Archive for November, 2004

This much I know

Tuesday, November 30th, 2004

I may have to subscribe to the Guardian. Any paper with their level of real news coverage, and that has time for lots of Pullman and Mieville is OK with me. Hell, I subscribe to all their RSS feeds (well, OK, not the Sports or Football ones, I admit) and read most of the stuff, [...]

US Currency Part N+1

Friday, November 26th, 2004

Continuing the trend of looking at the weakening US dollar, we’ve got a couple of new articles.
First, an analysis post from Kitco, a gold bullion dealer, looks at the potential effects of Japan and China cutting back on, or dropping their support for the US dollar.

For a while now the US has been pressuring China [...]

Halifax prepares for George Bush visit

Thursday, November 25th, 2004

CBC News: Halifax prepares for George Bush visit
I plan to protest.
Creative suggestions welcomed.
I can’t wait to tell my boss (a rabid, pro-Bush Republican) that I want the time off to go protest. Should be fun.

Diametrically opposite models

Thursday, November 25th, 2004

I still can’t believe it’s 2004 and I’m devoting this much time to reading about religiously-based arguments against evolution. Sigh.
There’s a nice round-up of evolution vs. “intelligent design” stories over at Orcinus. (I should add a filter so that any comment that includes “intelligent design” without the scare quotes would be instantly deleted. )
Even more [...]

Permanent Damage

Thursday, November 25th, 2004

So, I read comics. Yes I am an adult, no I don’t read about super-heroes. We can have this tired argument later. The point is that as a reader of comics, I also read a number of online resources about comics.
Consistently the best of these, to my taste, is comic writer Steve Grant’s weekly column, [...]

He’s not Bob Geldof

Wednesday, November 24th, 2004

I ran into the Czeslaw Milosz (that’s “Nobel Laureate Miolsz” to you) poem below, in one of this month’s magazines. I avoided typing it in by finding a copy already on the web along with a reading of the poem in it’s original tongue.
Song on the End of the World
On the day the world ends
A [...]

I love Harper’s

Wednesday, November 24th, 2004

What you will find below are sample quotes from Precalculus For Christians, a text book published by that bastion of scientific thought, Bob Jones University, as reported in this month’s Harper’s magazine. Apparently the text is designed to help students “conform their thinking to biblical precepts.” (As an aside, I am stunned to realize I [...]

So Yesterday

Wednesday, November 24th, 2004

So, let’s talk for a little bit about Scott Westerfeld.
I had been hearing his name for some time in regards to his Succession series (well, two books might not officially be a series, so we could just refer to them by title as The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds) which always came up [...]

‘Economic Armageddon’?

Wednesday, November 24th, 2004

Wow, I thought I was getting close to tinfoil hat territory on the whole currency/economy thing, and along comes Morgan Stanley’s chief economist who makes me look like Pollyanna.
Here’s the first few paragraphs, but you’ll want to read the whole thing:

Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation [...]

Textbook disclaimer stickers

Wednesday, November 24th, 2004

Taking the evolution sticker comedy one step further

Nerd Dad Fashion Sense Part 2

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004

A followup to the earlier post.
Ladies, and Gentlemen, I present yet another photo of Sarah Kathleen McLaren. I’m burning the comedy ones onto a disc that we will use to embarrass her for many, many, years to come.

Blogger As Developer

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004

Warning: this will be a very geeky post about WordPress internals and a bug I just fixed in the current version. Feel free to skip this if that stuff isn’t up your alley.
So, this PHP stuff is pretty easy to figure out compared to the stuff I do every day at the day job.
I had [...]

Songs Stuck in Your Head

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

I’ve been walking around all day humming and singing bits from Danny Michel’s alt.country cover of David Bowie’s Young Americans.
Of course, this isn’t such a bad thing–if you have to get a song stuck in your head, it might as well be something good.
Last week it was Ice-T going on about how “my lethal weapon [...]

Religious Red Code

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

You know, looking at this map ( from the Glenmary Research Center) of the US by primary religious group, all I can see is a really scary game of Core Wars being played out. I’d love to see a time-lapse animation of this–I bet the explosion of the Southern Baptists and the slow creeping of [...]

Even Greenspan is worried about the dollar

Sunday, November 21st, 2004

Of course he won’t come out and say it in those terms, but his statement at a banking conference in Frankfurt (as reported in Reuters) is about as close as he can get”

“It seems persuasive that, given the size of the U.S. current account deficit, a diminished appetite for adding to dollar balances must [...]