[post futuredated for easy visibility] Originally Posted: 4/3/04
I'm instituting filters for certain types of posts, so I don't feel guilty about cluttering up my friends' pages with "random" information. As for other random information, you can find out about common post topics here, memory categories, and the tags sidebar at your right (duplicated here). If you don't like at least, oh, five of the topics, I'm not sure you'll see much point in friending my LiveJournal.
Currently *Quizzes *Surveys *Tarot Readings *Food/Recipes made public, because they're fairly general interest, not repetitive, and they're cut anyhow.
Comment here if you want to -know why I friended you -how I found you -join a filter -leave a filter ( Read more...Collapse )
If I ever contribute to a misunderstanding, please let me know. I'd be pretty sorry, and I'd want to know what happened so I could prevent it happening in the future.
This goes for everybody. Misunderstandings happen. I can't fix it if I don't know.
This is -really- important to me, not just for love, but for decency. For peace. For respect. If I am harming respect, it is crucial to know it.
It's very difficult to understand why someone would withhold this. Difficult, and hurtful.
If I've ever contributed to a misunderstanding, especially one that hurt your feelings, please accept my deepest apology and sorrow.
For privacy's sake, comments will be screened unless the commenter wishes otherwise.
Edit (10:40): Very cold outside. And cloudy. Not enough to obscure it all the time, just most. But it was pretty when visible. And there wasn't any rain/snow/sleet in the air or on the ground, unlike tomorrow's forecast.
GREENWOOD, IN—Sitting in a quiet downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there's more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book.
I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas Words and music by John Rox performed by Gayla Peevey (1953)
I want a hippopotamus for Christmas Only a hippopotamus will do Don't want a doll, no dinky Tinker Toy I want a hippopotamus to play with and enjoy
I want a hippopotamus for Christmas I don't think Santa Claus will mind, do you? He won't have to use our dirty chimney flue Just bring him through the front door, that's the easy thing to do
I can see me now on Christmas morning, creeping down the stairs Oh what joy and what surprise when I open up my eyes to see a hippo hero standing there ( Read more...Collapse )
Users are experiencing lost calls and lengthy waits. Officials say it's better to summon help on a land line.
An explosion in calls from cellular phones has overwhelmed critical parts of California's 911 system, resulting in hundreds of thousands of lost calls and lengthy waits to reach dispatchers even as crimes or potentially deadly emergencies unfold.
Wireless 911 calls statewide have jumped roughly tenfold since 1990, to more than 8 million last year. Cell calls now make up the majority of all 911 calls, and key emergency agencies are struggling to adapt.
The problems are aggravated by call surges -- such as when multiple motorists call in about the same accident -- staffing shortages at 911 dispatch centers, and technological hurdles. Cell calls are more easily interrupted or lost and take longer to handle, officials say, reducing the number of calls each dispatcher can field.
Many people are unaware of such deficiencies until they desperately need help. ( Read more...Collapse )
We may never know if Shakespeare had a sister, but we can be certain he didn't have a hard drive. What if he had? Details of his writing process and his life currently a mystery might be pitilessly exposed.
As scholars will tell you, there are no manuscripts of the plays surviving in the Bard's own hand. The text of King Lear, for example, comes to us from two published quartos and the First Folio (1623), with hundreds of lines and thousands of words differing between them. In the so-called "bad quarto" of Hamlet, a certain soliloquy begins: "To be or not to be. Aye, there's the point, /To Die, to sleep, is that all, aye all." The speech is also placed differently, in Act II, Scene 2, rather than its accustomed place in Act III, Scene 1. Today it is typically thought that the bad quarto is a memorial reconstruction of the play by an actor or spectator, but we can't be sure. In any case, the texts are rife with ambiguities. Which versions are right? What was closest to Shakespeare's own original (or final) intentions?
