Posted 5:23 PM by Floyd

Check out this weird editorial by Richard Reeves. Here are the money grafs:

DO not be shocked to read or see in a week, a year or five years, a declaration by Japan that it has decided, as a matter of self-defense, to build nuclear weapons and missile systems to deliver them. Or perhaps it will be Brazil. Or South Korea. Or Turkey. Or Egypt. Or Saudi Arabia. Or Mexico.

In just two years, the Bush administration has managed to undo the decades of work all over the world to try to prevent the proliferation of ``the bomb.'' In talking of pre-emptive strikes against ``evil'' regimes -- evil, of course, being in the red-white-and-blue eye of the beholder -- the United States is forcing other countries and their leaders, sane and insane, to re-evaluate long-ago decisions to trust a few rich nations that already had nuclear technology.

I haven't followed Reeves' career too closely, but I know he's been writing editorials for twenty years or more. And yet he cannot tell that if Japan or South Korea develops the bomb, it will be because North Korea is insane and belligerent and likes to launch rockets to show what they can hit. Even worse, he rejects the idea that there are any objective criteria by which a country can be judged to be evil. Hey dumbfuck, it's your job to persuade people that A is true, but not B. If you don't think that's possible, why are you risking a nasty case of carpal?

Maybe Reeves should hang it up and try something else.

Posted 5:14 PM by Floyd

Slate had an article on Google's ascendance and Yahoo's purchase of Inktomi. The article noted that Google was the fourth most popular destination, and mentioned that Microsoft/MSN was first.

This is only true because of some cheating by Microsoft. If you use IE, try typing in a bogus URL to see what I mean.

Posted 5:03 PM by Floyd

Have you seen the blog version of Samuel Pepys' Diary, run by Phil Gyford? If not, you should check it out. The diary entries being published are from the year 1660.

It's interesting to read Pepys' early modern English. On Jan 2nd Pepys wrote:

... so returned to Mr. Crew’s again, and from thence went along with Mrs. Jemimah home, and there she taught me how to play at cribbage.

Nowadays we would say she taught me how to play cribbage, leaving out the preposition. To play at is a French idiom -- jouer à. Middle English borrowed a ton of words and idioms from French, because England had been conquered by French-Norse people. I assume that to play at was imported from French, then discarded.

Here is a very strange example of French influence on English: The second person possessive pronoun, meaning "belonging to us", was spelled ure in Old English. Old English is pronounced like Latin, so ure is pronounced oo-ray. In Middle English this word was spelled according to French rules, so it became oure or our. Later the English began to pronounce this spelling by English rules -- this changing the pronunciation to ow-er.

Posted 9:00 PM by Floyd

Here's a safety tip for you bloggers: If you are about to make fun of another country's spaceship, ask yourself first, am I married to a person from that nation? If the answer is yes, consider writing something else.

Posted 8:29 PM by Floyd

I have made fun of the San Jose Mercury News for publishing "letters to the editor" from six-year-olds, but I guess it's no worse than the muddled reasoning from this gentleman:

Farmers provide a vital commodity

Your editorial, ``Farmers, cities must find a way to share water wealth equitably'' (Opinion, Dec. 16), misses a key point about what products consumers are guaranteed to need in the 21st century.

No one can predict what the next century will hold. For all we know, in 100 years the microchip may prove to be as irrelevant as the buggy whip.

But no matter what, people will still need to eat. Farming may not meet your definition of the ``new economy,'' but it is the essential economy. As a society, we should take care to ensure that farming continues to prosper in the most productive region on earth, California.

And we should be slow to condemn the people of the Imperial Valley, who face wrenching choices that could affect their home for generations to come. We should remember that they were poised to approve a water-transfer proposal, only to have the terms change -- radically and to their disadvantage -- at the 11th hour.

Californians must work to develop new water sources and use existing sources more efficiently, so that fewer communities face the Imperial Valley's dilemma.

Bill Pauli
President, California Farm Bureau Federation
Sacramento

It's the Pauli exclusion principle! There is room for only one brilliant person named Pauli; all others must take up positions of blithering idiots.

Greenhouses grow better food then fields. So if we don't mind erecting greenhouses, water distillators, and power plants, Antarctica could be the most productive farmland in the world.

Posted 8:19 PM by Floyd

In 1985 I discovered Usenet and read it with a passion. In those days there were a few thousand newsgroups, and not too much traffic. I read news on a terminal, with the Unix rn program. Didja see that? Didja see how I put rn in Courier and you instantly knew it was a Unix command? Those were the days. A friend of mine claimed that he didn't need readers at all; he would go to the /usr/news/usenet subdirectories and read the articles right off the filesystem.

After college my interest trailed off. Around 1993 I stopped reading the newsgroups. But Alta Vista piqued my interest again, and since 1996 or so I have read rec.games.bridge, the sci.space hierarchy, and various political newsgroups.

Usnet contains a lot of cool information, and very knowledgeable denizens like James Donald and Henry Spencer. It also contains a lot of idiots. Recently I began reading alt.fan.harry-potter. I present to you some Subject lines:

Re: Harry Potter and the Lord Of The Rings. I think magic is tied to the Big Bang theory.

I don't respect the opinions of Cartman.

