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Tuesday, April 4, 2006 |
12:35:55 AM 
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Friday, December 16, 2005 |
...the researchers scanned a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece and subjected it to cutting-edge "emotion recognition" software, developed in collaboration with the University of Illinois.
The result showed the painting's famous subject was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful and 2 percent angry. She was less than 1 percent neutral, and not at all surprised.
12:29:16 AM
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Sunday, August 21, 2005 |
The real action is over on the OPML blog, so if this looks dead, try looking over there. I'm going to be using this blog for parts (i.e. maybe I can get some things I like about Radio working over in OPML land), but it's just more lively and fun over there. See ya!
2:46:16 PM
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Wednesday, August 17, 2005 |
"We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
"A Senior Official" in the Washington Post 8/14/05
7:10:54 PM
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Tuesday, August 9, 2005 |
It now appears (I'm behind in my New Yorkers) that the word muttered by the desk clerk before Russell Crowe threw the phone at him was "Whatever".
8:39:53 AM
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Saturday, August 6, 2005 |
I changed "employies" to "employees". Daring.
I got there because I was testing the amazing wikipedia widget for Dashboard.
12:14:47 AM
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Sunday, July 31, 2005 |
Tiffany vs Margaret... Baby name popularity.
Try typing in just the first couple of letters of a name to see how it works.
6:25:52 PM
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Wednesday, July 27, 2005 |
Great idea
1:24:45 PM
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Tuesday, July 26, 2005 |
11:41:18 AM
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Monday, July 4, 2005 |
"Describing herself as a polymath, Sontag once declared that, 'to be a polymath is to be interested in everything, and nothing else.'" (From this obituary.)
Well, at some point this weblog will become completely embarrassing, because I'll have to try to clarify what I think it's about, and that's not going to be pretty. At least each post will eventually scroll off the page.
What I think it's about is self-development, using an evolutionary idea, that by writing and writing (it's hard to make myself write full paragraphs, since they reveal the state of things--I'm much more drawn to write the obtuse little squibs) I'll gradually make the connections and build the structures in my own brain that I think ought to be there. That I won't feel fully smart until they're there. that they have to be mirrored in writing or they don't exist. That there's a mental ecology that needs tending, or flushing, as the case may be, in order to be healthy.
The other thing it's about of course is making connections with others, becoming known. Somehow people have to be able to talk about the things that are important to them. Some people have no problem doing this, but others of us find it awkward and artificial to bring the conversation around to something we find interesting, and even then find it almost impossible to express much about it. Aagh. Thoughts that seem coherent when mulled privately prove thin and insubstantial when offered up.
As I was saying tonight, I'm hoping to discover how the things that seem interesting in what I read are linked, or have something in common. Will I see it or will others see it? Maybe they can tell me (Stephen's idea). I was expressing how this might end up being a log of frustration, frustration that I really can't participate in "the issues of the day," or of any other day. I read a fascinating article about Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Nation, and also the Guardian; and that may be that for that subject. Yes, there's quite a mixing of feminism, anti-multiculturalism, human rights, questioning liberal values, left and right: a heady brew. But I can only penetrate the first 2 inches into the topic. Then there's the Supreme Court. And the books on Evolution (Dawkins and Gould). And the novels I want to read. Well, it's all fodder for writing practice, and the fact that it's in public does provide the extra frisson.
10:49:54 PM
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Casting the Last Stone by Steve Gillmor
"After a week of Rojoing the syndisphere, I've finally found something good to say--maybe. This Ross Mayfield post augurs for a new post-del.icio.us fraglet style, where each factoid is couched in the soundbite-sized Extended field. It's Liz Smith meets Movable Hype. All the news you can eat in zipless link-blog chunks. One of them dropped [...]"
10:21:59 PM
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Marvelous book--I'll read all of Richard Dawkins after this, even though I bogged down in "The Selfish Gene". This one's 5 times as long and bog-free. It's rewarding in one way the "Eighth Day of Creation" was--although not so prodigious in its writing, its subject matter carries a similar excitement, and Dawkins is a good enough writer to present it. His writing has lots of virtues: he knows where he is in his story, his tangents return to the point he left off, he's able to complete his thoughts, his logic is coherent. These are qualities not always to be found even in science books (see "How not to learn about Emergence").
5:26:52 PM
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(see below)
4:42:52 PM
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Saturday, July 2, 2005 |
From what I gather, the multi-author tool sounds appropriate. I want 2-machine posting more than I want mobile posting. Folder synchronization sounds good I'm very unclear on the Asset Manager recommendation--it appears to be something to do with posting pictures. Interesting also that its author sounds like he may be leaving Radio behind for Moveable Type.
I'm grateful for the help to be had here, and to the folks doing the helping. I find the overall process awfully daunting: choosing between these different tools will take days of experimentation--I know that's why they call it the frontier, except we're now 15 years in and I'm not a cowboy.
Folder synchronization also sounds ideal, if I can figure out how to configure _that_. Not clear on the advantages or disadvantages of these various solutions, though I'll be finding out. It's funny, I suppose the easiest solution would just be to designate one machine the weblog machine and the other not, but I'm willing to go through endless hoops just to not be limited like that.
