My soap-making friends Tam and Julie should
My soap-making friends Tam and Julie should make Fetus Soap instead.
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Entries for August 2003
Get prescription drugs online without having to
Get prescription drugs online without having to go to the doctor. I’d like 10,000 orders of valium, please
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond has written a fantastic book that lays out in simple terms how Europeans came to dominate the rest of the world without resorting to racist notions of Europeans being intrinsically smarter or more gifted than the inhabitants of the rest of the world. Diamond’s thesis is so simple and powerful, it seems, as Erdos would say, to come from “God’s book of proofs”. An illustration of this powerful simplicity is how the orientation of the continents affected the spread of domestication of crops, animals, germs, and ideas (which in turn influenced how fast difference cultures matured):
Why was the spread of crops from the Fertile Crescent so rapid? The answer partly depends on that east-west axis of Eurasia with which I opened this chapter. Localities distributed east and west of each other at the same latitude share exactly the same day length and its seasonal variations. To a lesser degree, they also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats or biomes (types of vegetation). That’s part of the reason why Fertile Crescent [crops and animals] spread west and east so rapidly: they were already well adapted to the climates of the regions to which they were spreading.
Britney and Madonna kiss open mouth with
Britney and Madonna kiss open mouth with tongue. 50 million teen boys just exploded.
There’s a tiny black hole where our mailbox used to be
Meg’s issue of Vogue arrived today and I about got a hernia carrying it up the stairs. The damn thing is more than an inch think and weighs about 5 pounds. Luckily I had the cover photo of Nicole Kidman to keep me company as I waited for the ambulance. (BTW, have you ever heard Kidman say “Baz Luhrmann” before? I saw a TV interview with her where she repeated his name about 4 times. It’s just about the sexiest thing I’ve ever heard.)
Some guy ate a 20x20 at In-N-Out
Some guy ate a 20x20 at In-N-Out Burger and has the photos to prove it. 20x20 = 20 beef patties + 20 cheese slices
New Wes Anderson film called The Life
New Wes Anderson film called The Life Aquatic starring Bill Murray.
Web standards and semantics
Following up on my last post (Standards don’t necessarily have anything to do with being semantically correct), here’s some further discussion on the issue:
This Validates!
On Standards and Semantics
Semantics and Bad Code
Semantic Markup
And Dan Cederholm takes a tentative first step toward the creation of a Am I the Semantic Web or Not? site with his first SimpleQuiz, the objective of which is to “ask some questions about markup and generate some discussion about preferred methods”.
1977 interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger in which he
1977 interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger in which he describes his wild lifestyle.
Soderbergh, Clooney, and the gang to make “Ocean’s Twelve”
Soderbergh, Clooney, and the gang to make “Ocean’s Twelve”. No foolin’
You can submit a PDF to Adobe
You can submit a PDF to Adobe via the web or email and get it converted to HTML or text.
Pirates of the Caribbean
If you’d asked me six months ago if I wanted to go see a Disney movie based on a Disneyland attraction, I probably would have punched you in the face. But Pirates is as good as you’ve heard it is. Depp gives a great performance as Jack Sparrow (I knew I’d love the film when Depp steps off the crow’s nest of his sinking ship right onto the dock), and Keira Knightly, well, let’s just say I’ve got a bit of a thing for her.
Standards don’t necessarily have anything to do with being semantically correct
Since the push toward good HTML/CSS/XHTML standards started a few years ago, browsers have gotten better at rendering standards-compliant code correctly and web designers have gotten better at writing standards-compliant code. Safari and Mozilla in particular have made great gains in rendering code correctly and folks like Todd Dominey, Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, and Doug Bowman (the four Ds?) have built great-looking and usable sites with standards-compliant code and then told us how they did it all.
But what I feel like is being implied in the effort to get more people to embrace standards compliancy is that coding a page in valid XHTML with valid CSS involves improving the semantic meaning of the content…which is just not true. Take the following from an informative site on Standards-compliant XHTML:
Removing presentation from (X)HTML documents and using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control visual design is a revolutionary approach for many. Designers will find good reason to separate style from content and abandon use of
, and
tags to control visual design. For example, a single CSS document can control the visual design for thousands of (X)HTML pages. Updating a site with redundant, non-standard
and tag hacks is a chore. With CSS, a few simple changes to the style sheet can refresh an entire site comprised of thousands of documents.
