Thursday, February 13.
Can you say "wolf guarding the henhouse"? Apparently, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) can. I guess the good news is that we're going to start testing low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. These should be perfect for the block-by-block streetfighting that is required when combatting modern terrorists.
Is it just me, or are things starting to get really fucked up?
Tuesday, February 11.
Minister of Fear say: Terror-con Orange!
Priceless! This is my favorite:
Joe: Oh my God, this War On Terrorism is gonna rule! I can't wait until the war is over and there's no more terrorism!
Sam: I Know! Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore? It'll be just like that!
Joe: Right! God, if only that War On Drugs hadn't been so effective! I could really use some fucking marijuana right now!
Tip o' the cap to Shaver for that. ∴
Sunday, February 9.
Good day skiing at The 'Wood yesterday. Alison and I met up (individually, as one or the other had to be on baby duty) with Vidur and Kristen.
Finished Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation; what a great book.
The history of the twentieth centry was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.
Amen, brother. One of the most impressive things about this book is that it is so well researched. Sure, there's plenty of polemic, but it's all backed up: there are fifty pages of notes that detail each fact or figure that's cited. For God's sake, read this book!
Thursday, February 6.
Axel Hecht is working on making RDF accessible from untrusted script in Mozilla, yay! I pointed out some security issues that he'll need to tackle first, because we (me, alecf, sspitzer, etc.) were too lazy.
Wednesday, February 5.
Our friend, the atom.
Just saw another truth ad on T.V.; I wonder why they don't have these for other industries.
Monday, February 3.
Saturday, February 1.
In Dulles most of the week this past week. I'm not really cut out for this travelling thing. Alison got some weird prank calls while I was gone, some loser asking for me, claiming he was "Bob Smith from work", and then screaming at her when she refused to put me on the phone. (Which would have been hard, what with me being in Dulles and all.) She called Pac Bell, and apparently, was the fourth person that the operator had talked to who'd received similar calls.
It kind of gets you thinking about freaks and stalkers and such. Which makes me wonder if blogging is really that great of an idea, after all. I mean, you (gentle reader) could find out a lot about me and mine be reading through these pages -- perhaps more than I'd like were I to meet you in a dark alley or an identity theft case. (I'm sure that Blake would recommend that I stop subjugating the innocent to my drivel, anyway.) What would Kompressor do?
The one nice thing about travelling east is that there's a lot of time to read. I finished off Jackendoff's Architecture of the Language Faculty on the way out, and am now a True Believer in the "parallel tripartite architecture"! On the way back, I started Pollard & Sag's Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Little did I realize that this is the formalism used for most computational liguistics these days (or, at least, was in 1994). It jumps right in and starts laying out how everything fits together: after about thirty pages I realized that I was going to have to write a Pollard & Sag Bot, and started one on the plane. Stay tuned.