10:51:48 AM
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Simple posting is easy, and that's great; anything beyond that and you immediately have to be a programmer.
So what's it going to be? Mail-to-weblog? Multi-author tool? Asset Manager? Gaak!!
I installed Asset Manager years ago but still don't really know what it does. Why? Because it's for people who already understand it, as with so much of this. Have I ever used it? Not sure. I successfully uploaded some pictures, but that may have been using Dave Winer's tool instead. How would I know now? And pictures aren't what I wanted to do anyway. (So I'm not clear on why it was suggested in response to my 2 Computers question.)
Multi-author sounds best to me: David A and David B. Why would I choose one of the other ones?
10:28:07 AM
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Makes me want to read more about the current justices.
10:24:51 AM
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do you know why some people cross the number 7 (for example, the Lucida Blackletter font: http://www.fontage.com/pages/lblack.html)? Because when Moses announced the seventh commandment, "You shall not commit adultery", everybody said "Cross the seven! Cross the seven!". (It's funnier in portuguese...)
Roberto
9:02:10 AM
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Friday, June 24, 2005 |
Haven't tried these yet...
7:33:30 PM
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7:31:16 PM
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But I'm less interested in Microsoft's foray into RSS (it's a gorilla) than Dave's OPML editor. That's the one that's going to make a difference to me, if I can have an editor I like on both Mac and PC, and shuttle my outlines back and forth. That it appears to be a blogging tool is icing.
7:03:08 PM
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You might have to practice.
Life Of the mind versus life In the mind.
7:01:16 PM
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Thursday, June 23, 2005 |
What good is this entry without a link? But it's at the NY Times, so will the link go away? Do I copy the piece in here, or is that illegal? Can I host it on the blog server? What are my options here?
7:55:55 PM
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I've forgotten how to do anything having to do with this weblog. I've forgotten how to edit the booklist. I've forgotten how to edit the blogroll. I've forgotten how to do categories. Help!
I've almost forgotten how to do links, and I certainly want a simpler way of doing them. They should be automated (I have a QuicKey (actually a YoupiKey) that puts in the HTML expression, but I want the copying and pasting to happen more automatically too). The one task I've dreamed up for Automator so far didn't seem doable (open Network Diagnostics with its little green lights and move it down to the righthand corner with only the lights showing. There's no move window or grab command that I can discover. Do I have to wait for the book? No, there are websites. ugh ugh ugh.)
7:54:14 PM
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If you haven't heard "Tallahassee" run right out and buy it. Or ask me for a copy. I just bought my third (to mitigate the unvirtue of making those illicit ones).
7:33:23 PM
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That, followed by "Everything is Miscellaneous." Not what I want to hear. The world as Trivial Pursuit.
And another thing: the American Zen is somehow depressing compared to the twinkly-eyed Japanese version: "It is what it is." "You gotta' do what you gotta' do." "What goes around comes around." Why does this sound so utterly dreary?
7:22:12 PM
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My hunch is that all 4 test posts are going to land. Here's hoping. I want to get back to the weblog just as a place to keep my notes flowing. It's relentlessly chronological, which has at least one virtue: no messing with time. (At least at the level I'm operating at.) I just ran across my first personal [wiki] [Bill Seitz's] and I suppose that's the next place to go. But it's [Ugly!] even though more forgiving, spread out, accommodating. Don't know if I could accept that (although it's hard to think you can't change the font, and then the layout. What are the tools here? Can VoodooPad post to a weblog? What's the editor? Dave's new OPML editor will do exactly what? Something's happening...
7:19:04 PM
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Test post from MarsEdit on the laptop
7:10:44 PM
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Test post from Laptop Radio webpage
7:10:01 PM
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Sunday, June 19, 2005 |
"It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is."
8:42:31 AM
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I'd love to get my head around the new web services, and realize (or don't) that the way is just to dive in once again. Delicious (dots in there somewhere), Rojo, Safari RSS, where do I keep my notes... Radio is the content management system?
Other ideas: the 3 blogs (at least)
The computer that stopped going to sleep.
The test post. So MarsEdit and Radio both keep their databases locally: can both post to the weblog? Without reading from the weblog? We'll find out (written on the laptop.)
8:20:03 AM
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Monday, May 2, 2005 |
for the many years you've "been on my radar" (as I said to you at the Stanford BloggerCon).
From a fan since ThinkTank 128: welcome to the 50's and best wishes!
9:06:59 PM
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Tuesday, April 5, 2005 |
Don't know if this is the "correct" use of LazyWeb, but if it's supposed to be Lazy then I shouldn't have to learn all about it before using it, right?
My need is to come up with a script that turns a long text file with delimiters (the export of an iData file in QuickDex form, which uses the delimiter */rN) into a folder full of separate files. Just once. I have a couple of concepts but I really don't know enough to write the thing, and Googling hasn't done it.
One comment on the instructions on the LazyWeb website: some of us don't know what "send a trackback ping" means in practice.
8:13:37 AM
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Thursday, March 31, 2005 |
-Online Scrabble.
