the art of writing is discovering what you believe
for some reason, small birds (finches, I think) have been flying into my windows today and walking around on the gutters and the vent covers, so many little footsteps, I thought it was raining.
We’ve had birdstrikes before, some fatal, but never more than one a day: some of these have been more than one at a time. They seem to bounce off and fly away, but that’s gotta hurt.
Press Release – Nav4 Search Engine Patch Kit 1.0 Available for Download
Based on Think Tank 23’s patent-pending Waypoint technology, which uses advanced natural-language processing to dynamically identify thematic categories embedded within Web pages, Nav4 SEPK generates in-context related-document navigation automatically.
Good news here. This is the much improved successor to the core technology that FizzyLab, my previous startup, was based on. Steve and Martin never gave up on the idea that context and relevance could be used as navigational tools. You would all be using it now, everywhere, from the desktop to the web, but for an ill-fated drive to find relationships between consumer goods and textual information.
Why this is considered the next generation of search and navigation is easy to explain when you consider where most search technologies fail. The truism “garbage in, garbage out” applies here: if the user can’t figure out what keywords will get them the results they want, it doesn’t matter how scalable the search engine is or how many documents it searches. Eliminating keywords through textual analysis and then using that information as the example to query for is where search is headed. Like the intelligent robots of vintage SciFi or Apple’s Newton technology, new technologies like Nav4 will eliminate the searching and allow knowledge workers, students, everyone to use the information they need.
Sadly, the Himalayan Blackberry (rubus discolor) is considered an invasive pest. Rightly so, of course, since they will grow almost anywhere and once established are difficult to remove.
But the berries are wonderful. We ate a couple of pints right off the canes at Magnuson Park this morning, and it looks to be a big yield this year.
For all the costly and failed efforts by media companies to create and charge for online material, blogging suggests that the web works best as a link to other people—and a way of finding and raiding their content.
A Computer’s Eye View (from 1972)
How far has computer technology advanced since this was written in 1972? In the proceeding chapter, Kemeny describes the then-new GE 635 machine that ran the Dartmouth Time Sharing System: the “dual processor system is capable of some 10 million multiplications per minute.”
That works out to be 166,166 multiplications per second. (I’m assuming these are “fixed-point” multiplies: no decimals allowed.)
A Pentium 4 can do at least one multiplication per clock cycle; for a 1.7GHz P4, that’s 1.7 billion multiplications per second. Rounding a bit, that 2002 Pentium 4 is about 10,000 times faster. (And if that GE 635 cost 10 million dollars
The question I have to ask is, where has all that power gone? On what have we spent all the speed? Do we do anything 10,000 times faster or even 10 times faster? Or do we instead use this tool more than the other (pen and paper, sliderule, calculator, ledger book), thereby soaking up the capacity?
As much as it seems we should have a surplus, when you look at examples like the one above, there still seems to be the demand for more.
I was doing some shopping at my local Fred Meyer and as I left, I was greeted by a fellow handing out flyers, saying something about a “burger giveaway.” As a vegetarian, I’m not going to be interested, but rather than get into that, I took the flyer and dropped it into the cart. As it left my hand, I saw the word “baptist” and realized this was actually an invitation to visit a local church, burgers provided.
The early Christians were willing to face the lions or the griddle, any number of horrific fates, for their faith, while today’s evangelical Christians seem unwilling to risk a polite refusal or disapproving glance for theirs.
While some are reluctant to publicly profess their faith, others are assassinating their enemies and then fleeing, rather than standing up for their beliefs. I know of no recent violent acts, planned or committed, against religious leaders here in the US.
That seems hypocritical to me. It suggests a lack of real conviction: not that I condone or encourage killing doctors or blowing up healthcare facilities, but commiting the act as a declaration of your faith and then hiding is not the act of a true believer, merely a murderer, a criminal, and a terrorist.
Is the fellow hiding his church’s fellowship meetings behind free burgers evil? No, I don’t think so, but what is there to be afraid of? I suppose some could claim my reluctance to engage him on burgers and vegetarianism constitutes a lack of conviction on my part, but I’m not evangelizing. I could suggest pizza as a more ecumenical approach, food-wise, but that’s another matter. The bottom line is, I’d rather see someone be open about what he’s doing.
Matt Stephenson, the maintainer of the samba package for OS X, liked my docs and based on my feedback will move the package into the stable tree. It seems he has gotten no feedback from anyone, and never knew if it just “worked for him” or just worked.
So send an email to the author of that port, package or utility you use daily and tell him what it means to you. In the gift culture that is the open source world and to some extent the internet, that kind of thing really counts.
Do it now.
“Mother died yesterday. Or was it today?”
So runs the opening of Camus’ “l’etranger”, variously translated as “The Stranger” or “The Outsider.”
It was today, somewhere between 1 and 2 am, that my mother died. We hadn’t spoken in any meaningful way in 30 years, so we weren’t exactly close.
The best summation I have for how the past 48 hours have gone for me is that I feel bad that I don’t feel worse. After all, losing the person who brought you into the world is a milestone for most people.
I first learned she was gravely ill Friday night, about 11 pm, in a rather roundabout way: an aunt with whom I have never had a close relationship telephoned from England earlier in the day to say she wanted to speak to me personally. When the timezones permitted, she told me what was happening: cancer everywhere, no hope of recovery, thought I might want to know.
The best case was that she might last the week, but her suffering ended just a day later.
a house near mine was demolished today: it was old and rundown, and likely had not been lived in for years.
It took two men with an excavator less than a day to destroy the whole house and put the pieces in dumpsters (only three were needed, as far as I could tell). They were halfway through it by 12:30 and there was nothing left but a pile of bricks that had been the chimney stack and a few chunks of concrete foundation by 4 PM.
A fire would take longer and leave more remains . . . .