Not Eligible, But Qualified
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006A stunning 100%, although I admit that I don’t really know what Feinstein, Boxer, and Pelosi all look like, so that one was a guess.
Archive for October, 2006
Vacation Note #2: Tower Records Going Out Of Business Sale, &c
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006I’ve been coming to Boston several times a year for work for something like 13 years now. There are several pockets of the greater Boston area that I know really, really well.
One such pocket is the area between exits 27 (Waltham) and 32b (Burlington) on I-95 (or “the 128″ when you talk to natives.)
In the [...]
Vacation Note #1: Double-check Manny’s work.
Monday, October 30th, 2006While Manny may seem like a very nice guy, especially after you’ve been driving for 12 hours and just want a hotel room to lie down in, you should really take the time to double check his work.
For example, when you say “Hubley, Nova Scotia”, Manny apparently hears “Monterey, California”. And, perhaps more importantly, when [...]
On Vacation
Sunday, October 29th, 2006OK, not really fishing, but spending a lot of time with the family this week, and not thinking about work AT ALL.
I may have time to blog in the evenings, or I may be too exhausted from family fun. Don’t expect much, and it will be a (pleasant?) surprise if I have time to post [...]
A More Explicit Punctuation?
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006That’s the “irony mark“, one of a set of proposed additions to punctuation. Others proposed include the doubt point (), certitude point (), acclamation point (), authority point (), indignation point (, essentially ¡), and love point ( or ).
On the one hand, I think the idea of punctuation that can be used to explicitly [...]
A congeries of iridescent globes
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006(Pi, originally uploaded by [P!]Wack.)
This graphical representation of pi sure looks like an autostereogram to me.
If you click through and look at the large version, and then sort of relax your eyes, you can faintly start to hear a soft chanting of “Y’Ai’Ng’Ngah Yog-Sothot H’Ee-L’Geb F’Ai Trhodog Uaaaah“.
If at that point an image of a [...]
A Gentle Madness
Monday, October 23rd, 2006Books are coming into my house much faster than I am reading them.
Books very rarely go out of my house–I really, really try not to take in stuff that I won’t like well enough to keep, so it’s rare that something is inside that I am willing to part with.
Obviously if things are coming in [...]
No longer a green shoot
Sunday, October 22nd, 2006In a folder in my office are a bunch of pieces of paper, each of which has a nicely formatted poem or quotation. At some point they were either posted in my cubicle, back in the days when I worked outside the house, or else they were framed and displayed in my house during the [...]
Some genre bits
Saturday, October 21st, 2006I’ve been of the mind for a while now that there was a hole in my book collection that needed to be filled with a copy of William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel. Well, I see where Millipede Press is doing a lovely new edition, and with an introduction by James Crumley, no less! I think, though, [...]
Hanging Around The House: Still Unhung
Thursday, October 19th, 2006Earlier this month I took advantage of the “50% of custom framing” offer at Michael’s to get a frame put on the large Michael Zulli oil painting, “Na Tire Finne”, that I mentioned previously.
I picked it up today, and I think it looks great in the frame:
Apparently the frame the canvas is stretched on [...]
Educate Yourself On Darwin
Thursday, October 19th, 2006Here’s another way to educate yourself that I ran into online today. The Guardian ran a piece on the opening of an online archive of the complete works of Charles Darwin.
Here’s a quote:
The collection brings Darwin’s breathtaking range of writing together for the first time, with 50,000 pages of searchable text, and tens of thousands [...]
Educate yourself.
Thursday, October 19th, 2006You know, if you manage to avoid spam, porn, and piracy, there are lots of ways to communicate with intelligent people and educate yourself on the internet.
The classic example, of course, would be academics. Improving communication amongst academics was one of the first purposes of the internet. Ironically most of the journals are locked up [...]
Torture and the English Language
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006Well, it’s official now. Bush has signed the Torture Without Habeas Corpus bill into law:
Bush Signs Terror Interrogation Law
President Bush signed legislation Tuesday authorizing tough interrogation of terror suspects and smoothing the way for trials before military commissions, calling it a “vital tool” in the war against terrorism.
If the facts of the story aren’t already [...]
Elegant Anti-DRM Statement
Friday, October 13th, 2006For my money that’s the best of the winners of the FreeCulture.org contest to produce anti-DRM video. So elegant.
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006My favourite evolution-in-schools story this week: Apparently Michigan has at least some sense.
The State Board of Education on Tuesday approved public school curriculum guidelines that support the teaching of evolution in science classes — but not intelligent design.
…
“The intent of the board needs to be very clear,” said board member John Austin, an Ann [...]
Neil MacFarlane
Kira