February 27, 2006
Quote of the Day
Property "rights" are basically an epiphenomenon arising from respect for voluntary agreements. As such, if a society doesn't respect voluntary agreements, private property doesn't last long. You can't even decide who owns something unless voluntary agreements are respected.
Perry Metzger, by permission, from a private mailing list
February 25, 2006
Misheard words of the night: "Prairie Vole"
Don't ask me why I was using this term in conversation - many of my conversations would be surprising if one dropped into the middle of them - but my interlocutor just now heard "Pure Evil" when what I'd actually said was "Prairie Vole." Heh.
Testing hReview Creator, thanks to Mike Linksvayer
Just minutes after I'd complained in my latest blog posting about the lack of taxonomies for doing business reviews, Mike Linksvayer leaves a comment to the contrary:
In-blog reviews, no hacking required beyond copy and paste.
In the fullness of time these will be aggregated by someone for viewing in the context of similar reviews. On the other hand, reviews posted at review sites may be similarly aggregated.
OK, now trying out hReview Creator:
Test review of Ramen Rama using hReview Creator
Feb 25, 2006 by Russell Whitaker★★★★☆ I visited yesterday with my friend Suzu, and like her had one of the 3 lunch specials, #28, the "Cupertino special". I agree with Suzu's assessment of the noodles, which were a bit limp. Having lived in Japan, I will add that advertising this dish as "tonkatsu" - breaded pork - is a bit misleading, since the pork (which was very good, I should note) was not what I recognized as tonkatsu style.
The meal comes with cola included, which was a bit annoying since I don't normally drink carbonated sugar water: iced tea, which I prefer, is only at extra charge. I took the next best included alternative, a lemonade drink.
The best feature of the meal: the remarkably fresh-tasting gyoza, enhanced with chopped water chestnuts.
Billion Monkeys & a start at restaurant reviews
Yesterday, I visited Ramen Rama in Cupertino, California, with my longtime friend Suzu. Here's another of what Brian Micklethwait refers to as a "Billion Monkeys" moment:
Some other tech industry friends of Suzu have started a company called Yelp, whose product is a business reviews website, where Suzu and I have reviewed the ramen shop. I've not populated this blog with restaurant review entries to my satisfaction, since the blog format is not granular enough (without hacking) to support a taxonomy for star ratings and such, so I'm going to experiment with posting my reviews on Yelp and pointing to them from here. Putting my own reviews in the context of others' should add value to the opinions.
February 23, 2006
Quote of the Day
Canada is a great place to live... it is cool that we can smoke weed and marry people who have similiar genitals.
Jade Palamarek
February 21, 2006
I've caught the "Billion Monkeys" meme
I've caught the "Billion Monkeys" meme from my English blogger friend Brian Micklethwait (whom I met during my London sojourn in the early 1990's), who coined the term to describe those who take digital photographs of, well, others of those who take digital photographs of others. Here's one from my trip last spring to Beijing, a tour guide in the Forbidden City:
I must admit of course that the "Billion Monkeys" thing didn't occur to me at the time... I was simply taken with a rather attractive young Chinese woman.
Oh, yes, another War Department language guide, this one Japanese-English
Yesterday, I scanned the cover of a pocket WWII English-Chinese dictionary published by the U.S. War Department in 1943, at the height of the war. Today, I've scanned the cover of another from my collection, published shortly after V-J Day, in September 1945: TM 30-481, "The Supplementary Japanese-English Dictionary", this one a very large hardcover which I just barely fit on my scanner's flatbed:
From the Preface:
This dictionary of 43,000 terms is supplementary to the following six standard Japanese-English dictionaries with which it forms a complete set of seven:
...which I will paraphrase thus:
- a technical manual of about 100,000 terms which was in "final editorial stage" at the time;
- another technical manual of about 4,000 terms which was claimed in a similar state;
- Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, Harvard Univ. Press;
- Kato's Medical dictionary, 1944, German language edition (!);
- "Ozaki's Sea Terms";
- "Creswell's Military [Dictionary];
I'd love to see a copy of the 100,000 word technical manual... anyone know if this was ever actually published?
More old school: "New Worlds of Modern Science"
In preparing yesterday's "Little Red Book" post, I discovered that my US $99 Canon all-in-one scanner/printer/copier is an excellent proxy for a macro lens on an expensive camera (I have an Olympus E-1 but don't yet have that lens.) Here's another old school example from the many I have in my personal book collection, this one from 1956, "New Worlds of Modern Science":
I love this type of thing.
