carbon's Role in Global Warming
A professor at the annual AAAS meeting gives a talk on the role of black carbon, the other carbon, in global climate change. A mere 10% reduction in black carbon would be equivalent to eliminating 25 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions. Alexis Madrigal reports from Boston.
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ofben's Xanga site
ofben's Xanga Blog
Sorry if it looked like something else... (Wednesday, April 25, 2007 )
ofben's entry on Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at (1 comment)
Changing Choice Systems (Wednesday, June 21, 2006 )
ofben's entry on Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at (6 comments)
Moving Forward (Monday, May 08, 2006 )
ofben's entry on Monday, May 08, 2006 at (1 comment)
Monkeys (Tuesday, January 31, 2006 )
ofben's entry on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 at
Thursday, January 26, 2006
ofben's entry on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at (1 comment)
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Pentecostal Tabernacle
Where everybody is somebody and Jesus Christ is Lord!
Special Announcements:
Calling all singers and musicians! The Praise and Worship Team is looking for you. Those interested must (1) be a full member or a Watch Care member, and (2) audition. For more information, please see or contact Lady Carmen Greene.
Watchcare Membership
The next Watch Care Membership Class will be held. This class serves those seeking temporary membership while residing in the Boston area (i.e., students or those on temporary assignment). Please see Sis. Debbie Plummer for an application or additional information.
Weekly Prayer Focus (2/10-2/16)
Lord please begin to allow us to see Your work of spiritual renewal in Pentecostal Tabernacle.
Christians 4 Life Meeting
Christian 4 Life, the Youth Ministry of PT (ages 12-18), will hold a meeting, on the 2nd floor of Washington Street. Come learn about living for Christ while having fun, food, and hanging out with fellow teens.
Wednesday Bible Study
Join us as we come together for a time of prayer with a special guest speaker during our consecration. There will be no small groups on the week of February 4th.
Weekly Prayer Focus (2/3-2/9)
During this week of prayer, fasting, and consecration, let's ask God to reveal Himself to us both individually and as a congregation.
O Well, Nobody’s Perfect!
It’s been six hours now since one of the greatest upsets in Super Bowl history. The New York Giants defeated the New England Patriots by three points, even though they were picked to lose by at least twelve. Up until last evening, the Patriots had yet to lose ...
Consecration Week
We will be have a week of consecration starting Monday, February 4th - Sunday, February 10th by performing the Daniel Fast (PDF; see last year's for plain text). There will be no small groups the week of February 4th. We will have a guest speaker on Wednesday, February ...
W.O.R.T.H Event
W.O.R.T.H (Women of Reaping the Harvest) will hold their next session entitled "Home Improvement, Maintaining your Temple" in the lower sanctuary.
Change Agents: Bible Study
Stressed out by school and work? What does the Word say about stress and anxiety? Theﾠ Change Agents, the young adult ministry (ages 18 to 30), will hold a Bible study and discussion focused on "Change Inhibitor: Stress, Imbalances, & the Pressures of Life." Join us for prayer at 7pm ...
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World Wide Web Consortium
Leading the Web to Its Full Potential...
XML is Ten!
