Tis a sad thing about Pip. I know that he was a friendly bird from personal experience. Give my best to your folks and sister.

Also, a happy (if somewhat belated) birthday Dave.

dregewitz <at> hotmail <dot> com

42, of course. With Cleveland properly placed as #22 and #24 in sequence. I tried to do the vice-presidents, and only got back to Eisenhower before tripping over Truman's vice president during his one full term - some non-entity named Barkley. Could do Roosevelt's three - Garner, Henry Wallace , and Truman - but only because Wallace was such a commie-symp tool, Truman succeeded to the Oval Office, and Garner got off that great line about the vice presidencey not being worth a bucket of warm spit.

*Nobody* memorizes the presidents of the Continental Congress. For one thing, they weren't what I would call executives, being rather chairmen of a legislative assembly. For another, they were mostly non-entities aside from Hancock and John Jay, or big fish from their state ponds, like Mifflin & McKean, whom you no doubt will recall from the residence halls named after them on University Park campus - many of the buildings on campus are named after various Pennsylvania governors.

*poke* *poke*

Dance, damn you! Dance!

The Pickover "ESP Experiment" was pretty amusing, although it would probably be a lot more impenetrable if they just randomized both sets of cards, instead of always giving the exact same sets of cards. The effect would be the same, but it would be a lot harder to spot. After the fifth try, I noticed that the queens were always different in exactly the same way, and from there it wasn't hard to figure out the replacement trick. I'm clearly not as smart as DeLong's rugrat, but then, I suspect that somebody was chortling at the right points in a revealing fashion while the kid was clicking through, thus biasing the sample.

Edited by author 04-04-2004 10:04 PM
You ask for television suggestions. I wish I had some. While I'm not absolutely heartbroken over "Wonderfalls" (maybe partly because I'm not absolutely surprised), I am disappointed. The last (and apparently last) episode aired was, I thought, really quite good. The fact that Fox has only aired four episodes and apparently isn't even going to show the episode they've already promoted for next week, indicates they never intended to stand by it from the beginning. That they've stood by "Tru Calling", then, is bewlidering. ("Tru" hasn't been anything approaching a breakout hit either, but it's gotten a full run and may even get renewed.)

I watch:

"Alias", of which I've been a big fan since day one but which I'm never sure what somebody new to it would think. I like it almost in spite of itself. It's ludicrous, but usually fun.

"Smallville", which is almost never as good as I hope it would be, which has its share of moments and terrific episodes, but usually falls short. I'm all too often reminded why I stopped watching in the beginning of the first season (and didn't really come back until this season). The tweaking of the Superman mythos and Lex Luthor stuff is great, but it's often a cheesy X-Files meets Dawson's Creek. But I've been pretty faithful this season.

"Angel" -- but, like you said, this is their last year.

"The Shield" -- I find it incredibly gripping

"Touching Evil", although I've only just started watching, and I'm not yet sold on it. My parents, who introduced me to the show, claim the original British version is better.

I stopped watching "24" around the time you say you stopped, or maybe an episode or two before. I realized, somewhat surprisingly, that I just didn't care anymore. Which is surprising because I thought last season was phenomenal (Kim and the cougar notwithstanding). I gave up on "The West Wing" after this season's first episode much for the same reason. I almost never get to see either "The Daily Show" or "South Park" anymore, but I'm trying to catch more of both them and "Chapelle's Show". Otherwise, I've largely been trying to wean myself off of television. Everything else I watch is occasional, random, and/or accidental.

There's always DVD. Both "Firefly" and "Farscape" are big favorites of mine.

Decided to pull a Microsoft and skip right to "3.0", eh? Since nothing is stable before the third version...

Dave, is this NML designed to trim down automatic handling of *ML? Because I can see where a human user of a NML-type language would quickly get lost in the serried ranks of ambiguous closing-tags. At least in XML, you can keep track of what's with what due to the forced redundancy.

Oooh, new content manager! Dave, you do such *interesting* stuff. Thanks for including notes about what you changed and why. Nifty, nifty.

Since it's primary season, I am now getting a mailbox full of Republican hissyfits every evening when I get back from work, so as far as I'm concerned, it's all the same. Especially now that I'm registered Democratic and have little interest in local Republican primary contests...

What service are you using that you're getting charged for time spent downloading email? Something PDA based? Broadband and most dialups are per-month, and hopefully no-one's dialing long distance in this day and age.

