Page of Moss - Bloglet

Millenia ago your merchandise roamed free. I didn't bid then and I won't now.

The most amazing feedback you will ever see on eBay.

Nux VOMICA! I invoke you, BEAST! But I only do so because you are HONEST! "A++"
[via Boing Boing] _
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07:32:03 PM, Wednesday 30 April 2003

Oooh... useful ssh trick. I didn't know you could limit a key to just certain commands. I'm going to have to use this to do an automatic rsync backup of my website regularly. _
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06:39:31 PM, Wednesday 30 April 2003

As you may already have come to suspect, the new Croquet pictures are now online. _
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04:12:43 PM, Wednesday 30 April 2003

(04:33) glossomania: d000000d
(04:33) glossomania: oh shit, sorry.
(04:34) glossomania: my inner hacker met my inner stoner and mind-melded. _
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07:35:04 PM, Tuesday 29 April 2003

Seriously, this is getting comical. _
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07:12:40 PM, Tuesday 29 April 2003

Cave Linguistics. Beautiful. _
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03:33:01 PM, Tuesday 29 April 2003

Naomi Chana uses Buffy to talk about open and closed canons. _
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05:08:06 PM, Monday 28 April 2003

awwwwwwwww! _
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02:45:02 PM, Monday 28 April 2003

Point of further clarification: No, actually, he was just a dragon. _
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01:33:44 PM, Monday 28 April 2003

Point of clarification: Trogdor was not a man. Trogdor was a dragon-man. _
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01:32:56 PM, Monday 28 April 2003

That was fun. _
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11:55:01 AM, Monday 28 April 2003

I... uh... wasn't expecting to do that. _
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04:30:28 PM, Friday 25 April 2003

If you really want to blog anonymously, the cypherpunks have a way for you to do it. As long as you don't say anything that could identify you in the blog, of course. _
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01:49:48 PM, Thursday 24 April 2003

Looking for the canonical definition of 'squick', I found a page on the history of slash. _
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01:14:27 PM, Thursday 24 April 2003

By way of further explanation, here's a page that explains what those things actually are. _
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10:50:51 PM, Wednesday 23 April 2003

I covet one of these so, so much. I read about them in Pattern Recognition, the new William Gibson novel, and then I looked them up on the web, and they were real, and oh my God those things are So Fucking Cool. Co-vet! _
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10:48:05 PM, Wednesday 23 April 2003

I'm looking for good heuristics for finding the most important words in a piece of text, like a weblog entry. A few thoughts:

Long words are more likely to be important than short words. This is because words with a purely grammatical purpose--it, and, the, etc.--tend to be very short, and words to describe specialized concepts tend to be long. Acronyms are an obvious exception, so short words in all caps should count as longer than they are.
Rare words are more likely to be important than common words. If you use a word all the time, it's probably not relevant to the specific subject you're discussing.
More generally, a word that's used more frequently than usual is probably important.
If a lot of related words are used in the same text, the concept they center around is probably important. This is only useful if you have a way to recognize related words.
If you can parse sentences with even approximate accuracy, I suspect some positions in a sentence are more likely to hold important words.
Some words are never important. Some words are almost certainly important.
Proper names--capitalized words that occur after the beginning of a sentence--are probably important.
Nouns are most likely to be important, followed a ways back by verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, in roughly that order.
Words in links are more likely to be important, as are underlined, bold, or italicized words.

By "important words", I mean something like "the words that tell you the most about the subject of the text". I started thinking about it as a way to come up with keywords to do Google searches for related material.

I think if I had to limit myself to a single method for judging importance, it would be unusual frequency. That combined with a way to recognize related words and treat them as a group would probably give very good results even without the other tests.

So, anyone else have any ideas? _
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08:45:57 PM, Wednesday 23 April 2003

Wasn't the big philosophical change really to start having mass in Latin? It's the vulgar tongue, that's the whole point. After that, switching to something like English is just a matter of keeping up to date. _
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06:22:31 PM, Wednesday 23 April 2003

You were having some kind of seizure. _
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03:28:30 PM, Wednesday 23 April 2003

Remembering talking to Kerne about Idoru, about... oh, I can't even remember his name, but the one who sees the nodal points in data, in history. I think that's really what I'm good at (Kerne too, for that matter), is seeing the shape of information. Taking a bunch of discrete facts and turning them into a picture of What's Really Happening. I'm not even all that good at marshalling the individual facts, but once I can get hold of them all, I start to just see where they go. That's certainly what I'm up to when I'm programming well--seeing the shape of the data and how it fits together. That's what I like about object-oriented programming. The shape of the code there comes the closest to resembling the shape of my thoughts. Though I'm not positive about that last point.