2008-02-12: Ten years ago, on 10 February 1998, W3C published Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation. W3C is marking the ten-year anniversary of XML by celebrating "XML10" and extending thanks to the dedicated communities -- including people who have participated in W3C's XML groups and mailing lists, the SGML community, and xml-dev -- whose efforts have created a successful family of technologies based on the solid XML 1.0 foundation. The success of XML is a strong indicator of how dedicated individuals, working within the W3C Process, can engage with a larger community to produce industry-changing results. "Today we celebrate the success of open standards in preserving Web data from proprietary ownership," said Jon Bosak, who led the W3C Working Group that produced XML 1.0. Read the press release and testimonials. Send W3C a greeting and learn more about XML at W3C. (Permalink)
Note: Best Practices for XML Internationalization
2008-02-13: The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Working Group has published a Group Note of Best Practices for XML Internationalization. This document provides a set of guidelines for developing XML documents and schemas that are internationalized properly. Following the best practices describes here allow both the developer of XML applications, as well as the author of XML content to create material in different languages. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity. (Permalink)
W3C mobileOK Checker "Beta" Released for Mobile World Congress
2008-02-08: W3C invites Web content authors to run the beta release of the W3C mobileOK checker and make their content work on a broad range of mobile devices. This new version provides more accurate results and a more reliable experience. Visitors of the Mobile World Congress (in Barcelona, starting Monday, 11 February) are welcome to stop by the W3C Mobile Web Initiative booth (in Hall 7) to learn more about this tool for making Web sites mobile-friendly. (Permalink)
Call for Review: Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition) Proposed Edited Recommendation
2008-02-06: The XML Core Working Group has published the Proposed Edited Recommendation of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition). This revision of XML 1.0 incorporates all known errata for XML 1.0 Fourth Edition; see the diff-marked specification for changes. This version of the XML 1.0 specification contains one major change, to the definition of names, bringing one major benefit of XML 1.1 into XML 1.0; please read the background for this change as part of any review. Comments are welcome through 16 May. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity. (Permalink)
WAI-ARIA for Accessible Rich Web Applications: First Public Working Drafts
2008-02-04: The Protocols and Formats Working Group published First Public Working Drafts of:
W3C Talks in February
2008-02-01: Browse W3C presentations and events also available as an RSS channel. (Permalink)
Toward More Transparent Government: Workshop Report on eGovernment and the Web
2008-01-31: W3C has published a Workshop Report: eGovernment and the Web Workshop: "Toward More Transparent Government". Participants discussed ways to facilitate the deployment of Web standards across government sites and how to shape the ongoing research agenda in the development of Web technology and public policy in order to realize the potential of the Web for access to and use of government information. Held 18-19 June (press release), in Washington D.C., USA, the Workshop was jointly organized by W3C and WSRI. Learn more about eGovernment at W3C. (Permalink)
Call for Review: Canonical XML 1.1 Proposed Recommendation
2008-01-29: The XML Core Working Group has published the Proposed Recommendation of Canonical XML 1.1. The specification establishes a method for determining whether two documents are identical, or whether an application has not changed a document, except for transformations permitted by XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML. Canonical XML 1.1 is a revision to Canonical XML 1.0 designed to address issues related to inheritance of attributes in the XML namespace when canonicalizing document subsets, including the requirement not to inherit xml:id, and to treat xml:base URI path processing properly. Comments are welcome through 07 March. Learn more about W3C's XML Activity. (Permalink)
Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies
2008-01-29: The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the Working Draft of Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies. This document describes best practice recipes for publishing vocabularies or ontologies on the Web (in RDF Schema or OWL). Each recipe introduces general principles and an example configuration for use with an Apache HTTP server (which may be adapted to other environments). The recipes are all designed to be consistent with the architecture of the Web as currently specified. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. (Permalink)
SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference (First Public Working Draft)
2008-01-25: The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference. This document defines the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Semantic Web. SKOS provides a standard, low-cost means to describe the semantic relationships between existing knowledge systems and to port those systems to the Semantic Web. SKOS also provides a lightweight, intuitive language for developing and sharing new knowledge organization systems. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. (Permalink)
W3C Publishes HTML 5 Draft, Future of Web Content
2008-01-22: W3C today published an early draft of HTML 5, a major revision of the markup language for the Web. The HTML Working Group is creating HTML 5 to be the open, royalty-free specification for rich Web content and Web applications. "HTML is of course a very important standard," said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML and W3C Director. "I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web." New features include APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics and ways to embed and control audio and video content. HTML 5 helps to improve interoperability and reduce software costs by giving precise rules not only about how to handle all correct HTML documents but also how to recover from errors. Discover other new features, read the press release, and learn more about the future of HTML. (Permalink)
Relationship Between Mobile Web and Web Content Accessibility (First Public Working Draft)
2008-01-22: The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group and the WAI Education and Outreach Working Group have published the First Public Working Draft of Relationship Between Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. See the announcement email.
