craigslist: ken-rockwell-obssessed husband

someone found this in craigslist. very funny. [ken rockwell. i do read some of his reviews, but rarely buy only on his recommendation. sometimes he is way over the top, and sloppy.]

    Ken Rockwell-Obsessed Husband (North York)
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    [...]

    One gently-used caucasian male. 36 years-old. Slightly defective.
    Remembers the names of Ken Rockwell's kids but not our own. Constantly
    buying high-end photo gear then selling it on craigslist the second
    Canon or Nikon releases something new. Complains endlessly about
    lowballers, tire-kickers and pixel peepers. Sold car to buy a Leica body
    and now wants to mortage house to buy lenses, all at Ken Rockwell's
    insistence. Maybe you can reprogram him. I have no time because I have
    to cart our kids around on the TTC and work two jobs while while he
    fiddles with film and DSLR to achieve super-saturated highlights.

    Reasonable offers accepted: Food, clothing, 1992 Subaru Justy. Offers of
    photo equipment will promptly be deleted! Lowball kickers are welcome! A
    swift one in the nuts will do him some good.

       * Location: North York
       * it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other
         commercial interests

    PostingID: 1239135682

paypal scam via craigslist

Subject: mint lowepro computrekker plus AW - $175 (toronto)
From: annemary
Date: May 21, 2009 12:28:08 PM EDT

Thanks for the post...I am really interested in buying this item but I am not in state for now I'm in Germany for a conference meeting...Am buying this item for my company agent located west africa....I will add $100.00 USD for the shipping cost...Making $275.00 USD... I will make the payment through my PayPal account cos is very secure and easy to receive money.....Kindly send me your PayPal email so that i can send the payment... Hope i will read from u again here soon..

this is a blatant scam of course. i did not ask for $100 for shipping, because i am not planning to ship it. the paypal payment is not very secure; credit card payments can be reversed. see paypal chargeback faq.

reflection [haiku]

wet tulips -
looking in a drop
for reflection.

[oz/2009. all rights reserved.]

frozen [haiku]

spring thaw -
in a rushing stream
frozen heart.

[oz/2009. all rights reserved.]
sometimes, what froze during the dark, cold days of winter cannot be thawed.

birch and starling [haiku]

dying birch -
one starling on a branch
now two.

[oz/2008. all rights reserved.]

recent notes, tweets and quotes

eren says [and clearly he has been watching too much kids tv and superhero cartoons]

let's face it... in the future, world may be ruled by birdbrains...

overheard in a bday party:

what manners? this is maple pie!

tweet #2858933749: we should be able to tweet straight into wikipedia so that some gems of our tweet-ergo-sum [or maybe sum-ergo-tweet] can be preserved....

"land of the goodebump and the white knuckle" no, not wallstreet... not the average north american bedroom... just mazda's imaginary world.

anonymous on ruby/rails:

it sucks mightily!

toronto star frontpage reads: "politicians chase naked truth" [leaving aside the comic mental image, which two words don't go together?]

I think I overheard someone say "we require spontaneity" ... uhh.

we arm ourselves with ideologies. -- wendy kaminer

thought of the day: familiarity invites carelessness. (familiarity breeds things too but i think this is more important)

flustered dad [me] in need of a paper towel: please bring me a ... a... child: what? an elephant?

adobe "air" ... hmm one thing to learn from car companies: choosing less dumb names.

I wonder what CNN would be like tweeting. repeating the same sniplets of "news" endlessly. or change the word order to keep it "fresh".

situation room: wow it is as dull as I remember it from the bush days. evidently, an increase in the IQ of the administration has had no positive effect on CNN talkies.

need some grounding... phew the C compiler still works! ran out to find a bookstore... where is russell? ooo... house and philosophy!

retweeting redux:. if you like tom u probably will like geoff. here Is a 15-day trial subscription...

thought of the day: if a choice is too easy, it probably isn't real. [some hard choices are not real either.]

correct math considered harmful: you are the 9,672,535,834th visitor to see this lucky banner. congratulations, you won!

plato in tech age: commentators should be required to spend a year hacking and living in the technology they want to comment on...

i wish there was an icon or some onomatopoeia that would accurately reflect a deep sigh, tightened lips, and exasperation. siiighooghummm?

shirky's coverage of linux, from what I have skimmed, is depressingly unoriginal. sigh I will have to read here comes everybody" more fully...

wow the kid can actually explain how fast lucky luke has to be to draw his revolver faster than his shadow!

have picma micron 05mm with archival ink, will travel...

thought of the day

if history repeats, by definition we did not learn from it, and each iteration costs more. [oz/0309]

recent notes, quotes and tweets

AIG... is the sound of brain matter squished underfoot...

when there is nothing to do, it's a waste of electricity to keep the mind running. -- Andre Kukla [mental traps]

I would like originality and repeat scores on my tweets. maybe numbering, indexing and concordance as well. (pat. pend)

grrrr bad enough we had to live with stupid watered-down "sci-fi" for years. now syfy? is that the sound u get when ectoplasmic goo drips?

quoth graydon hoare:

facebook users are insane. it's a web page. full of people's vague mutterings and crude party photos. get a grip.

new journalism: i wish it would be called something else, like journalism-the-next-generation (jtng)...

thought of the day: sun bleaches anything it touches, including thoughts.

so cool to find a quote i had noted from a broderick essay come back to me via my email sig line someone responded to four (!) years later:

bloat is the enemy of promise. sadly, like super-sized servings of greasy junk food, bloat sells. -- damien broderick

deleted ambiance app from my iphone. latest edition requires signup/login for sounds to put you to sleep and you have to pay for the priviledge. just what I need: another login in yet another opportunistic web service. not sure if sleeping is the expected result or the existing condition.

what would world be like without omelettes?

facebook vs twitter: re-structuring vs structuring... closed to open vs open to well... open. perennial battle of world-building. alas, twitter has a foundation made of balsa wood, bale wire and duct tape, so we'll see how easy it is to build a structure on.

thought for the morning... heraclitus was wrong: u can bathe in the same river twice. you just have to swim damned fast to catch it again.

thought of the day: when all else fails, pay attention!

nothing like an old-fashioned shave: meditation under cold steel.

readings on photography for early spring, part one

portraiture... one of the finest books on portraiture is now out of print, alas. i have studied every image in it countless times since 2000... just great portraits with short notes on the process of making the images, composition, positioning the sitter etc.

jane bown, faces

closeup... this one is a photographer scientist's exploration of extraordinary things around her, from microscopic to larger. just amazing and eye-opening work, with short, sometimes lyrical introductions to out-of-this world [yet of this world] images.

felice frankel and george whitesides, on the surface of things: images of the extraordinary in science

light... for a long time i searched for a really good book on photographing lighting that covered everything, from product to portrait. this book happens to be an indispensable reference. a lot of text, a lot of technical detail, but i think well worth the effort if one is interested in best uses of light.

fil hunter, steven biver, paul fuqua, light - science & magic: an introduction to photographic lighting

composition and design ... this one is one of the better books on the topic. covers everything from gestalt perception, dynamic tension, to graphic and photographic design elements to process. i especially like the case studies, various images made and their issues, leading to the one image that has all the right ingredients.

michael freeman, the photographer's eye: composition and design for better digital photos

law of indecision

i recently discovered this:

oz's law of indecision: when enough indecision accumulates, it collapses into a dwarf decision.

