Octopodial Chrome

Well, another year is about to expire. In the past 366 days we’ve seen more of Janet Jackson than anyone would want to; we’ve defeated the most left-wing candidate ever to stand for President; we saw a witch-hunt which ended with Martha Stewart jailed; we saw the winningest man ever to play Jeopardy—and we saw him lose. On a personal note, I gained a sister-in-law, which is excellent; I finally started my mediæval weapons collection; and I saw my financial position improve as the stock market slowly rebounds. It wasn’t a great year, but it wasn’t all that bad a year either. Here’s hoping that 2005 exceeds ’04 in the good and falls behind in the bad. Happy New Year!

I just discovered a handy LaTeX reference, Formatting Information: A Beginner’s Introduction to Typesetting with LaTeX. LaTeX, of course, is just about the best document preparation and typesetting system ever, capable of producing professional-quality output easily.

Another perspective on English style is that of George Orwell in Politics and the English Language. A great read whose advice boils down to:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Very good advice.

A little over a week ago I was nearly run off of the road by a woman in a Chevy 4x4 with the license plate 048-KLE, apparently annoyed that I should have the temerity to use the road (as is the right of every cyclist, and in some cases the duty too). Should I be smashed by a hit-and-run, one might wish to check that vehicle for scrapes…

Fowler’s 1908 classic The King’s English is now online at Bartleby. It’s the definitive guide to proper style, written at a time whose pronouncements on the matter may be safely trusted. Now I just need to read it and take its lessons to heart.

Michael Wiedmann has a great reference for screen presentation (e.g. PowerPoint) tools which focuses on those which run on open platforms (and maybe Windows/Mac OS X as well).

I see that Missouri has legalised noodling—fishing for catfish with one’s bare hands and feet. Be sure to follow the link: there are pictures of some monster cats!

I recently found Corsets & Crinolines, a collection of photos of antique & vintage clothing. Unfortunately, it’s all women’s clothing, and thus useless for my own research, but pretty cool nonetheless.

A man sold the Christmas gifts he’d gotten for his sons on eBay—because they misbehaved. Good for him!

Back in ’03 Clay Shirky gave an interesting speech on group dynamics. It discusses how groups can devolve without structure and order, and how those are vitally necessary to the long-term welfare of the group as a whole (which is unexpected to many and unwelcome to those with a lefty viewpoint). It also details how technology can enable new ways of working within a group, which is pretty cool. Well worth the read.

I received a catalogue from the local stationer’s; one of the items is a Merry Christmas from Heaven ornament which reads:

I love you all dearly,
Now don’t shed a tear,
I’m spending my Christmas
With Jesus this year.

What kind of sick jerk would send such a thing? I can’t think of something worse to receive such a thing when sad & miserable. What is this world coming to?

Listening to Rebel Rouser this evening, it occurred to me what a fine tune it is. Like November Rain or In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, it has he quality that it could be played for an hour or two and not seem amiss.

I remember the wonderful autumn of the year I was graduated from Austin College. I had more money than I knew what to do with, having gone from $400/mo. to a rather more livable sum; I dined out frequently; my life was a whirlwind of activity and fun.

One night early that November I dined at the Chez Walter, a now-defunct Swiss place. I noticed that they were to have a prix fixe menu specially for Thanksgiving. This looked like a fantastic deal: enjoy some top-quality food at something of a bargain price and celebrate the holiday in style. But of course my parents wouldn’t hear of it: I got more grief and caterwauling than I’d ever received before (payment, perhaps, for the grief and caterwauling I dealt when having my teeth pulled…). Oh well, of course there’s always another chance.

But of course, there was no other chance. Every year, Thanksgiving and then Christmas would roll around, and every year the finest establishments in town would offer various prix fixe and table d’hôte options (each one enticing and attractive) and each year all I wanted was to go to church, eat a nice quiet meal in a nice quiet atmosphere and go home and have a nice quiet day in which napping would figure heavily—and each year I was prevented due to my family’s demand that I dine with them. Oh well, this wasn’t that big deal: I do love them, and they are in town, and it does seem a bit wrong not to celebrate holidays with family in town, and my mother and father are absolutely wonderful cooks, and after all someday I’d have the chance to realise my dream.