This is pretty brilliant, actually
Just saw a telecast version of this print article on Foxnews, "Cruisin' For Cash"; a small town (Littleton, Massachusetts) police chief, John Kelly, is using carside adverts - no tax money - to fund his police cruisers:
The chief says he felt he had little choice but to take an unusual, much-criticized step to upgrade his patrol cars. He’s selling advertising space on the quarter panels and rear bumper of patrol cars to pay for the new wheels.12 grand a year for three years earns a local business the right to put a banner ad on the back and sides of a town police car. This allows Kelly to buy all new lights, sirens, radios, scanners, shotgun and assault rifle racks, and an on-board law enforcement laptop computer. Plus, it covers the entire cost of the vehicle lease. A local grocer, Donnelans, bought space to pay for the first new cruiser.
Brilliant, and if someone proposes yet another obnoxious bond measure (or tax) in my town in California, I'll point them to this example as a superior alternative.
Quote of the Day (from a private mailing list I run, with permission)
Frank Bieser writes:
> Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> Without enough people working on the problem, we won't finish in
>> time. Right now, I'd say smart people are the biggest missing resource.
>
> And why might that be? Where did all the smart people go?
They didn't "go" anywhere. They've never been in the field.
How many smart people were working on orbital rocketry in 1920? A half
dozen, perhaps. Lots of people claimed the whole idea was bunk, too,
including the New York Times. Later on, lots of people joined up.
Today, not many people are working on Drexler's vision. That doesn't
mean it isn't worthwhile -- it just means that the field is young and
lots of people are still skeptical about it. I suspect that the number
of people actively working on it numbers less than 20, and possibly
less than 10.
There is enough work for thousands of people to push on this for many
years to come. At some point, we'll get IA or AI and the pace will be
able to pick up, but that point still seems pretty distant. Meanwhile,
direct molecular manipulation and molecular manufacturing pose a very
hard set of problems -- possibly the hardest engineering problem yet
faced by mankind -- and we need more minds to make progress. On the
flip side, MNT will also bring the biggest revolution in civilization
yet experienced, dwarfing everything that came before, so I see it as
a worthwhile problem to attack.
Still, we lack enough smart people working on it. As any good VC can
tell you, money is something of a commodity, but smart people are
rare. More smart people are needed.
Perry
A "Little Red Book" of another kind
A few hours ago, I went on a somewhat controlled shopping binge at one of my favorite used book shops, one in Sunnyvale, California. I found this little gem, TM-633, "Chinese Phrase Book" published by the U.S. War Department in 1943:
Included phrases in this pre-Maoist American Little Red Book run the gamut from "Are there Taoist priests in the mountains?" to "I have been poisoned" to "Don't try any tricks!" to "You will be rewarded" to "Give my horse water."
February 18, 2006
Me and Dale Seago at a recent Rabbie Burns Birthday celebration
Meant to put this up a few weeks ago: me and Dale Seago at a recent (21 January 2006) Rabbie Burns Birthday celebration in front of San Francisco's Edinburgh Castle Pub:
It was busy that night: I managed to snag the last booth upstairs in the mezzanine area, with a sightline into the area where we expected the haggis to be piped in. It took an hour and a half to get our fish & chips, which were worth the wait; they're made at some nearby mom & pop shop and delivered in. In the meantime, we enjoyed a few of the most excellent Belhaven peat-smoked ales, my first time trying that, and I thank Dale for introducing it to me.
The festivities were well worth the trip up to the city. The piper was very good - and looked every bit the part, wish I'd snagged a good shot of him - and the Burns poetry readings were rousing, marred only ever so slightly by some rather self-consciously narcissistic political posturing on the part of a (I'm not making this up) Scottish socialist lesbian Buddhist working class nun.
The night culminated in a hearty reading of "Address to a Haggis" followed by a free-for-all of flying forks in a frenzy of delectation. I managed to snag a small amount, happy I had any, and returned to the booth to enjoy it... and discovered to my gratitude that Dale had managed to snag double servings for both of us! I quite enjoyed it, and may even keep a small stock of it in cans for emergencies.
February 17, 2006
Beijing's Bungee Chair ride in Wangfujing
Still going through my burgeoning archive of travel photos. Here's a ride I took - a bungee chair - in Beijing's Wangfujing shopping district. The guy on the chair is not me:
I'd had a bit to drink when I decided to do this myself; the boisterously friendly Chinese guy who shared the chair with me (since it was cheaper for 2, cheapest for 3) was plastered. I bought a copy of the video taken by the elderly, cage-mounted VHS camera, without having taken into account (I'd been drinking, remember) that the camera was recording in PAL format... doh! Eventually, I'll get it converted to NTSC, or directly to MPEG. Should be fun to see.