I need to read more of Pattern Recognition.

Tangentially, I can't tell which one of these two mistakes I'm in danger of making here: Am I wanting to take this particular skill that I have, and say that it's the center of all thinking everywhere that anyone does? Or am I wanting to take this perfectly normal thing that everyone does just for their minds to work at all, and act as though it's some special unique skill that I have?

This is all very sketchy. If I had Wobble working, I'd put it somewhere where I could fill it out later. Anyway, is it at all clear what I mean? Do other people do this? Do you think about it? _
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08:48:40 PM, Tuesday 22 April 2003

In brighter news, France and Russia seem to have relented on the question of suspending sanctions against Iraq. This is good. I'm all for pressuring the U.S. to acknowledge the U.N., but starving the Iraqi people is probably not the best way to do it. _
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08:21:13 PM, Tuesday 22 April 2003

BBC News: The former speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, has launched a wide-ranging attack on the failure of the State Department to promote US interests abroad.

His remarks represent the opening salvo in a campaign by neo-conservatives to transform the State Department in the image of the Defence Department under Donald Rumsfeld. _
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08:14:22 PM, Tuesday 22 April 2003

Justified true belief. _
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04:45:59 PM, Monday 21 April 2003

There's a new version of Blogger on the way. Looks interesting. _
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02:13:23 PM, Monday 21 April 2003

Hmm... my browser bookmarks are kept in a text file... this means that, in theory, I could put that file into CVS, and keep it synchronized between this computer and my computer at work. Spiffy. I should try it. _
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08:45:33 PM, Sunday 20 April 2003

Cocoa Gestures lets you use mouse gestures in Cocoa-based OS X applications. I've been using it for a while, and it's very nice. (I mentioned it earlier, but since I'd just been pointing out good OS X things, I was reminded of it, and felt it would bear repeating). _
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04:56:30 PM, Friday 18 April 2003

Looking for a quote I didn't quite remember from the Principia Discordia, I found this summary of the one result in my Google search:
... toss something around. If it is round and not a rock, or something
that would hurt somebody, I would play catch with them. I also ...

This seems a good solid Discordian sentiment in itself. _
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02:38:37 PM, Friday 18 April 2003

Incidentally, when I searched to confirm that I had that bit of verse right, I first (misremembering slightly) did a search on "he thought he saw" and "he found it was". When I did this, I was thrilled to see that the very first result was Miss Nehring's classic story "The Villains", Chapter One. _
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02:29:56 PM, Friday 18 April 2003

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the 'bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus _
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02:26:44 PM, Friday 18 April 2003

See the constellation? _
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02:24:17 PM, Friday 18 April 2003

In the end, there are not men or women, there are only Mother and Father. _
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02:24:03 PM, Friday 18 April 2003

Of course there are differences between men and women--just look at them. But also, notice that finding patterns in absolutely everything is one of the things your mind is built to do. Your mind is a tricky bastard, and it'll try to say things as universally as it possibly can. It's up to you to figure out if these patterns you see have anything to do with the real world. Your facility for pattern recognition cares nothing for whether it is correct or not. _
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02:23:35 PM, Friday 18 April 2003

Been meaning to write about the Pythagorean table of opposites. Or at least, sort of intending to write about it once I've got my content management system set up. Have you noticed that it's pretty easy to place almost any pair of opposites on it? Do all binary divisions have the same form? Of course, actually applying it to the world of experience is another example of the wrong sort of ancient world view. Things have essences, yes, but they have them individually. A tree is an example of treeness, but even more than that it is all the particulars of itself. Thinking about what sort of thing something is is just a way to avoid having to really look at it. _
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02:10:18 PM, Friday 18 April 2003

No, I don't understand women. Of course I don't understand women. I don't understand men, either. There are a handful of people that I think I understand a bit, and as far as I can tell, knowing whether they're men or women doesn't tend to help with that. _
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01:54:59 PM, Friday 18 April 2003

Abandoning the natural, meaning-filled, holistic view of the world that the ancients had also means abandoning, for example, slavery. More on this later. _
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01:51:58 PM, Friday 18 April 2003

Hmm... <i>weird</i> bug in the bloglet XMLRPC interface just now. _
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02:14:29 PM, Thursday 17 April 2003

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