If Shakespeare had had a hard drive, if the plays had been written with a word processor on a computer that had somehow survived, we still might not know anything definitive about Shakespeare's original or final intentions — these are human, not technological, questions — but we might be able to know some rather different things. We might be able to know, for example, the precise date on which he began composing Hamlet indeed the precise minute and hour, time-stamped to the second. We would be able to know how long he had spent working on it, or at least how long the file containing the play had remained open on his desktop. We would very likely have access to multiple versions and states of the file, and if Shakespeare had "track changes" turned on while he wrote, we would be able to follow the composition of a soliloquy keystroke by keystroke, each revision also date- and time-stamped to the second. We might discover the play had originally been called GreatDane.doc instead of Hamlet.doc. We might also be able to know what else he had been working on that same day, or what Internet content he had browsed the night before (since we'll assume Shakespeare had Web access too). While he was online, he might have updated his blog or tagged some images in his Flickr account, or perhaps edited a Wikipedia entry or two. He might even have spent some time interacting with others by performing with an avatar in Second Life, an online place where all the world is truly a shared virtual stage. ( Read more...Collapse ) Will The Response Of The Library Profession To The Internet Be Self-Immolation? by Martha M. Yee, with a great deal of help from Michael Gorman
There are two components of our profession that constitute the sole basis for our standing as a profession. The first is our expertise in imparting literacy to new generations, something we share with the teaching profession. The other is specific to our profession: human intervention for the organization of information, commonly known as cataloging. The greater goals of these kinds of expertise are an educated citizenry, maintenance of the cultural record for future generations, and support of research and scholarship for the greater good of society. If we cease to practice either of these kinds of expertise, we will lose the right to call ourselves a profession. ( Read more...Collapse )
Which is prettier? A picture of a black cat sleeping on a pillow or one of a curly-haired brunette woman in a miniskirt? I've got only a few seconds to decide. I vote for the cat. I'm sitting in a laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, playing Matchin', a computer game developed by Luis von Ahn. In the game, two players — von Ahn and I, seated at different terminals — watch as pairs of pictures swiped off the Internet flash up on our screens. Our goal is to pick the one we think both of us will find more attractive, not necessarily the one we personally prefer. This requires a sort of mindmeld, and it doesn't always work: Von Ahn picks the girl in the miniskirt instead of the cat. We've got one minute to process as many pictures as we can, so we race on frantically, evaluating photos in an instant. Soon we hit a groove: We both say that a picture of a peacock is prettier than one of a picnic, a baby is lovelier than a tombstone, a wedding couple beats a field of wheat. Then the game is suddenly over, and we get our score: We agreed 70 percent of the time. Pretty good, but not enough to hit the high-score tables.
"Man," laughs von Ahn. "You picked some weird stuff!"
It's an oddly enjoyable game. But Matchin' is also a covert experiment in artificial intelligence. Every time players agree on a picture, it's tagged as prettier. Von Ahn, a 28-year-old professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, will put the game online this summer, and as thousands of people play it, his database of 100,000 photos will be imbued with something quintessentially human: an aesthetic sensibility, encoded as a ranking of attractiveness.
The game basically tricks humans into teaching computers what constitutes prettiness. If enough people play Matchin' — and von Ahn's previous games have garnered millions of play-hours — it could eventually rate the appeal of every image on the Internet. Google could incorporate the ratings into its search engine, so you could search specifically for "beautiful" pictures of houses, people, or landscapes.
"People are good at figuring out what's attractive, and computers are good at quickly searching and finding," von Ahn says. "You put them together, and bang!"
This is "human computation," the art of using massive groups of networked human minds to solve problems that computers cannot. Ask a machine to point to a picture of a bird or pick out a particular voice in a crowd, and it usually fails. But even the most dim-witted human can do this easily. Von Ahn has realized that our normal view of the human-computer relationship can be inverted. Most of us assume computers make people smarter. He sees people as a way to make computers smarter. ( Read more...Collapse ) Games that Help Solve Computing Problems. Your Turn. Luis von Ahn's new games pair random players to solve a computing problem. Because the two players get points when their answers match, the accuracy — and fun quotient — increases. To try them, go to www.gwap.com. ( Read more...Collapse )
Don't you hate it when things get dumbed down? There was a time when you needed two years of engineering classes and a month of free time to make a web page, but now any troglodyte with a library card can put up a monstrous tribute to Overkill and Scarlett Johansson. The inventors of the web did not intend for it to be used by people who can't conceive of deleting a file unless there's a little picture of a trashcan on the screen. It's not just the web, either. First we had one-click cameras, then we had digital cameras, and now we have one-click digital cameras. It degrades the very medium of photography that anyone with the rudimentary ability to aim can take "snaps" of his or her Dantean birthday parties and stomach-turning family gatherings. At least when there was a week between taking a picture and seeing the result, you thought twice before taking a photo of your cat immersed in packing peanuts.
