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Less panic, more work! - 30 January 2007
Jan. 31st, 2007 12:54 amForayed a tad into writing my paper today. Not out of the first segment yet, and doing well. Need to get into writing mode faster, maybe. I’ve still got lots to read, but now I’m trying to make some coherent sense out of it, and choose some representative samples to make the arguments with, and then cite the rest as backups. I hope that counts toward the units. I may not need to cite backups anyway, if the page continues like this. Tomorrow means I’ll be doing some work on my latest project, but I need to be convinced to do some paper writing, too. Hopefully we’re done with the CSS positioning for now, and I can tear my hair out at Ruby or Rails or SQL or something else like that. Heh.
Trying to get out of the single role typecasting, Daniel Radcliffe is appearing in a revival of Equus, of which there are nude scenes involved. Making a classic mistake (or showing off their ship) the writers ask about Hermione’s opinion. Ginny’s would be a better one to ask. Still, this is seeing Daniel in a new light. Hopefully, it does well and he can start making a name for himself outside of Potter.
In America, we have politicians who claim to talk to Jesus. We haven’t yet had any who claim to be Jesus, or the second coming. That honor falls to Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, who has ramped up his claims form being Paul to Christ to the Anti-Christ, although paradoxically he’s the Anti-Christ as the Second Coming of Christ. And there are more than 100,000 who follow him, he claims. Well, this is America, where despite the prominence of the term in news, politics, being a strong contributor to the rebound of Silicon Valley (through hiring of many people to develop green technology), 13 percent of the country says "Nope, never heard of global warming.". Are these oens homeschooled and never exposed, actively denying that the term exists in an attempt to make the things the term describes not exist, or something else entirely? This is the country where college students at Clemson hold a party around Martin Luther King Day using African-American stereotypes. This is the place where the administration can be very loose with classified information, when it wants to, and at other times be overly strict about what goes under security clearance.
Although, America also has people that make the "We Have Fossils. We win." bumper sticker. Unfotunately, the dispute is not that cut-and-dried in the minds of Joe American. Considering Britain's astronomyer royal giving humanity 50-50 odds of surviving to 2100, as well as predicting that by 2020 bioterror or a biocatastrophe will have killed one million people (both of these posted on the Long Now Foundation’s Long Bets), you really do wonder whether these people are waiting for New Jerusalem and the Second Coming.
Internationally, there seemed to be a bit of a stir with someone else’s Apocalyptic dreams - A sect claiming to have the last imam of Islam lost 200 members when their planned ambush of clerics was defeated.
Elsewhere in the world, things looked to be changing. Israel put a Muslim in the political Cabinet. This could be a sign of better relations - or it could be that the minister is the right person for the job. It’s probably a little of both. On the other end of things, the Minister of Health in Japan was more than a little clinical (and many would claim insulting) when he made the true statement the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, and all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head. Not the most elegant way of putting it by any means, but not a falsehood, either. The minster’s job has been called for by Parliament members. Lastly in our world tour, Archaeologists have found an ancient settlement that they claim was used by the people that built Stonehenge.
The United States Army built a rehabilitation center for amputees in San Antonio, where more and more people will be going the longer this conflict drags on, I predict. American Samidzat pulls together a string of articles simply titled Lunatics that says the conflicts are more likely to expand, despite common sense. Exploding Aardvark gets us geared up on soldiers' sayings and phrases that have come about or been used in the current conflict. Several links to make sure your lingo is well-polished. If Bush follows through on his continued threats that Iran will take it on the chin if they interfere with him too much, we might all get a good seasoning of solider-speak.
Google’s great at what it does, but on those occasions where you need more or specialization, or perhaps a new way of looking at things, the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines may be able to help you find what you’re looking for faster, and maybe even better, than Google. After all, when doing database searching, being in the right place is critical. Perhaps the same holds true for the Web.
It’s not a thousand monkeys banging out Shakespeare, but a computer program is writing fiction based on emotional links between characters. Once it has links and scores for those links, it then starts putting in “atoms” of story that makes sense for the characters to be doing. Maybe the next generation of novels will be written by computers. Probably could make stuff of the quality that we’d consider to be pulp, trashy fiction these days. (They can probably already do Harlequin Romances...) And when they go no tour, maybe they’ll have flexible robot bodies to greet fans with and sign autographs for.
Speaking of books, The New Yorker provides some analysis of copyright law and Google’s ambitious book-scanning project. The conclusion seems to be that if Google settles on the lawsuits facing the book project, it's good for publishers, it's good for Google, but it may very well be bad for everyone else.