[march 2009]

recently noted quotes

must... have... sushi! - eren yigit [age 10]

ufs must die. -- casper dik

will true love conquer all? not in my show! -- joker

when in doubt, eat broccoli -- liz pearson and mairlyn smith [ultimate foods]

the wonderful thing about science is that it doesn't ask for your faith, it just asks for your eyes. -- xkcd [what about the brain?]

recently deleted iphone apps

two pieces of "free" ad-supported software deleted from my iphone: movies (flixter), and i.tv. thank you for playing. currently undecided on the movies replacement, not an important app. i.tv was quite easy to replace: napkin studio's what's on is a [says so from the start] ad-free tv guide. it has a somewhat strange initial setup sequence, but once configured, quite nice and smooth. thanks guys.

all i want

first noted quote of the new year... john shaw, from the intro to his photoshop cs3 ebook [review]:

All I want to do is make a good image. I don’t want to make a composite picture by taking a tree from one photo, a wolf from another, those humpback whales from a third, and putting all these parts into a shot of the Grand Canyon.

perl

As I progressed through the project -- as my shell surpassed 1,000 lines and made its way towards 10,000 -- I was learning of a painful truth about Perl that many others had discovered before me: that it is an undesigned dung heap of a language entirely inappropriate for software in-the-large. -- bryan cantrill

[on a related note, see perl as voodoo. thanks ivo.]

storm [haiku]

snow storm -
unblinking, she holds
my gaze.

[oz/2008. all rights reserved.]

idiotic comment of the month

mr harper, on his potential departure from power:

the opposition is attempting to impose this deal without your say, without your consent, and without your vote.

those of us who have lived in countries that produce minority and coalition governments with great regularity should either find a nearby wall to relieve the strain on our heads, or laugh uproariously in disbelief. it is not clear what part of the recent election results mr harper does not understand: his minority part, the opposition having received the majority of the votes, or that coalitions can and should be formed when a governing party is too arrogant and/or too stupid to do its job properly.

toronto sun and canadian democracy

today's toronto sun headline screams: no! no! no! this must not be allowed to happen. [those who studied media are excused for thinking that this is a headline from a newspaper in chilean dictatorship years, and the newspaper is el mercurio] toronto sun should stuff it. this is exactly what is allowed to happen in canadian democracy, where majority of canadians have elected people who can and should use their position to bring change when needed, including a re-structure of governance. goodbye to mister harper, whose arrogance and weak¹ intellect is the cause of unnecessary turmoil. to quote david mamet [bambi vs godzilla]

the unfortunate and inevitable concomitant of "bring it on" is "how do you like it now?"

¹an intellect which has ideology as its primary source of nourishment is weak by definition.

today's dropped iphone app: WeatherEye

nice looking app. in its info page, in all caps, it claims it is FREE. nowhere in its info page does it mention that it is ad-supported. nowhere does it mention that it will want to know your sex and birthdate for better ad placement. yet another bit of cybercrud that wasted my bandwidth, and is now deleted from my iphone.

my eyeballs are very expensive. ask permission before trying to capture them, or go to hell.

gas pump [haiku]

autumn dawn -
old gas pump
serving dewdrops.

[oz/2008. all rights reserved.]

recently noted quotes

we see what we know until we know who we are, then we see what we feel. -- ernst haas.

there is no unconditional love. there is unconditional need. -- gregory house

It's not house-trained. It probably won't work. Don't try and use this release for anything useful. We have made every effort to ensure that all bits in this package are either 0 or 1. However, these bits may not be in the correct order and proportion. -- mdma readme

Anyone found laughing at the code will be shot at dawn. -- mdma readme

there is a technical term for this: it is called being really really stupid. -- fred whiteside [no, he really is not talking about republican politics and strategies.]

if they respond to spam, sarah palin may look reasonable. -- anon

Before citing any statistic, you should have a clear understanding of what that figure is measuring, who calculated it, and how. -- timothy b. lee [piracy statistics and the importance of journalistic skepticism]

Books are souvenirs that hold ideas. Ideas are free. If no one knows about your idea, you fail. If your idea doesn’t spread, you fail. If your idea spreads but no one wants to own the souvenir edition, you fail. -- seth godin [10 questions for seth godin]

inertia is apparently more powerful than creative intelligence. -- anon

autumn buried [haiku]

autumn buried -
color of leaves
in afternoon snow.

[oz/2008. all rights reserved]

atwood on harper

from a letter by margaret atwood on arts, creativity, and stephen harper:

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily. Of course, you can always get some tame artists to design the uniforms and flags and the documentary about you, and so forth - the only kind of art you might need - but individual voices must be silenced, because there shall be only One Voice: Our Master's Voice. Maybe that's why Mr. Harper began by shutting down funding for our artists abroad. He didn't like the competition for media space.

quote of the day

republicans at one time heard to have said:

We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself. We believe in the free market as the best tool to sustained prosperity and opportunity for all.

[found in david brin's blog]

recently noted quotes

true intelligence is incompatible with the fascist impulse. -- spider robinson

it is never the size, it is always the technology! -- eren yigit [10yrs old]

passwords come from down deep. -- jack reacher

please fasten your seatbelts: we are about to encounter contradictions. the subject is love, and things may get bumpy. -- laura kipnis [against love]

We'd also like to take an opportunity to remind you that one query is sufficient and multiple queries regarding the same issue make the Magic Donkey cry. -- flickr help mail

No humans were involved in the creation of this email. -- flickr help mail [good to see that flicker was able to employ enough many typing monkeys to eventually generate this fascinating email. alas the same email did not contain any important lines from shakespeare.]

almost dying changes nothing. dying changes everything -- house

dad is like a rubik's cube. you have to twist and turn him to figure him out. -- eren yigit

only two things you ignore: things that aren't important and things you wish weren't important and wishing never works. -- private investigator [house]

time for a change

just as i was celebrating the release of nikon d700, and saving money, canon comes up with 5D mark II, and blows me away. twice d700, and costs less.
shopping cart:

• Canon 5d mk II
• Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro
• Canon EF 70-200mm f4.0L IS USM
• Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L II USM
• Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM

update: i specified 16-35 strictly for uses on architecture and interior, thinking it may have less distortion than 17-40 f/4. looking at some of the reviews, i am not so sure anymore. the price difference is huge, i don't care for speed, and 17-40 distortion is not much worse than 16-35.

quote of the day

from A C Grayling's guardian column road to nowhere:

Secularists say, "believe whatever nonsense you want, but keep it to yourself and act responsibly". The Brian-sandalistas say, "believe what we want you to believe and act as we say". The psychopaths among them say, "believe what we want you to believe and act as we say or we will kill you".

brian-sandalista: see life of brian

recently noted quotes

morning is a portal to misery and school! -- eren yigit

my memory is great but seems to be very short these days. -- emily calkin

excuse me, I've just got to go and unclench my teeth. -- prose [tom duff]

gamma is not a relative on your mother's side -- thom hogan

it is always easier to create deviations from normal color than it is to create normal color from deviated colors. -- thom hogan

you know when you run out of questions, you don't just run out of answers, you run out of hope. -- thirteen [house, m.d.]

i could not find any red tape. -- anonymous sensei [jccc taikai, 2008]

the meat is the whole deal. are you getting the picture? -- terry bisson

when faith stands trial, its appeals must go to the court of reason --austin dacey [secular conscience]

it is the special beauty of faith, that, like the fabled phoenix, it draws its life from the flames that destroy it. It flies as it dies. -- thomas m. disch [the word of god]

pulse

three images from a recent photo project.all images copyright ozan s. yigit.
see also: silentrunning photostream

shards [haiku]

evening train -
shards of sunset
cut my sleep.

[oz/2008]

tv shows and reality: a quote

abby: i am good mcgee, but i cannot work miracles. this is impossible. i told you once, i told you a thousand times -
mcgee: there is no substitute for quality source imagery, i know.

[finally a show that does not try to screw with the information theory, insult the audience, and try to extract 10mp worth of information from a crude 1mp cell-phone image... CSI fantasy shows should get a clue, and go back to something resembling science. oh wait, narrative brain damage is irreversible...]

leica M8 in iraq

a working photographer has to read michael kamber's detailed field review of leica m8. if that does not deliver the swift, smarting kick leica needs, i do not know what will.

I have found the Leica M8 to be unreliable, poorly designed, and to deliver substandard results in most of the situations in which I have used it. I can’t think of any camera--or for that matter any electronic device I have recently used--that so thoroughly fails to live up to its potential and its heritage.

[some of us have spotted a few of the design issues without having to make a living out of it, or paying the outrageous sums of money required, thank goodness...]

a zen poem

the moon's the same old moon,
the flowers exactly as they were,
yet i've become the thingness
of all the things i see!

bunan (1602-72)

[found in zen poetry: let the spring breeze enter edited and translated by lucien stryk and takashi ikemoto]

recently noted quotes

yeah, don't give me any ideas. i am getting too farfetched! -- eren yigit [age 10]

there is no pause button on reality. -- eren yigit [a remarkable observation that gives difficulty to many religious fanatics and republicans]

i love the word "smear"... -- laura calder [french food at home]

The life of a contrarian is inherently frustrating. Whenever you point out the flaws in a particular dogmatic position, there is a tediously-predictable, reflex reaction that you must be a dogmatist, for the opposite extreme. -- david brin [Airline deterioration, the new elite, levees and clkimate deniers]

Thought, without the data on which to structure that thought, leads nowhere. -- victor stanger [has science found god?]

I bought it because I'm a sucker for finishing a series. DON'T DO IT. Put the mouse down and walk away. Do NOT check that box. -- from a review of stross's "clan corporate" at amazon [we get reviews]

[...] but I trust my family jewels only to Linux. -- donald knuth [interview with knuth]

hating bit fields in c structs. dat shit nevah werkz -- peter honeyman [tweet]

finding a needle in a haystack isn't hard when every straw is computerized. -- dexter

We need to kick the bishops out of the House of Lords, ban the Police and judiciary from taking donations from religious organizations, and get religion out of politics by any means necessary. -- charlie stross [when is a cult not a cult?]

i do not even know what a square looks like. i operate from a circle. -- dolores pitcher

fear is a frighteningly effective sales pitch. -- arianna huffington [right is wrong]

twee ... splat

this morning's fun task: feeding twitterrific to appzapper.

i have all but given up on twitter; a relatively interesting idea badly let down by inexperience and hyped-up, quick-and-neat frameworks that let you do well in boring situations, sell a rack-full of poorly written books, but cannot scale to the real world. talking about books: here is another possibly useful book idea that should be titled (you guessed it) twitterrible...

[related reading: release it!: design and deploy production-ready software]

encounter [haiku]

spring flies -
a delicate encounter
all blacked out.

[oz/2008]

[black flies are out in full force in new brunswick. they are in my ears, nose, eyes, viewfinder, hands. they bite. thoughtful, well composed photography is not to be had...]

quote of the day [on content, or lack thereof]

If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam? -- charlie stross [why your internet experience is slow]

a haiku

first plum blossom
lands on grass --
sudden sword.

[copyright ozan s. yigit, 2008]

cover design of the day

one of the best cover designs i have come across this month.
margaret mcmillan, uses and abuses of history [this is just about the cover. i do not know anything about the author or this particular book.]

recently noted quotes

i would rather eat tomatoes than listen to this. -- eren yigit [in response to kelly pickler's singing about red shoes. eren really dislikes tomatoes]

design with skepticism, and you will achieve resilience. -- michael t. nygard [release it! design and deploy production-ready software. - yes, this book is really very good.]

some people take pictures, i find them. -- jane bown [unknown bown]

who wants to go through life not ever singing? -- roger ebert [review of woody allen's everyone says i love you]

here are people we don't care about, doing things they do not understand, in a movie without any rules. triple play. -- roger ebert [review of "an american warewolf in paris"]

based on the evidence, the bible isn't scripture. it's a Rorschach test. -- solomon short

dtrace is the MRI of software. -- gil hauer

As long as ads are aimed at children, as long as luxury SUVs are presented as necessary, as long as the difference between "want" and "need" is blurred on purpose, I'll think of advertising as immoral. -- fraxas [on advertising]

People who brandish naturalistic principles at us are usually up to mischief. -- peter medawar [the future of man]

Philosophically, I believe the designer's goal involves making decisions for the user. If the decisions are good, it's a good design and the user is content. I do not believe it's the designer's goal to defer everything to the user. As a bonus, making decisions early tends to simplify the design. -- rob pike [9fans mailing list]

faith is the invisible means of support for a belief when reasons fall out from under it. -- austin dacey

unfortunately, consulting entrails has never been a reliable guide to truth, even when those entrails are your own. -- austin dacey [the secular conscience]

I DISLIKE YOU! -- anonymous canadian baseball fan [against detroit tigers pitcher]

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. -- Microsoft .NET Framework [another amusing and informative manifestation of enterprise-level public debugging infrastructure]

dealing with fatuous rhetoric

mike harding [hi x-boss!] at sun alumni blogs pointed to ethan at urbanspoon and made my day. do latte drinkers really vote for obama?