W3C Advisory Committee Elects TAG Participants
2008-01-22: The W3C Advisory Committee has elected Ashok Malhotra (Oracle), T.V. Raman (Google), and Henry Thompson (University of Edinburgh) to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). Continuing TAG participants are Noah Mendelsohn (IBM), David Orchard (BEA), Jonathan Rees (Science Commons), Norm Walsh (Sun), and Stuart Williams (HP), who co-Chairs the TAG with Tim Berners-Lee. The mission of the TAG is to build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C. (Permalink)
SPARQL Standard Opens Data on the Web
2008-01-15: Today, the World Wide Web Consortium made it easier to share and reuse data across application, enterprise, and community boundaries with the publication of three new Semantic Web standards for SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle"). SPARQL is the query language for the Semantic Web (see Semantic Web use cases). SPARQL queries hide the details of data management, which lowers costs and increases robustness of data integration on the Web. "Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL," explained Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. There are already 14 implementations of the standard, which is comprised of three W3C Recommendations: SPARQL Query Language for RDF, SPARQL Protocol for RDF, and SPARQL Query Results XML Format. Read the press release, testimonials and learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. (Permalink)
W3C Invites Implementations of SMIL 3.0 (Candidate Recommendation)
2008-01-15: The SYMM Working Group has published the Candidate Recommendation of Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 3.0), an XML-based language that allows authors to create interactive multimedia presentations. Using SMIL 3.0, an author can describe the temporal behavior of a multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks with media objects and describe the layout of the presentation on a screen. The Working Group is building a test suite help ensure interoperable implementation. Learn more about W3C work on Synchronized Multimedia (Permalink)
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Raw Thought (from Aaron Swartz)
"capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman" -- C. Wright Mills
Election Slate: February 2008
A Very Speculative Theory of Free Will
How Dumb is Daniel Dennett?
Introducing theinfo.org
2007 Review of Books
2007 Review of Projects
Starting Out in the Morning
The Theory of The Game
No Superpowers
Bubble City: Chapter 11
Judgment Day
The Handwriting on the Wall
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- updated: Feb 04 01:31PM
AppleGeeks
AppleGeeks
Issue 428 | Morgan Freeman
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/comics/issue428thumb.gif" /><br />
Issue 427 | Sonny
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/comics/issue427thumb.gif" /><br />
Issue 426 | Dud
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/comics/issue426thumb.gif" /><br />
Issue 425 | Unfappable
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/comics/issue425thumb.gif" /><br />
Issue 424 | His Passion
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/comics/issue424thumb.gif" /><br />
Issue 423 | Back or not
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/comics/issue423thumb.gif" /><br />
Issue 422 | Kick it
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/comics/issue422thumb.gif" /><br />
AG Lite - Issue 265 | Katsucon 2008
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/lite/strips/aglite265.jpg" /><br />
AG Lite - Issue 264 | Cooties
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/lite/strips/aglite264.jpg" /><br />
AG Lite - Issue 263 | Poem
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/lite/strips/aglite263.jpg" /><br />
AG Lite - Issue 262 | Bodies
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/lite/strips/aglite262.jpg" /><br />
AG Lite - Issue 261 | really suspicious
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/lite/strips/aglite261.jpg" /><br />
AG Lite - Issue 260 | Day After
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/lite/strips/aglite260.jpg" /><br />
AG Lite - Issue 259 | awkward
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/lite/strips/aglite259.jpg" /><br />
AG Lite - Issue 258 | imagination
<img src="http://applegeeks.com/lite/strips/aglite258.jpg" /><br />
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Blogos
God's Word | our words | meaning, communication, & technology | following Jesus, the Word made flesh
Blogos RSS Feed has Moved: Please Update Your Reader URL
I've moved to a new blogging platform (goodbye Radio Userland, hello WordPress). But if you read through an RSS aggregator (this is really important, so pay attention): This is the last post to the current RSS feed (http://www.semanticbible.com/blogos/rss.xml) You must change your feed URL to keep reading Blogos: the new feed is http://semanticbible.com/blogos/feed/. If you've only been subscribed to a specific channel (e.g. http://www.semanticbible.com/blogos/categories/semanticbible/rss.xml), those have moved as well: the new one for SemanticBible-only posts is http://semanticbible.com/blogos/category/semanticbible/feed/ (note 'categories' -> 'category'), and others are constructed in similar fashion If you read directly from the website, everything will work as before at my preferred URL, http://www.semanticbible.com/blogos/. The new site includes several syndication buttons that make it easy to add Blogos to your Bloglines, MyYahoo!, or other readers. If you have any problems with this, please send me (sean) an email at semanticbible daht com. I don't want to lose any readers in the transition (there aren't that many to start with!).
