The most important thing about the law of noncontradiction is that it comes very close--vanishingly close, I believe--to saying nothing at all.
_
respond?
10:58:10 PM,
Monday 13 May 2002
-
"If a person (a) is poorly, (b) receives treatment intended to make him better, and (c) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health."
-- Sir Peter Medawar, "The Art of the Soluble"
fortune just came up with this quote, and it made me very happy. I want to find the context it's from, and read it.
_
respond?
(3)
09:41:30 PM,
Monday 13 May 2002
-
"We never had a family meeting before!"
"We never had a problem with a family member we could give away before!"
_
respond?
(2)
10:55:36 PM,
Saturday 11 May 2002
-
If you did this to get access to teasmoke.net a few months back, you'll need to undo it now. Teasmoke's IP address has changed, so the one in your hosts file is now wrong. You won't be able to reach it until you take that line out of your hosts file.
_
respond?
07:53:13 PM,
Friday 10 May 2002
-
If you haven't checked out the ESP Experiment that's been going around, you definitely should.
_
respond?
(3)
06:12:44 PM,
Friday 10 May 2002
-
I don't want to go to Toronto.
I don't want to go to Chelsea.
I don't want to go down to the basement.
I don't want to work. I just want to bang on my drum all day.
_
respond?
(4)
03:08:48 PM,
Friday 10 May 2002
-
At one point, when we were talking about different ways of doing commenting on a blog, Kerne suggested the possibility of just using a wiki for comments. Well, Peter Lindberg seems to have done just that. That is, he's made it so that every post to his blog contains, at the end, an edit link to a wiki page with the same title as the original post. It's a very Simplest Thing approach to integrating a wiki and a weblog. I'll be interested to see how well it works.
[via WebSeitz]
_
respond?
02:49:07 PM,
Friday 10 May 2002
-
"I'm now in Budapest, Hungary" ... "Still here in Budapest ... We are going to stay (definitely) through this weekend" ... "Looks like I'll be in Budapest for a few more days" ... "Tomorrow will make the twenty-eighth day in Budapest and will also be the day I leave this wonderful city ... I've decided to return to Budapest for another two weeks after Italy and Croatia"
Jay Allen has been blogging his travels through Europe, and seems to have discovered The Dark Secret Of Budapest: it is impossible--impossible, I say--to visit that city without spending far more time there than you intended. You'll notice it wasn't on his itinerary. It hadn't been on mine either, but I decided on the spur of the moment to go for a couple of days, then a few days more, then several more... ten or twelve altogether. And, when I was there, at least, practically everyone else in the hostel was having the same experience. When people did try to leave, things would happen to get them stuck there for another few days. But nobody minded. It's such a glorious city, it would be hard to really want to leave.
_
respond?
01:39:51 PM,
Friday 10 May 2002
-
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think
little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and
Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."
-- Thomas De Quincey (1785 - 1859)
_
respond?
(1)
11:59:22 AM,
Friday 10 May 2002
-
If you've read Douglas Adams's Last Chance To See, you may remember the wonderful chapter on the kakapo, an extremely rare, flightless, nocturnal parrot. This year, 22 new kakapo chicks have hatched, bringing the total population of kakapos up to 84. Encouraging news. I am also pleased to see that there is a kakapo website.
[found on Metafilter]
_
respond?
(15)
04:28:00 PM,
Thursday 9 May 2002
-
"Well, I wouldn't exactly say I've been missing it, Bob."
_
respond?
(1)
02:24:39 PM,
Thursday 9 May 2002
-
Okay, here's the situation: Winter around here is pretty much exactly the right length. I still enjoy winter weather when we get to the end of it, but I'm just then getting ready for something else. It's also pretty much the right intensity. Not too cold, but still nice and misty and beautiful and cool enough that you can think clearly. However, a little bit of snow occasionally would be nice. Spring is absolutely gloriously beautiful, but it's over much too quickly. Summer isn't as bad as it is some places, like in Maryland, where the summer weather is just entirely unacceptable, but it is still a bit too hot a lot of the time, and it lasts too long. If it were a bit milder, it would probably be about the right length as it is. But the one thing they do some other places in summer is have storms occasionally, and we could really use that here. I suppose it would be okay to have a few really hot days if there were a storm to cool you off right at the end. Not too many, though. Autumn is really not much use around here. It's really just kind of an ongoing summer with less light. It's way better in places where they have lots of trees that turn pretty colors and things. If it did that, it would be wonderful.
_
respond?
(15)
11:56:39 PM,
Wednesday 8 May 2002
-
Something like 90% of everyone on the web has the Flash 5 plugin installed, so if you're aiming at a general audience, you're probably safe doing something in Flash. On the other hand, sites for certain smaller audiences may not be able to rely on their users having the Flash plugin. The one that strikes me as particularly interesting, right now, is that a site intended for more technically advanced users, or for developers, probably shouldn't use Flash, because more of their users will be on operating systems with flaky Flash support, or no Flash support at all.
_
respond?
(2)
09:19:33 PM,
Wednesday 8 May 2002
-
I haven't actually consciously set out to make a blog entry since... oh, at least since getting back from Croquet. The things I've posted have just been blogged as a totally ingrained part of my standard daily routine. So even without thinking about it at all, I just sort of produce about one blog a day as a natural consequence of my being at a computer. Interesting.
_
respond?