We could just assume all trust fund babies are sipping latte at Starbucks and refer to figure 1, but that wouldn't serve the interests of science. Instead, let's assume that trust fund babies have one thing in common, money, and look at how wealth stacks against voting habits.

looking for a notebook app

i have been looking for a good mac notebook applicaton for a long time. i have a set of requirements that may seem quite idiosyncratic; here are a few of them:

• basic wiki/blog/etc. functionality [esp. markdown et al support] for simple structured writing [mac user, blogger]
• emacs-grade editing capability for heavy lifting [oldtimer, unix hack]
• good image support [photographer]
• sketching, scribbling [designer, illustrator]
• good indexing [eg. see circus ponies notebook], regex search [author]
• good layout support [author]
• organizational tools for content

clearly i do not need just a notebook; i need a strange hybrid. so far, i like circus ponies notebook as a comfortable compromise, though its lack of direct blogging support is forcing me to look for other tools. [my blog is just one of my notebooks, structured slightly better for public display.] i initially wrote this entry as a test from macjournal. [the result did not display correctly, alas; it was fixed using appzapper...]

[if any readers of this blog have some suggestions, other than write the app yourself, i would appreciate them]

[update: i have circus ponies notebook, and voodoopad pro now. they are both reasonable tools, with some nice ideas. on the other hand, neither tool impresses me all that much.]

daily rotfl: iso and ooxml

jason matusow of microsoft wrote:

I could make a very compelling argument that Open XML has done more to revive the reputation of international standards than any other standard before it.

i doubt such an argument can be made anywhere except in warm fantasies of those oblivious to decades of international standards work. a reasonable reading of the events, arguments and objections around this particular "standard" suggests iso's reputation, such as it was since the heady days of iso/osi, is worse off than before; there has been significant complaints that microsoft, consistent with its history of monopolistic aggressiveness, has abused the standards fasttrack process to push out a specification that it can manipulate to compete against a well-specified, open iso standard it does not like. [canada, i am proud to say, voted against this faux-standard precisely because of this]

being a microsoft toady is not the kind of reputation iso needs.

good books in the pile

an incomplete list of books from 07-08 i found entertaining, essential, edifying, exciting and sometimes exceptional.

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction Of The Human Mind

Predictably Irrational [i expect everyone knows dr. ariely by now...]

logolounge 4 [a logo designer has to keep up with these logo lounge collections. alas, the content is less innovative than one may expect.]

collective intelligence [very interesting book with some cool algorithms, and in python. sort of book numb3rs might publish...]

Refactoring to Patterns

Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter [masayuki miyata's paper cuts [kiri-e] make this book possibly the best edition out there. i wish it was in bigger format]

Venus on the Half-Shell and Others

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability [second edition.]

Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights That Made the Modern Western World

Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life

Here Comes Everybody [hmm, i know some people called this a masterpiece, but i reserve that word for very, very special books. my initial impression is that this is a good solid piece of work, but not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination.]

Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

The Age of American Unreason [robert fulford of national post called her a "demi intellectual" and wrote a lazy, lip-smacking critique of sorts, as befitting his paper: "To satisfy Jacoby, it's not enough to exhibit intelligence. It's necessary also to use that intelligence properly, to develop views closely resembling hers." first part of the sentence is priceless, never mind its degeneration into a slur afterwards.]

Dark Integers and Other Stories

Calendrical Calculations (3rd ed)

Brasyl

Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting [one of the most informative books on photographic lighting i have ever found.]

Influences: A Lexicon of Contemporary Graphic Design Practice

Silver Palate Cookbook 25th Anniversary Edition [you just have to have it. many years ago i discarded an early edition, now have it back with better photography...]

How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

Cosmic Motors: Spaceships, Cars & Pilots of Another Galaxy

Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism

Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters [one of the best in this topic]

Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars

Statistics as Principled Argument [MAGIC: magnitude, articulation, generality, interestingness, and credibility. required reading.]

Scientists Confront Creationism [insert picture of fish in a barrel]

[list extracted from my amazon [ca] and chapters orders, but all pointers on this blog are directed to barnes and noble [us]]

ventus available online with CC license

one of my favorite authors, karl schroeder just released ventus under a creative common license. [eg. pdf] see karl's site [recently redesigned] for different download formats.

Ventus is a novel of information apocalypse set in the far future. For a thousand years the sovereign Winds have maintained the delicate ecological balance of the terraformed planet Ventus. Now an alien force threatens to wrest control of the terraforming system away from the Winds...

Jordan Mason, a young tradesman, is thrust into the midst of an ancient galactic conflict when he becomes the only human on Ventus who can locate the source of the alien threat. But will he side with the Winds, who have brutally suppressed technological development among the human colonists of Ventus? Or will he throw in his lot with an entity that may be planning to remake Ventus in its own, deathly image? Ventus incorporates ideas about nanotechnology, terraforming, and information theory in an epic tale of war, tragic love, betrayal and transcendence.

a photographer's notes: images on facebook

if you care about copyrights, especially your rights on your images, you may want to keep them away from facebook.
first their stuff:

No Site Content may be modified, copied, distributed, framed, reproduced, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted, transmitted, or sold in any form or by any means, in whole or in part, without the Company's prior written permission, except that the foregoing does not apply to your own User Content (as defined below) that you legally post on the Site.

now your stuff:

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plain and clear. if you are a serious photographer, your images do not belong in facebook.

[group link: My photos are MINE! NOT Facebook's! Change the Terms and conditions!. so far as i can tell, this group was formed in 2007, and has amassed 87164 members. facebook has not changed its terms and conditions, and i doubt it will.]

recently noted quotes

lock-ins are never good for customers: a business that isn't confident that it can keep your business by providing the best product at the best price is a business that isn't planning on providing the best product at the best price. -- cory doctorow [in defense of complaining]

look, she is nuts, but we cannot give her 10ccs of atheism and send her home. -- tal [house, m.d.]

Don't you have paint to watch dry? -- cosma shalizi

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. —- marshall mcluhan

This page was last updated in 1984 by a gifted psychic who foresaw all that is described here. -- mr bunny's hutch

ah, complexity: the mother of all consulting fees! -- marco tabini

you may have an invisible opponent, but you still have to see him. -- sandra jorgenson [iaido 5th dan sensei, mu mon kai]

i paid a life to get these parents. [because i pay a lot more, i get better parents] -- eren yigit [age 9]

properly implementing a singleton requires a number of the tricks shown earlier. -- the ruby programming language

people don't change. for example, i will keep repeating: people don't change! -- house [house, m.d.]

cyborg: do you even have opposable thumbs?
beastboy: most of the time! -- teen titans [fourth season]

why is the notion of a fundamentalist comedian funny, or at least quite odd? -- john allen paulos [irreligion]

the incongruity necessary for appreciating humor is only recognizable with an open mind and fresh perspective. -- john allen paulos [irreligion]

people want interesting clutter. people want clutter that is on sale. -- matthew powell

left to its own devices, the mind runs off in random directions as synapses connect to others that happen to be in the neighborhood. -- jack hart [a writer's coach]

Dear site operators: Here's a quarter, go buy a terabyte from Amazon S3 and stop complaining. -- cory doctorow [17 tips for getting bloggers to write about you]

autosave failed ... autosave failed ...

google's blogger, a year or two later: utterly boring layouts and templates. unbearably mediocre editing front-end. endless "autosave" failures. same sorry software, different day.

