I am off work all week, to spend Trish’s last week before the PhD crunch begins hanging out with her and Sarah. This will either mean lots of blogging (if I get to sleep in) or no blogging (if Sarah wears me out.) Read more →
Month: April 2006
Adaptations
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature of adaptations, in particular adapations to film, but also to other media. Partly this was brought on by my reflections on Wodehouse and how first person works necessarily lose something in the translation to filmI’ll probably, at some point, write up my thoughts on how the ideal medium for Jeeves &… Read more →
Living “Up” To Stereotypes
So, some concerned parents in Gwinnett County, Georgia are try to get Harry Potter taken out of school libraries. Sigh. It’s like they really want us to think of it as Jesusland…. Laura Mallory of Loganville filed an appeal last week to get the best-selling book series out of the schools’ media centers. She is an evangelical Christian who has… Read more →
A Wednesday Miscellany
Let’s close some tabs in Firefox, shall we? First, I am just loving this story about the big mafia don’s encryption scheme. We live in a world where essentially uncrackable public key encryption is freely and easily available, and this guy–the “boss of bosses”–is using a substitution cipher that my 20 month old daughter could crack. It’s not the simplest… Read more →
Some Software Links
Three sets of links today to useful software lists. First is the eConsultant.com list of free software that solves common problems. This list is going to be useful to every level of computer user–at least for Windows users. If you can’t find at least a dozen things on here you can use then you aren’t really using your computer (or,… Read more →
A Couple Of Articles I Wish People Above Me In The Org Chart Would Read
I don’t often do job blogging, but these articles are worth pointing out. Let’s start with the latest essay from the always interesting Joel on Software: The Development Abstraction Layer. I’m going to pull a very tiny segement out of this article, and the emphasis here is mine: Your first priority as the manager of a software team is building… Read more →
Jealousy
Man am I jealous of Walter Jon Williams–not only is he a great writer, but he has one of those adventurous lives that I always wish I was living… But I’ve seen a lot more than a solar eclipse. I’ve seen the Dervishes whirl. I’ve flown in a balloon over the lunar landscape of Cappadocia. I’ve seen Our Lady of… Read more →
Culture of Debt?
It’s been a while since I’ve gone on about U.S. economic policy and currency issues (although I’ve certainly talked about the currency thing enough over the years). Partly this is because the story isn’t changing: the value of U.S. currency keeps dropping–even against ours, which is so tightly integrated with it. Here’s the long term chart: (I’d like to take… Read more →
Artificial Life and Competition
I’ve always been kind of interested in Core Wars. (See also the main Core Wars page, and the King Of The Hill page.) Not enough to actually compete, you understand, but enough to run a local server and let some of the more “famous” programs battle it out, and maybe to throw in one or two of my own. I… Read more →
An Open Question To The Universe….
How is it that I can be married to a woman who, even after being married to me for five years, can’t tell a porter from a stout? Read more →
Old School
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Helen Thomas, who appears to be one of the two last journalists in AmericaThe other one is, of course, Seymour Hersh. Greg Palast might be one someday when he grows up–if he drops the shrill joking style.. Remember back in 2003 when no one in the White House press pool was asking any questions… Read more →
Connecting some dots…
So, an Administration official says Iran “could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days“. Well that sounds scary. Of course over in the reality-based community we can read that “Western nuclear analysts said yesterday that Tehran lacked the skills, materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear ambitions“, and in particular that: The… Read more →
I am such a geek.
How else to explain how much pleasure I got from this piece on that important question: Who would win in a fight between Cthulhu and Godzilla? Just in case you don’t click through for the metatextual analysis, here’s the best sentence from it: “He’d eat a few thousand people, make a giant throne of their bones, and just generally do… Read more →
More Moyers
Last year my impression of Bill Moyers as a stately intellect was shattered when I discovered that he is actually a really intelligent rabblerouser. Well, this year he’s still rousing the rabble, this time about campaign finance and K Street corruption, and making a lot of sense while doing it. He starts out with a pithy summary of the problem,… Read more →
Grammar question
FARTHER/FURTHER: according to the AP style guide you use “farther” to refer to physical distance and on “further” to refer to an extent of time or degree. So you had to wait a further two hours past the appointed time because I had hiked 10km farther than I expected. So, what happens if the extent of degree is also a… Read more →
