Monthly Archives: January 2009
links for 2009-01-20
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“The sort of bureaucracy that would label Op-Ed writing an act of war goes a lot deeper than just Bush and Cheney and their immediate circle. There are a lot of people who need to be fired at the very least and prosecuted in many cases. Equating an Op-Ed with war suggests to me that Joe the Plumber is running the Pentagon.”
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Trying to learn a bit more about this, to reconcile it with my understanding of agile design. Thinking there may be an incremental path between agile development and formal completeness/consistency… but it would be a path of practice meeting a path of logical modeling, and that will be complex and interesting and difficult to elucidate.
The overdue library books I really wish I had taken time to read before today

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,

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, and finally American Magazine Journalists, 1741–1850 (Dictionary of Literary Biography) Volume 73
, which pisses me off because it’s so goddamned expensive. Gale Research (now displaying your name in the skyline near my house), you are increasingly becoming an obstacle.
[He said, waving a fist at the sky, not realizing that Gale Research might well be a different animal from the Thomson Reuters sign he was indicating. And also failing to connect in any way his disappointment in finding how expensive the Dictionary of Literary Biography actually is to his failure in reading the one he had been hosting in his own home for several weeks.]
links for 2009-01-16
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“Or the methane could be produced by some kind of Martian cows, buried no doubt. On Earth each Earth-type cow produces .6 metric tons of methane annually. One of the comments to yesterday’s NASA press conference on this discovery pointed out that since the plume contained about 19,000 tons of CH4 that indicates (if Martian cows are similar to Earth cows) that we should be looking for about 19,000/.6 = 31,000 (hidden or buried) Martian cows. This possibility will probably be reported on extensively in supermarket publications over the next several weeks.”
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“There’s also an unspoken class bias at work here, a bully mentality that chooses its targets based on who’s likely to fight back and win. Consider commercial TV, which is filled with programs that routinely air copyrighted material without permission for purposes of journalism, satire or simple entertainment. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report don’t ask permission to air any of the news clips they slice and dice each night for yuks; they consider a network’s onscreen logo to be acknowledgment enough, and their assumption is almost never challenged.”
Have a Book: Theodore Thinker’s Tales: The Balloon and Other Stories (1859)
Theodore Thinker’s Tales: The Balloon and Other Stories, by Francis C. Woodworth. Clark, Austin & Smith (New-York), 1859. Uncorrected OCR and downsampled grayscale images; we’ll post a more authoritative version someday when I’m not just putting the software through its paces.