While we're at it, what demented populist invented the desktop printer? Thanks to this person's thoughtlessness, you can't even do your laundry without being subjected to a nauseating collage of advertisements from people who want to align your chakras, sell you a lawnmower, baby-sit your pets, or all three. There was a time when we realized that advertising is an exacting discipline, best left to trained professionals and displayed proudly on majestic billboards. ( Read more...Collapse )
Howard Sherman is hoping to convince people that their iPods and cell phones aren't just for music or phone calls. Instead, he'd like you to use yours to fight dragons and solve murder mysteries.
A lifelong computer-game player, Sherman spends his professional life talking up the nostalgic charm of old-fashioned text-based games. His company, Malinche Entertainment, has produced several titles similar to old Infocom text games such as the legendary Zork. While the company has found a niche market selling these retro games for computers, Sherman is hoping to exploit new devices to reinvigorate the genre. ( Read more...Collapse )
CLEARWATER - Jackie Ramseur sits outside the library on a park bench, her bags at her feet, smoking roll-your-own cigarettes. She's tiny, wiry, with skin browned by the sun. She had two teeth pulled this week, and the pro bono dentist wants to pull two more. She won't say exactly where she sleeps at night - only that she has a "hidey hole," and it's safe.
Jacqueline Ramseur reads The Dark Mirror, by Juliet Marillier, on a park bench outside the main branch of the Clearwater Library. Ramseur is homeless, but checks out books to read on her favorite park bench overlooking Coachman Park and the intracoastal waterway.
Jackie prefers living on the streets to being "inside," as she calls it. Were she to go back inside, she would face heart surgery, a prospect she doesn't want to consider.
"I go everywhere in the world when I'm reading," says Jackie Ramseur, who checks out only one or two books at a time.
In her bag, she has library books. There's Valley of Silence, a Nora Roberts romance novel about Celtic vampires. She has Stargirl, a young adult novel about teenagers confronting high school cliques. And Second Wave: Acorna's Children, a sci-fi novel she picked up off a library display because it had a cat on the cover, and she loves animals.
"When I had a house," Ramseur says, "I had lots of books."
Ramseur spends her time near the main library in Clearwater, but it could be anywhere. From downtown to suburban branches, it's the rare library that has no homeless patrons. ( Read more...Collapse )
Born with heaven in their eyes God sent, innocent The promise of life Born into this mess we’ve made Holding the future And hope of better days ‘Cause these is nothing more beautiful And wild Than the dreams that grow in the heart Of every child
They are the roses They are the lights that shine They are the waves that roll in the ocean tide They are angels They are souls in flight They are the hope that Everything’s gonna be alright They are the roses ( Read more...Collapse )
Back when I was in 7th grade I stood up in front of my English class and delivered a tongue-in-cheek, poorly researched presentation on why I thought Mister Rogers should be the next President. I ate up the first few minutes zipping up my cardigan, and putting on some sneakers, and then I proceeded to mock him roundly. It was a riotous success. Fourteen years later, I’m using this post to repent. The following are 15 things everyone should know about Fred Rogers:
1. Even Koko the Gorilla loved him Most people have heard of Koko, the Stanford-educated gorilla who could speak about 1000 words in American Sign Language, and understand about 2000 in English. What most people don’t know, however, is that Koko was an avid Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fan. As Esquire reported, when Fred Rogers took a trip out to meet Koko for his show, not only did she immediately wrap her arms around him and embrace him, she did what she’d always seen him do onscreen: she proceeded to take his shoes off!
2. He Made Thieves Think Twice According to a TV Guide piece on him, Fred Rogers drove a plain old Impala for years. One day, however, the car was stolen from the street near the TV station. When Rogers filed a police report, the story was picked up by every newspaper, radio and media outlet around town. Amazingly, within 48 hours the car was left in the exact spot where it was taken from, with an apology on the dashboard. It read, “If we’d known it was yours, we never would have taken it.” ( Read more...Collapse )
Scientists have developed a system that lets pot-plants call their owners up on the phone and tell them they need water or sunlight.
The network, called Botanicalls, is an example of how programmers on small budgets have been able to do some quirky things with telephone systems thanks to an application called Asterisk.
Botanicalls, developed by a New York based group, uses soil moisture sensors to signal to a computer if a plant is in need of watering.
