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April 30, 2004
Supermodel personals
This is the funniest thing I've seen in a while. Sure it's late, but that's only part of the reason I'm laughing until it hurts. These alleged personal ads from a variety of supermodels (yes, with pictures!) are creative writing at its best. This is modern Shakespeare:
I hate that moment on Sunday mornings when you wake up at some guy's house and realize you have to stumble home in the same miniskirt and makeup that looked so sexy the night before, but just looks scary in the cruel light of dawn. And everyone on the subway knows you've got a raging hangover and your underwear is stuffed in your purse. God, let me get married soon, because if I have another one of these mornings, I'm going to slit my wrists....or this jewel...
So naive, and helpless that I don't even know my own Social Security number. I'm just waiting for a bossy, manipulative prick to tell me what to do, and get me into lingere modeling.
Posted by John at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2004
Library Week Free-For-All
Thomson-Gale, one of the largest aggregators of data in the world, is offering free access to selected databases April 18-24 in honor of National Library Week. If you have research to do, now's the time!
Posted by John at 04:47 PM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2004
Bush Shootout
Another winner from MiniClip, Bush Shootout. You're Dubya, and you and Condaleeza are fending off armed terrorists attacking the White House.
To make it even tastier, a Republican ad criticizing Democrat John Kerry is on the site. This ad, the latest in the recent onslaught from the Republican National Committee, says: "Senator Kerry says his own vote to 'abandon our troops' was reckless and irresponsible", followed by "To Listen to Senator Kerry in His Own Words Click Here!"
The campaign is getting more personal and uglier every minute. But the Democrats have taken the low road right from the start, and the sad truth is if GW doesn't strike back in kind, he'll lose this election.
Posted by John at 01:52 AM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2004
Political Map: You Are Here [X]
Harvard's Institute of Politics has posted a nice little political map that lets you answer eleven questions and locate yourself on the spectrum of America's college students in your political leanings. Results are sorted into four broad categories along the axes of religious/secular and liberal/conservative.
I think the methodology is flawed. The individual factors that make up the decisions called for in these ten questions are more complex than can be summarized in "Strongly Agree" or "Somewhat Agree" or the like. For instance, I wind up as characterized as a "Religious Centrist", even though on statement number five, "Religious values should play a more important role in government.", I answered "Strongly Disagree". So while I don't object to being characterized as either religious or centrist, as an encapsulation of my political position, it's a poor - even misleading - description.
In the survey results, Traditional Liberals are characterized by:Which I guess means I'm a liberal on the environment, a conservative on pre-emptive strikes against terrorism, religious on gay marriage issues and secular on the separation of church and state.
Opposition to Pre-emptive Strikes
Support of Gay Rights
Support of Immigration
Support of Affirmative-Action
Opposition to Tax Cuts as an Economic Policy
Belief in Basic Health Insurance as a RightTraditional Conservatives are driven by:
Support Pre-Emptive Strikes
Believe Gay Relationships are Morally Wrong
Religion Should Play a More Important Role In Government
Oppose Affirmative Action
Believe in Tax Cuts to Stimulate the EconomyReligious Centrists:
Support Affirmative Action
Support the Environment
Believe Gay Marriage is Morally Wrong
Believe Religion Should Play a More Important Role in GovernmentAnd Secular Centrists:
Strongly Support Gay Rights
Believe Strongly in Separation of Church and State
Less Supportive of Affirmative Action
Less Supportive of the Environment
Less Likely to Believe in Basic Health Insurance as a Right
The ambiguity of my own responses in terms of this matrix of political values leads me to question whether there's any value in the results of the survey overall. I think in the end, rather than enlightening me about my politicals attitudes vis-ΰ-vis the nation's college students, I just wind up being alarmed at the oversimplification of complex issues. This is what Harvard has to offer? The next generation of our country's leadership? We're screwed.
If you want your political leanings mapped, Political Compass does a much better job.
Posted by John at 08:06 AM | Comments (2)
April 10, 2004
Apocalyptic President
In this article: Apocalyptic president? How the left's fear of a right-wing Christian conspiracy gets George W. Bush -- and today's evangelical Christians -- all wrong, Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois, has an interesting view of Dubya's religious views and the impact - or lack of it - upon his administration. Jacobs goes to great pains to differentiate fundamentalists from evangelicals, premilleniumism from reconstructionism, and explains where GW falls on the spectrum. His analysis is right on target.