Well, this year I thought that I’d have that chance. They are all going to be headed to Grand Junction and will be staying the duration. This means that at long last I have no obligations and can finally have a perfect Christmas. Except that they tried to get me to go with them (which is fundamentally absurd: five people in a college student’s flat is the sort of thing that even a French surrealist would abhor, among other reasons), and gave me so much grief in front of other people that some very good friends of mine took pity on me (mistakenly believing that I’d be sad and alone on Christmas, when it fact it is my very dearest desire to have a quiet day on my own) and invited me to their place, and so of course I was honour-bound to accept their invitation.

Now this is all fine and dandy: my friends are outstanding and good people, and I always have a great time with them, and anticipate having a superlative time on Saturday, and will be glad to have gone. But I still won’t have been able to go to church, eat a nice dinner and then take some nice long naps. Four Christmases have come and gone; five Thanksgivings have come and gone, and I still haven’t realised my dream! Five years—half a decade; 1/15th of my life—have passed, and I still haven’t been able to have a Thanksgiving or Christmas ordered as I would have it.

I visited a website promoting a 28-hour day. The premise is that instead of 7x24-hour days in a week one instead has 6x28-hour days. The length of the week doesn’t change, and one still works a full work week (10x4 instead of 8x5). It sounds like a pretty cool idea. Perhaps once I start working from home I can start doing it.

Check out Black Box Recorder, a band out of England with an amazing, hard-to-describe sound: a kind of retro-pop-sophistication which wouldn’t sound at all out of place in a cocktail lounge, except for its often bitter subject matter. I can’t say that I agree with their politics, but I can say that any man who can remain unmoved by Sarah Nixey’s vocals is no man at all. I highly recommend The Facts of Life.

I recently got myself a membership at emusic, a legal MP3 download service. They have a large number of indie/college bands (like Black box Recorder, Dressy Bessy, 16 Horsepower &c., but they also have mainstream artists like Otis Redding, Green Day, Bush, Violent Femmes, Willie Nelson and so on. The deal is that when you sign up you get 50 free downloads; after that it’s $10/mo. for 40 songs/mo., $15/mo. for 65 songs/mo. and $20/mo. for 90 songs/mo. You can always redownload a song you’ve gotten before without affecting your monthly cost. It’s also possible to buy additional one-time downloads for a price. The deal isn’t quite as good as used to be (a few years back, I believe it was one price for unlimited downloads), but it’s pretty good, and a lot cheaper than buying a CD which will just sit on the bookshelf, and at 22–25¢/track, cheaper than the other online music stores.

If you decide that you’d like to use the free trial (imagine: 50 legal, high-bit-rate MP3s), let me know so I can invite you: I get 10 free tracks with each successful referral.

In 1897 the highest ranks of England gathered for a costume party. The images are quite interesting and in some cases rather amusing. Oddly enough, some of those present would live into the 1960s.

I want a Neuros. Completely open; has a mike; transmits FM; plays Ogg Vorbis. A bit pricey, though: $280 for the full bundle of player, flash backpack, earphones, belt clips and a charger.

Slashdot recently reviewed Mathematics and Sec; sounds like an interesting book. Among its findings, if one has a run of n possible mates who after rejection will never be seen again, then one’s optimal strategy is to sample the first x = n/e (where e is the base of natural logarithms, 2.7183), then take the first one thereafter who is better than the previous x. This applies for anything, of course—even job applicants.

A commenter linked to an economic model developed at the University of Texas concerning ecstasy and the costs and benefits of faking it. Very curious.

Another commenter linked to Why I Will Never Have a Girlfriend, which mathematically demonstrates that there are 18,726 gals whom he might like and who might like him, and that meeting one new girl a week it would take 3,493 weeks to meet even one of the 18,726—67 years. In other words, he will never have a girlfriend.

