Language Hat’s comment in response to this post of PF’s leads me to the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, and, from there, to the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary. The former is an online collection of Sumerian literary texts, in the original language and in translation, and the latter is a project to assemble a Sumerian dictionary, which will be made available online for free. The first beta of the dictionary is intended to be online this summer. To understand how happy all this makes me, you should know that I’ve been interested in Sumer since I was about 14, and that I’ve been occasionally trolling the web for something like this since I first got online in 1995, when the closest thing I could find was John Heise’s Akkadian language page. All of you Great Books types should be interested too: what we’re talking about here is a collection of some of the first works of literature ever written.
_respond? (6)
08:57:45 PM, Tuesday 16 March 2004
-
Cosma Shalizi's Notebooks now have an RSS feed and a search tool. Go take a look, they're well worth reading.
_
respond?
(2)
11:14:22 PM,
Saturday 13 March 2004
-
Has Mirabai seen this?
_respond? (1)
05:57:45 PM, Friday 12 March 2004
-
doctest is a Python module that treats usage examples in your documentation as tests for your code. This is really lovely.
Even lovelier: Ian Bicking has been working on some extensions to the regular Python unit testing framework, unittest, that make it a bit easier to work with. They’re to be found in a module called DataTest, of which he has just released version 0.2. It even includes a couple of enhancements to doctest.
_respond? (2)
01:35:06 PM, Friday 12 March 2004
-
I haven’t used the GoogleBrowser, but I played with the TouchGraph WikiBrowser a while back, and it was quite nice. Mike’s right, it’s worth looking at.
_respond? (4)
11:21:12 PM, Thursday 11 March 2004
-
More Google fun: Goering remixed Search
_respond?
08:06:59 PM, Thursday 11 March 2004
-
Vitamin Q has wonderful lists.
_respond? (1)
08:16:50 PM, Wednesday 10 March 2004
-
If you like Ursula Le Guin, you should take a look at this interview with her in the Guardian. (Note that the version there is just a condensed and cleaned up selection of the highlights of a longer online Q&A.
_
respond?
(2)
08:16:17 PM,
Wednesday 10 March 2004
-
Paul Krugman has just posted one of the most beautifully expressive diagrams I have ever seen.
_
respond?
(3)
05:46:06 PM,
Tuesday 9 March 2004
-
The occasion for my remembering to post that last item was seeing Belle Waring's delightful response to some Libertarian debate on the coming anarcho-capitalist utopia. Brad De Long also uses it as the jumping off point for an amusing little dialogue.
_
respond?
12:55:17 PM,
Tuesday 9 March 2004
-
C.H.E.S.S., the Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search, is a big searchable database of every Calvin and Hobbes strip at all, ta. They've transcribed all the dialogue and written up descriptions of the action in all the strips, so it's easy to find, for example, the exact strip where Calvin the zombie searches for food.
_
respond?
(5)
12:42:33 PM,
Tuesday 9 March 2004
-
New from Greg Knauss: The American People. You hear an awful lot about them. Politicans, especially, are experts: they know what we want, need, feel, think, deserve, demand. So we thought we'd start keeping track of who's claiming to speak for us, the American People. Who speaks for you?
_
respond?
(3)
04:37:53 PM,
Friday 5 March 2004
-
As Mike has just pointed out, Slate now has an RSS feed. This is the one thing I needed to make my news page complete.
_respond? (3)
04:24:02 PM, Friday 5 March 2004
-
Joho: The system worked perfectly and I was very happy with it, except for the gnawing fear that it disenfranchised me of my most basic right as a citizen.
_
respond?
(1)
01:05:56 PM,
Friday 5 March 2004
-
In accordance with his wishes, Justice Harry Blackmun's papers have recently been released to the public and placed in the Library of Congress. You can read more at the Library of Congress website, or at NPR, where Nina Totenberg has been describing some of the things she's found among the papers.
_
respond?
12:39:06 PM,
Friday 5 March 2004
-
_respond? (4)
01:14:15 PM, Thursday 4 March 2004
-
_respond?
05:47:34 PM, Wednesday 3 March 2004
-
Oh, hey, and if anyone's up for it, I have a similar request about psychology. And that one doesn't even have to have math.