Your Zen moment for tonight - A Nintendo Entertainment System, with all accessories and all of the game cartridges made for it, available on eBay. Whomever gets that is going to shell out a lot for it. But I suspect there’s some sort of enlightenment in seeing such a classic system, surrounded by the accessories and all the games. You could probably get a good Zen meditation out of it just by staring at the cartridges.
Less Zen and more zoning out, I’m going to bed. 9am class rocks, really. Especially bending my head around programming concepts.
Trying to get out of the single role typecasting, Daniel Radcliffe is appearing in a revival of Equus, of which there are nude scenes involved. Making a classic mistake (or showing off their ship) the writers ask about Hermione’s opinion. Ginny’s would be a better one to ask. Still, this is seeing Daniel in a new light. Hopefully, it does well and he can start making a name for himself outside of Potter.
In America, we have politicians who claim to talk to Jesus. We haven’t yet had any who claim to be Jesus, or the second coming. That honor falls to Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, who has ramped up his claims form being Paul to Christ to the Anti-Christ, although paradoxically he’s the Anti-Christ as the Second Coming of Christ. And there are more than 100,000 who follow him, he claims. Well, this is America, where despite the prominence of the term in news, politics, being a strong contributor to the rebound of Silicon Valley (through hiring of many people to develop green technology), 13 percent of the country says "Nope, never heard of global warming.". Are these oens homeschooled and never exposed, actively denying that the term exists in an attempt to make the things the term describes not exist, or something else entirely? This is the country where college students at Clemson hold a party around Martin Luther King Day using African-American stereotypes. This is the place where the administration can be very loose with classified information, when it wants to, and at other times be overly strict about what goes under security clearance.
Although, America also has people that make the "We Have Fossils. We win." bumper sticker. Unfotunately, the dispute is not that cut-and-dried in the minds of Joe American. Considering Britain's astronomyer royal giving humanity 50-50 odds of surviving to 2100, as well as predicting that by 2020 bioterror or a biocatastrophe will have killed one million people (both of these posted on the Long Now Foundation’s Long Bets), you really do wonder whether these people are waiting for New Jerusalem and the Second Coming.
Internationally, there seemed to be a bit of a stir with someone else’s Apocalyptic dreams - A sect claiming to have the last imam of Islam lost 200 members when their planned ambush of clerics was defeated.
Elsewhere in the world, things looked to be changing. Israel put a Muslim in the political Cabinet. This could be a sign of better relations - or it could be that the minister is the right person for the job. It’s probably a little of both. On the other end of things, the Minister of Health in Japan was more than a little clinical (and many would claim insulting) when he made the true statement the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, and all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head. Not the most elegant way of putting it by any means, but not a falsehood, either. The minster’s job has been called for by Parliament members. Lastly in our world tour, Archaeologists have found an ancient settlement that they claim was used by the people that built Stonehenge.
The United States Army built a rehabilitation center for amputees in San Antonio, where more and more people will be going the longer this conflict drags on, I predict. American Samidzat pulls together a string of articles simply titled Lunatics that says the conflicts are more likely to expand, despite common sense. Exploding Aardvark gets us geared up on soldiers' sayings and phrases that have come about or been used in the current conflict. Several links to make sure your lingo is well-polished. If Bush follows through on his continued threats that Iran will take it on the chin if they interfere with him too much, we might all get a good seasoning of solider-speak.
Google’s great at what it does, but on those occasions where you need more or specialization, or perhaps a new way of looking at things, the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines may be able to help you find what you’re looking for faster, and maybe even better, than Google. After all, when doing database searching, being in the right place is critical. Perhaps the same holds true for the Web.
It’s not a thousand monkeys banging out Shakespeare, but a computer program is writing fiction based on emotional links between characters. Once it has links and scores for those links, it then starts putting in “atoms” of story that makes sense for the characters to be doing. Maybe the next generation of novels will be written by computers. Probably could make stuff of the quality that we’d consider to be pulp, trashy fiction these days. (They can probably already do Harlequin Romances...) And when they go no tour, maybe they’ll have flexible robot bodies to greet fans with and sign autographs for.
Speaking of books, The New Yorker provides some analysis of copyright law and Google’s ambitious book-scanning project. The conclusion seems to be that if Google settles on the lawsuits facing the book project, it's good for publishers, it's good for Google, but it may very well be bad for everyone else.
Your Zen moment for tonight - A Nintendo Entertainment System, with all accessories and all of the game cartridges made for it, available on eBay. Whomever gets that is going to shell out a lot for it. But I suspect there’s some sort of enlightenment in seeing such a classic system, surrounded by the accessories and all the games. You could probably get a good Zen meditation out of it just by staring at the cartridges.
Less Zen and more zoning out, I’m going to bed. 9am class rocks, really. Especially bending my head around programming concepts.