Beware so-called trusted computing. Can you trust your computer?

Ted Turner wrote on media consolidation this year; while I often disagree with him one must admit that he has achieved some remarkable successes, and this is an area in which he has no little amount of expertise.

In 1894 James Parker published his Glossary of Terms Used in Heraldry. In certain respects it is incomplete, but it remains still a valuable resource for the student of that noble science.

No-one who has followed recent American politics can be ignorant of the recent calls for blue-state (i.e. Democrat) secession. The New York Times has an article concerning Yankee secession. The best quote comes from a Southerner, in regards to the rather remotely possible War of Southern Aggression: We could go up there and get back some of the stolen silverware they looted from our ancestors 140 years ago.

Although I believe that secession is a fundamental right of a state, it would be nice to give the God-bedamnéd Yankees a taste of their own medicine.

Three hundred thousand Yankees,
Lie stiff in Southern dust,
We got three hundred thousand,
Before they conquered us,
They died of Southern fever,
And Southern steel and shot,
And I wish it was three million,
Instead of what we got.

It’d be quite satisfying to conquer them for a change.

Given the choice between having his wedding ring or his finger cut off, a US Marine chose to lose the finger in order to honour his wife. Unfortunately, the ring was lost nonetheless in the chaos of it all. I hate to say this, but the guy was unwise. Any physical thing is recoverable or replaceable: had the ring been cut off, he could have saved the fragments and had them remade into a new ring; even had the pieces been lost, he could have simply gotten a new ring. But now he’s lost his finger and his ring together—he can still replace the wedding band, but his finger will never return.

Still, one must respect a man who pays homage to his wife and his marriage in such a manner. A man who will give his finger for his wedding ring is surely a man who would give his life for his wife. he may have been unwise, but perhaps sometimes it’s best to be unwise.

Now this is the sort of essay any admissions officer would be glad to read.

A small, unremarked portion of CNN’s coverage of President Bush’s medical report notes that he smokes an occasional cigar. I’m heartened to read it. Can one trust a man who despises tobacco? I don’t believe so.

The Morning News offers a list of Good Gift Games for 2004; Funagain Games offer the Games Magazine 2005 Awards. Regarding the latter, it seems strange to number the awards for a year which hasn’t yet arrived.

Saw in Mike Adams’s most recent column this not-so-fun fact: Planned Parenthood has murdered far more innocent people than the KKK and the Nazi Party combined. Sad but true.

The Straight Dope takes on the pressing question: did the Vikings wear hornéd helmets? The answer is unsurprising to a cynic like me.

Britain has banned fox hunting, sadly enough. The things are pests, for Pete’s sake!

Combining this cartoon and a passage I read in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, I’ve realised that the secret of immortality is to do something so notable that generations to come study one. I never realised it at the time, but there is a certain undeniable absurdity to an 18 year old studying a man dead almost half a millennium ago. And yet there’s something fundamentally awesome (in the original sense of the word) in that as well. It’s reassuring to think that we still try to get our children to see the world with a bit of perspective.

Well, I’d the rottenest Thanksgiving thus far. My brother Thomas was on the East Coast celebrating with his new wife (which is right and proper—but I miss them both nonetheless). I’m recovering from surgery and in no small amount of pain. My brothers spent the day playing Halo 2 on an XBox, despite a plethora of board and card games we could have played together, enjoying one another’s company. I had to work the day after Thanksgiving, which has normally been a holiday. And one of my brothers decided to harangue me with his imbecilic and thoroughly ignorant economic theories (worthy of a Kerry voter, not of anyone with an IQ above room temperature) throughout dinner, rather than discussing pleasant subjects.

On the plus side, the turkey was excellent. My mother brined it this year, an excellent and commendable idea. And I did manage to do a decent job of carving the bird, which was gratifying. Other than that, it was a thoroughly miserable day: the most enjoyable thing I did all day was take a nap after dinner.

Some guys got together and built a throne out of AOL CDs. I want one!

