Sad Day in the Neighborhood

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.

2002 Books

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 … Continue reading 2002 Books

Let’s hear it for not blowing up!

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.

Text Trent Analysis

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).

Extensive Text Search

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.

Christmas Bargello

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.

Distributed Proofreaders

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 … Continue reading Distributed Proofreaders

Idealized Courtship

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 … Continue reading Idealized Courtship

TIA on Hold

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.

Stash Reduction Project

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, … Continue reading Stash Reduction Project