_
respond?
(5)
02:14:40 PM,
Wednesday 3 March 2004
-
Does economics at all resemble a real science, and do the judgments of economists have any kind of consistency or accuracy? If so, is there something I could read that would give some of the evidence for this? Something fairly accessible? It's fine if it has lots of math in it--indeed, I don't think I'd trust it if it didn't.
_
respond?
(19)
02:12:02 PM,
Wednesday 3 March 2004
-
You may have heard about Yahoo's new search engine, intended to compete with Google. If you're interested in seeing how the search results from Yahoo and Google compare, you should have a look at Christian Langreiter's Yahoo vs. Google tool, which gives a nice clear diagram comparing results for the same search at both engines. It's pretty neat.
_
respond?
(3)
12:02:42 PM,
Wednesday 3 March 2004
-
JavaDoc for ActionScript. Cool. Well, cool for Flash developers.
_
respond?
08:14:14 PM,
Tuesday 2 March 2004
-
Liberals and radicals hate each other because each group thinks that the other does nothing to bring about real change. But really, they ought to be friends, because they are both right.
_
respond?
(5)
06:19:03 PM,
Tuesday 2 March 2004
-
Wow. One more reason I’m glad Mike has started blogging again: I was thinking just yesterday afternoon that I should go looking for something like this.
_respond?
12:00:39 PM, Tuesday 2 March 2004
-
In that case, would you like me to change the format at all?
_respond? (3)
07:22:04 PM, Monday 1 March 2004
-
The Cat With Hands is a deeply bizarre little movie.
_
respond?
(2)
03:15:20 PM,
Friday 27 February 2004
-
So, with a primary coming up 'round here, I guess the relevant question now is: is there anything to strongly recommend either Kerry or Edwards over the other? (Unless there is something, I'm voting for Kucinich.)
_
respond?
(12)
02:20:09 PM,
Friday 27 February 2004
-
I really don't understand why Kerry is doing so well, and frankly, this explanation sounds as convincing as any I've heard.
_
respond?
(4)
12:46:40 PM,
Friday 27 February 2004
-
Hitler: Neither Vegetarian nor Animal Lover
_
respond?
(5)
12:03:18 PM,
Friday 27 February 2004
-
ReverseIteratorProxy is something I’m pretty sure I should have used in some code I wrote a while back. So I’m making a note of it.
_respond? (1)
08:41:14 PM, Thursday 26 February 2004
-
A nice Python module for dealing with file paths.
[via Ian Bicking]
_
respond?
(1)
03:45:50 PM,
Thursday 26 February 2004
-
_respond?
03:08:57 PM, Thursday 26 February 2004
-
Client-side web programming tools for web scraping and web functional testing. (In Python)
_
respond?
03:03:47 PM,
Thursday 26 February 2004
-
Some encouraging news.
_
respond?
(1)
01:24:35 PM,
Thursday 26 February 2004
-
After switching their allegiance from anarcho-communist Howard Dean to ultra-liberal John Kerry, and then to liberal John Edwards, on the final day of their convention Democrats switched one last time to extreme moderate Adolf Hitler, convinced that he's the man who has the best chance of beating Bush.
[via Gillen]
_
respond?
12:25:07 PM,
Thursday 26 February 2004
-
Perl is diseased. That is all.
_
respond?
(3)
06:29:29 PM,
Wednesday 25 February 2004
-
Democrats: you have a real shot at winning the presidential election. The left is with you. The center is with you. Most people who voted for Nader in 1996 and 2000 would likely say that in 2004 the first priority is to get Bush out. Many of Bush's former supporters would likely agree. But if you spend your time and energy campaigning against Nader, rather than against Bush, you will throw all this away. Former Nader supporters will see this as the rejection of everything they were fighting for. Former Bush supporters will see it as petty liberal infighting, It will lose you the goodwill of anyone outside the core of the Democratic party, and it will lose you votes. Please, please, for all our sakes, do not fall into that trap. I do not want four more years of Republican control of every branch of the government. Please do not help to bring that about. Please.
_
respond?
(2)
12:44:28 PM,
Monday 23 February 2004
-
