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Wired has an article about the latest wave of production quailty 'music-making for the masses' software.
I've used Acid Pro for a while and it's both amazing and easy to use. I've also fooled around with Reason (a demo) and was impressed. But not so much as to pay $400 for it.
Over at Kuro5hin there's an great article on particle physics, and another on weightlifting. More evidence that the internet is just now starting to get interesting.
Lawyers preparing cases, are now competing against one another for evidence, available for sale at eBay and other sites.
“While "evidence" is not one of eBay's 18,000 product categories, lawyers who know what they are looking for can filter 11 million items by punching in keywords. There are dozens of active "asbestos" auctions every day. But asbestos lawyers aren't the only ones shopping for evidence on eBay.”
According to this article in New Scientist, mass emailing does more harm than good. That sounds about right, but still, there are lots of gullible people out there, (as the persistence of the Nigerian scam attests) who have to be nibbling at the bait.
This William Saletan article at Slate says it certainly looks that way.
If the lack of off-beat flavors at the local Dairy Queen is a problem for you, then you can always order some of this delicious sounding fish and brandy flavored ice cream, from a Japanese supplier.
Clicking through the other selections will introduce you to tempting ice cream flavors, such as ox-tounge, squid, octopus, eel, wasabi ("surprisingly edible ice cream" they say) and of course, the summertime favorite, corn ice cream.
I’ve spent the last few hours on a beautiful Summer Sunday evening trying to get the layout of this page to come out right. I had a table free css layout that worked on IE in windows, but it looked horrible on the Mac IE and shaky in Opera and was just unusable in Mozilla. And after breaking the layout down to a very simple three columns, and (seemingly) a million tweaks, it now seems to work on all four browsers.
I was unhappy with the original page, with all those pencil lines. It was a first try with both css and movable type, and at first, I was just happy that it seemed to work. But it did look a little off. After putting some more time into the design of Guardroom (which, if I do say so myself, looks pretty snazzy) I became more and more unhappy with the slapped together look of this page.
So back to business.
And lets see what the stock market does tomorrow with the WorldCom bankruptcy.
Oh, and Gail, you can give up on Infinite Jest if you want. My next recommendation will be better, I promise.
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A women who wisecracked with an America West crew about the sobriety of the pilots was ejected from the flight. So now she’ll be forced to spend her money with another airline, maybe one that didn’t have its pilots arrested for flying drunk. Good move.
The Ted Williams story is getting too strange not to be true. Originally it was just his head, (his brain, apparently) that was going to be frozen. But stop and think: we're talking Ted Williams here, not Richard Feynman.
Then it was his DNA that was going to be utilized for cloning. But you don’t need to preserve the body, or even the head, to extract DNA. As I understand it, a sample can be taken from the body and stored in a lab, and the body could then be buried or cremated normally. This would be much cheaper than freezing the body.
And now it seems that the real reason his son, John Henry, wants to put Ted on ice is to revive him later. News flash: Ted has been out of the Major League for a while. He was a once great athelete, with a now, 83 year old body. Even forgetting for a moment, the loonyness of the process itself, what exactly would be the point of cryogenicaly preserving him in that condition?
It seems to me that there's a whiff of Norman Bates and his mother in all this.
Also, Dan Shaughnessy weighs in on this debacle.
Amir Taheri, writing in the Arab News says that Bin Laden is dead, if not literally (and that's likely) then, certainly politically. (via Instapundit)
Racing scrollbars. It's so stupid, it's actually fun.
And Battleships is reborn as a browser game. (via Firda)
As the AIDS pandemic continues to spread through sub-Saharan Africa, the numbers show that women are contracting the disease at almost twice the rate of men. John Donnely writes in a Sunday Globe story, that this has cultural implications, as women are seen as the glue that holds village life together.
An eerie midafternoon twilight hangs over southern New England this Sunday, the result of smoke from forest fires in Canada blowing down at high levels. The 11 fires are raging in western Quebec region of Nemiscau, near James Bay with no forecast of rain in sight.
I'm just getting around to reading Lileks' 4th of July column. Tatoos, discount stores, garage door openers, lemons the size of softballs, and forty flavors of orange juice. A great column, on a great day in a great country.
This Australian news story says that America is on edge following the LAX shootings on the Fourth of July. Not quite. What would put me on edge, is if there were killer sharks swimming around all the beaches, and dingoes sneaking from the brush, stealing babies. But an isolated shooting by a single malcontent Egyptian?
This is a great story. The Maharishi Yogi, the guy who entranced George Harrison, resulting in a whole generation being subjected to twelve-minute sitar solos, has a new offer for the West. In a tone more reminiscent of Doctor Evil than a pacifist, he says that he will make terrorists threats against the US go away for the sum of one mill… uh, one BILLION dollars.