Unfortunately, I am absolutely certain that knee-jerk reactions from the anti-religion crowd will be fothcoming, to the effect of:
"Of course Bush is inconsistent in adhering to religious doctrine - he's been inconsistent in his policies all along!"
"It doesn't matter what he really believes, he's just using religion to get votes!"
"Any influence from the religious right is a bad thing, it doesn't matter whether he's a fundy or an evangelical!"
And so on.
Which is unfortunate, because it misses Jacobs' point. I think you can hear it clearly near the end of the article, though, if you can keep your cool long enough to think it through:
President Bush, like most evangelicals (and most Americans), is intellectually mongrel. The likelihood that his thinking and his policies are shaped by a single, coherent, radical ideology is virtually nil. Bush may be a bad president -- he may pursue bad policies on the domestic front and abroad -- but if so, his Christianity has little or nothing to do with it.In fact, I think that comment is true for something on the order of 99 and five 9's percent of the population. We haven't thought it through, because either thinking about it makes us uncomfortable, or because we very quickly arrive at problem sets that force us to resort to supernatural forces. Many, many of us find that prospect so threatening that we would rather walk away from the intellectual struggle, acknowledging, perhaps, in passing, that there are things in this world and beyond that we may never understand.
Most of us are intellectually mongrel. We pick and choose bits of our theology and our worldview based on what is comfortable, what is expedient, what works for us. The bad news, as many find out far too late, is that approach does not hold up over the long term. It is a topical anesthetic applied to a mortal wound, and the comfort it brings is false and short-lived. I don't know much about Bush's theology either, but I am glad that he is finding help and refuge in Christian values and I hope it leads to more theologically consistent and mature - and eternally rewarding - relationship with God.
Happy Easter.
Posted by John at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)
April 09, 2004
Tipping for service
It's something everybody takes for granted, but few feel comfortable with. The difference is that getting comfortable with the practice of tipping the maξtre d' for a table can get you seated in minutes. Bruce Feiler gives a detailed accounting of how he learned the fine art. Great article.
Suddenly I'm Frank Sinatra. I'm King of the Strip. I exude aftershave and savoir faire. Call it the fedora effect. My girlfriend looks at me in a way she hasn't since I surprised her by uncharacteristically demolishing a friend on the tennis court.Bruce's ten tips:
Posted by John at 02:06 PM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2004
Street drumming
This guy, or someone very much like him, sits right outside the Metreon technology mall in downtown SF every evening. If your band needs a drummer, this guy looks like a good candidate. Wow. Street Drums.
Posted by John at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)
Today's math problem
You have a bicycle with square wheels. How do you make it ride smoothly? The answer might surprise you.
Posted by John at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2004
GMAIL - Email the Google Way
Search, don't sort.
Use Google search to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received.
Don't throw anything away.
1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.
Keep it all in context.
Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation.
No pop-up ads. No banners.
You see only relevant text ads and links to related web pages of interest.
Gmail, Google's new email service is in early beta testing, so while you can't jump on board and lock up your email address @gmail.com just yet, you can sign up to be notified when they are available. (So if your name is jparker, don't read this entry, sucker.) Screenshots and beta testing comments here, here and here.
Here's a fascinating article on what Google is doing.
"...the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else...Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers.
Fascinating observation that I think is right on target. When you scale the hardware large enough and fast enough that you have effectively unlimited cheap CPU cycles, new computing paradigms emerge. Services which are impossible to duplicate on a standalone basis (at least under economic constraints of reasonability) become commonplace.
It's interesting to get your head into that space; old rules don't apply and you literally have to think outside the box. To see what I mean, read the comments that follow the blog entry linked above. Half of them are debating what the hardware racks look like and the other half are going "what does it all mean?"
We're clearly just seeing the beginnings from Google.
Posted by John at 09:33 PM | Comments (1)
April 04, 2004
Apparently, I got good grammar
You are a GRAMMAR GOD!
If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!
How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Posted by John at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)
April 03, 2004
T-Shirt Travels
When you make that last minute run to the Salvation Army depot on December 31, trying to scrounge every available tax deduction, do you know what actaully - physically - happens to that t-shirt? There are a couple of steps in the voyage from your closet to the back of some less economically endowed individual that might surprise you.
Posted by John at 04:35 PM | Comments (0)
