Archive for May, 2005
Tuesday, May 31st, 2005
It appears that the Washington Post is confirming that Mark Felt was Deep Throat. The Watergate hearings and Nixon's resignation dominated the news the summer between high school and college for me, so Watergate coverage always has a special coming of age tinge for me.
For some reason--probably because I've ...
Posted in Politics and News | Comments Off
Sunday, May 29th, 2005
So Donald Trump has started himself a university, and Roger Schank, who headed the Institute for the Learning Sciences when I was a grad student at Northwestern, is the Chief Learning Officer.
Roger writes an "occasional column" called "Educational Outrage. He talks about the press reaction to some comments he made ...
Posted in Education | 3 Comments »
Saturday, May 28th, 2005
Just finished reading--for the first time--Robert Heinlein's Have Space Suit, Will Travel. It has the perfect Heinlein Golden Age of SF quote: I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls.
Posted in Whim | Comments Off
Friday, May 27th, 2005
Morse Code Music by David Tulga
Posted in Language, Music, Science and Tech | Comments Off
Monday, May 23rd, 2005
Prewar Findings Worried Analysts (reg. required)
More evidence that Bush et al. cooked the evidence for WMD in Iraq:
...Bush said in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address that Hussein was working to obtain "significant quantities" of uranium from Africa, a conclusion the president attributed to British intelligence and ...
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Sunday, May 22nd, 2005
I don't like President Bush much, but he did give a good speech at Calvin: "Remarks by the President at Calvin College Commencement:"
As the Class of 2005 goes out into the world, I ask you to embrace this tradition of service and help set an example for all Americans. As ...
Posted in Politics and News, Religion | Comments Off
Sunday, May 22nd, 2005
I posted this note to the fasola.org mailing list (Sacred Harp singing discussions):
Hello all,
I did a frequency analysis of the songs led as either the opening, or
the closing, hymn during the 222 singings reported in the 2004 minutes
book.
Here are the songs most frequently led as an opening song (five or
more ...
Posted in Music, Networks | Comments Off
Friday, May 20th, 2005
Physcists and sociologists don't cite each other much while doing social network research.
Posted in Networks | Comments Off
Tuesday, May 17th, 2005
Was there political pressure placed by the Republicans to reward "Red" states, and punish "Blue" states during the recent round of base closings, as some have said?
Perhaps some, as indicated by the chart above. Click on the chart for a bigger picture. Number of electoral votes accounts for about ...
Posted in Politics and News | Comments Off
Monday, May 16th, 2005
I'm getting hundreds of spam emails in German today -- it looks like this started in general about a year ago. I'm surprised the spam filter in Gmail isn't catching them.
They pretty much all start 'Lese sebst:' followed by a URL.
Anyone else getting these suddenly?
Update I guess it is ...
Posted in Science and Tech | Comments Off
Saturday, May 14th, 2005
I created a map of 2004 Sacred Harp Singings. Enjoy!
Posted in Music, Networks | Comments Off
Saturday, May 14th, 2005
Tim Converse participated in a search panel that turned ugly. Tim thought no one was taking picture, but he was wrong.
Posted in Whim | Comments Off
Monday, May 9th, 2005
U.S. security devices at ports to be replaced (via robotwisdom).
After spending more than $4.5 billion on screening devices to monitor ports, borders, airports, mail and the air, the U.S. government is moving to replace or alter much of the antiterrorism equipment, concluding that it is ineffective, unreliable or too expensive ...
Posted in Science and Tech | Comments Off
Friday, May 6th, 2005
Here's the first composition I've ever done: an arrangement of Amazing Grace, as a Midi file, as a PDF file. These were created using the cool ABC Convert-a-matic tool.
Update: made a minor change to the tune.
Posted in Music, Whim | Comments Off
Friday, May 6th, 2005
Janis Karpinski has been demoted from brigadier general to colonel. She is the person who was in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison when the scandalous behavior there occurred. Also, the article says: The Senate Armed Services Committee has said it intends to hold hearings soon to assess whether ...
Posted in Politics and News | Comments Off
Friday, May 6th, 2005
I made a correction or two and reformatted my translation of Borges's The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.
The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the
universe does not, however, dissuade us from planning human
schemes, even though we know they must be provisional.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Language, Science and Tech | Comments Off
Friday, May 6th, 2005
The NSF just announced the Documenting Endangered Languages project -- $4.4 million dollars to document about 70 languages before they go extinct, and, perhaps, to prevent their extinction.
The Ethnologue, probably the single best reference on the demographics of the world's languages, lists 516 nearly extinct languages., including 170 in ...
Posted in Language | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005
According to this Reuters article, the House and Senate have agreed to spend an additional 82 billion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the total to around $300 billion.
According to my reckoning, that's over $5,500 for every man, woman and child in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005
Tim Bray writes about how much he hates 'solution' as marketing speak. Unfortunately, perhaps, even Google is providing solutions.
Posted in Whim | 1 Comment »
Sunday, May 1st, 2005
From a secret Downing Street memo written in July, 2002 (eight months before the war began):
The Foreign Secretary [Jack Straw] said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not ...
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