An online journal of the excavation of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton. Cool.
[via jwz]
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09:22:41 PM,
Monday 17 May 2004
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Color photographs from the '30s and '40s. via MetaFilter.
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07:42:25 PM,
Monday 17 May 2004
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Current thoughts on automatic organization of weblog posts:
- I don’t actually want autoclassification. Autoclassification generally organizes a group of documents into discrete categories, where each document has one and only one category. This would be confused by posts that are on more than one topic, and by topics that blend into each other.
- I do want some sort of keyword guesser: something that can look at the text of the post and find a good list of keywords to describe it.
- I don’t just want something that will find keywords within the text of the post. Sometimes a post will be about language or programming or politics even if it never actually says those words, and a good keyword guesser should be able to catch those posts.
- Latent semantic indexing seems relevant to all this, in that it finds connections between related keywords.
- But I essentially want a kind of backwards version of it: instead of finding documents relevant to a group of keywords, I want to list the keywords that are most relevant to a document.
- Phrased this way, I may actually be starting to have a clue of where to go with all this.
- Most importantly: I don’t ever want to have to manually enter a piece of metadata.
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05:11:41 PM, Monday 17 May 2004
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“You see how I had to write that down right then so I wouldn’t forget it.”
“Oh yes, I see. It’s surprisingly easy to forget things.”
“Is it surprising?”
“Well, it’s been surprising me for years.”
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08:23:08 PM, Saturday 15 May 2004
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A good search tool for AIM logs can save so much time. (Particularly if, like me, you use AIM for work a lot). I'll be trying to remember something Dave told me weeks ago, and usually instead of having to go into his office and bother him about it, I can just look it up in my records. Pretty slick.
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02:53:43 PM,
Friday 14 May 2004
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Okay, that does it. I still think the left would do well to vote for Kerry in this year's presidential election (for reasons I can explain later if provoked), and I still basically plan to vote for him, but I'm so sick of Democratic whining about Nader that I'm now offering this ultimatum: If, between now and the election, I hear more than one hundred public remarks from Democrats blaming Nader for running without offering any reason for Nader supporters to switch to Kerry, I WILL vote for Nader. Got that? 100 Inarticulate Whines = Your Boy Loses 1 Vote. I think that's fair. If you need to vent, you can still do it in private; if you want to argue in public, you can still offer actual arguments; and if you still really need to whine at me, you're now in a position to weigh the consequences of it more accurately than you could before.
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05:55:11 PM,
Tuesday 11 May 2004
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Ooh! via #python, I learn that the Python documentation has a good explanation of why floating point numbers tend to go all 0.9999999999998 on you!
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03:25:08 PM,
Tuesday 11 May 2004
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The Porter Stemming Algorithm is "a process for removing the commoner morphological and inflexional endings from words in English".
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(6)
02:37:48 PM,
Monday 10 May 2004
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at home tonight, talking about wanting to get sushi again some time soon
Julia: Do you know how much I love unagi?
Moss: Pretty goddamned much, I'm guessing, if you have any sense at all.
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(9)
11:27:52 PM,
Sunday 9 May 2004
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Via Respectful of Otters, I learn of this article by Molly Ivins about Camille Paglia. It says pretty much what needs to be said, and in particular, "Christ! Get this woman a Valium!"
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(15)
08:37:12 PM,
Thursday 6 May 2004
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And on that same topic of reading lists I’m interested in, Andrew Black is compiling a list of canonical South African writing.
[via Gideon Strauss]
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08:06:05 PM, Tuesday 4 May 2004
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Brad DeLong has posted a reading list for a potential undergraduate class on “Economics and Philosophy.” I’ve been wanting something like this (a list of some major works from the development of economics) ever since the Adam Smith and Karl Marx readings at St. John’s. Cool. Pleasingly, some of the books listed are things I’ve already been wanting to read (or already read). And people are making further suggestions in the comments.
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04:35:36 PM, Tuesday 4 May 2004
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That thing that’s been going around where you put your mp3 player on random and then quote your favorite line from each of the first 20 songs and then make people guess them? Yeah. Here goes:
1. “And you wondered why your father was so resigned—now you don’t wonder anymore.” Julia got it
2. “And you decked some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids.” Martin got it
3. “You had a dream, they called you king of all the hipsters, is it true? Or are you still the queen?” Anne got it
4. “make everything from from toy guns that spark to flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark, it’s easy to see without looking to far that not much is really sacred.”
5. “When they kick at your front door, how you gonna come? With your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun?” Anne got it
6. “Good night and God bless, now fuck off to bed.” Martin got it
7. “When you cancel dinner plans, when you cross the street and you don’t take my hand, when you make impossible demands I wish I didn’t understand.” Julia got it
8. “And it’s so sad, the army’s good times are all gone.”
9. “And I can still smell you on my fingers and taste you on my breath” Moira got it
10. “Don’t you remember? You told me in December that a boy is not a man until he makes a stand. Well I’m not a genius but maybe you’ll remember this, I never said I ever want to be a man.” Anne got it
11. “It was fun for a while, there was no way of knowing.”
12. “Work all night with a bottle in my hand.”
