The following is from an actual Midwestern newspaper clipping (you know, the things printed on flattened trees) from circa 1992. Monday, July 19, 7 p.m. — Overeaters Anonymous at the Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, use south door (kitchen). On a serious note, researchers at Cornell University found that people who pass through an entryway near…
Author: mdubinko
60 Minutes covers it. Disclaminer: haven’t seen it, the video doesn’t even play in my browser. Let me know if you have better success in viewing. -m
Google for RIAA, get this first result: RIAA – Recording Industry Association of America – April 12, 2009 Trade group that claims to represent the US recording industry. Details on services, members, executives profiles, statistics, and contact information. “Claims to” represent the US recording industry? The word “claims”, accurate as it may be, appears nowhere…
Whoa. Check out this brutal takedown of the beloved The Elements of Style. Even though I generally have little patience for grammar nazis, I couldn’t stop reading things like The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to…
I enjoyed this post, from Jeremy Allison as it turns out. It talks about how GPL software is “the new BSD” when it comes to cloud computing, since redistribuion of the software doesn’t happen, and thus doesn’t trigger the relevant clauses of the GPL. Any old company can use, re-use, and modify the software without…
This article states: The analysts determined YouTube’s bandwidth costs by assuming that 375 million unique visitors would visit the site in 2009, with 20 percent of those users consuming 400 kilobits per second of video at any given time. That works out to 30 million megabits being served up per second. That’s a heck of…
Never trust a document with “Manifesto” in the title, nor that document’s writer. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
This article seems encouraging. I’ve never been able to come to grips with the anti-CF bias of the scientific community. Sure a few researchers made fools of themselves two decades ago, but what has that got to do with falsifiable hypotheses? A small amount of research goes on with minimal funding, under the newer name…
An interesting proposal from Liam Quin, relating to the need for huge rafts of namespace declarations on mixed namespace documents. In practice, though, almost all elements [in the given example] are going to be unambiguous if you take their ancestors into account, and attributes too. Amen. I’ve been saying things like this for five years…
The 1980 BBC version with John Cleese. Available for instant watching, but will go away on April 01. Apparently lots of BBC stuff is supposedly going away soon. (I’ve never linked to a Netflix title before, let me know if it doesn’t work) -m
[Update: now featuring Actually Correct Math. Somebody stop me before I late-night-blog again…] Recent news coverage mentions a badly-needed breakthrough at MIT in battery technology. Using a slight variation of existing lithium materials, much faster charge and discharge rates are possible. The money quote is that [Professor Gerbrand Ceder and graduate student Byoungwoo Kang] went…
Omito: (Spanish) First-person singular (yo) present indicative form of omitir (to omit). (Proto-English) Shortened word form of an error of omission, e.g. in written. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
The remarkable (and prolific) Stephen Wolfram has an idea called Wolfram Alpha. People used to assume the “Star Trek” model of computers: that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. Which has proved to be quite distant from reality. Instead But armed with Mathematica and…
Your search – :-) – did not match any documents. Suggestions: Try different keywords. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
Sudo says make me a sandwitch. Sudo says clap your hands. Sudo says touch your nose. Sudo says turn in a circle. Now give me a thumbs up. Ha! I didn’t say sudo says! More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
With apologies to a real news site. (02-27) 16:14 PST SEATTLE, (AP) Amazon.com Inc. changed course Friday and said it would allow copyright holders to decide whether they will permit their works to be read aloud by the latest laryngeal apparatus, a feature that has been under development for several thousand years. The move comes…
Dear Amazon, Speaking as an author myself, you not only made a bad choice, you set a precedent in the wrong direction. The Author’s Guild doesn’t speak for me, nor do I want them to. TTS is only going to get better. The last thing we need is another backward industry fighting progress. -m
It is what you don’t expect that most needs looking for. From Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, p 29. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
This is fantastic. Brian May (yes THAT Brian May) not only blogs, but talks about all kinds of challenging subjects. Like how and why space and time are linked. Worth a read. -m
I’m (just barely) enough of a writer that I can spend cycles on Steorn‘s claims without being branded a crackpot. After all, the novel I’m working on involves a similar device being invented 4,000 years ago. It’s all research. Imagine if Earth’s gravitational field, instead of being a constant 1.0G, rocked back and forth between…
Honestly, I don’t even need to write a punchline for this one, it sounds so much like the setup of a Monty Python-esque joke. Give it your best shot in the comments… -m
From the company home page, reknown XSLT trainer and friend G. Ken Holman has expanded his offerings to include XQuery training. The first such session is March 16-20, alongside XML Prague. I’ve always thought there is great power in having both XSLT and XQuery tools at one’s disposal. I’ve seen people tend to polarize into…
Steorn is making noise again about the free energy device they claim to have invented. The proper scientific attitude to have toward such claims is skepticism, though most responses (always from individual who have never seen it) goes well beyond that. But think of the downside if every phone, iPod, refrigerator, car, air conditioning unit,…
A few days ago, a carrier update arrived for my iPhone. Since then, my battery life has suffered a significant decline. Anyone else seen this? -m
From Jeffrey D. Kooistra’s April 2009 Alternate View column in Analog magazine: If there is one thing that has become clear in the twenty years since the advent of [Cold Fusion], it is that presenting the straight scientific facts in straight prose and to a significant level of detail doesn’t sway set-in-concrete, or even set-in-Jell-O,…
XSLTForms, the cross-browser XForms engine (written about previously) that makes ingenious use of built-in XSLT processing, reached an important milestone today, with a beta release. Tons of bug fixes and additional support for CSS and Schema. If you’re thinking about getting involved with XForms and are looking for something small and approachable, give it a…
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. — attributed to Pablo Picasso. Economies are useless. They can only provide goods and services. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
This year’s Mark Logic User Conference is May 12-14, in beautiful San Francisco. Attend the conference at no charge as a speaker! Submit a proposal for a breakout session on business applications, technical implementation, or best practices. Deadline is February 13th. Thanks! -m
If you’ve seen MarkMail before, you may be pleased to know that a new version launched last week, including new features (like saved search sets) for power users. If you haven’t seen MarkMail before, what are you waiting for? -m P.S. If you could use something like this behind your firewall, ping me.
I’m not now right here. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.