Lexical vs. Conceptual Semantics for Humility
In a comment on my recent thoughts on semantic search, Matt asks a reasonable question: "Wouldn't Louw-Nida help?" Since i've recently gotten a copy of Logos 3 Scholar's Library: Silver (i'll have a lot more to say about that later, but here's the preview: it's a fantastic resource), i tried it out. For this particular question, the answer appears to be no. Humility is under 88/G, Moral and Ethical Qualities and Related Behavior/Humility (note this is a conceptual label for the passage: the word humility doesn't actually occur). Related words here would include: lord (as in "lord it over"): 37/D, Control, Rule/Rule, Govern. exercise authority: same domain and subdomain servant/serve: 35/B, Help, Care For/Serve slave: either the same subdomain as "lord [it over]", the more figurative sense, or more literally as 87/E, Status/Slave, Free This isn't too surprising: Louw-Nida is a lexical resource, but the fundamental issue here (and the point of my post) is that there are lots of significant semantic concepts above the level of words. That's exactly what makes notions like "topic" slippery in practice.
xpound.org and Web 2.0 Bible tagging
xpound.org is a new Web 2.0 site that provides passage search, blogging, and social connections, but with an interesting new twist of Bible tagging, along the lines of del.icio.us. (I'm not sure if it's pronounced with equal stress like "slashdot", or "ex-POUND", like the verb) The basic idea of tagging is that, rather than a top-down, authoritative organization and labeling of knowledge, people can simply attach whatever labels make sense to them, in a bottom-up, unstructured (and, some would say, chaotic) fashion. The natural advantage of this kind of folksonomic tagging is that, at internet scale, it can overcome a lot of the messiness, while highly structured knowledge management approaches don't always scale. As with other tagging sites, there's no guarantee that what somebody tags as, say, africa, will have meaning to anybody else. But it means something to the person who tagged it, and thus becomes a highly personalized way to organize information. I think using this approach for Scripture makes some sense, and i've blogged about it previously. But i also have some questions. With del.icio.us, the item being tagged is clearly defined: it's a URL. But what's the natural unit for tagging Scripture? Verses are one answer, but they often don't have enough context. Books are generally too large, and chapter divisions don't necessarily line up with the content you'd want to tag. Of course, you can tag arbitrary passages: but here's where the comparison to del.icio.us breaks down. With del.icio.us, others who use the same tags as me can point me to sites i didn't know about. But where the passages aren't necessarily bounded the same, aggregation doesn't work quite the same way. Here's an example: a few days ago Josh tagged Ephesians 5:3-4 with five tags: gratitude, greed, immorality, impurity, and saint. 3 But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. 4 Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving. (Eph.5.3-4) If you search on these tags (like gratitude), you'll find this unit. If instead you search by verse for Eph5.3, you still see the tag for gratitude, presumably inherited from the larger unit that was tagged (though you could argue that gratitude really only applied to verse 4). And of course, the following verses also talk about immorality and impurity, though (since they weren't included in these tags) they're not retrieved. One of the most interesting new capabilities that del.icio.us creates is knowledge discovery: if i find someone who has bookmarked several of the same sites as i have, i can go look at their other bookmarks, and often find new sites i was unaware of. This provides a kind of search by likeminded community intelligence, a really interesting counterpart to typical web search engines. I haven't found this capability in xpound, but it would be a great addition. (Hat tip to the ESV Blog for pointing me to xpound.org)
Search Interfaces for the Composite Gospel
I'm preparing a new version of the Composite Gospel Index pages, to standardize around the ESV text, and hopefully provide both more usability and more visual appeal. Designing an interface for this data poses some interesting challenges. There's a wealth of different attributes available, and while some (like traditional verse references) are familiar to most Bible students, i'm hoping to get outside the box a bit and do some novel things. The whole point of the Composite Gospel is to provide a different way to look at the story of Jesus' life, in particular one that is more oriented around stories, many of which are common to multiple Gospels, and to show how they fit into the whole. So i'm hoping to reinforce this in the new interface. Right now there are two ways to access the Composite Gospel, the typical entry point being the Pericope Index, a traditional single static page listing the pericope ID, title, and references, with hyperlinks to the content pages. It's got a number of faults: as soon as you click through to an individual pericope (here's Pericope 118, Jesus sends out the twelve disciples), you're back to looking through a keyhole, without the view of the whole sequence. It would be better to have a view of the whole index alongside the content for a selected pericope. there's no help for finding pericopes with specific titles or Scriptural references (other than browser search) while you can easily see how many sources are behind a given pericope (it's just a matter of how many columns are filled in its row in the table), the significance (as evidenced by size) is buried. Pericope 153: Jesus teaches about forgiving othersis only two verses: the next one, Pericope 154: Jesus tells the parable of the