Audioblog.com announces unmetered bandwidth plans
I occasionally attend some rather memorable lectures on topics of extropian interest, such as Aubrey de Grey's lectures at Stanford last summer. I've gotten permission to post some of the recordings I've taken with my iPod/iTalk combination, but have not yet aggregated those recordings for public consumption. With yesterday's announcement by audioblog.com concerning their "unmetered bandwidth" plan, I just may have found my venue. Stay tuned.
Me at my most Poindextrous...
I'm going through a year's worth of iPhoto archives and found this, taken in organic chemistry lab by my friend Jenny... me in Maximum Nerd mode:
February 15, 2006
Cats 'n Lanyards
Yes, I've descended into kittyblogging. This is my friend Jen's cat Willow about to pounce on my camera lanyard:
February 14, 2006
The all-time busiest on this blog: the American Community Survey
A year and a half ago, I posted "'None of Your Business!': the American Community Survey" in which I reported on Ron Paul's opinions on an illegal expansion of the U.S. Census. In the time since, by what admittedly are very modest standards compared to much more popular poltically-oriented blogs, the post has generated a consistent level of interest, not so much from what little I said, but from a snowball effect brought on by the increasingly large number of comments from people who've been harassed by minions of the American Community Survey.
Makes me glad that I didn't shut down my blog some months ago, as I'd considered doing.
A Livejournal blogger, harmlessinc, has linked to my article as a repository for real-life harassment stories.
February 12, 2006
Mohammed image blogburst: the 12 forbidden images
Something about all this Mohammed image craziness has gotten under my skin. Large, nasty, violent crowds of adherents to a pre-medieval death cult have made it their mission to nullify the very concept of "freedom of speech," and this really, really pisses me off (notice that I'm now blogging again?) and I have chosen to vent. So, inspired by Michelle Malkin's courage in posting "the 12 forbidden cartoons, I've decided to lash myself to the mast and join my fellow blogbursters in posting all of them myself. Here they are:
Need help fleshing out a Wikipedia entry
I was surprised to find a Wikipedia entry for "Boycott" but none for "Buycott" so I created the latter. I'd like help collaboratively fleshing out the entry. Help, anyone?
Tonight's Danish products buying binge
I took a break from studying this evening and visited a number of local stores to buy Danish food and booze products. Here's what I came back with, minus duplicates (I had to buy more than one of the tins of ginger cookies):
From left to right, purchases from various stores in Cupertino, California:
From Trader Joe's:
- Rosenborg Danish Blue cheese
- Silver Goat Organic Feta cheese
- "The Queen's Cookies" Ginger Spice Cookies (made in Denmark for Trader Joe's)
From Whole Foods:
- Denmark's Finest Havarti cheese
- Denmark's Finest Havarti cheese with dill
- Rosenborg Danish Blue cheese
- Blue Danish Castello Triple Cream cheese
- Fontina Danish Cheese
From Safeway:
- Denmark's Finest Fontina cheese
- Denmark's Finest Blue cheese
- Primo Taglio Havarti with Dill cheese
Especially notable and tasty are the ginger spice cookies made under contract in Denmark for Trader Joe's:
The thing that's missing from the first picture above: Danish beer. None of the three supermarkets above had any Danish beer - assumedly Tuborg and Carlsberg - and the one place I think might have such beer (Cost Plus World Market) closed tonight before I could check out their stock. I'll try there tomorrow night. In the meantime, I'm enjoying my Havarti with Newcastle Brown ale tonight.
I encourage all of my readers to participate in this Danish buycott.
"Results 1 - 20 of about 177,200,000 for Support Denmark"
This is a pretty amazing number, considering that a couple of days ago, Google was claiming around 3% of this number:
"Results 1 - 20 of about 177,200,000 for Support Denmark"
...and growing.
Frogman's "Support Denmark" banner posting updated with Chinese graphics
The Dissident Frogman has updated his "Support Denmark" banner blog posting with banner versions in additional languages such as German and Simplified Chinese.
February 09, 2006
Show your support for the Danes and for free speech
The Dissident Frogman is actively maintaining and updating a blog entry with "Support Denmark" graphics in multiple languages. Translations in additional languages are forthcoming (Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Korean, to the best of my knowledge.)
Oh, yeah: go out and stock up on Havarti cheese... it's not only a show of support contra the recent Islamist boycotts and violence against the Danes (and random others in their neighborhood) but it's also damned fine cheese.