[addendum: yes i know i can take my blog elsewhere, but quietely walking away is not good enough. i want google to be informed. i want it to know that blogger is mediocre, and should be improved. google did not get to where it is by being the second or third best.]

[april update: at least one blog entry become entirely un-savable in draft form. several other drafts have had intermittent autosave failures. this is gone from bad to disgusting.]

daily rotfl

yet again pz myers is making fun of fishes in a barrel, er, creationists. [a creationist own goal?]

Creationist: There are no transitional whale fossils!

Scientist: Oh, dear, really? That's terrible! We should teach the students about that, don't you think?

Creationist: Yes, we should. That information must go into the science standards for our state.

Scientist: I quite agree. When we mandate that our teachers must offer instruction in the details of whale transitional fossils, the gaps will be so obvious.

Creationist: Good. Let's insert, "Teachers will discuss the nature of evolutionary transitions, emphasizing the kinds of evidence needed to support claims that land animals evolved into whales, and that cats give birth to dogs."

Scientist: Well, as a compromise, let's leave out the bit about cats and dogs, and we'll have to clean up and standardize the language in committee, but let's do it. The committee might even make this broader, pushing for discussion of all kinds of transitional fossils, which, of course, are absent. Boy, you sure got me over a barrel, forcing me to include discussion of an evolutionary flaw in our public schools. I hope you aren't going to continue to outwit me with your Mastery of Science.

Creationist: <preening smugly> Ha ha, our cunning plan is working!

dns and censorship

a judge orders dynadot to

prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.

hm. until we get a domain name system that can withstand arbitrary attempts of censorship and manipulation, click this link: wikileaks

blue note needs java and linux

i try to track all rudy van gelder remastered blue note jazz. this used to be somewhat easier; rvg had its own section in bluenote. it is now redesigned, and more difficult to navigate even when not throwing up after a simple click. how embarrassing for such a legendary label...

Exception Details:
System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format.

Source Error:
Line 40: for (int i = 0; i < b1.Items.Rows.Count; i++)
Line 41: {
Line 42     if (Convert.ToInt32(b1.Items.Rows[i]["Width"]) < 433)
                   b1.Items.Rows[i].Delete();
Line 43: }
Line 44: b1.Items.AcceptChanges();

Source File: e:\inetpub\wwwroot\LabelSites\BlueNote\
bluenote.com\www\CatalogArtistReleases.aspx.cs    Line: 42

prophet and wikipedia

nytimes reports on an attempt to censor a medieval image of prophet muhammad in wikipedia. evidently, no amount of inhumanity or insanity [such as beheadings, suicide bombings] can arouse enough islamic sensitivity to put together a petition [not that petitions would ever work against insanity] but a medieval image in wikipedia can. too bad the painter is already dead...

quote of the day

So in light of the issue’s new prominence and with a desire to improve the mental hygiene of others, I would just like to say that Intelligent Design is a really, really bad idea -- scientifically, politically, and theologically. I say this as a dedicated conservative, who has on many occasions defended and espoused religion and religious conservatism. I also say it as a professional molecular biologist, who has worked daily (or at least week-daily) for years with biological problems to which the theory of evolution has contributed significant understanding -- and to which Intelligent Design is incapable of contributing any understanding at all. -- mac johnson [intelligent design and other dumb ideas]

late resolutions for 2008

• touched: i will never buy any new electronic gadget without a reasonable touch interface. thanks to apple, the year of the teeny buttons, plastic styli, undergrad-grade interfaces and poor navigation are gone. [sad observation: palm is still producing things for year 2000. see centro.]
• right of ownership: i will rip every single cd in my cd library in three different ways: lame mp3, aac, and ogg, and i will encourage and provide assistance to anyone with a cd collection to do the same to their own library.
• food fight: every package of food that i find in my storeroom that has any form of tropical oil [such as palm oil] regardless of how many "healthy grains" claims it may have, will go in the garbage. companies that produce this crap [such as orville redenbacher] and pretend you are getting something healthy will be boycotted.
• environmental protection: i will do everything within my power as a canadian citizen to keep majority [preferably even a minority] government from the reach of harper and his drooling toadies.
• squeezed: i will write ten thousand lines of python. a portion of that will be rewriting others' java, perl and ruby code.
• overbooked: i will finally clean up my library, and get rid of anything i have not looked at in the last five years. [this is going to be very difficult. what am i to do with my copy of weissmann's lisp 1.5?]
• wikiful: i will contribute to at least ten wikipedia entries. [i had also once promised that i would contribute 100 images to wikimedia; i am still working on that one...]
• fox hunt: i will remove every copy of firefox, iceweasel and any other related animal from all my systems. i am sick and tired of of this bloated, resource gobbling piece of cyberblob eating up my systems.
• martial way: i will finally learn aikido. [i am minutes away from aikido yoshinkai canada where kimeda sensei teaches.]
• imagenation: i will make 2000 good [keeper] images, and display ten of them at a nearby starbucks. [see photographic goals]

recently noted quotes

to clarify, add detail. -- edward tufte [iphone resolution]

archer: you're sure there is nothing down there?
t'pol: yes captain.
archer: not even a microbe! i don't want to blow up something that can evolve into a sentient species in a couple billion years. -- [star trek enterprise]

as usual with arguments about the invisible hand of the market, it is a load of rubbish. -- mark c. chu-carroll [insurance: why it sucks]

I have an unreasoning prejudice against phones that I can't run a Python interpreter and a word processor on. -- charlie stross [marketing musings]

don't you know? a dead martyr's worth ten posturing leaders. -- kyril finn [star trek next generation]

streamlined madness is what i've come to expect from sun. -- anonymous coward [slashdot story on Sun buying MySql]

Ideational Clearance Sale! Going out of our minds, all concepts must go! -- http://gnosis.cx

we live the life of mollusks! -- anonymous mom

if my mom was a role model, she would be famous. -- connor yigit [my five-year-old nephew]

apple and dtrace: move along, nothing to see here

adam leventhal discovered that apple broke dtrace while trying to prevent some applications from being traced.

The notion of true systemic tracing was a bit too egalitarian for their classist sensibilities so they added this glob of lard into dtrace_probe() -- the heart of DTrace:

#if defined(__APPLE__)
        /*
         * If the thread on which this probe has fired belongs to a process marked P_LNOATTACH
         * then this enabling is not permitted to observe it. Move along, nothing to see here.
         */
        if (ISSET(current_proc()->p_lflag, P_LNOATTACH)) {
            continue;
        }
#endif /* __APPLE__ */

[i was tempted to say but at least they have dtrace, while linux developers are still scratching their heads and armpits but i won't. i just realized that they are now even at being differently clued.]