Dinesh D'Souza wrote a great article about why he loves America; worth reading, all you lefty sorts.

A priest I know forwarded this report from the Hebrew Press. It appears to have come from a Jewish blog, so one doubts that it is Greek or Orthodox fabrication. The story does note that there are different deaths for Mr. Kanidis.

In an act of unlimited devotion and dedication,to the bitter end, an elderly teacher insisted on remaining with his students. He protected them, bandaged their wounds, and with his death,saved their lives.

Children who escaped from the school told of how they owed their lived to elderly Yanis(Ivan)Kanidis, age 74—a man of Greek origin who worked as a gym teacher at the school. He was among the hundreds of teachers, students and parents taken hostage last week when Chechen rebels invaded the large school.

On Thursday, in what was an unusual humanitarian move in the midst of the horror, the terrorists agreed to allow a group of women and babies to leave the building. The commander of the terrorist squad, saw Kanidis—a sickly elderly man [ed: one wonders at how these bastards can show some mercy towards infants and the elderly, but not to children—but then their so-called prophet married a little girl, as they admit]—and offered to allow him to walk free as well.

But Kanidis refused. I will stay with my students till the end, the teacher insisted.

Whatever you say, said the terrorist, dismissing him with a wave of the hand.

He was just like Janus Korzchak, who accompanied his pupils to Auschwitz, said one of the students who was saved.

Like Korzchak, Kanidis didn't just accompany his students, he guarded their lives. On Friday, when the children began to lose consciousness from the stuffy air and their thirst, Yanis went to the terrorists. You have to give them something to drink, at least to the smallest children, he insisted angrily. One of the terrorists hit him with the butt of his rifle, but the teacher continued to yell: How dare you!? You claim you are people of the Kafkaz region,but here in the Kafkaz even a dog wouldn't turn down the request of an old man!

His efforts bore fruit. The terrorist allowed the teacher to wet one of the bibs of the children and pass it around to dampen the mouths of the little ones who were choking from thirst. The hostages who escaped told how the teacher repeatedly risked his own life in order to save the children. He moved explosive devices that the terrorists had placed near the young students, and tried to prevent them from detonating others.

When the first bomb exploded next to the windows of the school, parents and children began to run out. The terrorists, trying to prevent their escape, threw a grenade at them. The elderly teacher ran to the grenade to prevent it from exploding on the children. One of the terrorists shot at the teacher to try to stop him and Yanis was wounded in the shoulder—but didn't give up.

With the last of his strength, he continued to run, jumped on the grenade, covering it with his body.

The grenade exploded, and the body of the teacher absorbed the explosion, protecting the children around him from injury.

If true, it’s quite a tale.

A CNN article about a wealthy man who worked as a janitor in retirement and left a large sum to a university mention one Oseola McCarty, of Hattiesburg, Miss.: a washerwoman who donated $150,000 to The University of Southern Mississippi. Now that’s a story worth reading: a little old lady spends her life scrimping and saving, and then in 1995 she gave 60% of her accumulated wealth to a school regarding which she noted, they used to not let coloured people go out there, but now they do, and I think they should have it. I don’t believe that I could be so forgiving.

Anyway, this old woman never learnt to drive a car and only purchased an air conditioner at about the time of her gift—and despite the attention she got back in ’95, she never seemed to really take much note of all the fuss. A remarkable story; I encourage the reader to peruse the entire site. She passed away in 1999.

CNN have an article on crunk—what is it? So far as I can tell, another form of debased amusic for the hypocephalic sub-men who make up an ever-larger percentage of our population.

Every year the RCMP riot squad practise their skill against a local barony’s SCA fighters. This is just way to cool:riot police against armoured fighters. Originally spotted in a link to a web forum.

James S. Robbins writes about the Afghani talwildar (key-holders) who preserved their nation’s treasures through the chaos of Soviet invasion and Taliban theocracy. After a quarter century their task is complete, and they have returned the priceless artifacts they guarded.

