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Peter Nixon
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Sunday, 29 February 2004
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Letters. Is America a sociopathic child? Readers respond to Ann Marlowe's review of "Civilization and Its Enemies" by proclaiming "get stuffed!" and encouraging a New Zealand empire.
[Salon.com]
12:21:46 PM 
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Saturday, 28 February 2004
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Friday, 27 February 2004
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You've got to give it to those dissenters who drew up the American Constitution; in making life possible for Puritans they made it just as possible for everything Puritans stood against.
Here come the brides. After 25 years together -- including children, mortgages, intimacy and boredom --- Kay and I stood for six hours in the San Francisco rain to become mundane and unspecial. To be married.
[Salon.com]
11:41:21 PM
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Thursday, 26 February 2004
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Copyright gone wrong. Don't hit the back button yet! Usually when a blogger mentions copyright, you know what's coming: "I can rip anything I want, and anyone who says that's wrong is a jerk." For a change of pace, Lawrence Lessig has a good story this morning about how copyright law and its current interpretation in the courts makes it hard for copyright holders not to keep their work, but to give it away:
Ron Suskind wanted to make sure that the records supporting his book, The Price of Loyalty, were in the public domain so others could draw upon them to verify, or critique, his account of Paul O[base ']Neill[base ']s time at Treasury. In principle, the documents should be in the public domain because they were government documents. But there would always be a way for someone to argue that, e.g., the digitization created a separate right, or special marks on the document created a special right, or whatever.
[Paul Boutin]
12:14:25 AM
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Wednesday, 25 February 2004
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There will be some Director stuff here from now on. Don't panic.
Time saving trick from Alex Zavatone
This is a little time saving tip for those who use a lot of movie scripts:
Step 1:
Command Shift U opens up the first movie script.
Step 2:
To access all of your commonly used movie handlers, create a movie script called "reference" and in it, put all of your commonly accessed movie level handlers. Comment them all out.Pressing option or alt when clicking on a handler name will open that script.
Step 3:
With this setup, you are now one command shift U and one option click away from all your commonly used movie handlers.
Neato. :-)
[Undocumented Lingo]
1:26:54 AM
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Monday, 23 February 2004
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Sunday, 22 February 2004
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Thursday, 19 February 2004
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Wednesday, 18 February 2004
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Tuesday, 17 February 2004
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Sunday, 15 February 2004
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Bullet matching found to be suspect.
Much of forensic science seems to be utterly unscientific. Although all
of the arguments used seem plausible, very few of them have been put to
any sort of rigorous scientific test. This article looks at one of the
most suspect techniques - bullet matching.
[David Harris: Science news]
6:07:22 PM
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Saturday, 14 February 2004
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Friday, 13 February 2004
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Manufacturing hydrogen like plants. Science magazine yesterday
express-published a paper that looks at how plants are able to split
water into hydrogen and oxygen. If we could replicate that process
artificially, it might provide a way to supply the hydrogen needed to
establish the much-touted "hydrogen economy".
As you probably already know, hydrogen is not an energy source as such
but a good means for transporting energy, in certain circumstances. The
big problem is that creating the hydrogen (for which there is no
natural "well") costs more energy than you will get back. In some
cases, you might still make some savings because of the potential
benefits of transporting energy as hydrogen rather than as fossil
fuels, etc., but that is still not practical.
Fundamentally, the energy that will create the hydrogen must come from
the sun if we want to make the process environmentally friendly. We
could use solar cells to collect the energy to run the electrolysis
process to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. Or we could do
things more directly and copy the process plants use to separate water.
The first step in this process is understanding exactly how plants do
it. That is the subject of the Science paper.
Abstract (sub required) | PDF (sub required) | Press release
[David Harris: Science news]
10:46:31 PM
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Tuesday, 10 February 2004
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Monday, 9 February 2004
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Sunday, 8 February 2004
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While this is part of a serious discussion of trademark infringement, it is a laugh.
Spotted by Dave.
10:47:41 AM
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Tuesday, 3 February 2004
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© Copyright 2005 Peter Nixon.
Last update: 27/9/05; 9:22:31 PM.
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