Page of Moss - Bloglet

Been out searching for mentions of St. John's in the blogosphere. There's more stuff out there than last time I did this:
A current student blogs about what it's like.
A writeup of Croquet '02.
"You will find almost nothing about Apollonius on-line."
Not the student paper but a blog of a '79 graduate.
"When I was in college (St. John's College, Annapolis, early 1970s)"
"We're being housed at St. John's college, which, if you don't know, is something of an oddity."
Links from Straussians.
Bookmarks page of someone from the class of '94.
"Victor Davis Hanson's commencement address at St. John's College in Annpolis last May will surely become a classic in itself"
"I don't think I can stand too much more on the Straussian conspiracy topic."
...more later, maybe. _
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09:08:02 PM, Friday 25 June 2004

BBC News: Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole in it. _
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01:49:01 PM, Friday 25 June 2004

Thought: massively multiplayer online role playing games as testbed environments for different economic systems. Markets in these games act substantially like real markets in some ways even when they're not intended to, so it seems to me it wouldn't be too hard to set up a little simworld based on, say, ParEcon, or some kind of market socialism. It wouldn't tell you everything you wanted to know about these things, of course, but it would at least give some idea of how well they cope with distribution of goods. _
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02:29:27 PM, Wednesday 23 June 2004

Hello, kitty.

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02:00:10 AM, Wednesday 23 June 2004

Hello, kitty. _
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01:53:39 PM, Monday 21 June 2004

Everyone Knows What A Dragon Looks Like is a wonderful book. I don’t know why I thought of it just now, but I’m glad I did. (The amazon page has a little more information on it, though of course if you want to buy it I think you’re better off going to BookFinder.com.

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05:29:53 AM, Sunday 20 June 2004

Scott, I’m a little confused, and it could be a factor of age, but I’m just wondering, you were saying this morning that the findings of the 9/11 Commission, which definitively say that there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, are completely consistent with your position that there was such a collaborative relationship. And I’m just wondering if you could explain how those two disparate thoughts are completely consistent. _
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04:27:21 AM, Friday 18 June 2004

I've got a gmail account now (thanks, Tori!), but I'm not giving out the address just yet--I think I'll probably set up an @m14m.net address to forward to it. Meanwhile, my main home email account still isn't working quite right, but I think I will be able to fix the corruption that damaged my old messages (it's a problem I've had before with OS X Mail). So I'm working on getting a new email setup going, and there's one thing I've pretty firmly decided: I don't ever plan to receive another piece of spam at my home address. I haven't yet worked out every detail of what I'm going to do, but I've got some ideas, and dammit, I've had enough of this shit. _
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07:24:13 PM, Wednesday 16 June 2004

This take on an American Pantheon, which Homeslice linked to over in Neil's comments, is well worth reading. _
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02:49:41 PM, Tuesday 15 June 2004

My email appears to be pretty much completely fucked, between an excess of spam (hundreds and hundreds each day) and what appears to be a damaged mailbox file on my computer. I'm still considering what to do about it (I imagine I'll be getting a gmail account from someone or other pretty soon), but in the meantime, don't expect email to reach me. You can still get me at my work address, which is [REDACTED]. Edited to add: I now have gmail: my first name dot my last name at gmail dot com. _
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12:06:28 AM, Tuesday 15 June 2004

Hmm... that makes three different Interesting People in the past couple of weeks that I've seen reference Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. Maybe a sign that I should check it out. _
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07:02:19 PM, Monday 14 June 2004

Findory News tries to learn what sorts of articles you're interested in by watching what you click on. They also have a similar thing for blogs. _
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03:31:35 PM, Monday 14 June 2004

If annoying registration processes keep you from reading a lot of online newspaper articles that people link to, you might be interested in bugmenot.com. There, you can find a bookmarklet that will automatically look up usernames and passwords that you can use at most online newspapers. _
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03:06:37 PM, Monday 14 June 2004

Washington Post: Angered by President Bush's conduct of foreign policy and dismayed about America's diminished reputation abroad, more than two dozen former top diplomats and military leaders will release a statement this week calling for a change in U.S. national security policy. _
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03:03:34 PM, Monday 14 June 2004

Letter From New Orleans #13: This particular story begins in November 1998, before E and I had even moved to New Orleans. We were visiting the city with a bunch of friends, sharing a house in Gentilly for Thanksgiving. One night some of us went to Donna's, in the Quarter, where the Hot Eight was playing. They did a version of "St. James Infirmary." I had heard St. James Infirmary a number of times, and liked it quite a bit. But this was the first time I'd really thought about the curious lyrics.

The author goes on to trace the history of the song back to 18th century Ireland, and to explore the process by which it grew into the form we know today. It's a fascinating story, and well told. Go read it.