[update: landon fuller's fix]

daily yawn

perl6 and parrot
released, i hear
oh, like
wow.
welcome to 2001
without
the onion.

daily rotfl

here is john dvorak, pissing on sun, again. [i find it disappointing to be in an industry that encourages its practitioners to wear the "engineer" label also continues to encourage employment for drooling "analysts" whose fame and typing skill far exceed their ability to assemble a coherent and thoughtful analysis.]

I'm close to being convinced that Oracle wanted to buy MySQL to kill the product, but knew it couldn't pull off the stunt itself. So it sent in a stooge to do the job.

nicely put, but...

stephen metcalf tries to rescue slate, but too late, me thinks...

The crux of Saletan's pieces was his Liberal Creationist analogy. The analogy is hopeless along several competing dimensions, but it reminded me of the Dilettante's First Law of Empirical Narcissism. In a moment of controversy, the temptation to proclaim yourself an avatar of truth, and your opponent a faith-based inquisitor, is natural enough. But Darwin is Darwin thanks to generations of independent corroboration. By definition, generations of independent corroboration do not stand behind a thesis that is still being hotly contested. In claiming Darwin (or Copernicus or Galileo) for his cause, a person is often by implication saying: There would be consensus here, but for you damned critics! This is an odd definition of consensus. Conversely, when one's angry reaction to an idea is being adduced as evidence in its favor, one should ask: What does my anger have to do with the truth-content of your idea? If you told me there was a genetic basis to Jewish avarice, I would be angry. So what? What does my anger have to do with your crappy research?

broken social

i just deleted my opensocial account. [why? i do not have the time] first attempt spinned for an hour, though i was warned that "this will take a few minutes." second attempt did what it was supposed to do after a shorter spin. so we know that the deletion sort-of works on opensocial.

recently noted quotes

the god of design is the diminishing god of the diminishing gaps. -- alan dershowitz [blasphemy: how the religious right is hijacking our declaration of independence]

spock: doctor, you are an essentialist.
mccoy: you bet your pointy ears i am, mr spock! -- star trek [arena]

green lantern: some things can't be taught. some things can only get through experience.
hawk girl: like?
green lantern: clarity.

he lives in france, the place where all good americans go when they die. -- bugs bunny [on pepé le pew]

an active prefrontal cortex is a happy prefrontal cortex. -- brain age

liberty is not divisible; a society's members do not have it if they have only some of it in some spheres. -- a. c. grayling [freedom of speech]

when we have sufficiently drunk in the beauty of the vista that spreads before us on these heights, and start thinking about returning home and actually building such a parser, it will come to us that there is a small but annoying problem left. -- grune and jacobs [parsing techniques: a practical guide]

so may i take this opportunity to beg pamuk, anyone who writes about pamuk, and indeed, anyone who writes about Istanbul, to retire forever the phrase "caught between east and west"? -- claire berlinski [from her rather amusing dismantling of pamuk in her globe and mail review of other colors, the tedium existence - istanbul and elsewhere]

[yes, i have other colors and i agree with berlinski's review. in fact, she is being rather polite. i too have lived in pamuk's istanbul...]

daily rotfl

found this lovely bit in the national post [canadian printed simulation of fox news] christmas eve editorial "room for god" [i glance at this rag on occasion to get a dose of adrenalin, or laughter, or both.]:

a society that has no place for the supernatural, the metaphysical and, yes, the religious, is closing itself off from the most profound questions. there has to be room for the things of god.

[insert laughter soundtrack]

sigh. the editorial author must have just finished reading roger scruton's latest "political philosophy" dump.

[it is really just a coincidence that i decided to make note of assorted daily inanities after reading scruton's uproarious [late onset] paradox on how "the falsities of religious faith" are supposed to "enable us to perceive truths that matter".]

doctorow's alice

cory doctorow just posted a two and a half hour long reading of alice in wonderland. what a wonderful present for the end of 2007!

earth to flew, earth to flew...

i finally had a chance to long-skim a copy of that new book attributed to antony flew. i was particularly interested in seeing how and what, a philosopher, going from a methodist minister father to uncompromising atheism, and apparently coming back, would discover. intelligent poly-theism? tao? allah? some other philosophically sound riff on cosmic consciousness [eg. see smullyan]? no. one finds, with considerable sadness and not much surprise, that flew can only discover a christian god, and goes on to discuss, with all the seriousness of a mediocre philosophy undergrad, the resurrection fantasy. i have to say that this book, if indeed was written by one, is an embarrassment for a professional philosopher [regardless of his/her religious affiliation], and especially so for someone with flew's credentials. [if he is mentally fit, and not contractually obliged, he should give his advance back, donate the royalties [no doubt would be pouring in from evangelicals in the US as a part of their wish-fulfillment fantasy reading] to a non-religious charity, and disown this worthless piece of pulp attributed to him.]

update 21/12/07: when i wrote this blog entry, i had just returned from the bookstore, and had not seen richard carrier's ongoing update on flew's overall philosophical [in]coherence and the mysterious authorship of this sorry volume. my earlier, naively optimistic note.

404 haiku

encountered while visiting a link at vivtek.com

404

You step in the stream
the water has moved on
page not found

how to write a computer book review

i just came across Tv's 2005 review of twisted network programming essentials by abe fettig. this is a textbook example of how to write a carefully detailed and rigorous technical book review.

And, in case you didn't read the review above and don't know me, let me restate this: I am not going to write a glowing fluffy review, give a link to amazon and increase sales -- even if I was bribed with a shiny book, which I do appreciate -- but to really dig into this book, see how good it is. Blame it on me being an average pessimistic Finn, or something. Take it this way: everything I don't complain about is just perfect.

[he actually keeps notes while reading the book. how cool is that?] such a lovely contrast to most hand-wavy [glowing fluffy] technical book reviews found in login;, slashdot and elsewhere...

recently noted quotes

open source zealots don't mix well with real life. -- sam leffler [sane 2006]

i think that to achieve true adulthood is to understand the simplicity of things . -- peggy noonan [on speaking well]

In the next version we plan on integrating back scratching and toast making. -- omni group [OWF description in omni group developer resources]

in the future we will all have shaved cats. -- charlie stross [japan: some impressions

if the stakes aren't high, then neither is the audience. -- joss whedon [geek blog interview]

you have to gird your loins. my loins are notably ungirded. -- joss whedon [geek blog interview]

We have a technical term for any business plan that relies on making life difficult for customers and easy for non-customers: we call it "circling the drain". --charlie stross [why i don't like amazon's kindle]

love is never having to read miranda rights. -- ncis

nobody else with the possible exception of Michael Moore has cajones this big. -- acidrain71 [review of penn jillette's sock]

garbage golem are the creation of the truly desperate. -- gurps magic items 3

And so here I am, writing a Python SOAP server and getting all Arlo Guthrie on your keister. -- vivtek [python soap server]

charlie on kindle

charlie stross has an excellent assessment/critique of kindle: why i don't like amazon's kindle

Do I think Kindle is destined to succeed? Well ... this reader's a turkey, but the Kindle service might succeed, if they can iron the bugs out. But they're going to have to make a whole lot of changes, and some of those aren't up to Amazon — the publishers need to change their minds about DRM, and (perhaps more controversially) to accept that it's necessary to renegotiate their rights splits to permit a true worldwide English language ebook market to evolve.