A low moisture reading is translated into a call for water, which is transferred through the Asterisk platform to connect with the public phone system.
Individual plants are matched up with individual owners, who then receive a voice message indicating the need for water.
Asterisk, the technology at the heart of such projects, is starting to catch the attention of some of the high-end phone system providers such as Cisco and Alcatel - companies not typically known for their openness when it comes to end-users pimping systems. ( Read more...Collapse )
Is it possible to exist without digital technology? Nick Galvin rewinds for two days.
My youngest daughter is in tears. She points accusingly at her older sister. "She's being mean!" she sobs. "She won't show me the picture on the camera."
Daughter No. 1, it turns out, has taken a picture with an old camera we gave her. I explain to my youngest that this is a film camera and that, unlike a digital camera, she will only be able to see the picture once the film is developed.
She looks dubious and, as she wanders off to cause mayhem elsewhere, I can tell she doesn't believe me.
And why should she? She has grown up surrounded by digital devices that make everything instant and convenient. Why would anyone want to go back to the old analog ways, stuffing around with something as old-fashioned as, say, film?
She has never known anything different in her short life. But this proliferation of digital devices has only really taken off in the past couple of decades.
All of which got me and the Icon editor thinking: what would it be like to abandon digital technology, for a while at least?
What would it be like to do without all these gadgets we take for granted and, as much as possible, to do things the old analog way, even if for only a short period?
The challenge is then made - go digital cold turkey for 48 hours.
Without thinking too much, I agree. I mean, how hard can it be? It's not like doing without food or, God forbid, wine for two days. Surely I am not so far down the path of digital dependence that going tech-free for a short while would be that painful. ( Read more...Collapse )
Rebecca Lynn Howard (or Jim Brickman) -- Simple Things
Hey, time won't wait Life goes by Every day's a brand new sky Every tear Comes to dry All that really matters in this crazy world Is you and I together, baby Just remember ( Read more...Collapse ) P.S. You so need a theme song to go with that romance novel.
As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.
Yeah, I am naked on the Internet,” says Kitty Ostapowicz, laughing. “But I’ve always said I wouldn’t ever put up anything I wouldn’t want my mother to see.”
She hands me a Bud Lite. Kitty, 26, is a bartender at Kabin in the East Village, and she is frankly adorable, with bright-red hair, a button nose, and pretty features. She knows it, too: Kitty tells me that she used to participate in “ratings communities,” like “nonuglies,” where people would post photos to be judged by strangers. She has a MySpace page and a Livejournal. And she tells me that the Internet brought her to New York, when a friend she met in a chat room introduced her to his Website, which linked to his friends, one of whom was a photographer. Kitty posed for that photographer in Buffalo, where she grew up, then followed him to New York. “Pretty much just wanted a change,” she says. “A drastic, drastic change.”
Her Livejournal has gotten less personal over time, she tells me. At first it was “just a lot of day-to-day bullshit, quizzes and stuff,” but now she tries to “keep it concise to important events.” When I ask her how she thinks she’ll feel at 35, when her postings are a Google search away, she’s okay with that. “I’ll be proud!” she says. “It’s a documentation of my youth, in a way. Even if it’s just me, going back and Googling myself in 25 or 30 years. It’s my self—what I used to be, what I used to do.” ( Read more...Collapse )
A visual map of digging behavior on Digg. The horizontal axis represents Digg users; the newest are on the far right. The vertical axis represents stories; the newest are at the bottom. Each dot on the map represents a digg, with red dots belonging to a story’s first digg. The horizontal white lines represent digging activity for a popular story. However, the vertical white lines do not describe typical digging behavior and may represent bot activity. Data-visualization tools and community policing help keep Digg's social news site legitimate and valuable to its readers.
Digg, the popular aggregation website, is redefining the way that many people find news. Some 850,000 registered users effectively act as an editorial staff, recommending--or "digging"--stories that they deem interesting enough for the site's home page.
The challenges are keeping undesirable content out and making sure that stories are promoted legitimately. Some people try to "game" the system, using dishonest means to try to increase a story's chance of getting to the main page. The motivation: money and fame. Articles featured on Digg's home page typically generate a lot of profitable page views for the source of the story. Gaming attempts takes place in many different ways. Some people create fake user accounts and software called bots, designed to automatically digg stories. Other gamers write fabricated interviews with famous people and post them on suspiciously new blogs in hopes of driving traffic to their website. ( Read more...Collapse )
"I don't like reading off a computer screen" — it's a cliché of the e-book world. It means "I don't read novels off of computer screens" (or phones, or PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers), and often as not the person who says it is someone who, in fact, spends every hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a computer screen. It's like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate.