[via a MetaFilter post that, now that the site's back up, I see is by languagehat] _
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06:13:32 PM, Friday 11 June 2004

JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language. _
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02:43:52 PM, Thursday 10 June 2004

When Mirabai did the seven dream Jeopardy categories thing the other day, it reminded me that I’d done one for myself before, but that I couldn’t remember when. I finally realized today that it was part of my hundred facts. Number 62: If my life were a game of Jeopardy, my seven dream categories would be:

Undocumented irregularities of Flash ActionScript
Ancient Sumer
Sleep deprivation
Talking Heads songs
The history of science
Western occult traditions

There are only six listed there, and I imagine they would be different today. Except the Flash quirks, God help me.

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05:07:09 PM, Wednesday 9 June 2004

I’m experimenting with Technorati. It tries to track cross-blog conversation.

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04:35:26 PM, Wednesday 9 June 2004

You have been beguiled by my cohorts! _
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07:29:01 PM, Tuesday 8 June 2004

BBC News: Previous studies on gender and the net have suggested girls communicate better, and more often, than boys.

But US researcher David Huffaker's study of 70 blogs contradicts this. _
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04:46:00 PM, Monday 7 June 2004

Do you ever get the feeling you've been cheated? _
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01:40:30 PM, Wednesday 2 June 2004

Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks, online, available in RSS. _
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06:07:03 PM, Tuesday 1 June 2004

How to write 1999 in Roman numerals. _
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01:18:08 PM, Tuesday 1 June 2004

A very happy birthday to Julia! _
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09:00:10 PM, Friday 28 May 2004

Conditional comments are one Internet Explorer feature I heartily approve of. A convenient way to include code to be read by only one browser. (Excellent for working around bugs). I learn of them through IE7, which is in itself an interesting project: a big magical bundle of CSS and Javascript that can be included on a page to fix various CSS rendering problems in IE.

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08:34:41 PM, Friday 28 May 2004

Radiohead is my favorite band and what better way to honor them than by running their music through the beer-swilling, ass-kicking hick-filter of my homeland, the American South.
[via MetaFilter] _
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06:42:48 PM, Friday 28 May 2004

And on a related note: I am become *, destroyer of *. _
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04:49:59 PM, Friday 28 May 2004

Mark Pilgrim has pointed out the Google index to things that make god kill a kitten every time you do them.

More generally: is there some general term for these kind of generic Google searches? I seem to remember that the folks at Language Log had come up with one, but I'm not sure of that, and I certainly can't remember what it was if they did. _
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01:53:36 PM, Friday 28 May 2004

The World's Largest Collection of World's Smallest Versions of World's Largest Things.
[via MetaFilter] _
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12:28:18 AM, Thursday 27 May 2004

History of Liberia. _
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06:46:16 PM, Wednesday 26 May 2004

I love Kant! Do you hear that? I think his philosophy is pretty rockin', and I don't care who knows it! _
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05:08:42 AM, Sunday 23 May 2004

Trac is a tool for software project management that integrates a bug tracker, a wiki for documentation, a revision control system (well, to be precise, it plugs into the Subversion revision control system), and a few other tools. It looks really beautiful--elegant and unobtrusive. I don't really need it for my own projects, and I don't know if I could convince them to use it at work, but I'm going to play with it some anyway. _
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11:44:31 PM, Friday 21 May 2004

The FCC Song, by Eric Idle.

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01:58:06 PM, Friday 21 May 2004

Well, since you ask, I’m pretty sure the reason comments on teasmoke.net aren’t working is that something went wrong in the installation of the anti-comment-spam software that Kerne added earlier today. I’m sure he’ll catch it tomorrow, or the next time he’s got a block of free time. More generally, not working is basically a computer’s natural state, and it tends towards that state any time you do anything with it, so, if you’re using a computer, you should pretty much expect it to be broken.

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02:00:58 AM, Friday 21 May 2004

Workers at SBC (my local telephone carrier, and possibly yours) are preparing to strike ("Among key issues in the contract dispute, CWA members are seeking to strengthen their employment security, including gaining access to new jobs in growth areas of the company, and to preserve their health care benefits in the face of substantial cost-shifting demands by SBC management."). If you'd like to support them, you can pledge to switch carriers (to AT&T, another unionized telephone carrier) if and when union leaders say it's a good time. I've just done so, and I would urge you to do the same.

(If you'd like more details, you can look at the Unity@SBC website.) _
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09:10:35 PM, Thursday 20 May 2004

This Language Log post about AAVE (and about the 'Ebonics' incident a few years ago with the Oakland school board) is well worth reading for anyone interested in language and the politics of language. _
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05:35:06 PM, Thursday 20 May 2004

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