-Why isn't the new LaunchBar as good as the old LaunchBar?
9:59:46 AM
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Consider this an example of one of the egregious kinds of blog posts: thinking out loud. I couldn't decide whether to write this in my journal, i.e. with pen and ink, in my "journal", i.e. the collection of entries currently residing in "MacJournal", which I may never use again because its organizational capabilities have been far exceeded by my current adoptee Hog Bay Notebook, or in my weblog, which is what I'm presently doing. There are some differences. I fancied taking up the pen again, because I thought I needed to get away from the computer, which I've been spending too much time at. For a period I used to write the Three Morning Pages advocated by Julia Cameron, and it was in fact a good exercise, unclogging the pipes. I may still turn to that if this typewriting doesn't accomplish that. I do crave it. But I also had a train of thought (perhaps never to be revealed) that I hated to think of having to transcribe if I ever wanted to publish it. Publish is a grand word, but it is in fact what happens with a blog post.
Perhaps the distaste for transcription is too strong, and I should just accept doing that sometimes. OTOH, I don't think I've ever done it before, and it seems most likely that nothing that goes into the journal will ever see the light of day, sheerly through inertia. It's not like I have a burning need to get my message out, just that I want to be more visible to my friends and family (and an elite segment of the blog-reading public).
I do notice a slight change in tone as I write in this weblog editor (Mars Edit) rather than in my 'journal' even as I type, and both are a far cry from the horrors I'll allow in the journal itself. And that might be a reason to choose one or the other. Typing seems to be the bigger difference than audience, though, since I still have to decide whether to post this: it's not foreclosed.
Well, the train of thought has broken up (caffeine will do that) but it had to do with the need to assemble a world, and the computer's ability to feed into that need, in the form of scanners, collectors, and organizers. As I was alluding, I've spent perhaps too much time in thrall to that drive, reading and collecting scraps of information, but so far I can't help myself. I just want to shift the balance by doing a little more writing and a little less hypnotic reading and filing.
And yet I may have found a more nearly ideal tool for this meta-project in the form of the forementioned Hog Bay Notebook (where are the spelling controls on this damn computer: I know they're built into the operating system now, since every program seems to go underlining things with red squiggles, but how do I access it? It's currently objecting to "adoptee", "blog", "blog-reading", "caffiene" and "forementioned". Are those all wrong? I realize why it doesn't like some of them, but I want to be able to larn it what I please! It doesn't go for "larn" either!)
[Well, that's interesting: caffeine breaks the i before e rule.]
[And shocked to find that forementioned isn't a word at all.]
So, all "meta" and no "noia", but believe me, it's coming.
Ok, I'm picking up my pen now, to see if my drift changes...
9:58:31 AM
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Thursday, March 24, 2005 |
8:41:46 PM
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Tea in pill form
Love the taste, fussiness and brown teeth of tea-drinking, but don't have time to boil a kettle? No worries: tea in a pill!
Indian tea scientists have produced a tea-flavoured pill that can be chewed or quickly dissolved in hot or cold water.
The brownish tablet weighs 0.3 grams and consists of 80 percent tea and 20 percent other flavours -- a combination the inventors at the Tocklai tea research centre in Assam say peps you up just like a traditional cuppa.
"You can suck it, chew it or dissolve it in water the way you like to have it and still feel the taste of a real cup of tea," said the centre's director, Mridul Hazarika.
8:38:07 PM
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Tuesday, February 22, 2005 |
Imprisoned Iranian bloggers.
8:55:24 AM
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1939 - 2005.
8:54:27 AM
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Monday, February 7, 2005 |
"Why has oblivion consigned Stephen Spender to posterity?"
--Stephen Metcalfe
But then there's this:
"A loose jointed mind," Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary after one encounter, "misty, clouded, suffusive. Nothing has outline …we plunged and skipped and hopped—from sodomy and women and writing and anonymity and—I forget."
10:13:28 PM
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Tuesday, January 25, 2005 |
Journalists hate jargon; technologists tolerate it as the price of being able to understand the new.
from one of the WebCred bloggers--yes I'd like to remember who.
7:58:09 AM
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Friday, January 21, 2005 |
Once again thrilled by this wired world.
I've been listening to Dave Winer's Morning Coffee Notes on my ipod as he makes his way to Boston for this conference, and this morning I found the webpage, downloaded an IRC client, fired up Real Audio, and am now listening to the conference on the stereo while watching two scrolling text windows: one with a line-by-line transcript (one good typist!) and the other with comments from chat-participants around the world. Incredible.
And the first voice I heard: Dave Winer's. But also lots of people I met (or saw) at Bloggercon at Stanford: Rebecca McKinnon, Ed Cone, Jay Rosen. It's my Hollywood.
9:44:48 AM
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Tuesday, December 21, 2004 |
So the referer record has resulted in my learning something completely unexpected about 2 of the authors I liked as a child: Patrick O'Connor of Black Tiger at Indianapolis and Leonard Wibberley of The Mouse that Roared are one and the same person! Full name Leonard Patrick O'Connor Wibberley.
6:41:35 PM | |