But I know what you mean. You don't like reading long-form works off of a computer screen. I understand perfectly — in the ten minutes since I typed the first word in the paragraph above, I've checked my mail, deleted two spams, checked an image-sharing community I like, downloaded a YouTube clip of Stephen Colbert complaining about the iPhone (pausing my MP3 player first), cleared out my RSS reader, and then returned to write this paragraph.
This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who's made cardboard furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip's done, gotta start the music up) (19 more RSS items). But that's not to say that it's not an entertainment medium — indeed, practically everything I do on the computer entertains the hell out of me. It's nearly all text-based, too. Basically, what I do on the computer is pleasure-reading. But it's a fundamentally more scattered, splintered kind of pleasure. Computers have their own cognitive style, and it's not much like the cognitive style invented with the first modern novel (one sec, let me google that and confirm it), Don Quixote, some 400 years ago. ( Read more...Collapse )
Well? Is it that people lack attention for electronic books, or that paper books have different appeal (cheap, no glare, sturdy, off-line, replaceable, etc)?
It is the sheer difficulty of learning the Latin language that makes it a great social leveller
Imagine an evening at the theatre listening to words like this. "Thine arms were gyved! Nay, no gyve, no touch, was laid on me. 'Twas there I mocked him, in his gyves..." It's hardly a thrilling prospect. But if the study of Greek and Latin in this country had been quietly stopped after the first world war (as nearly happened), this is how we would now all be experiencing Greek tragedy, for that was a quote from Gilbert Murray's translation of Euripides's Bacchae, published in 1904. It's the leader of the chorus talking to the god Dionysus, who's just escaped from prison - a "gyve" is apparently an old-fashioned word for a chain. In a Greek-less world, that would be about as close to Euripides as we could get.
There are many good reasons for fostering the study of classical languages. Will Hutton recently wrote powerfully in the Observer about how important Roman history is to our own political culture. And what would be lost if we lost our direct links to ancient literature in the original tongue?
Over the past few decades, classical drama has been one of the jewels in the crown of British theatre, from Diana Rigg's wonderful Medea to Tony Harrison's Oresteia. This has been possible precisely because we still have that link to the original words. Tony Harrison knows Greek. Even Diana Rigg would have failed to move an audience with Gilbert Murray's translation.
Murray was not a dud. In the early 20th century his translations seemed up to the minute, and they were politically influential. His translation of Euripides's Trojan Women (a devastating exposure of the after-effects of armed conflict) was performed in Chicago in 1915 as part of the campaign to keep the United States out of the war. If it now seems hopelessly archaic, that's because every generation rediscovers and retranslates the classics for themselves, re-engaging with the original texts.
If we do decide to keep the classics, there's still the issue of who should learn the languages, and how. For centuries Greek has been an exotic minority option. This debate centres on Latin and on the question of whether it is too difficult. In particular, should its GCSE be made easier so that more children, across the ability range can enjoy it?
This is to miss the point. Learning Latin properly is very hard. That is part of the pleasure and the challenge, and it does no one a good turn to pretend otherwise. It's not that the Romans were cleverer than us, but the writing they left behind (which is why, after all, most of us want to study them) is difficult, complex and highly literary. Reading the Roman historian Tacitus is probably best compared to getting to grips with Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
We should not be confusing social exclusivity with an intellectually elitist subject. All bright children, no matter how wealthy or privileged they are, should have the opportunity to learn classical languages. One of the biggest crimes of the national curriculum is having eased Latin out of the maintained sector (though not entirely, I'm pleased to report). But it is no more sensible to put Latin on the curriculum of the less academically able than it is to put Mandarin Chinese or quantum physics there.
In fact, paradoxically, it is the sheer difficulty of Latin that makes it something of a social leveller, and a route to intellectual upward mobility. Questioning my colleagues who teach classics at Cambridge (a university in which roughly 40% of undergraduates across the board still come from the private sector), I found that only about 20% had attended independent schools.
The good news is that, whatever its posh image, Latin is a hard subject in which the academically able thrive. It's rather like maths: money alone can't make you good at it.