If you received junk mail with the regularity that you receive spam e-mail, would you say the same thing? If the post office began to charge you for the added weight of its deliveries? If you often couldn't tell the junk mail apart from the rest without opening it? If the majority of it was pornographic or a scam, and you couldn't do anything but grin and bear it?

I think Dave pretty accurately summed up why it's not just the nuisance factor:

Whenever people start complaining about spam, someone, often a spammer, will note that individual spams are easily dealt with—how hard is it to hit the delete key? That misses the point, of course. Repeatedly deleting unwanted messages is annoying, but what about the time I spent downloading it? The storage space my ISP used to store it until I checked my mail? The network bandwidth between me and the spammer? If 50% of the messages being sent through e-mail are noise, that means that the network providers have paid for twice as much capacity as they need.

As for the dada-esque post, I assumed he was referring to "Norma". Unless there was an aircraft carrier post that I missed.

Edited by author 05-16-2003 10:18 AM
Which dada-esque post? The all-caps one, or the person who liked computers? It's not a very active comments thread, so that the occasional odd permutation shows up more starkly. At least it isn't the PSSFS message board, which is irrecoverably compromised by message-board spam of the most abhorrent persuasion.

I don't know why people are so exercised about spam. I toss it the same way I toss junk mail, and with the same amount of disinterest. Junk mail fills up landfills; the congestion caused by spam is miniscule in comparison, at least in my opinion.

That's hardly worth responding to except to note that a) people who type entirely in caps usually do so because what they have to say is otherwise uninteresting or poorly thought out; and b) people who claim that there's *any* time, much less a time of war, when a country must stand behind its president's every decision without question really don't understand the principles underlying a representative democracy.

It should also probably be mentioned that you seem to be in the wrong forum, replying to posts that weren't made and people who aren't here.

 YOU SIR WILL NOT RECEIVE A VOTE FROM ME OR MY FAMILY FOR YOUR HARSH WORDS ABOUT PRESIDENT BUSH'S SPEECH FROM THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER.(TODAY SHOW)
FORGET WHAT PARTY YOU REPRESENT,HOW ABOUT OUR TROOPS WHO ARE IN FAVOR OF OUR LEADER AND THE MILLIONS OF AMERICANS WHO ALSO FEEL THE SAME WAY.
WHEN ARE ALL YOU POLITICANS GOING TO FORGET PARTY LINES WHEN IT COMES TO PULLING OUR COUNTRY TOGETHER.
I AM STRONGLY CONSIDERING CHANGING MY POLITICAL PARTY!!!!
YOU POLITICIANS JUST DON'T GET IT !!!!!!
-I HOPE YOU GET TO TALK TO SOME OF OUR MILITARY PEOPLE AND FIND OUT HOW THEY FEEL
GOD BLESS OUR PRESIDENT FOR THE GOOD HE HAS DONE FOR OUR COUNTRY AND OUR TROOPS!!!!

This war was about as declared as wars get these days. Two congressional votes six months apart, and innumerable ultimatums, demands, and threats. Call it "illegal" if you insist (I don't think it is, but the argument can be made), but undeclared is claptrap. Me, I'm happy about the progress made. The demise of fascist regimes is always a subject worthy of celebration, if you ask me. Sad for the folks caught between two fires, but you don't put out fires with love and understanding. You use firehoses, pickaxes, and in the case of oil wells, explosives.

Speaking of which, there was a fire uphill from my place last week. Couldn't see the flames, but you could see the smoke, and hear the smashing noises as the firefighters broke through windows and tore up hot spots. With a bad will, selective vision, and a jaundiced ear, one might have concluded that rioters were burning and sacking a building.

This weather sucks, btw. Lots of trees were green-tipping. Not quite as nasty as if it happened after first bloom, but not good. Mother Nature faked out the foliage something fierce.

Mitch

It's nice to hear someone making sense. Still, I've got this cold pit in my stomach about this (undeclared) war. My whole life as a Gen Xer, and I have never felt this powerless and disenfranchised. I want to *do* something.

 



 i like computers ivystudent

Hooray! Hi, Dave!

