This is the personal weblog of Moss Collum, a programmer living in Healdsburg, CA. I mostly blog about tech stuff, linguistics, politics, and fun things I find on the web, but there's really no set topic.
If you've found this page through Google, I hope it helps. The search tool may help find the exact post you're looking for. If you want to see what I've posted lately, you can go to the front page of the blog.
If you're someone I know, you probably already know about this blog and come here regularly, but if not, please leave me a note: chances are I'd be delighted to hear from you.
If you want to contact me, you can email me at gmail (where my address is my first name dot my last name), or just leave a comment here.
Note that the "Bloglet" of my page title is the Perl script I use for my blogging, not the other, better known Bloglet.
The National Security Archive "collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The Archive also serves as a repository of government records on a wide range of topics pertaining to the national security, foreign, intelligence, and economic policies of the United States." (from their about page)
They have some fascinating things there, including selected Nixon tapes and a big collection of primary sources relating to September 11th.
Since they seem to have a steady supply of fascinating information, I've used Leonard Richardson's wonderful HTML parsing library, Beautiful Soup, to set up an RSS feed of their news page. If you think you'd be interested in that too, feel free to subscribe.
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02:41:45 AM,
Wednesday 13 September 2006
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Happy birthday to Neil!
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11:11:43 AM,
Monday 11 September 2006
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The Office is brilliant, quite as good as everyone has been saying. However, watching more than one episode at a time is a very, very bad idea.
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04:16:00 PM,
Saturday 9 September 2006
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In the past week or so, I’ve seen front page headlines about the Pluto thing on two different days. Both times, it got way more space on the front page than I’ve ever seen a science article get. (Indeed, I can’t actually seem to remember another front page science article, though I’m sure there must have been some). To me, this sums up everything that’s wrong with popular science reporting: a meaningless change in terminology, after which we will know exactly nothing more than we did before, is considered big front page news.
(I’ll admit I may feel more strongly about this than it deserves. And certainly the Internet commentary has been brilliant.)
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It seems distinctly possible that all of the following are true:
(and knowing this crowd, I’ll also include):
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Free the ... fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
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02:23:27 PM,
Tuesday 22 August 2006
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Since I seem to be making an ongoing project of looking up primary sources for news stories I find interesting, allow me to provide a couple of footnotes to Jason’s latest blog entry.
Warantless wiretapping: The recent court decision is available as HTML from Wikisource and as a PDF from the ACLU or from FindLaw. The ACLU also has a collection of other resources about the lawsuit. The White House response can be found in the Statement on the Terrorist Surveillance Program from press secretary Tony Snow, and in President Bush’s response to a question on the matter in a recent press conference (starts at 11:50 if you’re watching the video).
Hubbert’s Peak: Really, the Wikipedia article Jason linked to appears to have a good set of links, but I’ll draw particular attention to Hubbert’s original paper (PDF link) introducing the idea, which I plan to take a look at.
Free Bonus Link: Here (PDF) is an opinion in which a federal court tells the FBI to Just Fucking Google It.
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Writely, a reasonably spiffy web-based word processor, is now open for new registrations for the first time since being bought by Google. Check it out!
It also lets you post things to your weblog--I used it for this post!
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01:38:10 PM,
Monday 21 August 2006
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The major lesson of a morning spent reading various True Lab Stories: if something is about to change states, don't put it inside your body.
(Well, and the classic: "People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die.")
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04:42:21 PM,
Friday 18 August 2006
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Listen, in a variety of formats...
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02:08:47 PM,
Wednesday 16 August 2006
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thinking to myself this morning, in the process of trying to organize some of the files on my computer...
My job right now is not to ask why I randomly have three PDFs of maps of various places. My job is just to make a Maps folder to keep them in.
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12:42:57 PM,
Wednesday 16 August 2006
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I’ve been collecting material on global warming, energy, and alternative fuels for a while, especially since An Inconvenient Truth came out:
The Basic Science: The IPCC report seems to be the best place to start: first the short summary (“for policymakers”), and then the longer summary (“technical”). The National Academy of Sciences also has a brief report that looks interesting. If you want to know why scientists are convinced about anthropogenic climate change, these are probably good places to start looking. If you just want to know that they’re convinced, here are three shorter statements expressing the breadth of the scientific consensus on climate change.
