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June 29, 2005

JWZ on telemetric breast-exam robots

"I love this notion that these 'remote areas with no health care' are more likely to have a boob-bot than to have a doctor who knows how to do a breast exam." http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/503933.html

Posted by irons at 04:08 PM

June 27, 2005

Mike Luckovich: "We've turned the corner"

Slate redesigned its editorial cartoon display, mostly for the better. Wonder how long they're archived. http://cartoonbox.slate.com/hottopic/?image=9&topicid=10

Posted by irons at 05:10 PM

The Periodic Table of Haiku (and apostatic renunciation of the 5/7/5 form)

"Dead stars reborn
as diamonds, buckeyballs,
and beings" http://www.iscifistory.com/scifaku/elements/periodichaiku.asp

Posted by irons at 03:59 PM

June 25, 2005

Core Data has trouble with autosaving

This would appear to be a pretty serious oversight for a major object-persistence scheme developed in 2005. Manual saves were a good idea twenty years ago. http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/NSPersistentDocumentTutorial/01_Task/chapter_2_section_3.html

Posted by irons at 05:04 PM

John Scalzi on cracking the flag-burning amendment

"'Protecting' the flag with a Constitutional Amendment won't solve the not-at-all pressing problem of people burning flags for political protest. They'll still do it. They'll simply do it in ways that will now additionally mock the stupidity of those who love the symbol of American freedoms more than they love actual American freedoms." http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003585.html

Posted by irons at 08:42 AM

June 24, 2005

Amy Sewell, producer of Mad Hot Ballroom, interviewed on the trials and tribulations of clearing music copyrights in documentary film

[via kottke] http://blog.stayfreemagazine.org/2005/06/mad_hot_ballroo.html

Posted by irons at 01:36 PM

June 22, 2005

RMS' Guardian op-ed comparing software patents to literary patents is cracking good

[via] http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1510566,00.html

Posted by irons at 06:25 PM

June 21, 2005

Good thing someone had a camera

[via] http://www.rumborak.com/Accident.jpg

Posted by irons at 09:38 PM

June 20, 2005

Neal Stephenson's analysis of the chief defects of the second Star Wars trilogy is insightful and disturbing

"In sum, very little of the new film makes sense, taken as a freestanding narrative. What's interesting about this is how little it matters. Millions of people are happily spending their money to watch a movie they don't understand. What gives?" http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/17stephenson.html?ei=5090&en=a693ccc4ec008424&ex=1276660800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

Posted by irons at 08:20 AM

June 13, 2005

BitTorrent, unintended consequences, mooching

A paper from the University of Bologna has an alternate theory to explain BitTorrent's impressive resistance to mooching: "We advance a hypothesis which argues that BitTorrent may resist free-riders in a way that has not been previously fully comprehended. Ironically, this process relies on what is commonly believed to be a weakness of BitTorrent -- the lack of meta-data search. One consequence of this is to partition the BitTorrent network into numerous isolated swarms - often with several independent swarms for an identical file - which is one of the necessary conditions for a kind of evolutionary group selective process, a process that has been recently identified in similar simulated systems." http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/2005/06/10/free_riding_and_bittorrent.php

Posted by irons at 12:11 PM

June 12, 2005

Proud as always of Jim McDermott

McDermott, my congressman, is a cosponsor of H. con. res. 176: "Expressing the sense of the Congress that, as Congress and all Americans learned the identity of “Deep Throat” as W. Mark Felt this week, it commends and honors W. Mark Felt for his uncommon courage and bravery in exposing major Government corruption and encourages other FBI employees aware of wrongdoing to follow the lead of this model whistleblower." http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:HCONRES176:

Posted by irons at 08:33 PM

Justin Lin, who made the remarkable "Better Luck Tomorrow", to direct "The Fast and the Furious 3"

  http://rocchireport.netflix.com/netflix_weblog/2005/06/the_cars_are_th.html

Posted by irons at 12:40 AM

June 10, 2005

Jon Carroll on California's "Minutemen" immigration vigilantes

"I would wager that the Minutemen encounter more illegal immigrants during their off hours than during their patrols. Illegal immigrants are sort of like fetuses -- once they get across the border, no one really cares about them anymore. A waiter in San Francisco; a child in Oakland; ho hum." http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/05/04/DDGM7C8CLB1.DTL

Posted by irons at 08:35 AM

June 07, 2005

Florida reliever Nate Bump sent down to triple-A

For shame, Nate Bump. http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/recap?gid=250607128&prov=ap

Posted by irons at 07:30 PM

June 06, 2005

Words in 10.4's dictionary, but not in its spellchecker, ninth in a series: "Souter"

Alone among the current nine, the definition for David Souter’s name is not his own — the sole definition of “Souter” in the OS X dictionary is “a shoemaker”, with old English derivations and the same Latin root as “suture”.