unforgiving debtor, has 13 verses. But there's no visual clues to this in the index. let's face it, it's just ugly :-/ The individual pages themselves have different navigational elements: next/previous pericope, and also next/previous for a given Gospel author. These are okay as far as they go: my major complaint is they don't go far enough. I'm also hoping to add more supplemental information: other pericopes with similar topics or content. For example, though i consider the cleansing of temple early in John (Pericope 031: Jesus clears the template) to be different from the one during the Passion Week (Pericope 249: Jesus clears the template again), clearly one ought to have a "see also" link to the other. a list of names in the pericope in view, with navigation to other pericopes which mention the same name It will be a while before i can do all this, though! I've been searching for some time for the right visual metaphor (and corresponding interface code) to provide a much more visual index to replace the current text-heavy index. It would be great if you could scan a clear visualization of which authors covered a particular story, and how much content there is for it (number of tokens). Likewise, when you've selected an individual pericope, you should have a clear view of where it fits into the entire sequence. In preparing for this, i got interested in the distribution of sources (an individual author's version) by their size. This graph shows that, binned in groups of 10: the black trend line smooths this a little further with a moving average (window of 3). There's quite a bit of variety (no surprise), ranging from a single source with just 9 tokens (Luke's description of the beginning of Jesus' Galilean preaching ministry, " And he was preaching in the synagogues of Judea.", Pericope 048: Jesus preaches throughout Galilee), to a single source with 566 tokens (Pericope 119: Jesus prepares the disciples for persecution, found in Matthew). But there's some approximation of a normal distribution (with an elongated tail on the high side), and clearly the bulk have from 30 to perhaps 270 tokens, with values near the median of around 30-40 instances (since i'm binning, this number itself isn't very meaningful). This suggests the cases i need to optimize for: i should be able to fit up to about 270 token displays on something close to a single page view (these days that really means 1024 x 768 pixels, though surprisingly i still get 15-20% of my visits from people with 800x600 displays). Ultimately, i'd love to have a rich treemap interface to support exploring the data in a variety of different ways (this was the substance of my presentation at the Society for Biblical Literature last year). As publisher Tim O'Reilly notes in a recent post, treemaps are really made to be interfaces, not graphs: their power lies in your ability to interact with them to explore the data. Unfortunately, i don't know how to do this live on my website: i don't have permission to host the Treemap software i use myself from the University of Maryland, and i don't know of a good substitute (O'Reilly's post is about a Rails implentation, but that's outside my current scope).
Topic Labels and Semantic Bible Search
But Jesus called them to him and said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Matt.20.25-28) I've been thinking about topic labels for Scripture passages lately: a deceptively simple idea that's quite hard to nail down. The notion of topic includes many different things: a person might be a topic (Jesus talks about John the Baptist in Luke.7.24-30), but every mention of a person probably isn't a topic in quite the same sense (the same passage mentions the Pharisees, but the passage isn't really about them, it simply mentions them). Sometimes key words and phrases are topics ("luxury" is a word in the same passage, and a relatively distinct one at that: it only occurs 4 times in the New Testament). But if that's what you mean by a topic, then word searches will usually find what you want. The toughest cases (and therefore the most interesting ones) are when you don't have a distinctive lexical item for a topic decision. The classic Librarian Problem is that whatever i call a topic may have different meaning to someone else, or fall outside the conceptual schema they're using for searching (Shirky has a nice overview of this). The kind of folksonomic tagging popularized by del.icio.us works well at a personal level (i know what my "facets" tag means to me, even though you may not), and it works well at the larger level because enough others might happen to use the same tags that aggregation adds value. I expect this kind of tagging for Scripture will start to show up in some interesting ways in the next year under the Web2.0 rubric. Here's what got me thinking about this: i was reading Humility by Andrew Murraythis morning (highly recommended, by the way), and he discusses the passage above as an example of Jesus' teaching about humility. I'd agree (as would Naves, and most other topic-oriented indexes): but if you wanted to label such passages in some automated fashion, what evidence would you use? The words "humble" and "humility" are nowhere to be found, and neither are their direct antonyms like "proud". Jesus mentions the contrasting examples of Gentiles who "lord it over them" and others who "exercise authority over them": but these complex semantic constructs aren't easy to take apart (and the first one isn't very typical English: the Contemporary English Version's translation of "order their people around" is arguably more natural). Certainly being the servant of others implies the personal trait of humility, but the relationship is quite abstract. Just another argument for why this kind of annotation of Scripture will probably be done the old-fashioned way (by hand) for the foreseeable future ...