Samuel Pepys has the oldest blog in existence. I find this curiously amusing.

One of the signs of getting older is when one is driving in a car, sees a pretty girl and start to ogle…appreciate her personality from afar—only to realise that there’s a baby on the seat next to her. I suppose that this is no big deal in the slums, when it happens at 13, but out here it’s something of a blow when one realises that one has become old enough that one’s contemporaries are old enough to get married and have children.

Well, something even worse happened yesterday. I was in a store, saw a pretty gal, then saw her kid and didn’t even care. I guess I ought to buy a coffin now…

I’ve recently been watching Alias, a television series about a gal in the intel biz. Last night as she and her fellow agent entered a Swedish nightclub, I realised something: everywhere they go, she changes costume—this night it might be one type of dress, tomorrow another and the next day something else entirely—while his disguise always consists of a coat and tie. Now, far be it for me to disdain coat and tie, but doesn’t it seem unfair to us fellows that we do not get a chance to show off in order to attract gals, while they get to show off to attract us? Not that I mind them showing themselves off, of course—but it’d be cool to be able to do the same.

I think I could figure out that. The whole having-a-personality thing is much more difficult…

On Thursday I changed out the oil in my deep fryer and in the process filled up one of my used-oil bottles. This presented me with a bit of a problem: what to do with the foul stuff. It seems wrong to just cast it into the dustbin, and I’ve only so many cast iron kitchen utensils to season.

Someone suggested that I burn it in a lamp, and I’ve recently bid on and won a very nice piece, but a lamp only uses up oil so quickly. Someone else suggested that I make soap from it, and another posted a procedure meant to strip much of the reek from oil. So I tried it, and now have a pie-plate’s worth of new soap curing. I seasoned it with hyssop, ginger, cardamom, clove & cinnamon in the hopes of covering the lard and used-corn-oil smell, decreased though that might have been by the washing procedure (it involves boiling with water, salt and baking soda). I also added a bit of olive oil, but that’s not an offensive smell. They soap-cakes don’t seem to smell like anything other than soap, so it seems to have worked.

Jonah Goldberg sets the record straight on John Ashcroft. A must-read, if only for the real story behind the topless statue cover-up.

Apparently many television stations are refusing to air Saving Private Ryan because they fear the FCC. The Commission refuses to tell them whether or not airing it would be permissible, claiming that it would be censorship if they told them beforehand. As though it weren’t censorship to do it afterwards as well!

Whatever happened to free speech? If you’re a parent who doesn’t wish your kids to see the film, don’t let them. If they see it anyway, well that’s part of growing up. If you’re an adult who doesn’t wish to see it, then don’t.

Twits who whine about being offended by what they choose to view annoy me to no end.

Michael Ledeen writes engagingly on the Theo van Gogh murder. His thesis is that the murderer was a product of a European attitude which is beyond tolerance, a kind of suicidal ignorance of one’s enemies.

Recently found How to Write Unmaintainable Code; it’s an amusing compendium of how not to write code. I’ve a nasty feeling I’ve done some of it, too…

It occurs to me that we on the right are not really all that different from those on the left: for the most part, we want the same things; it’s just that we disagree on how to achieve them. We conservatives want to lift up the poor; we want to ensure that no-one goes to bed hungry; we want health care to be affordable; we want every able student to get a good education—we just believe, based on sound economic principles, that a free market will do a far better and fairer job of ensuring that outcome than will state socialism; those on the left disagree.

We all want to prevent unjust killing: it’s just that those on the left see nothing wrong with slaying infants yet object to executing child rapists or fighting a war against a bloody tyrant. We on the right see things rather reversed.

We all want a clean environment: no-one wants the air he breathes to be filthy or the water he drinks to be foul. We differ on how far to go, yes. And it seems to me that the Right could care a bit more for nature than we appear to (although how much of that is media trickery is another matter).

None of us argues that we should be cruel to animals or wasteful of resources. We do disagree on what exactly is cruel or wasteful—but we agree in principle.