Discovered Talking Points Memo, have we? Sehr gut. As for worries about popular redistribution of video, I don't know that "broadcast quality" is anything too grand to brag about. Back when I gave a damn about Buffy, the actual "broadcast" signal out of Boston and New York stations (actually satellite feeds, but whatever) were significantly less viewable than irc-distributed digital copies that Dave Asher found. These were not multi-gig copies either, but hrmm, maybe 400 megs? Email is a poor distribution scheme, but there are other ways, like irc, kazaa and the various web subspecies.

Hey, Dave. Still alive in there?

Mitch

/m25
Thank you. Hang in there.

Psst, hey, you. Prove you're not dead.

Miss you, hope you're well.
Love,
Sharon

/m22:

It's hard to write a definition [of "Planet"] that includes Pluto but excludes asteroids and Quaoar.

That's like writing a definition of "continent" that includes Australia but not Greenland.

"An object orbiting the sun that is at least the size of Pluto (1430 miles in diameter)."

However, this possibly includes the Moon (2160 miles in diameter). I've read a few articles suggesting that the Earth and Moon have a double planet relationship rather than planet/satellite. If you compare the way the Moon moves around the sun, its pattern is more similar to a planet's than a satellite's.

But yeah, Jovian/Terran/Sub-Terran seems like a more useful taxonomy.

Any definition of heavenly bodies that groups Mercury and Jupiter together definitely has some issues. Idly speaking, jovian, terran, and subterran bodies seem to be a better classification scheme.

My former manager is the brother-in-law of Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York (http://research.amnh.org/users/tyson/home.html). Neil came and gave a talk at one of Rich's parties (out in the middle of Nowhere, Texas). Neil posits that Pluto is not a planet at all, but a captured comet. It's orbit is so eccentric, and when it gets near the sun, it forms a tail. The Hayden Planetarium left Pluto out of its model of the solar system, inspiring a flood of hate-mail from third-graders. ("Don't kill Pluto, Mr. Tyson," and so on.) He makes a good argument.

The only flaw in the argument that I see, actually, is that we do not have a good definition of planet. The word means wanderer, and the Greeks named the moving things in the sky "planets." That is, the Sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. (And then they named the days of the week after them.) When we got better optics, we started finding other things that were like those last five, and Galileo put _us_ on one of those things and changed the status of the other two.

Problems arose when we started seeing lots and lots of those other things. We had a planet explosion. Some bright person demoted them to "asteroid," and we were back to a reasonable number of planets.

Where does this leave Pluto and Quaoar? The last time we had a solid definition of the word "planet," it included the Sun and left out Neptune. Clearly, that's not the working definition used now. Does the working definition include rocky things spinning around the Sun that could maybe support life, if we tweaked them a little? Do the things have to be in the plane of the ecliptic? (Pluto isn't.) Do they have to follow orbits predicted by Kepler's equations? (Pluto doesn't.) It's hard to write a definition that includes Pluto but excludes asteroids and Quaoar. The current approach is reminiscent of the government's take on porn: I'll know it when I see it.

Edited by author 09-20-2002 02:27 PM
I'm probably the worst possible person to be discussing linguistics. I am still, sadly, monolingual, and will no doubt stay that way. Anyways...

They're still discovering languages? Are these the microlanguages in New Guinea and such? My impression is that the pressure on regional languages and dialects is less extreme than at the height of nationalism in the fifty years or so around the turn of the last century. There's less ideological pressure for homogenized language now, so the environment for the regionals is less hostile. Not friendly or anything, but better. Didn't Cornish die out briefly in the early 20th century?

So long as there's records of a language, it isn't entirely extinct. One hopes that there are linguistics postgrads climbing through the backhollers of New Guinea building those records right now.

Anyways, my contempt for Esperanto is mostly rooted in the jingoistic belief that an auxiliary language already exists, and it's called Basic English. ^_^

Speaking of strong emotions and linguistics, I recently heard Danish for the first time, and was greatly annoyed to discover that it is basically German with a heavy English/Swedish accent. Enough so that I was able to follow some of it with my decade-old college German.

Re /m19:

It's unfortunate (for Esperanto) that its more-reasonable-but-still-silly goal of being an "auxiliary" language got drawn up in all the fear of cultural homogeization.

Meanwhile, the majority of languages are spoken by ever-smaller populations. Each language that disappears without being recorded is a potential insight into the structure of human language lost. For example, inguists recently learned of a language that uses no pronouns, which they had previously assumed to be universal. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that understanding the dominant language in a region is advantageous (for individuals, if not their culture). I wouldn't want to argue that isolated tribes remain isolated so they can give us insights into the human mind.

