newer log
Hm, well, what? Don't like the sound of this new Pope much. Images of Catholic Church turning its back simultaneously on the 3rd world and the XXIst century. Ought to give him a chance, though. Never know.
Stock market up on having been down yesterday!
Slots are going fast, so sign up today!!
Extremely and utterly cool (from the Dynamist):
For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
...
Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work - the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.
Ancient Greek pulp fiction: yummy goodness! (Not to mention new Sophocleses and stuff.)
Kills weeds, not lawns!
From Alamut, a paper with a very memorable title: A Calvinist Defense of Anarcho-Capitalism. And they mean it, too.
A Hyundai like you've never seen before! No hidden costs! Apply now! A better way to forecast the Atlantic hurricane season!
From amptoons, the interesting headline "CDC: Dangers of being overweight overstated". Turns out those dangers have been overstated by the CDC, and they intend to keep overstating them. (See also followup post on amptoons about more on the recent "it's good to be 'overweight'" and "it's bad to try to lose weight" findings.)
Very much enjoyed Where the Money was. It's part of a series that also includes Ponzi (about Ponzi of the Schemes); is that good also? Anyone read it?
From Camworld, a great essay, A Coder in Courierland, about a youngster that quit his computerish job for a zipping around the city on a bicycle delivering stuff job. Good story well told.
I feel remarkably inarticulate. Maybe because I spent the afternoon reviewing papers written by (ummmm) people in a profession that does not always put a sufficiently high value on skill in the assembly of English prose. And because there's this television going.
(My brain, my poor brain...)
Noffis!
Oh, nothing much really. Just not weblogging to speak of, you know? The eagles grow lax, this is the kind of thing that happens.
Really lovely weather, and the kids have the week off. I'm going to be mostly going to work, but I'm taking tomorrow afternoon off to just loll around, or maybe all go somewhere together and do something. Over the weekend I took a good walk around the neighborhood and down along the lake shore, and we left the doors open alot and generally enjoyed the air.
At work, I got out an old CGI script (which, although it seems impossible, I seem to recall was one of the ones I mentioned in our first anniversary issue, which was five years ago), and dusted it off and taught it RSS (which, I'm impressed to see, did exist at the time the script was originally written, although I probably hadn't heard of it), for a little side project at work. The HTML that it produces is horrible (at least by today's standards); have to CSS it up sometime.
Otherwise, well, y'know...
Oh! The other day Larry Wall (the God of Perl) gave a talk (more or less this one, if it's still there) at the Lab. Given his reputation for quirky and interesting talks, this one was remarkably dull; maybe because he had so many slides that he wanted to get through that all he could really do was give laundry lists of Programming Principles (which might have been interesting at lower speed) and of lots of changes that will be in Perl 6 (which wouldn't have been all that interesting at any speed).
He got the biggest laugh from something I think he intended seriously. On one slide he put up a Perl 5 regexp:
/^ .* $/msx
and then showed the new Perl 6 version:
/^^ \N* $$/
and said something about how much clearer the new one was. Everyone laughed.
From amptoons, the ultimate Abstinence Education site. Spread the word!
Also from amptoons, more evidence that the Family Research Council are a bunch of just utter bastards. I mean, just utter.
From Elf Sternberg (a name that I recognized from the good old days on alt dot sex dot stories dot star; proceed with caution if your local firewall screens for cute furry humaniods having wholesome sex) today's recommended Google search. (Oh, well, he doesn't mean it's the country's business what he does in his bedroom! Just those other people!)
From ntk, a very funny and incisive piece calling bullshoot on stuff that I generally admire, but that does need humbling now and then.
Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond.
I finished and wrote up two more books.
yahooyahoo
I sure wish I could understand what you're talking about. :-) I was never any good with that philosophy stuff, it confuses me.
cakes.
Yes. Yes, there is such a word. A word for things ("things") for which there is no particular evidence. but for which there are obvious emotional or psychological or even practical resons to believe anyway. Yes. Oh, most certainly, yes.
Did you know that you can now publish and sell your very own hardcopy books on CafePress? It's so retro! [link]
anna paquin -- in french
Irish Bacon, fresh from the pan.
Iris Chacon, my friend. Iris Chacon.
nonomusntouch
No, read it to me.
...or not??
So, "Will Rogers"
a mass of incandescent gas
Princeton
buy kamagra in the UK
I'd say it's between Iris Chacon and the mass of incandescent gas. Although the blank entry and the Irish Bacon (hoo hoo: Bacon, Chacon; never noticed that before) are a close second. And the hot cakes (the other day in my Sims game, Merram threw a party to celebrate Artemesia's being accepted into the astronaut program; they had a dancer pop out of a cake, and Drew Carey even stopped by; it was quite a party!). And probably Anna Paquin, except that the judges have recused themselves for some reason. And all the rest, too, really (my readers never disappoint me).
No, no, mustn't touch....
Speaking of hot, Pope or Nope?
And Pope name odds. (How's "George Ringo I" doing?)
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