No-one openly advocates racism. There are many on the Left who advocate racism against whites, but I believe for the most part they are in the minority, just as those on the Right who are racists are in the minority (although there are rather more of the former than the latter).

No-one, Right or Left, wishes women to be legally subservient to me.

Even on the issue of gay marriage (very probably the reason we won the recent election), my own perception is that the vast majority of Americans are willing to live and let live when it comes to homosexuals: very, very few would argue that their lifestyle should be illegal. Most would support some sort of civil union carrying with it many of the rights which civil marriage carries.

We all agree that religious freedom is important. Many on the Right don’t see prayer in school as infringing on that freedom—I happen to disagree—while many on the Left seem to think that religious freedom means never being reminded that anyone has a religion. But thoughtful people on both sides, I think, can come to an agreement on most issues.

It seems to me that our similarities outweigh our differences and that if we could recognise this then tempers needn’t run quite so high, as they recently have amongst the ignorant.

Well, Bush beat Kerry. This is good—as bad as George Bush has been, Kerry would have been far, far, far worse. It was important to defeat him, and so far as presidential elections go it was a pretty decisive victory. Here in Colorado, unfortunately, Democrats took the contested Senate seat as well as both houses of our state legislature.

Worse yet, an alternative-energy amendment to our constitution passed, which will drive up energy prices without any real effect. On the good side, the amendment to destroy our electoral significance died an ignominious death.

Worst of all, an amendment to massively increase tobacco taxes passed with flying colours. The benighted, tyrannical, foolish, despotic, evil voters decided to steal money from smokers, chewers and snuff-takers and use those ill-gotten funds for anti-tobacco propaganda. The worst of it is that the brunt of these punitive measures will be borne by poor folks. I don’t really care that my few tins a year will go up (well, I do, but it doesn’t really hurt me), but the poor slob who smokes a pack a day will end up spending hundreds extra a year to fund a campaign dedicated to opposing him. It’s like Hitler raising taxes on the Jews to fund an anti-Semitic newspaper.

Given that God likes freedom (He gave us free will, after all), and given that it’s a sin to oppose His will, I am certain that every single bastard who voted for the accurséd legislation will spend eternity burning in Hell. I feel sorry for them: their victory in this life will seem as naught compared to their misery in the next. On the other hand, they deserve every lick of flame and every lash of the whip, so I’m not shedding too many tears for them (I have too many faults of my own to regret). They had the chance to do what is right, and they chose the path of iniquity.

At least John Kerry won’t be president. That would have been an absolute disaster, probably worse than the Clinton years (for the stakes are higher now).

I’ve just ordered The Knights Next Door. It looks to be a very interesting read about the SCA and other recreational mediaevalists. I can’t wait for it to arrive.

As I write, things look favourable for Bush, but we’re not out of the woods yet. A Kerry victory would be disastrous for this nation and would doom our efforts to defeat radical Islamism, and yet some 36 million voters (at the current count) support his agenda. The states still up for grabs (as well as the current counts) by the C-SPAN reckoning are: Washington (50-49 Bush); Oregon (43-57 Kerry); Nevada (48-51 Kerry); Colorado (52-47 Bush); New Mexico (51-48 Bush); Minnesota (45-54 Kerry); Iowa (48-51 Kerry); Michigan (48-51 Kerry); Wisconsin (48-51 Kerry); Ohio (52-48 Bush); New Hampshire (49-51 Kerry); and Florida (52-47 Bush) (and Alaska and Hawaii, but there are no results yet from either). That means that by the current reckoning, Bush has 210 dead and 66 possible and Kerry has 188 dead and 60 possible, with another 7 votes going who-knows-where. It’s all very much up in the air: anything can happen. But both Florida and Ohio look in the bag for Bush, which is vital.

I’m worried sick that the electorate have made the wrong decision, but so far it’s too early to tell. I hate democratic government: give me hereditary rule any day of the week. We’d know the next king from the day he was born.

The first snow of this season fell tonight. The world is beautiful under its blanket of white.