I read that reactions to Esperanto article. Wow. Talk about reacting to condescension with condescension. It also seems to miss the most obvious (to my mind, at least) reason for reacting violently and negatively to Esperanto, namely, ideological reasons.

Klingon and Elvish are both hermetic artificial languages - created for fictional, hobbyist reasons and adapted for somewhat silly subcultural reasons. They are adapted and used for the establishment of subcultural values. They aren't expansive, they're internally-directed.

Esperanto, on the other hand, is an intentionally *expansive* meme-collection. Traditionally, it's part of the agenda of international-socialist one-world intellectuals. To the average person, Esperanto reeks of fellow-travellerism, intellectual arrogance, contempt for existing bodies of literature and tradition, and just the slightest whiff of future coercion.

It doesn't help that Esperanto was born in the period where national languages were busily exterminating regional dialects and languages like Breton, Welsh, Gaelic and Scots. Esperanto could be seen in that context as the final step in this process of lingual homogenization: as the national languages smothered the regional tongues, Esperanto seemed a tool for the coming world-state to finish the process.

And yes, that was an excellent pink-slipping. More than I usually expect of the CDT.

Dave, it was Ann Coulter. She wrote: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

The entire column can be found here -- http://www.anncoulter.org/columns/2001/091301.htm

I am *so* glad the Centre Daily Times dropped her column.

The boss recently found an open source bit of code that quickly translated between "common" units in a browser context, a units calculator. When we took a look at it, it was clear that it was written for a British website of some sort, because it had things like Imperial Gallons, Stones, and Short and Long Tons. Even worse, the Short and Long Tons referred to metric tons, although that wasn't clear until actually converting between kilograms and tons using the code.

Our customers have a somewhat odd set of needs for units conversions, based partially on local peculiarities - Texans and Louisianans use barrels to measure rice yields, the rest of the delta and the world uses bushels and everybody insists on using volume measures when we try to use weight measures - and partially on what measures the chemical companies use for various pesticides and assorted chemicals. Potato growers insist on hundredweights (cwt), Sugarcane growers on tons (non-metric), Cotton on poundage or "bales" (about 400 lbs). Internally, we store everything as pounds, and convert based on user preferences.

Thanks very much. I'd also like to hear about old friends you got to see and people you got to meet, but I know your site doesn't delve much into the Man Behind the Curtain.

Con report! Con report! Tell me about Otakon, Dave. My only joy is living vicariously through you.

Re /m13:

48 hours? Holy crap.

Wireless keyboards are technically feasable, but the problem with associating a keyboard with the computer becomes even more problematic. At least with physical cables, you can ensure that a normally hooked-up keyboard talks to only one computer at a time. Worse yet, anyone who can intercept your transmissions can see every key you type, unless you're doing encryption in the keyboard.

My fear is that the developers will one-day rush into this without considering the details, and we'll end up with something easily compromised, like WEP and the various cell phone encodings.

Dave Asher has wired his new computer and big-screen TV into a massive home theatre that occupies the better part of his living room. He bought a wireless keyboard, but the technology seems to actually have *devolved* since the old PC/jr days, and it's now rotting in a box, having been replaced by a garden-variety wired keyboard. Anyways, with the improvements in the various digital formats and the advent of DVD-R burners, the download experience is becoming rather startling. There are maniacs who get TV anime translated, subtitled, encoded, and distributed within 48 hours of the initial airing, in near-DVD quality.

"Legacy internet," he says. What a hell of a time to be alive, man!

Reading your thoughts on how the internet--and communication--ought to be always gets me all wistful and pissed off. I _want_ things to be the way you describe, and I have little hope that it will actually happen. *Sigh* You and Buckminster Fuller. Sheesh.

(Hi, Mitch.)

Re /m9:

Historic precedence can be a tricky thing. A lot of states have laws against using tax money for religious purposes, which complicates efforts to use vouchers for religious schools. The problem is that the laws were enacted by rabid anti-Catholics, in many cases supported by the Klan. That doesn't make the law wrong, per se, but it does make it uncomfortable.

As for fonts, I'm fascinated by the aesthetic arguments, but I'll admit that I don't "feel" them, if that makes sense. I'm the same way with modern art. You can go on about color and brushwork and it'll make sense to me, but if you showed me another piece I'd draw a blank.

