Archive for May, 2007
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Today's Earth and Sky discusses a few topics mildly dear to my lunatic heart. They discuss blue moons and time zones.
When there’s a second full moon of a calendar month, it’s come to be called a Blue Moon.
I like the careful use of "it's come to be called," since ...
Posted in Science and Tech, Whim | Comments Off
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
Darrell Swarens has posted a video of the Chicago Sacred Harp Singers' Midwest Convention, held over the weekend. The video shows James Eldridge leading Panting for Heaven. It shows his skill and composure at leading despite his young age. It also shows the beautiful setting of Ida Noyes Hall at ...
Posted in Music, Personal and family | 1 Comment »
Thursday, May 24th, 2007
Powerlabs coming soon! See the our Powerset home page.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Search technology | Comments Off
Thursday, May 17th, 2007
Sitting down to dinner, I said something like today I wrote a program that wrote a program, and its running righ now. Daughter and wife looked slightly alarmed, and dear wife asked if there were any chance that I was working myself out of a job. I said I didn't ...
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Science and Tech, Search technology, Whim | 2 Comments »
Thursday, May 10th, 2007
The most ambiguous place name in the US is Lake Winnipesaukee (map) with 163 official alternatives (according to the USGS and its US Board on Geographic Names), followed by Okefenokee Swamp (105), the Mississippi River (103) and the Potomac River (93).
(Lukas is right, I mean 'place with the most ways ...
Posted in Language, Search technology | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
I've got five freebase.com developer invitations; if you're interested, and are a 'data fanatic,' then get in touch with me.
Posted in Science and Tech, Search technology | 9 Comments »
Monday, May 7th, 2007
Sunday evening, Bess, a number of friends, and I went to hear Calvin professors Kelly Clark (philosophy) and Steve Matheson (biology) speak on "God after Darwin, Dawkins, and Dennet" at the Church of the Servant in Grand Rapids. Kelly has been a friend of Bess's since high school, and Susan ...
Posted in Personal and family, Religion, Science and Tech | 2 Comments »
Monday, May 7th, 2007
My dad loves to vote. He once paid to take a taxi just so he could vote in a local school election. He was very disappointed that he couldn't vote in Michigan's last gubenatorial race, so we worked hard on getting him registered in Kalamazoo township, where his nursing home ...
Posted in Personal and family | Comments Off
Saturday, May 5th, 2007
The uniqueness and immense pragmatic convenience of proper names in our language lie precisely in the fact that they enable us to refer publicly to objects without being forced to raise issues and come to agreement on what descriptive characteristics exactly constitute the identity of the object. They function not ...
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Language, Search technology | Comments Off
Friday, May 4th, 2007
When Mr N.N. dies, one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies.
-- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Language, Search technology | Comments Off
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007
26 × 5 × 19 × 12043 × 216493 × 836256503069278983442067
Posted in Politics and News | Comments Off
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
On the Fasola discussions list (a list for discussions about the history and practice of shape note singing), I wrote the following paragraph about a crooked ‘singing master’ (that is, a 18th or 19th century singing school teacher):
On the other hand, I did recently read (in the Historic ...
Posted in Language, Personal and family | 6 Comments »