(The portable dictionary widget in 10.4 truncates definitions with multiple entries, showing the first with no overt indication that there might be more if you ask the app. Bringing up “O’Connor” in the portable widget brings up only Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie Bunker, though Sandra Day is available in the Dictionary application.)

Posted by irons at 08:59 AM

Words in 10.4's dictionary, but not in its spellchecker, seventh and eighth in a series: "Stevens" and "O'Connor"

Stevens' definition is a bit arch: "Appointed to the Court by President Ford, he was considered a moderate conservative." Scalia's definition scoots by Bush v. Gore in asserting that the Justice is "an advocate of judicial restraint." (The other six are all in there too.)

Posted by irons at 08:31 AM

June 05, 2005

Words in 10.4's dictionary, but not in its spellchecker, sixth in a series: "falsifiable"

This is proving way easier than I expected.

Posted by irons at 12:05 AM

June 03, 2005

Joan Didion goes all analytical on Theresa Schiavo

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18050

Posted by irons at 12:31 PM

createpdf.adobe.com

O'Reilly's PDF Hacks book includes a mention of createpdf.adobe.com, a web site that can process Office or WordPerfect documents into PDFs for you. This struck me as a good solution for a family member who has problems sending OS X's native PDFs to a colleague using an incredibly old version of Windows. To my dismay, however, I learn that since the book's printing, Adobe has decided to turn the service into a marginal revenue stream, charging $99/year for the privilege of supporting their slow, awkward, read-only document format. Way to screw up a nice gesture, jerks. http://createpdf.adobe.com/

Posted by irons at 11:37 AM

IT Conversations' April 2004 interview with Bruce Schneier

IT Conversations records speeches or interviews with, mostly, smart geeks, and makes them downloadable (and iPod-friendly) in addition to providing streaming audio versions. Schneier's 35 minute interview, pimping his book "Beyond Fear", is worth approximately ten billion dollars in Homeland Security funding. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail119.html

Posted by irons at 08:56 AM

Sarah Dickerman's war on crap pastry

"Enough ink has been spilled on the evils of corporate coffee, but no one has paid attention to its corollary: the evils of corporate pastries. When industrial-scale bakeries pump out cupcakes and call them muffins, or slap some jelly on an undercooked slab of dough to simulate a Danish, they slowly wear down our standards." http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=21645

Posted by irons at 08:49 AM

June 02, 2005

The Stranger redesigns

It looks good, if a bit conventional. Their old site seemed proud of its baling wire. At least they don't seem to have broken their old inbound links, and they've still got Sarah Dickerman's local food column. http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Home

Posted by irons at 02:01 PM

Words in 10.4's dictionary, but not in its spellchecker, fifth in a series: "fave"

Posted by irons at 12:59 PM

Obsessive attention to Lucas' Star Wars tinkering

I've never gone out of my way to see the Star Wars re-releases (especially Empire Strikes Back, my fave of the three) because I was annoyed that without knowing exactly where the movie diverged from the original, it'd monkey with my memory of what I saw the first time. The one specific example I knew about was an undignified yowl when Luke takes his flyer off the platform, making it appear less a noble sacrifice and more like he might have slipped. This illustrated review of Lucas' meddling at dvdanswers.com not only solves the first problem, it asserts "the scream was removed for the 2004 DVD release." I guess two wrongs occasionally do make a right. http://www.dvdanswers.com/index.php?s=8&c=29

Posted by irons at 12:58 PM

The Freedom Archipelago

If this isn't a contender for Word of the Year next year, I'm founding a rival to the LSA. http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005/06/so-youre-being-tortured-to-death-in.html

Posted by irons at 11:30 AM

June 01, 2005

Words in 10.4's dictionary, but not in its spellchecker, fourth in a series: "oxytocin"

Oxytocin is "a hormone released by the pituitary gland that causes increased contraction of the uterus during labor and stimulates the ejection of milk into the ducts of the breasts." The Slate review of Elisabeth Lloyd's "The Case of the Female Orgasm" mentioned last week that orgasm and "any kind of vaginal or cervical stimulation" are associated with oxytocin release in women. The Guardian reports today that Swiss scientists have demonstrated that in a laboratory setting, inhaling oxytocin causes people to be more trusting of others. Hmm. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1497244,00.html

Posted by irons at 10:46 PM