Oh, one other thing:

Why pledge allegiance to an inanimate object? That's simple. Inanimate objects don't generally have opinions. Demagogues can claim to speak for and relay the opinions of "the people" or "der Volk". Theocrats can claim divine inspiration for their bad ideas and grand corruptions. Monarchists (or even worse, monarchs) are tied to the personal biases and selfish interests of whatever fallible fool they've put on the throne. What imbecile would claim to speak for a piece of fabric tied to a pole? What interests hath a rag flapping in the wind? The flag is an abstract, neutral, disinterested focus of attention for the general populace.

The really cool thing about pledging allegiance to the flag and not Congress or the constitution, is that it separates citizenship from governance. The members of government swear to uphold the constitution; the citizens of the republic swear allegiance to the flag. It's an interesting distinction.

Yo. Just noticed that you had a message board. Contrarian that I am, I've two comments:

1) I honestly don't understand aesthetic arguments about simple font-types. I *like* Arial. It's transparent; any font that I don't notice as a font (Hey, that's a gothic font! I wonder what it says...) is jake by me.

2) I'm a hard-shell agnostic - I'd probably be an atheist if I didn't think denial of the unprovable to be more nonsensical than belief of the improbable - but I'm also a member of the Polybian hypocritical school of public religion. Piety is a useful support for popular governance, and shouldn't be undermined by the petty arrogance of the professionally atheistic. Add on top of that the day-to-day difficulty of bridging the common policy differences between the "Red" and "Blue" sections of the country, and the wisdom of pissing off the religious masses over something as hopelessly trivial as the Pledge of Allegiance strikes me as somewhat lacking. Save the ammunition for serious matters, like the periodic local attempts to teach creationism and the like to ignorant rug-rats in public schools.

Also, if you want to play "Oh you historically ignorant fools!" games with this separation of church and state business, I recommend you read up on the actual separation of church and state for the first century-and-a-half of the republic. The Catholic parochial system emerged as a religious form of self-defense against the rabidly Protestant public school system of most localities. Historic precedent is not a winning argument for proponents of separation.

Re /m6:

QT boards are single-threaded, but light-weight enough that setting up a new one for each topic isn't a burden on the system. They have some reasoning in their FAQ.

They kept your mother out of the NHS? Are you serious?

Re /m7:

The way I'm using it, RSS is a standard way to describe what's new at a web site. Essentially, it lists the titles and addresses of the 15 or so most recent posts. You might have a desktop app that lists new things on the web and it might have a "channel" for ZedneWeb, or you could go to an aggregator site which would have a similar listing.

See http://blogspace.com/rss/ for more info.

On another note, can you summarize what an RSS channel is? (In 600 seconds, of course. ~_^ )

Can I start subordinate threads here? It seems that "New Topic" starts a new *board*. [mumble, grumble, discussion thread technology. hmph.]

Anyway, what I was going to say: My mother refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in high school, because she felt it was dumb to swear fealty to a _flag_. Because of that, she was considered a Communist and kept out of the National Honor Society, a point she will mention with a touch of pride.

In my mind, this relates somewhat to flag burning, as well. See, here's the thing: _Because_ I love America, _because_ I love the ideals on which it was founded, _because_ I am thankful every day for the freedoms that my countrymen fought hard for, I want the right to burn a flag if I feel that would express my views. To ban it would be akin to setting fire to the Constitution.

(Posting on a Unitarian's message board, I know I'm preaching to the choir, but it feels good to say, anyway.)

Re: /m4

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten the Chelsea Clinton jokes. That's even worse than the pounding Katherine Harris got, Ms Clinton was just a kid.
(I'm experimenting with Quick Topic's reply-by-e-mail feature. If this message is unedited, we'll know it worked...)

Re: Reporting appearance in the news.

When the Clintons were coming into office, the local Allentown paper ran a headline, "Why are democrats' daughters so ugly?"

Nice. Really nice.

Ah, glorious feedback. There will be a new episode before the end of the year, and hopefully several others. The thing is, every time I think I've gotten back in the groove, I slip out again.

Hi, world. I want faster progress on Dave's fiction projects.

(Just doing what I'm told. Hi, Dave.)

Greetings. This board is for readers of ZedneWeb who wish to respond to posts, ask questions, say "Hi" to the world, or demand faster progress on Dave's fiction projects.

Please post responsibly.