Cartman is not a Harry Potter character, nor is he an alt.fan.harry-potter poster. He is the Cartman you think he is.

Do you all think Hermione could be related to Professor McGonagall

Clearly George Lucas has a lot to answer for.

If somebody actually finds a way to perform witchcraft. Ask Judge Judy?

Al Pacino as Dumbledore

Is Snape a kitten-friend? :-)

Posted 12:46 PM by Floyd

InstantMan posted a link to a report that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist saw an accident while driving on a Florida highway and stopped to give first aid. He said "this guy's going to be harder to demonize than, say, Newt Gingrich", but noted that Alexander Cockburn was trying to do so anyway.

Cockburn wrote an article for the New York Press titled "Dr. Bill Frist: Moral Monster". If Frist had the same finely honed moral sense as Commie apologizer Cockburn, I assume he would have blithely passed by the accident scene. Later he would have explained that reports that six people were killed or injured were right-wing propaganda, and anyway police and firemen and paramedics are reponsible for many deaths themselves.

My first exposure to Cockburn was in a Wall Street Journal (!) editorial twenty years ago, when he explained that while people in Poland had to stand in line for hours while shopping, that was equivalent to Westerners spending hours working. If he was that loopy two decades ago, I wonder what he's like now?

Posted 11:16 PM by Floyd

CNN reports that the Chinese plan to put a man in space this year. Check out the picture of the spacecraft next to the article. It looks like some cheap crappy Star Trek prop -- like the evil Nomad robot.

Posted 11:05 PM by Floyd

Drudge has a link to a Telegraph story about a chimp who appears to have created his own sounds for four concepts (three fruits and the word "yes"). Aside from the normal gee-whiz reaction that anyone would get, this news is interesting to me because it relates to the celebrity who lives closest to me.

I live in Sky Londa, which is an unincorporated community of a few hundred people near the junction of California state routes 35 and 84. We have several local celebrities. Joan Baez lives nearby, but I think closer to Woodside. Neil Young used to live on a nearby road, but I think he has moved out. The closest celebrity to my home is not a singer, but a signer -- Koko the gorilla, famous for having been taught sign language.

A friend of mine is an artificial intelligence experts -- formerly one of the top researchers in the field of "artificial life" -- and he is skeptical of the claims of Koko's linguistic prowess. He thinks that Koko's signings are basically random, that the researchers who study her have massive amounts of footage, and they can choose excerpts that make her look intelligent.

Posted 5:41 PM by Floyd

Here's another test -- I didn't put the comment generator in my Blogger template as I should have.

Posted 4:59 PM by Floyd

I got an email on a mailing list from someone I had met at a party. I checked out her web page and found this little statement at the top: No matter how bad things get -- war is worse.

Let's test this proposition with a thought experiment. On the left is a list of bad things; on the right, the situation during wartime. Pick which you would prefer.

Jewish civilian, Reichskommisariat Ostland	Soldier, Red Army, Baltic Front
Laborer, White Sea Canal Project	Soldier, White Army
Tibetan Buddhist monk	Tibetan guerilla rebel
Afghan civilian, August 2001	Afghan civilian, October 2001
Black slave, antebellum South	Soldier, Union Army

Posted 4:48 PM by Floyd

I love getting Christmas cards. Every year I do what my parents did with them; I tape the cards to my wall for a festive display of holiday cheer. I get cards from friends, relatives, and people I do business with.

Today I got what I assume will be my last Christmas card. Note that it really is a Christmas card, not some bogus generic holiday greeting. Today is the 30th, so the card appears to be five days late.

Who sent me this straggler? Why, of course, my mailman.

Posted 3:11 PM by Floyd

This is my first post with comments. If it's not too much trouble, could you leave a comment to test the system? Thanks!

Note -- there are two comments now; the original which I incorrectly did manually, and a second comment field created after I figured out how to make comments part of my template. I've kept the original around so Paul and I can chaff each other.

Posted 7:26 PM by Floyd

My most loyal fan has pointed out that the picture I posted of snow at my house was too large and made readers scroll the page horizontally. So I edited the post to a half-size picture, which links to the full size.

Last night while Sherry and I were driving home we saw patches of gleaming white stuff on the side of the road. But I didn't see how it could be snow as the temperature was over 40 degrees (our Subaru has a thermometer). When we got home we found it was hail. Still, it's only December and I am hopeful that we will have some snow for the third year in a row.

Posted 7:17 PM by Floyd

Top Ten Professions for those who Loathe Humanity:

10. Trial lawyer

9. Film star with enormous mouth

8. Peace and Democracy Comrade, Lhasa

7. Lubyanka prison guard

6. Cincinnati Bengals ticket salesman

5. Vital organ macerator, Greek Inventor Department

4. Limb collator, Tuol Sleng

3. Taliban Department for Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered Services

2. Einsatzgruppen commando

1. Screenwriter, Sex and the City

Posted 7:02 PM by Floyd

Sorry for the lack of postings lately. I've been under the weather, but not with a cold or flu. I woke up Friday morning and felt the room spin around me, a sensation I have never had the pleasure of feeling while sober.

I went to the doctor yesterday and she said it was likely an inner ear infection. I'm taking Sudafed, which helps a little.