I’ve recently created a gallery of my 15th century Italian clothing; here are the pictures currently in it. There’s more information about the clothing itself on the page.

Donald Rumsfled strongly denounces the lie that a draft is planned. The leftists who spread it should be ashamed of themselves. But, of course, they won’t be—for they have no knowledge of shame, nor the self-awareness to feel it.

I just discovered this excellent defence of the Electoral College. It explains why the College plays an important role in guaranteeing the stability of our republic.

The Register has sponsored a comprehensive comparison of Windows and Linux security, and has posted a brief summary as well. The upshot is that Linux—while imperfect—is much more secure than Windows.

Years ago I started work on travtrack, a database editor for the excellent game known as Traveller; my basic idea was to create a program which would generate star systems per the GURPS Traveller rules (the ones in GURPS Traveller: First In, the supplement dealing with the Interstellar Scout Service). Of course, a generator which doesn't give one the chance to manipulate the generated data’s not very useful, and so I had to write a GUI to display it. The project also server as a learning exercise for me, but a long while ago I ran out of free time to play with it (the latest release of travlib was on the fifth of May 2003; the latest release of travtrack was the eighth of June 2002).

Well, I recently got back into it and as a project decided to try rewriting it in Python. It’s coming along amazingly well: I have a screenshot of the subsector editor available on the travtrack screenshots page.

There is a registry of Linux users available; approximately 145,000 users are currently registered. If you run Linux, be certain to register, in order to help contribute to accurate statistics gathering.

The Periodic Table of Perl Operators. Egad—I used to write a lot of Perl, but it has increasingly grown insane; now I’m a Python guy.

Caml appears to be an interesting programming language. Programs written therein are supposed to be strictly verified for a whole slew of potential bugs—and thus they are apparently much more reliable than those written in other languages. That’s the theory, anyway.

Inferno is a cool little OS, the child of the old Plan 9, which itself was a kind of Unix-done-right. It runs anywhere (atop Plan 9, Windows, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X), or on its own. Apparently it unifies networking into the OS in a way which no-one else has yet done. Supposed to be mondo capable.

FeedBurner provides RSS & Atom newsfeed services. Looks like it can be a nice solution if you need to proxy your feed, or if you’d like to filter it somehow (e.g. they can toss in Amazon Associate program links and the like). I’ve added a new FeedBurner feed for Octopodial Chrome, just to play with it.

I recently discovered the Great Computer Language Shootout, a very cool collection of benchmarks for various programming languages. My one quibble is that the guy normalises the results to a ten-point scale, when a twelve-point would be superior. Other than that, quite slick.

Jed Babbin reports that it appears that there was a mutiny by US soldiers in Tallil on the 13th, but that the US Army doesn’t appear to be treating it with the gravity it merits.

In the 1840s Lieutenant (later Captain) Peter Alexander Halkett invented an India-rubber cloth cloak which could be inflated to form a boat. I found it whilst researching boat cloaks—my father recently made a remark which implied that there was a uniform boat cloak in the US Navy within living memory.

And actually, as Chapter Three, Section Five, Item Four of the US Navy Uniform Regulations specifies, there is still a boat cloak specified for male officers and chief petty officers. It is made of dark blue woolen fabric, three quarters of a circle, with a circular bent collar, and extending 2 inches below the kneecap; may be water repellent; [and] is closed at the neck with hooks and eyes and on the chest by one set of silk or mohair fasteners. It is to be worn with all fasteners closed.

I recently read an interesting story about Herbalife, a multi-level marketing thing. Folks, be extremely wary of MLM: almost no-one makes any money; most distributors have lost money on the deal.

Robin is a desktop-like interface coded in XUL which runs on Firefox. It is, quite frankly, incredible. Imagine where this could lead in half-a-dozen years…

Saw an interesting aside in an article by Peter Augustine Lawler: fertility rates are associated with support for Bush. Indeed, if those states which went with Gore in 2000 were to secede, they would have the same ruinously low birthrate and rapidly aging population as France.

