« January 2003 | Main | March 2003 »
How very like Fred Rogers for there to have already been a page up at the Mr. Rogers website this morning to help parents talk to their kids about his death. It's very nicely done, and it's very sad to have to be reading it.
I make myself write a sentence or two about every book I read, for my own future reference, but isn't the internet all about sharing odd lists with the world? I've finally compiled and formatted my ratings and comments on the books I read in 2002. Essential stats: I read 52 books total, with a rating distribution of 36 '+'s, 14 '0's and 2 '-'s, and my favorite books of the year were England, England by Julian Barnes, Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress, Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, The Code Book by Simon Singh, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark.
Let me put some love out there for the local utility companies. This morning when I got up, there was no heat, no hot water, and no gas coming out of the stove. Not only have they kept my house from blowing up from the gas main which had accumulated water, but they're still out there now tearing up the road and such, and think I'll be hooked back up by midnight. With the low tonight forecast at an entire degree above zero, it will be appreciated.
I've heard a few talks about the research in this article about analyzing text collections (such as e-mail!) for "word bursts" to organize texts or identify trends over time, and I think it's really cool. The article even includes a speculation about applicability to weblogs for tracking social trends (and notes that Google already does something like this, though no mention of Daypop which is sort of the same though just using URL's), but integrating this into an e-mail organizational tool intrigues me the most (which is described in a little more detail over at Scientific American).
I can imagine a number of uses for this search tool I just found which lets you search not just the titles but also the text of every book in the Project Gutenberg collection. Go to the "Preferences" page to activate boolean searching.
I'm way overdue in finally photographing the quilt I made over the holidays, so to make up for it, I've put together a fairly extensive write-up about this bargello style Christmas quilt, including scans of the graphs I used in designing it.
I've been meaning to volunteer with Project Gutenberg for a couple of years, but I finally signed up to help proofread scanned and OCR'd texts. The Distributed Proofreading project makes it very easy. Sign up, read over the proofreading guidelines document, and then you can view page scans and the OCR'd text side by side in their web browser tool and edit the text to make any necessary corrections. They manage to coordinate the proofreading of between 500 and 1500 pages a day. It's a very easy process, and a single page isn't too time consuming, so think about signing up yourself!
I'm a Miss Manner's fan, and it is surely poor manners to admit that my favorite bits are when she repremands the "etiquette police" for their own poor manners. But last weekend she wrote a wonderful editorial about nostalgia and idealization of old-fashioned courtship in which she comments on why 50's style dating disappeared. She says:
Dating was universal in theory, but not in practice, leaving plenty of people lonely, if not ashamed, for lack of Saturday night alternatives. The presumption that a date was the only natural way in which the sexes could mix put a damper on nonromantic relationships that now provide a variety of other social activities.Far from encouraging respect, dating fostered competition. Those seeking to break hearts were pitted against those striving to overcome inhibitions. The progression from courtship to marriage lacked a stage for the development of friendship.
Because it's good to focus on the positive as well as the negative: Conferees in Congress Bar Using a Pentagon Project on Americans, and Total Information Awareness is on hold until the privacy and civil liberties impact can be more thoroughly examined.
Last year, I made a resolution to reduce my unread book pile, which was only a moderate success (how I managed to read over 50 books last year and still have a stack of 90 still staring at me is beyond me). This year, I'm turning my attention to my absurdly large yarn stash, which is spread across too many rooms to even show you a picture. I will not buy any yarn this year unless it is to make a present for someone, and even then I will consult the stash first. As a first step on this project, I'm thinking of making up this zip-up vest with some fuscia wool I picked up on sale with no particular project in mind.
I have been hearing good things about SpamOracle from a friend, and I think it's cool that it uses a Baysian classification algorithm to learn what is spam given your particular e-mail patterns. Even more cool is that it's compatable with unix-based e-mail and procmail, which I already have set up. This may be my next computer maintanance project.
The Kasparov-Deep Junior chess match ended in a draw yesterday after Kasparov forced the draw in the final game to avoid losing to the computer. Overall, Kasparov and Deep Junior each only won one game a piece in the six game match. There's coverage at the World Chess Federation, of course. They even have online animation of all of the games; I recommend ignoring the applet running on that page and clicking through to the individual match you want at the top of the page to get an interface where you can step through play-by-play. ChessBase also carries a lot of coverage including commentary on the games and their own interactive animations of the games (except, it seems, for game six...).
This page's sidebar images were taken near my house during the long cold snap we had during the end of January; I've put together a larger (in number and size) collection of my favorite images from my visit to Cascadilla Creek.
I recently received a copy of the Special 30th Anniversay Edition School House Rock! DVD, and it's every bit as fun as you would expect. I had no idea they had made forty-six songs, but they're all here, along with nifty extra features and a new video and everything. My favorites are "Interjections!" and "I'm Just a Bill!". But I noticed something odd in one of my other favorites, "A Noun Is A Person, Place or Thing". Check out their rendering of Chubby Checker I've included here. Is it just me, or is there something off with that image?
The key to a good personality quiz is to make the questions as entertaining as the potential results. The always funny BBspot offers up Which OS Are You?, and I'll admit that my enjoyment of it doubled when they were on-the-ball enough to peg me as HP-UX, the only old-time unix variant included. Wheee! [via PCJM] If that isn't enough fun for you, go scan the features archive for their reviews of movie trailers - one of my favorite parts of their site.
For those who are claiming NASA accomplishes nothing of value besides being a sort of "extreme-science" for thrillseeking nerds, I suggest you visit Space Research at NASA's Office of Biological and Physical Research (a huge list of technical articles about research out of NASA with nice summaries) or NASA's Earth Science page. I commented in a private forum earlier today that even beyond these results, I have no problem if we haven't seen the fruit of all of this research yet. Arguments against funding pure research when people are suffering are as old as government, as are the arguments for. Personally, I see the quest for knowledge of our world to be one of the admirable and selfless activities our government takes on. For the many criticisms I have of the scientific community, I think it is one of the few truly international communities. I can't think of anything (including going to war!) that the US feels it can only do with cooperation from other countries - except build and maintain the International Space Station. Putting aside the many scientific advantages, I like that there is one national priority we have that we admit we can't do on our own.
If I thought I was disturbed when, around about Thanksgiving this year, I heard John Madden rambling about some Turducken abomination, I am even more disturbed that you can see upclose-and-personal Turducken photos, from someone who ordered one off the internet and actually served it to their friends. (Of course you can order Turducken off the internet....) [via Anita LOL]
So far, the best on-line coverage I've found of the Columbia tragedy is at Spaceflight Now. They are updating continually on their Mission Status Center page, and you can read back through their coverage of the entire mission and the reaserch being done. [via Eatonweb]
I detest the media. The Columbia destruction is a tragedy for both the astronaut's families and everyone at NASA associated with the project. I am sure that nobody there is feeling relief that Bush said we will continue space exploration, as the pundits started saying after he spoke. I can't imagine they are feeling anything but grief over the loss of their teammates lives and the failure of the mission, and agonizing over whether there is anything they could have done to have prevented it. I hope that people's thoughts and prayers go out to them as well. The loss of lives that were in their hands must be personally devastating.