Moss's Bloglet

About

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.

Journal

Why Wait?
Why Wait?
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07:40:28 PM, Sunday 13 May 2007

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American Pillar on the left, Veilchenblau on the right
American Pillar on the left Veilchenblau on the right
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06:09:06 PM, Sunday 13 May 2007

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Grapes, Of Course
Grapes, Of Course
Because it would hardly be Sonoma County without them. _
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06:07:48 PM, Sunday 13 May 2007

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Joseph's Coat
Joseph's Coat
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06:07:11 PM, Sunday 13 May 2007

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Bloomield Courage
Bloomield Courage
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06:06:30 PM, Sunday 13 May 2007

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Westerland
Westerland
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06:05:52 PM, Sunday 13 May 2007

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Sutter's Gold
Sutter's Gold
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06:05:11 PM, Sunday 13 May 2007

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Saratoga
Saratoga
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06:04:24 PM, Sunday 13 May 2007

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Flowers!
Flowers!
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06:03:46 PM, Sunday 13 May 2007

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Iris at the rose garden
Iris at the rose garden
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06:03:14 PM, Sunday 13 May 2007

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My mother and I went to the Russian River Rose Company earlier today, and I took some pictures, to follow. _
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06:00:44 PM, Sunday 13 May 2007

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Modern science has done enormous good for the world because it is a crystallization of one essential piece of advice: make decisions based on evidence. This advice seems fairly obvious, but it is too widely ignored. _
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06:42:54 PM, Thursday 3 May 2007

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Have I recommended Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column and blog? Because it's totally great. He's very good at taking down all manner of absurd and insipid things that people offer up as science, while remaining calm, sensible, and extremely funny. The world being what it is, he ends up spending much of his time talking about two subjects: alternative medicine, and science reporting. _
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01:17:19 AM, Wednesday 2 May 2007

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Some arguments are hard to counter because they are right. And some arguments are hard to counter because, even though they are wrong, they are very clever, and it is hard to find the mistake. But some arguments (Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God has to be the classic example) are hard to counter because they appear to come so completely out of nowhere, to be so entirely untethered from reality, that it's hard to know how they are even meant to work as arguments in the first place. The first impulse, when arguing with someone, is to find where their presuppositions differ from your own. But in cases like these, it seems impossible to even guess what their presuppositions could be. _
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07:06:31 PM, Tuesday 1 May 2007

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The Wu-Tang Clan has put 215 mp3s up on their website for you to download. I would recommend doing so. _
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03:13:57 PM, Monday 30 April 2007

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My own opinion of the whole thing aside, The Nation is in pretty sad shape if the worst thing they can find to say about globalization is that it might lead to slightly less concentration of the world's wealth within the U.S. _
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03:23:11 PM, Friday 20 April 2007

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Anyone who cares about language and how it is used would do well to read Geoffrey K. Pullum's paper "Ideology, power, and linguistic theory". (That's a PDF link--HTML version via Google). _
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03:21:42 PM, Thursday 19 April 2007

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Rocks at the beach
Rocks at the beach
We went and had a picnic at the beach today. It was lovely, though also very windy. (This picture didn't seem to go through when I sent it the other day, so I'm trying again.) _
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02:15:05 AM, Tuesday 17 April 2007

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Cliffs
Cliffs
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09:35:39 PM, Sunday 15 April 2007

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Texture 3
Texture 3
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09:34:11 PM, Sunday 15 April 2007

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Wildflowers
Wildflowers
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09:32:45 PM, Sunday 15 April 2007

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Okay, so, I'm emailing the St. John's Forum people. If anyone particularly wants the link to their blog taken down, email me, and I'll pass it on. _
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04:43:12 PM, Thursday 12 April 2007

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Alex Payne: It's also worth mentioning that there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It's great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it's tough. If you're looking to deploy a big web application and you're language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it's worth being frank that this isn't one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow. _
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01:12:12 PM, Thursday 12 April 2007

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WTF? _
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03:47:46 PM, Tuesday 10 April 2007

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Flowers
Flowers
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08:00:38 PM, Sunday 8 April 2007

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Fountain
Fountain
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07:56:32 PM, Sunday 8 April 2007

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Wisteria
Wisteria
Hoping this shows up at all. _
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07:50:07 PM, Sunday 8 April 2007

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Texture 2
Texture 2
It's amazing how consistent the pattern of the cactus is. _
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07:46:14 PM, Sunday 8 April 2007

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Texture 1
Texture 1
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07:42:36 PM, Sunday 8 April 2007

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Wind Blowing
Wind Blowing
The wind seemed to follow me around while I was taking pictures, which made things a bit hard, but in this case I liked the effect. _
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07:38:33 PM, Sunday 8 April 2007

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Poppies
Poppies
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06:18:40 PM, Sunday 8 April 2007

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Becoming a Poppy
Becoming a Poppy
Taken at the Luther Burbank Garden in Santa Rosa _
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06:16:46 PM, Sunday 8 April 2007

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The Filter is something like Pandora, but drawn exclusively from your own music library. It's pretty cool, especially because it can dynamically make playlists for your iPod of music in a certain style. _
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02:11:10 PM, Thursday 5 April 2007

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Here [PDF link] is a letter from a big corporation to the FDA. In it, they ask that their product receive a special exception to the labelling rules, so that they can omit a standard informational label and make nutritional claims that would otherwise be prohibited. Oddly, they are entirely right. [via Ask MetaFilter] _
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12:52:00 AM, Tuesday 3 April 2007

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"Obsessed with putting ink on paper" is an essay by the authors of LilyPond about how they designed their automated music engraving system. It's worth reading even if you're not particularly interested in music notation or programming, in the way that seeing skilled people talk about their crafts always is (see also: English Cut, Mirabai's stenoblogging). [via Simon Willison] _
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02:07:42 PM, Monday 2 April 2007

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This MetaFilter thread, starting off with a link to a fairly bland series of London Times articles, leads to a long and interesting discussion about class in Britain and America. I was happy to see so many people talking about this, since it's something I believe should be talked about more. I was happier still to see it talked about so well: more than once in that thread, I found myself preparing for an annoying cliché, only to find an interesting new perspective. _
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06:56:49 PM, Friday 30 March 2007

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