13. “Better send a begging letter to the big investigation: who put these fingerprints on my imagination?” Sarah got it
14. “He’s got the cultivatin’ music that be captivatin’ me.” Anne got it
15. “This shade of autumn, a stale bitter end”
16. “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.” Sarah got it
17. “Since I am told month number three he has no memory of flyers in the night.”
18. “Her skin is pale like God’s only dove, screams like an angel for your love, then she makes you watch her from above” Sarah got it
19. “Got new skank—it’s so reet!” Julia got it
20. “But he can’t be a man ‘cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.” Tanya got it
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08:36:50 PM, Monday 3 May 2004
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03:27:46 AM, Sunday 2 May 2004
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Dear
Catastrophe
Waitress
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09:07:21 PM, Saturday 1 May 2004
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Happy May!
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(2)
08:50:28 PM,
Saturday 1 May 2004
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Revolutionary new "do shuffled playlists the same way WinAmp always has" feature.
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(1)
06:45:58 PM,
Friday 30 April 2004
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This is my Google search.
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(3)
03:45:44 PM,
Friday 30 April 2004
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This is a test.
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03:14:25 PM,
Friday 30 April 2004
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Interrobang‽
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01:33:35 PM,
Friday 30 April 2004
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Well there wasn't anything in the spec about not being completely fucking ridiculous, that's all I'm saying.
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(1)
08:12:10 PM,
Wednesday 28 April 2004
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My coworker Dave intuited, correctly, that I would be interested in this list of Internet Clocks, Counters, and Countdowns. I blog it now in case you will be interested too.
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(1)
03:39:11 PM,
Monday 26 April 2004
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$7.95 for wireless access is highway robbery. But still. Logged in from the airport! Spiffy!
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(8)
02:37:35 PM,
Sunday 25 April 2004
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I am currently online through a _very_ tenuous wireless connection somewhere just within range of our hotel room in the Governor Calvert House.
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(3)
05:44:24 PM,
Thursday 22 April 2004
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Perils of the BlogBot: I just told the entire world that I have a "Couple of questions when you've got a moment". In fact, my questions are only for Dave. I just clicked on the wrong damned screen name.
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(6)
07:30:27 PM,
Wednesday 21 April 2004
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Can I even begin to say how happy coffee is making me right now?
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(3)
02:33:11 PM,
Wednesday 21 April 2004
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I mentioned ages ago that I might have a way to plug livejournals into BLT. Anyway, I finally polished it up, and now have it running. The livejournals of those who said at the time that they wanted to be on BLT (that is, Julia, Patrick, Tania, and Chris) are now included in my blog tracker. If any of y'all have since changed your minds, just ask and I'll remove your LJ from the feed. I should say, it's not plugged into BLTadv yet--I'll try to connect with Martin about that soon. The script I'm using will work with any RSS or Atom feed, so if you've got another blog you'd like me to add, I probably can.
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(11)
10:35:51 PM,
Tuesday 20 April 2004
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This is mostly just for my own reference, but I'd like to know more about Mohammad Khatami, the president of Iran, and the rest of his government, including the vice president who has a weblog.
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(5)
05:07:01 PM,
Tuesday 20 April 2004
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If PulpFiction is as good as it sounds, I may not have to write my own RSS reader after all.
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02:22:46 PM,
Monday 19 April 2004
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The USDA National Nutrient Database lists nutrition information for some 6,000 different foods. It’s available in ASCII format or in Microsoft Access format. The ASCII version is a group of flatfile database files that should be suitable for importing into a relational database. Documentation is included. There’s also a web interface, and a version for PalmOS PDAs.
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12:37:19 AM, Saturday 17 April 2004
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From Mark Liberman's post on Language Log, I learn of the sci.lang FAQ, the FAQ for the Usenet group on linguistics. It does indeed answer frequently asked questions about linguistics. So if you have any questions about linguistics, it might be a good first place to look.
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09:39:11 PM,
Friday 16 April 2004
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Ian Bicking mentions in passing a Python script that diffs HTML files, looking only at the interesting textual bits, not at the tags and whitespace. I'm thinking of writing some code that will need a way to recognize new material on web pages; this could be very useful for that.
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(2)
09:25:46 PM,
Friday 16 April 2004
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Miss Mary's Victorian Halloween
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09:09:55 PM,
Friday 16 April 2004
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Brad DeLong presents a simple excercise to argue that some forms out outsourcing could be good for most people. It's worth looking at: it makes an interesting point, and it's also as good a demonstration as I've seen of the sort of thinking that leads some people on the left to support trade liberalization.
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(2)
09:09:11 PM,
Friday 16 April 2004
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Bruce Schneier explains just why a national ID card wouldn't make us any safer. While some of the problems he points out are technical, they aren't very hard to understand even without a background in security. This is the sort of thing more people need to be thinking about, because--in addition to being costly, useless, and invasive--a national ID card is exactly the sort of grand comprehensive idea that helps to win elections.
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(8)
03:23:04 PM,
Friday 16 April 2004
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That shit's pretty fucked up right there.
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(3)
03:13:52 PM,
Friday 16 April 2004
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