[i categorically refuse to buy anything that comes with kindle-style DRM, so i watch the discussion over this bit of cybercrud with great amusement.]

related reading: mark pilgrim's the future of reading (a play in six acts)

mother's gumbo, jambalaya ...

in a related note to my rather disappointing nawlins experience: i am very pleased to find that one of my favorite restaurants in new orleans, mother's restaurant is still around and appears to be doing well. this is where i had the best jambalaya of my life. they were kind enough to send me a typed up copy of their recipe some years later, and now it is online for everyone to enjoy, along with their gumbo, beans and bread pudding recipes.

pleasures and disappointments

pleasures:
enchanted: amy adams is enchanting to say the least, and i think [seriously] deserves of an oscar nomination. movie has its moments, especially when it punches its imaginary disney nose for fun. recommended.

disappointments:
nawlins restaurant: quite expensive for what it delivers to its tight, uncomfortable tables. [when we first sat down, we asked the next table for their recommendations - they were there for the first time, and were not impressed with their fishy blackened catfish.] crab cakes are just two, tiny, very tasty, but slightly over-fried. catfish gumbo is generally competent, but has too much cayenne. [i have been to NO many times, and have had enough many authentic gumbos to know. it is an art form] blackened chicken livers are excellent. blackened tilapia seems well blackened, but swimming in butter [and really overpriced]. it is served over an absolutely horrible would-be jambalaya, with cold sausages, other odd unrecognizable bits, and rice that turned glutenous. 12-oz new york striploin is very well done, blackened, perfectly medium-rare as ordered, but it is served over a potato-garlic puree my 9-year old son can easily improve upon [and any new orleans restaurant would be embarrassed to serve]. music was just good enough to make up for some of what is missing in the meal. we skipped the basic coffee; a place calling itself nawlins should at least be able to serve some cafe du monde coffee. [$5.50/can straight from the source - if i knew they did not have any, i would have brought some of my own for them to brew.] $115 for two, taxes and beers included.

note to self: had better meals at southern accent restaurant

[my wife, who had the blackened tilapia and tasted everything mentioned in this review, thinks i am being generous to nawlins]

[update: a week later, i found a 14-oz new york striploin at a nearby pickle barrel which costs $10 less, just as well prepared, and comes with better garnish.]

legal restrictions in whose country?

yet another notch in the decline of ebay. this time, not gross fees, just gross idiocy with handwaving:

Dear User:

Unfortunately, access to this particular category or item has been blocked
due to legal restrictions in your home country. Based on our discussions with
concerned government agencies and eBay.ca community members, we have taken
these steps to reduce the chance of inappropriate items being displayed.
Regrettably, in some cases this policy may prevent users from accessing items
that do not violate the law. At this time, we are working on less restrictive
alternatives. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may
cause you, and we hope you may find other items of interest on eBay.

Thank You.

what is my home country? trouble spelling canada? what exact legal restriction is this item violating in canada?

in case any canadian is wondering, the item in question is a miniature samurai sword letter opener. i can get a beautiful, razor sharp, folded steel katana in a blink, but i cannot get a miniature at ebay.

mind reels, boggles, throws up, and huddles in a corner, whimpering.

now reading...

all very highly recommended.

christopher hitchens, the portable atheist: essential readings for the nonbeliever
bruce sterling, ascendancies: the best of bruce sterling
martin gardner, aha: a two-volume collection
james patrick kelly and john kessel (eds), rewired: the post-cyberpunk anthology
jeff smith, shazam! the monster society of evil
bernhard edmaier, patterns of the earth
john brockman (ed), what are you optimistic about?
medawar and medawar, aristotle to zoos: a philosophical dictionary of biology
tom flynn (ed), encyclopedia of unbelief

scalzi's report

sf author john scalzi has written a wonderful report on the creation museum.

Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit. The kind of load of horseshit that has accreted over decades and has developed its own sort of ecosystem, from the flyblown chunks at the perimeter, down into the heated and decomposing center, generating explosive levels of methane as bacteria feast merrily on vintage, liquified crap. This is a Herculean load of horseshit, friends, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of Augeas.

it should be required reading on highschools, minus the bad language, of course...

scruton's matter

i have read just enough of roger scruton to know he is the kind of philosopher that gives the whole enterprise a bad name while providing some tv dinner grade food for intellectually starved conservative thought. here is an especially inedible example from a political philosophy that makes even the most gnomic utterance of ka'a orto'o [tough guide to fantasy land] look positively brilliant [in fact one can seriously argue that diana wynne jones is a more thoughtful philosopher than scruton even when she is writing fantasy for young readers]:

the paradox, then, is this: the falsehood of religious faith enable us to perceive the truths that matter. the truths of science, endowed with an absolute authority, hide the truths that matter, and make the human reality imperceivable.

ahahahahaha. this is funny!

[i wish he would enumerate some of the specific religious falsehoods out of the hundreds he no doubt has in mind so we can get a better insight into those mysterious "truths that matter". alas, such detailed explication would expose this sort of drivel for exactly what it is...]

recently noted quotes

a trick is a clever idea that can be used once, while a technique is a trick that can be used at least twice. -- don knuth [pre-fascicle 1a: bitwise tricks and techniques]

i demand a lawyer! i cannot be grounded for refusing to eat my dinner! -- eren yigit [my very own version of calvin]

A useful reductio, as we all learned in our first logic course, has just one bad premise that eventually sticks out like a sore thumb, but in this case we have an embarrassment of riches: four premises, all of them false. I will leave as an exercise for the reader the task of seeing if any presentable variation of Fodor's argument can be constructed in which some or all of these are replaced by truths. -- daniel dennett [fun and games in fantasyland]

religion: 1. boundless conceit concealed as utmost modesty. 2. justification for regulating one's own behavior and coercing others to regulate theirs. 3. an inexhaustible mine of meaning for the mentally lazy. -- thomas szasz [the untamed tongue: a dissenting dictionary]

I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace. -- stephen colbert [i am an op-ed columnist (so can you)]

WAITER: And what might you be having this evening?