Speaking of Consensus: Peter Norvig examines the famous study (linked above, and mentioned in Gore’s movie) that found no scientific articles (out of 928 surveyed) rejecting the consensus; he finds it imperfect but pretty much on target, and also gives an excellent demonstration of the value of researching things for yourself. John Quiggin, on Crooked Timber, observes the growing consensus among non-scientists, and the increasing number of former sceptics who are being convinced; the discussion that follows also has some very interesting bits, if you can stomach it, and was the source of several of these links.
More Basic Science, this time simplified and with attention to some specific issues: a basic brochure on greenhouse gases and the carbon cycle from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Association; Frequently Asked Global Change Questions form the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center; and a post about the relation between global warming and hurricanes from RealClimate (a question I was definitely left with after Gore’s movie).
Energy and Alternative Fuels: Key World Energy Statistics from the International Energy Agency; The Carbon Trust, which “helps business and the public sector cut carbon emissions, and supports the development of low carbon technologies”; some idle musing about the climatic effects of wind power from Cosma Shalizi; an article on Ethanol in Brazil from Wikipedia; a lot of stuff on renewable energy from the state of Oregon, which I first found by way of its collection of links about ethanol; and three articles from the Natural Resources Defense Council: A Consumer’s Guide to Buying Clean Energy, Growing Energy: How Biofuels Can Help End America’s Oil Dependence, and California Takes On Global Warming.
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And in aid of that, it's time I starting doing something I've been planning for a long time. For ages now (a couple of years? something like that) I've been collecting links I find interesting on Furl; you can see them in my sidebar. If you're really obsessive about what I read, you can get an RSS feed of them, or follow the link to browse my archive, but that doesn't make for particularly interesting reading in itself, and it's hard to tell which links are worth following. So I'm going to try to go through my Furl archive periodically (at least once a week) and collect things from it into larger posts. This will give me something to post about, restore some of the linky goodness that Furl has drained away from my blog, and present the interesting links I find in a way that may make them more accessible. For this first time, I'm going through everything back to the beginning of July. It'll probably work best divided into separate posts, which should follow soon...
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12:11:47 AM,
Tuesday 15 August 2006
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I just spent maybe an hour, if that, reading my last year's worth of blog posts. Conclusion: I should really post more.
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11:52:27 PM,
Monday 14 August 2006
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While driving today, we saw a couple of trucks from MOL, and were delighted by their adorable alligator logo.
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02:08:04 AM,
Monday 17 July 2006
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I was fascinated by the responses to my hypothetical government-shrinking post, by the way; many thanks to everyone who commented. Still mulling over what I’d say about it myself. I wasn’t really sure where I was going when I asked it, it just seemed like it would be productive to think about for a bit. It’s most immediate effect was to remind me that posting broad, open-ended questions can have very nice effects.
That said, what I’m wondering about right now is a not-so-broad question: what do y‘all know (or think) about ethanol? I vaguely remember that some people thought it wasn’t that great in the past, but it’s come up in a few different places lately as the other practical biofuel besides diesel. After seeing Vinod Khosla’s compelling presentation about it [video, Word doc, more], I’m very interested.
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Why Internet Polls Are A Bad Idea
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02:36:59 AM,
Friday 14 July 2006
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Would it be possible to reorganize the federal government to do 90% of the good it does now for 10% of the cost? Why, or why not?
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03:47:11 AM,
Wednesday 12 July 2006
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For dinner tonight, we had some delicious aloo saag, made by substituting potatoes for paneer in this recipe from a wonderful food blog that Julia found the other day. It’s really easy, and super-tasty: give it a try!
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For my birthday, Julia took me to Cyrus, a restaurant here in Healdsburg, for the best meal I have ever eaten. It was pretty much completely awesome. I lack the words to properly express the deliciousness I've experienced tonight, but I'll link to other Cyrusblogging here and here to give you some idea.
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03:19:26 AM,
Tuesday 4 July 2006
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And as long as I'm mentioning things that are completely great, let's hear it for avocados!
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01:33:37 AM,
Saturday 1 July 2006
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Making croutons at home is awesome. As far as I can tell, the worst case scenario is that they only turn out ten or fifteen times as tasty as the store-bought kind.
Also, that Gnarls Barkley song, "Crazy" [myspace link--will start playing music as soon as you go there], really is damned good.
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12:41:56 AM,
Saturday 1 July 2006
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I don't know whether it's insider trading or not, but this is wicked clever.
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02:06:08 AM,
Friday 23 June 2006
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Happy to have discovered an old Tigers and Strawberries post about two of my very favorite things.
