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Wednesday, November 21, 2001
Still, a lot of free beer 
| | There's an explanation of the award here. |
| | As I'm reading the site, I'm starting to think that the sum is much lower. Says here it's about $80,000 US. |
| | Ah. Says here it is ¥100,000. |
| | Shit. I just did what I should have done in the first place and looked it up on Google. It's old gnus. |
That's phatic. With a T.
| | We believe that the restricted domain of variable-length phatic interjectives is an interesting subset of English that can provide an alternative simple model system of word length distributions. |
| | Extra credit: follow the link and define phatic interjective. |
| | Extra linkage: spread a new one as a meme and screw up the research. |
| | Thanks to Don for the link. |
Flogrolling
No babes, no peace
| | Near as I can tell, the women of Afghanistan have not been busy killing anybody (other than themselves), while suffering persistent torture as an entire population. So what are we to make of that? Laura Bush says "The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorist." Therefore, the way we make sure the next government of Afganistan isn't a terrorist one is by helping restore what Arianna calls Girl Power, modeled on the Hermione Granger character in Harry Potter. |
| | Of course, Hermione is not your average 11-year-old girl. Besides being a bang-up wizard, the brightest student at Hogwarts, and a powerful female role model, she is also a modern manifestation of an ancient archetype, embodied by Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war. By following Athena's lead -- and now Hermione's -- women, both young and old, can learn to weave together strength and vulnerability, passion and discipline, intellect and imagination, and breathe humanity and mercy into the masculine order. Which is what so many Afghan women have done against all odds. |
| | It will be ... foolhardy to move forward in the war against terrorism, and the hard work of rebuilding a country, if more than half of the population of Afghanistan is not allowed to join the battle. |
| | By the way, you might remember Arianna as the wife of Michael Huffington, who spent a monstrous sum of money almost getting elected Senetor in California a few years back. Later the couple split and Michael outed himself as a gay man. |
| | Arianna, who is Greek and educated to an extreme, is widely regarded as a serious piece of work. She is a forceful writer and a brilliant polemecist whose ample skills served the Republican Revolution into the late 90s, when she turned on her old friends and became a ronin scourge whose perspective now seems to come more from the Left. |
| | Anyway, I've always enjoyed her writing, whether I agreed with it or not. She doesn't blog, but her syndicated columns come close to the format, and you'll find them here. |
Bad day
| | The Linux Show hit some hard times recently. Seems like every week I get a note from Jeff Gerhardt reporting yet another Act of God. Circuits went down. The DSL provider went belly up. |
| | Then Sunday his dad died. Here's he obit from the Chicago Tribune. |
| | Then, while the show wasn't going on, the site got hacked. Check it out. Google still has the proper page cached here, for what it's worth. |
| | Jeff's a good guy who doesn't deserve this kind of shit. |
| | The show should be back next week, by the way. |
Today's history lesson
| | Cringeley deconstructs Bill Gates' claims to open source paternity with some help from Jack Sams, the IBM dude who worked the first deal with Microsoft. Interesting history. Read all the way down to the stuff about QuickTime as well. Hard to believe it's been around for 10 years already. He adds: |
| | The amazing thing about Quicktime is that there was nothing like it before, and everything has been like it since. Look at the guts of Real Player or Windows Media Player, and you'll see structural copies of QuickTime. It is very hard to be an original, to be the first, and to still survive a decade later, but Quicktime does all that. And it might even get the last laugh. Apple is rumored to be preparing an MPEG-4 player for Quicktime (the Quicktime file format is already used by MPEG-4), which ought to give the system perpetual legs and a real advantage against more proprietary solutions from Real and Microsoft. |
Apache ambush
| | Says here Xbox might make a fine cheap Web server. |
Open the manual and follow the destructions
FreeBloggery, cont'd
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