Category: observations

The Seattle Times: Northwest Life

This weekend is the darkest of the dark days of winter, in a region that shares poster-child status with Scotland for Seasonal Affective Disorder. It’s what travel books mean when they say about Seattle: “Overcast days and long winter nights have long made the city a haven for moviegoers and book readers.”

The shortest day today. The toughest part of winter looms ahead. It doesn’t feel like the days are drawing out until March or so which is a big reason why everyone goes to Arizona or Hawaii in February.

I was hoping to download some video from my sister-in-law’s Sony Handycam and play with it in iMovie. But as I sat down to do it, I realized it didn’t have a FireWire port (or I.Link in Sony parlance). And to make matters more frustrating, the USB connector was a mini-B5, ie, not the A or B you would see in everyday life. So I was foiled.

But I was interested to see that Sony had removed Firewire from their newer cameras in favor of USB: USB ports have been standard on PCs for 5 years and Firewire is still an option. Obviously, Sony isn’t waiting for Firewire to be as ubiquitous as USB.

Ledger-Enquirer | 11/06/2002 | Sonny ends the reign

Perdue refused to talk about the referendum in an interview with The Associated Press. “We’re not going to talk about that tonight,” he said. “You folks in the media have been the only ones who wanted to talk about the flag. I’m going to talk about healing Georgia and bringing Georgia together.”

Confederate flag supporters to next governor: You owe us

[Sons of Confederate Veterans] members dogged Barnes throughout the campaign, showing up at campaign functions waving the old Georgia flag and posting “Boot Barnes” posters along roadways. Now it’s payback time, they say.

“We put out hundreds of signs, worked thousands of man-hours and wrote hundreds of letters,” said SCV Southeast Brigade Cmdr. Don Newman. “The Republicans owe us. And we expect to be paid.”

The usual duplicity as Georgia’s governor-elect disclaims any knowledge of the old segregation-era flag being used as an issue in his campaign. Glad I moved away. I’ve become more aware of the institutional racism of the South now than I ever was, even before this boneheaded but hardly surprising move. I wouldn’t object if the Old South were to secede again (they have a president in Trent Lott): Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia could secede as Cascadia. The dread of all military commanders is a war on two or more fronts: how about two simultaneous secessions?
Continue reading “a dishonorable debt”

Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys

I heard a piece in NPR this morning discussing this book. It was too early to get most of it, but I was struck by the passionate but matter-of-fact way in which the author made his case.

The premise is simple: boys are not allowed to be full-formed, emotional people, but are heavily pressured to deny their emotional and empathetic natures by what they perceive as a man’s role. Men don’t cry, they’re never afraid, they never need help, etc. And 95% of the murders in this country, claims the author, are committed by boys/men who take this message as the way they should live. Other western nations — Canada and Australia were the examples cited — don’t do this to their boys.

It’s on my reading list.

Ben Hammersley.com: Trackback, RDF, and the LazyWeb

Here’s the thing: I want to make a More Like This From Others button for each of the entries below. Clicking on it would bring a list of entries, formatted just like the blog, with excerpts of entries on a similar subject from other people.

Herein lies the rub: following my little investigation into people’s categorisation habits, I can see that everyone calls everything different names: and until we have a universal taxonomy for weblogs (ha!) then we’re stuck on a global “Google for Weblogs”.

Interesting thread. I think they’re on the wrong track and I think Ben has misstated what he really wants. Join in and see what you think.

Young Man, Would You Like That in a Box?

What distinguishes younger buyers, all car companies seem to agree, is that they don’t seem to care as much about cars as young people used to — putting more stock in the style of their cellphones or P.D.A.’s than in the style of what they drive. So the designers gave the Element a back-to-basics look.

I expect I’ll see a lot of these around town.

Another new book I grabbed tonight. Saw it on my nephew’s bookshelf and he hadn’t read it. I figured someone had to.

I have read the author’s other books on ADD and this looks to be interesting. The reader review are all 4 and 5 stars . . . that’s a good sign.

Froogle

Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google’s search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.

via John

One way to determine the value of a new service is by valuing the ones it replaces. The Shopping channel in Apple’s Sherlock (which replaced Karelia’s Watson) comes to mind.

What others?

Communications From Elsewhere

According to the hidden bias tests at tolerance.org, I have a slight association between the sciences and males, and a slight preference for thin people over fat people. Apparently I don’t associate “good” or “bad” with “straight” or “gay” or with “young” or “old”.

Interesting stuff. What kind of biases do you have?

A Mighty Wind Against Waste (washingtonpost.com)

“The possibilities inspire the imagination,” said Lewis Carr, a University of Maryland agricultural scientist who oversaw tests of an earlier prototype at the Salisbury campus on the Eastern Shore. “I expect to see this in the future. The question is how quickly it’s going to get to the future.”

Polifka calls his creation a “tornado in a can,” though the official name painted on the side of the cone is Windhexe — a branding inspired by the devil winds that sweep the Kansas plains that the 73-year-old Polifka has farmed all his life.