- Pass the feta, Greta. A study suggests that Greek food and sex contribute to a long heathly life.
- Officer (way too) Friendly. A domain name mixup has visitors to the Osceola FL Sherrif’s Office seeing porn instead of crime stats.
- Stinkfoot. A man was fined for taking off his shoes in a library.
- Can you hear me, now? A 78 year old grandmother has to climb a tree to get reception for her cellphone to make a weekly call to her grandchildren.
One of the all time great hitters, Ted Williams has died. He never wore a tie.
Janis Ian on Music Downloads.
Things maybe are heating up. Music industry sounces have leaked that they intend on going after individual file swappers. The Music Industry still doesn’t get it.
From an article on Ralph Peters, an author and retired Army intelligence officer...
"One of the most frustrating things about being a terrorist today is how hard it is to really hurt America."
A court in Copenhagen has ordered a news service to stop linking to individual story pages of the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association member sites.
The implication is that site owners own link access to their sites. How will this effect blogs in Denmark? How about outside news services that link to Danish stories?
In LA, an Egyptian man was identified as the airport shooter. More will be known after an investigation, but it appears that he was a lone attacker.
I didn’t know there was one of these:
The Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
These people apparently have given some thought as to what we should do if an alien civilization is detected.
Also, Glenn Reynolds has a lighthearted look at the subject.
And this site has even recorded messages in various languages to explain what is't all about to the aliens.
It takes a while to get the hang of it, but this is a pretty well built browser game.
It reminds me of an similar early computer game.
In Slate, mathematician Edwin Clark writes that he’s afraid that all the popular attention given to A New Kind of Science will teach the public that scientific turf battles are more important than the scientific method.
I can see his point. I’ve just finished Wolfram’s book and it is very interesting, at least to a lay person. But, at least for me, I think a lot of the appeal is based on the ‘outsider showing up the Academy’ theme that weaves its way through the 1200 plus pages.
And now it’s on to the Everyman’s Library compilation of all the Rabbit novels, another big and heavy book. (If I keep this up, I’ll be able to trade my gym membership in for a library card.)
I’ve liked Updike’s more offbeat novels (The Coup, S, Brazil, Toward the End of Time, and even the Bech books) over the ‘definitive’ Updike stuff. And although I’ve touched base with the Rabbit novels, this is a good opportunity to read them all, all the way through.
- The Declaration of Independence
”...And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
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- A listing of patriotic sites (Some, not very.)
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“Patriotism means to stand by the country.
It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country.
It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country.
In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth--whether about the President or anyone else--save in the rare cases where this would make known to the enemy information of military value which would otherwise be unknown to him.”
Theodore Roosevelt
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- A Sept 11th Blog. Start at the bottom and read up.
- A screen shot: NYTimes web site, 9/11/01, 10:16 AM.
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- George Orwell on Nationalism, Patriotism ...and a few other 'isms'.
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I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands; one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
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- Red Skelton on the Pledge of Allegiance
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- Notes on displaying the American Flag.
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- From a Jonathan Alter essay on Patriotism after Sept 11th:
"As the French journalist Alexis de Tocqueville noticed when he visited the young republic 170 years ago, American patriotism is more rational—more based on interests—and less emotional than older varieties of patriotism. Tocqueville observed that though “less ardent” and less visible than that of other nations, ours was a more durable faith."
- And from Peggy Noonan yesterday:
"Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, and we must celebrate. Let us hold high a single sparkler to honor those American institutions that, in this interesting year, did not flounder or fail. Much has been said of those that did--Wall Street, big business, big accounting, the Catholic Church, the FBI and CIA. But most didn't. Some stayed good and some improved and some seem to summon a metaphor: While the towers of the institution tottered, the men and women who worked within them took the stairs two at a time, hauling 80 pounds of gear to save the structure.
So: Let us hold a single sparkler to the lights that didn't fail."
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Entries have been light this week, as I am trying to get Guardroom, a collaborative cop-blog off the ground. So far, I’m the only one collaborating, but hopefully the reticence of some of the other contributors will fade, and other voices will be heard.
The NY Times has a fairly long story on Chief Justice Rehnquist, who they say is not ready to retire.
Facial recognition systems, plugged into image databases (Sometimes know as Mr. Potato Head systems) are helping to modernize the suspect sketch.
Here's a low tech Wired story on pig stink.
This sensible analysis piece says the Palestinian economy may not survive the fence. And, I'm sure they'll blame Israel when it collapses.