Lexical Statistics in the New Testament
I've been putting some of the data behind the Hyper-concordance into MySQL, in preparation for computing some statistics on lexical co-occurrence. Along the way, i've been collecting some numbers that i thought others might find interesting. There are a number of other sources for NT statistics: for example, this page from Prof. Felix Just shows words per verse per chapter per book (in the Greek NT). What's different about the numbers below is that they're based on Hyper-concordance's approach, which groups various inflected forms under their base form (what linguists call a lemma). For example, 'saying', 'says', and 'said' are all pooled under 'say' (as it turns out, the most common lemma in the New Testament, with 1946 occurrences). In the example from the Hyper-concordance home page (Mark.4.24), there are 10 content lemmas (9 of them unique) in this verse of 30 words: "say", "pay", "attention", "hear", "measure" (twice), "use", "still", "more", "add". Count Unique terms 73872 6333 base terms 73872 4526 name words 6638 593 non-name words 67234 3933 singletons 1444 1444 name words 281 281 "Count" is the actual instances, as opposed to the unique values (which we could call the content vocabulary of the New Testament). Some comments: As a textual corpus, the New Testament is relatively small by modern lexico-statistical standards: only about 8000 verses, with a vocabulary of only a few thousand words. I take some consolation from the modest vocabulary size: i'm interested in creating lexical semantics for these terms, and while ~4500 terms is far from trivial, it's not so large as to be completely impossible to consider. "name words" here means nothing more than a word written with a capital letter, about 1 in 10 words, which is actually rather large. I've only found three words that occur both capitalized and uncapitalized. The two obvious ones are God/god and Lord/lord: can you guess the other? (answer at the bottom) the ratio of terms to base terms is really a measurement of the compression induced by the lemmatization approach of the Hyper-concordance. I'd expect this difference to be much larger for a larger corpus. "singletons" here means words which occur exactly once (sometimes called hapax legomena). Clearly there can't be any variation in form here, so the instance and unique counts are the same. This is actually rather small, probably another consequence of the small corpus size: as a rule of thumb, for many large and general corpora, roughly half the words occur only once (though that's words, not lemmas), a consequence of Zipf's Law. the 11 most common words: say (1946 instances) God (1343) come (1120) all (1006) Jesus (964) go (749) man (745) Lord (657) see (622) no (569) know (543) Caveats: this is all based on the ESV text, your mileage will certainly vary for other translations. You could argue (with some merit) that all such counts should be performed on the Greek text, rather than an English one. However, since the ESV takes an 'essentially literal' approach, i'd argue that the magnitude will generally be roughly correct, though of course the exact numbers will be slightly different. Of course, these numbers for base forms depend on how you map forms back to their bases: i think my approach is credible, but certainly not perfect (i doubt 'perfect' here could even be well-defined). the Hyper-concordance omits 44 function words that are very common and not very contentful (in information retrieval terms, stop words). I'd argue this is a good thing, but you might think otherwise. (The second word that occurs in both capitalized and uncapitalized forms is much less obvious, though you'll figure it out if you think a lot about it ...)
NY Times Article on Parts of Speech
There's an interesting piece in the NY Times about linguistic parts of speech. It taught me the word Anthimeria (Greek: "one part for another"): from Wikipedia, "the use of a word of one class as if it were a member of another, typically the use of a noun as a verb." 'chill', meaning to relax (and thereby be culturally, rather than thermally, cool) would be an example.
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A typical sporadic weblog. With or without chunks.
Final Upgrade
Testing the final 4.01 MT upgrade....
Xerox Park
BK Broiler does it his way with a Pocky related TV ad....
Beer? Check. DB Restored? Check. Images Directory? ...
Whenever I decide to clean my office, move a service from machine to machine, or some similar form of housekeeping...
The New Roos