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07:29:47 PM,
Thursday 22 June 2006
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It's back.
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04:46:34 PM,
Wednesday 21 June 2006
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Attention Conservation Notice: five paragraphs of bloviating about programming language design, with no concrete recommendations at the end. Could still be interesting if you're into that kind of thing.
Despite my enlightenment experience a little while back, I still think that the Irritating Superfluous Parentheses in Lisp are, well, irritating and superfluous.
I also understand why they need to be there: the parentheses define the parse tree of the program, and the symbols define the content. If you want to let the meanings of symbols inform the parsing of your program, you give up the interchangeability of code and data: you can’t tell what the structure of a piece of code is until you’ve looked up the symbols in it. So it’s hard to do something like a macro unless you separate syntax and semantics, and keeping syntax and semantics separate means you have to have something at least as irritating and superfluous as Lisp’s parentheses.
This adds to my growing sense that (as I’m told John McCarthy once said) Lisp is a kind of local maximum in programming language quality: not necessarily the best thing possible, but hard to change in any simple way without making it worse. (Of course, strictly speaking, there are details that could be improved in small ways—as Paul Graham’s Arc is intended to do—, but the result will still be fundamentally Lisp).
There are a few other languages that feel like they have this quality: Smalltalk and C come to mind as likely examples. The common thread in all of these cases is simplicity and conceptual integrity. All the best languages have a core essence that’s easy to grasp and that can be unfolded in a variety of ways. They aren’t particularly like each other, which makes sense; after all, you don’t get to simplicity by combining lots of parts of things. But they’re not entirely dissimilar, either, because they’re all fundamentally expressions of the same sort of thing: computation.
The problem for a language designer, then, is not just one of combining all the best features of existing languages. The problem is to find the ideal starting point from which these features, and others, can be evolved with the most simplicity, power, and grace.
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A vision of pure terror.
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05:30:17 PM,
Tuesday 20 June 2006
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While Hobbes is being all fucky, I have a very basic pseudo-BLT that will let you track just m14m.net stuff. (Still no word on when it will be fixed.)
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02:12:52 AM,
Tuesday 20 June 2006
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Hobbes is down. Again. The problem's on their end, not with anything I did. I emailed support at noon yesterday, and the only thing I've gotten back from them is an email at seven this morning that they're "still working" on bringing it back up. I'm very sorry about this. Looking at finding a more reliable place to host everything.
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05:13:54 PM,
Monday 19 June 2006
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Wow, that's beautiful. All it took was two minutes of playing with it to convince me that Bazaar-NG is my new version control system of choice, at least for my own programming projects. There's no more mucking about with repositories! Just:
bzr init bzr addand suddenly everything in your directory is under version control. _
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I think this is my new favorite optical illusion ever. [via Miniver Cheevy]
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08:13:34 PM,
Monday 12 June 2006
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Thinking about polarized politics (as usual). Everyone tends to complain about it, even me, but the possible solutions are often worse than the problem itself.
I do think polarization is a problem. People feel free to completely dismiss and hold in contempt those who disagree with them politically, and to assume the worst of them. Real communication often seems to be impossible.
But the answer isn’t just to dismiss these disagreements as unimportant. If tolerance of different beliefs means anything, it has to mean tolerating them as beliefs—as being about truth, and not just expressions of some kind of personal style. If you make a fetish of tolerance in itself, the result is either to dismiss as scary extremism any belief that sounds too sincere, or to treat the most destructive and monstrous goals as mere superficial differences of opinion.
This is where the Unity08 campaign worries me. They have some very good and reasonable things to say about the problems of polarization, but when I look for their own beliefs, I can’t find anything there. Unity is a good principle, but it’s not enough to run a government on.
...more to say, but not right now. Lunchtime.
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It is Hugh Laurie's birthday! In honor of the occasion, I think we may be forced to watch some Jeeves and Wooster.
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03:46:30 PM,
Sunday 11 June 2006
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Oh, hey, there's going to be a Rails Day 2006! I'm in!
I'm planning to work on something by myself, but on the off chance that someone wants to form a team with me, that'd certainly be cool.
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03:16:12 PM,
Thursday 8 June 2006
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If anyone has any strong opinions on issues in the California primary election, now's the time to lobby me about them: I'll be voting in about eight hours (at around 6pm).
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01:08:45 PM,
Tuesday 6 June 2006
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Julia: Happy birthday, JFK!
Me: Wait, you have the same birthday as JFK?
Julia: No, and it’s May 29th now!
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