MCGRATH: Yes. Well, it’s important to distinguish between the various choices that a dinner menu offers. On the one hand, yes, there is a Chicken Cordon Bleu, and throughout the years it has been very satisfying to those who would choose to partake of it, as it is their right and wont to do so. I myself have been partial to such dishes, and I believe you would be too, were you to be one who enjoys partaking of such dishes as one is partial to. -- sexy secularist's alister mcgrath impression [watch alister mcgrath take a very long time to say very little - rotfl]

boxer: what was he doing in canada?
thomas: one place to go when you are having trouble with the law... plus the beer! -- women's murder club

angela: or just remind him of who i am, and ask him politely.
jack: what are you, a canadian? -- bones

imagine there is no heaven, my dear six billionth, and at once the sky's the limit. -- salman rushdie [portable atheist]

notapps...

jonathan has responded to netapps idiocy, and what a sweet response that is:

So later this week, we're going to use our defensive portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license - on which Network Appliance was started. By opting to litigate vs. innovate, they are disrupting their customers and employees across the world.

from the nose of the buddha

daniel dennett's appreciation of hofstadter's i'm a strange loop and minsky's the emotion machine

dawkins's speech in honor of dan dennett

ian musgrave's open letter to dr michael behe

andy lewis's criticism of the society of homeopaths, now forced down with legal threats, and replicated as a result: the gentle art of homeopathic killing

dis-continued education

university of st michael's college in the university of toronto offers this amazingly magical course, delivered by an instructor with an intellect as sharp as meringue...

RSS7-F By Design or By Chance? An Introduction to the Intelligent Design Controversy

The intelligent design controversy is best understood as a conflict between materialist and non-materialist views of the origin and nature of the universe. Reputable scientists can be found on both sides. Because the two sides proceed from different assumptions, they do not agree, as Thomas Kuhn would say, on what would constitute a falsification of their premises. The controversy continues to grow because, while the materialism is prevalent in academia and the media, it is widely discredited in the population at large, including the professional classes.

INSTRUCTOR: Denyse O’Leary is a Toronto-based journalist, author, and blogger, who is the author of Faith@Science, By Design or By Chance? and co-author of The Spiritual Brain with Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard.

fodor's evolution from curmudgeon to crank

jason rosenhouse deals with jerry fodor's latest missive on evolution, why pigs don't have wings. [dennett's fun and games in fantasyland is a helpful introduction to fodor's current state of mind]

recently noted quotes

the raven snored gently on top of his skull, counting dead sheep. -- terry pratchett [soul music]

what answer will make socrates shut up? -- gregory house

traveling via plane is feeling more and more like the yearly exam with the doctor: remove everything, turn your head and cough. -- thom hogan [bythom]

note to our institutional review board: no undergraduates had their DNA sequenced in the writing of this essay. -- cozma shalizi [yet more on the heritability and malleability of IQ]

yakka foob mog. grub pubbawup zink wattoom gazork. chumble spuzz. -- calvin [explaining newton's first law of motion in his own words.]

hmm, my burp tastes like ice cream! -- eren yigit [my very own version of calvin]

don't buy this book. stick your brain in a blender first. -- p z myers [review of the spiritual brain]
[i have skimmed this peculiar collection of pseudo-random ink spots on tortured wood pulp, and i agree that it is mind-numbingly awful. it was, as if guided by some divine force, stacked next to another steaming pile of awfulness, coulter's if democrats had brains, they would be republicans... sigh]

atheism has no problems, to my mind, in being more interesting than religion and absolutely no problems at all in being truer or more dignified. But it's quite hard for it to deliver an equivalent to the consoling satisfaction many people find in a church service or friday prayers, in part because the withdrawal of false consolation is at its core. -- thomas sutcliffe [dawkins - what can't he be blamed for?]

ahh, this is microsoft, hiding the useful bits under an advanced tab! -- anonymous

so my final piece of advice to dembski is that he quits pestering the biologists. -- olle häggström, professor of mathematical statistics [uniform distribution is a model assumption, essentially a thorough dismantling of dembski's latests quasi-mathematical attempts to sustain "intelligent design" comedy]

love of new ideas is a myth; we prefer ideas only after others have tested them. -- scott berkun [the myths of innovation]

belief itself is the food of the gods. -- terry pratchett [small gods]

books on my future shelves

bloch, effective java programming language guide [2nd ed]
krugman, conscience of a liberal
harry g. frankfurt, demons, dreamers, and madmen: the defense of reason in descartes's "meditations"
andrea levy, faith in faithlessness: an anthology of atheism
jonathan katz, digital signatures
steve mccurry, in the shadow of mountains
owen j flanagan, the really hard problem: meaning in a material world
a c grayling, towards the light: the story of the struggles for liberty & rights that made the modern west

moronic babble of the year

author should be obvious. she often talks about her malodorous fantasies, and gives dumb blondes a bad name.

If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine, but I don't think it's going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women.

story link: truthdig

sony ripples and friday's random albums

some lawyer at sony claims copying the music i own is stealing. well, certainly laws in this country [canada - for now, until conservative pawns get around to hugging the music industry - see michael geist's blog for the details] strongly disagree. i am happy to report that i have not purchased a single music track online, itunes or otherwise to this day. i only buy CDs, and I rip them the moment i get them. i think i have ripped [and re-ripped, because i was unhappy with some initial rip parameters] over a thousand CDs so far, and that is only about half my library.

here is friday's random selection of [ripped] albums from my library:

quick notes for september

redrawing the european map, or freudian slip of the union: lovely new euro coin, but carefully redrawn. turkey's real place in many european minds have been clear to observers for a long time, but never so pungent, and so idiotic. it is an urgent reminder to turks where the future lies, and what to do with the current government's deception about a future membership.

noir: author charlie huston has a cool site pulpnoir that includes chapters from his novels and other essays.

NEW YORK — I write pulp. I write noir. Open one of my books and you'll see I'm not lying. I write about people killing each other and suffering or not suffering the consequences. I write about the halt and the lame and the addicted. So it should come as no surprise that this site is for fucking grownups.

dezenhall and the art of fud: jim giles's new scientist article
on academic publishers and the PR skirmish over open access. [i label this a skirmish simply because academic publishers cannot win, only delay.]

important lens review: bjorn rorslett's review of the amazing nikon afs 24-70.

adjusting prices in real time: amazon.ca appears to screen-scrape chapters.ca as a competitive tactic. as soon as a book becomes unavailable to order from chapters, the matching amazon discount disappears. [i have caught this happen several times already, literally within hours...] amazon uses its US parent to source many books that chapters thinks it cannot source. i have no idea why chapters does not use a US partner to match amazon.ca in catalog depth...

on quotes: i have been noting my favorite quotes for quite sometime. i prefer original quotes previously uncollected in books or other blogs. if you notice a quote that was previously posted elsewhere, please let me know. [it is rather difficult to find previously unnoticed bits of wisdom from, say, terry pratchett, but i try. people often catch his obvious gems but overlook more subtle pieces.]

arithmetic, logitech style:

    Communicating with your Harmony remote
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