(6)
01:59:50 PM,
Wednesday 8 May 2002
-
I've been looking for a good blog about Python. A place to find interesting technical stuff. I hadn't found terribly much so far, but this morning the Daily Python-URL linked to Garth Kidd's Deadly Bloody Serious About Python, which appears to be exactly the sort of thing I'd been looking for. Excellent.
_
respond?
01:49:12 PM,
Wednesday 8 May 2002
-
Definite shades of Brave New World. Ending is better than mending!
_
respond?
(3)
02:46:01 PM,
Tuesday 7 May 2002
-
30 points to Mirabai for correctly identifying the source of: "Frowned upon, certainly. But then, what isn't these days?"
_
respond?
02:15:01 AM,
Tuesday 7 May 2002
-
Note: since teasmoke.net is down, anything that reports to blt will (1) be a bit sluggish and (2) not always report to blt. This is why blogging and commenting is so slow right now on m14m.net.
_
respond?
11:12:59 PM,
Monday 6 May 2002
-
Found a translation page that offers a joint interface to a number of different online translation services. Good stuff.
_
respond?
05:56:13 PM,
Monday 6 May 2002
-
Oh, neat! Someone's been compiling a list of Sonoma County weblogs. I'll have to check out the others. I notice that I've not been verified as living in Sonoma--I should email to confirm that I do.
I knew it was time to start looking at my server logs again.
_
respond?
04:54:16 PM,
Sunday 5 May 2002
-
Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian...
_
respond?
(11)
05:37:50 AM,
Saturday 4 May 2002
-
Well, if ever there were a worthy target for Googlebombing, it's Verisign. They are bastards, and incompetent ones at that.
_
respond?
12:07:35 PM,
Friday 3 May 2002
-
I decided it would be better with numbers, so I added them.
_
respond?
01:07:43 AM,
Friday 3 May 2002
-
Track list for my blogmass cd swap cd. Commentary to follow.
1. The Presidents of the United States of America - Ladies and Gentlemen Part 1
2. Clinic - Harmony
3. Violent Femmes - Hey Nonny Nonny
4. Shonen Knife - Sushi Bar
5. Timbuk3 - National Holiday
6. Bob Marley - Hallelujah Time
7. Randy Newman - Political Science
8. Lee Press-On - I Prefer A Coffin
9. Ramones - Beat On The Brat
10. Rolling Stones - Factory Girl
11. Dr. Octagon - Earth People
12. Cake - Commissioning a Symphony in C
13. Talking Heads - Swamp
14. Gorillaz - Punk
15. Sex Pistols - Anarchy in the U.K.
16. Holy Modal Rounders - Give the Fiddler a Dram
17. Patti Smith - Horses / Land of a Thousand Dances / La Mer (de)
18. Velvet Underground - Sunday Morning
19. Marcy Playground - A Cloak Of Elvenkind
20. Nick Cave - Deanna
21. Robyn Hitchcock - Uncorrected Personality Traits
_
respond?
01:05:28 AM,
Friday 3 May 2002
-
Branden Hall, a developer who does some truly amazing things with ActionScript, now has a weblog. This makes me a very happy little Flash hacker.
_
respond?
06:11:00 PM,
Thursday 2 May 2002
-
Ninja or Pirate?
_
respond?
04:34:06 PM,
Thursday 2 May 2002
-
Lego Moss:
_
respond?
(11)
09:14:59 PM,
Tuesday 30 April 2002
-
The idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds is not optimism.
_
respond?
(9)
06:31:40 PM,
Tuesday 30 April 2002
-
Blosxom looks to be a pretty nice weblogging tool. Very lightweight. Similar in spirit to Kerne's wl, I think.
_
respond?
02:34:13 PM,
Tuesday 30 April 2002
-
I am going to set up an online gallery for Croquet pictures. If you have some, I can give you a password that you can use to upload them. Request one in the comments to this entry.
_
respond?
(7)
07:13:13 PM,
Monday 29 April 2002
-
Go go gadget trumpet!
_
respond?
(6)
07:00:26 PM,
Monday 29 April 2002
-
Hacker needs coffee, badly. Hacker, your life force is running out.
_
respond?
(6)
06:02:45 PM,
Monday 29 April 2002
-
If nothing else, this whole ugly business in France demonstrates why it's useful to have some kind of runoff election.
_
respond?
(7)
04:59:57 PM,
Monday 29 April 2002
-
Interesting. I wonder if this has anything to do with why my flight was delayed an hour and a half last night. I was on US Airways.
Whee!
_
respond?
(10)
03:26:05 PM,
Monday 29 April 2002
-
"I am now going to utter what I suspect will, in the long run, turn out to be one of the more pathetic utterances of my lifetime... can I blog?"
_
respond?
(1)
10:48:53 AM,
Thursday 25 April 2002
-
Artificial intelligence research does not assume that people decide what to do based purely on logic. It assumes you can use logic to figure out what a human is going to do.
An analogy: you can make a computer simulate gravity. This is not because a heavy object decides to go down through computation. It is because you can use computation to tell a heavy object to go down.
Likewise with human reasoning. It is trivially obvious that our understanding often works in ways other than simple computation: induction, intuition, emotion. The question is whether these processes can be made to arise out of computation.
The effect does not necessarily resemble the cause.
_
respond?
(1)
07:29:42 PM,
Wednesday 24 April 2002
-