Quite intriguing. I believe that in two centuries the suicide by infertility currently being committed in Europe will be looked back on as one of the more absurd fads in history.

This is the kind of racist filth spewing forth from the American Left these days. It turns the stomach. Can one possibly imagine a conservative penning such an abominable piece of trash?

According to Chinese lore, Wan Hu attempted to go into space in about 1500. Apparently, his spacecraft was built around a sturdy chair, two kites and 47 of the largest gunpowder-filled rockets he could lay his hands on. His servants lit the fuses, and there was a very loud bang, and no more Wu. One likes to think that just maybe he did shoot off into the heavens…

Years ago I started working on a suite of Traveller™-related software; I haven’t really touched it in over a year, but after reviewing the GNOME developer documentation I am newly inspired (plus, I’m growing tired of all the sewing I’ve been doing on my cloak). Perhaps I’ll be able to actually get a working piece of software done sometime before I die.

I have found a most interesting article on the structure of churches, one of the theses of which is that a mediæval church would have more closely resembled an Orthodox church—this is only natural, since at the time they had not fallen as far from the truth as they have since. A good read and quick.

The SCA is often accused of being ahistorical—and not always unjustly. However, as the Rules for Submissions to the College of Heralds demonstrate, there are strong attempts to avoid and correct this in certain quarters. The heralds are doing their best to ensure historical practise in their realm of influence. Now if only we could get everyone to play ball…

The Ansari X Prize has been won by the SpaceShip One team. Civilian space flight is coming, slowly but surely. I expect that it will be several decades before it really comes into its own, but this is wonderful news. I wonder how many centuries it’ll be before we figure out some form of faster-than-light travel.

We all know the stuff about not torturing POWs and allowing Red Cross visits, but there are some lesser-known provisions of the Geneva Convention. Isn’t that more properly called that Geneva Conventions anyway?

Well, I attended the Great American Beer Festival for the fifth year running, the difference with past years being that I served as the designated driver. This was an interesting experience—I’ve never actually been the DD.

The festival’s great theme this year seemed to be bourbon-barrel beers—that is, beers which have been aged in old bourbon casks. They all looked quite fine. There was also an interesting blended beer made with beer from three different Colorado breweries; my buddy enjoyed it so much that he ended the night with a glass thereof. I’d have like to have tried that.

As with last year’s festival, there was really quite an amazing number of extraordinarily attractive women there. My buddy kept asking if he was just suffering from a massive case of beer goggles—and I kept assuring him that such was certainly not the case. I don’t know what it is about beer attracting attractive gals, but I certainly do appreciate it.

Next year!

My brother just got back from the Navy’s survival & evasion school, and apparently the big thing now is to google a fellow’s name in order to get information about him. He is thus concerned that I note him my name on my personal page and this blog. Well, he need worry no longer: he will no longer be known on these pages by his given name, but as Tim. Personally, I think it’s all just a bit silly, but if Tim wants to change his name, I’m glad to oblige him. I do love by brother Tim.

His name’s Tim, you see…

The new Yorker, of all things, recently had an article about the fact that the vast majority of voters are ignorant. Only about 10% of the population actual has a political belief system; 42% vote on self-interest; 25% vote on whether times are good or bad; and 22% vote on random factors—factors like how rainy or dry it is!

We need to limit the vote. My preference is for something like a checklist: if one meets X out of Y criteria, one is allowed to vote. My checklist would probably include items like: head of household composed of four or more persons; college graduate; owner of four or more acres of land; make more than the median income; thirty years of age. I’d also limit households to a single vote.

An Alaskan mom is encouraging big game hunters to donate the organs of their kills to school science classes. I love America!

Grace is a cool little graphing tool. It can’t do 3D plots like gnuplot can, but its 2D plots appear a bit nicer.

Reading about Intellectual Morons, a new book out by Chris Benscu, I discovered that he runs OrthodoxNet, a resource for Orthodox Christians. I also happen to know that a writer for National Review Online is Orthodox. Slowly but surely our voices are being heard…