Posts from — December 2004

: “”It’s our job to investigate issues like these and explain them to our readers, many of whom have family members serving in the military,” Moore said. “We hope Fort Carson officials reconsider their ban of The Denver Post. If they don’t, we will appeal to senior military officers at Fort Carson and in Washington, and through any other legal or congressional channels that are available to us.”"

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if reporters don’t get in there and stop this nonsense, the ’secrecy’ will become pervasive. freedom of the press needs to be preserved for the u.s. to be considered a democratic state. don’t these generals and governors read the founders of our country?

Work. This new quarterly magazine from New York lo…: ”

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(Via Creative Generalist.)

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this looks like it could be interesting…

Completely random shit: ” 1. Saw my therapist today: she made a strong case for me just quitting this job at the end of the year and moving home, replacement job or no. Best line: “you won the prize and got the job and now you’re taking anti-depressants. Obviously something’s wrong, right?”

(Via Bitch. Ph.D..)

actually, lots of academics have depression after they finish their dissertation and/or start their new position. i posit it is because people think they’ve managed to make progress to the top wrung of the ladder only to realize, there is no top wrung at all, just more wrungs.

i’ve heard of everything from the ‘life change’, ‘giving up academia’, and my university even had a suicide due to depression related to post-dissertation. it’s a harsh world. there may be identifiable issues here that need some looking into, or even a recognizable diagnosis like post-ph.d. depression.

Course / Beverages / Punch Recipes: “”

(Via .)

punch recipes… did someone say punch recipes?

and no one is citing William Juniper’s ‘the true drunkards delight’?

mortal sins….

he lists

Tovey’s Punch
Whisky Punch
Glasgow Punch

Halo Punch

Rum Punch

Oxford Punch

Milk Punch

Homemade camera kicks gigapixel ass: “Xeni Jardin:

Interesting piece in the NYT about inventor Clifford Ross, and an analog camera he developed which is capable of capturing astounding detail from great distances.

[The camera was] unusual enough to capture the attention of serious scientists, including the kinds who work for the government, experimenting with nuclear fusion, space travel and spy systems. What grabbed them were photographs Mr. Ross took that allowed them to see with astonishing clarity a tiny footpath on the top of a Colorado mountain seven miles from the camera.

Link to story. Image: A photo of Mount Sopris in Colorado, taken by Clifford Ross with his camera invention. (thanks, Susannah)”

(Via Boing Boing.)

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sweet camera!

Universal Free Dictionary: “Zdenek Broz writes “The all free dictionaries project focuses on maintaining free dictionaries (now more than 90 with more than 3,300,000 translations). We are designing a new system which will unite them all into one universal dictionary for all languages. The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL.”"

(Via Slashdot.)

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heh, dictionaries only seem simple enough to do this with… this is a bit of a techno-optimist project…..

Mueller comment: “

“You have not tried a free and market process. You have done almost everything else. You have shut the market down completely. You have tried trickling in additions through painful and laborious beauty contests…. However, there is a glimmer of hope…I heard Kleinsin say he saw no technical stability concerns about the addition of ten to 20 new TLDs to the root a year. …It’s clear that these technical concerns go away if we add something in the neighborhood of tens of top level domains per year.”

“I submitted a paper a year ago calling for the annual addition of 40 TLDs. Isn’t this something we could agree to? Something between 10 and 40 a year? This is progress. . . . The one part of this that doesn’t fit into a smooth transition is the board’s involvement in the content of a TLD. My proposal talked about a trademark-oriented dispute resolution process for new TLDs. You can set up a challenge process, and that can deal with a lot of the issues.”

Kleinsin: “From a technical restriction standpoint, I could throw my shoe at you. [milton: you've done that] There are a number of policy constraints that keep me from doing that. The ability to do something technically is not a reason to do it.”

We’ve been talking about new TLDs for some time today. It’s 1999! Joe Sims is here. Ken Fockler is here. Where is Chris Ambler?

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(Via Susan Crawford blog.)

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but here’s the rub: money, surplus and devaluation. which can be real or imagined. right now some people make good money off of people’s imagination that there is limited domains. it is a constructed market deficit condition, and lots of people who profit want it to stay that way.

UNESCO Free Software Portal: The UNESCO Free Software Portal gives access to documents and websites which are references for the Free Software/Open Source Technology movement. It is also a gateway to resources related to Free Software.

http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=12034&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

(Via Information Policy.)

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this could be handy.

Jon Udell on the passive-aggressive Semantic Web: “

He doesn’t call it that, but his column in InfoWorld, “Bootstrapping the Semantic Web” makes a fascinating point. At a site that aggregates info about people

… I show up as executive editor of Byte Magazine and contributor to Linux Magazine. And while those were once accurate descriptions of me, I have never been a member of Blue Titan’s board of advisors, and I am not the inventor of RSS.

…

Semantic-Web naysayers think people and organizations can’t be bothered to assert machine-readable facts about themselves. And, today, that is undoubtedly true. But when others assert facts about you — as they increasingly will — the tide could begin to turn. Individual acts of self-defense may ultimately combine to bootstrap the semantic Web.

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(Via Joho the Blog.)

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self-defense may drive it… i agree, or i suspect that some people will be overly aggressive and get sued, mire the whole thing a huge ball of crap and that will be the end of many assertions.

Conference: “Heteronormativity – A fruitful concept? June 2. – 4. 2005 Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway You can also find the program on the conference web site, but it’s still mostly lunches, breaks and other leisure things which…”

(Via GENDER & COMPUTING.)

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this could be fun.