And from the XHTML basics page on the same site:
Tables: for data only
Back in the glory days of the Web, designers exploited the
tag to create grid-based designs. This was out of necessity because browsers simply couldn’t understand Cascading Style Sheets. Fast forward to the present; almost every current browser understands most of the first CSS specification and some of the second. Use tables for data only (think spreadsheets). Should you come in contact with someone using tables for presentation, firmly reprimand them and point them to this guide.
The trusty font tag
Absolutely, under no circumstances, should you ever use the tag. It is antiquated, unsupported by the W3C, and makes for very unsexy (X)HTML. Condemn anyone using this tag and immediately contact the authorities.Last time I checked (about two minutes ago…to see if I was actually correct), both the
and tags are valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional tags and the
tag is a valid XHTML 1.1 tag. Documents with
and tags are standards-compliant. And yet, we’re advised not to use them. Rightly so, but not because they aren’t standards compliant, but because using alternative methods (defining styles with CSS, making sure tags are semantically relevent to the text they enclose, etc.) is preferable for the reasons outlined above (among others).
Coding web documents in valid XHTML doesn’t make them semantically useful nor does coding semantically correct documents mean the documents are standards-compliant; they are two distinct things but a powerful combination. As web designers, we need to be aware of what we’re getting with standards compliancy and semantically rich documents and that one does not necessarily lead to the other. More importantly, we need evangelize effectively to clients and budding XHTML coders & web designers, telling them *precisely* what’s so great about making sites standards-compliant and semantically useful and therefore worth spending money to redesign a site or time to learn valid XHTML/CSS.
Someone got fired for reading MetaFilter at work
Someone got fired for reading MetaFilter at work. Are you happy now, Matt?
It’s “weblog” not “web log”
Dear New Yorker, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post and others**,
Please stop using the term “web log” to refer to a chronologically-ordered frequently-updated website. The correct term is “weblog”. Furthermore, “blog” is not short for “web log”, it is short for “weblog”.
When dealing with words generated by the Internet, where people stick bits of different words together with reckless abandon, I can understand the need for high-quality newspapers and magazines to use the proper grammatical approach in dealing with compound words, hyphens, etc. At first blush, “weblog” appears to be a shortened version of “web log” which is in turn a shortened version of “World Wide Web log”, in which case the usage the media has adopted would be more or less correct (“Web log” would probably be more correct). But the evidence doesn’t support this:
1. The original spelling of the term is “WebLog” as seen on Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom WebLog page from December 1997. It was never “web log”. In subsequent correspondence (like this Usenet post from June 1998), Barger himself referred to his site as a “weblog” and sites like his as “weblogs”.
2. After Barger’s coining of “weblog”, a few early bloggers preferred to use “web log” as an alternative (see Raphael Carter’s Honeyguide Web Log from June 1998) but the majority use was and is “weblog” and the use of “web log” has waned (except for its misuse by the media, of course). A search for “weblog” on Google yields 4,620,000 results. A Google search for “web log” yields 383,000 results. The use of “weblog” is in the majority by an order of magnitude. The impact in the search results for “web log” due to its incorrect usage in the media is unknown.
3. Most of the citations for “weblog” and “blog” in the Oxford English Dictionary Online use “weblog”, not “web log”. The primary exception is the 1999-08-30 issue of TBTF, which appears to be an inadvertant misquotation by TBTF proprietor Keith Dawson. Courtesy of the Internet Archive, the original citation on Peter Merholz’s site reads:
I’ve decided to pronounce the word “weblog” as wee’- blog. Or “blog” for short.
The use of “Web log” in TBTF is clearly wrong:
Seems [Merholz] decided one fine day that “Web log” ought to be pronounced “wee-blog.”
While the “web log” spelling is an acceptable alternative to “weblog”, it’s clear from the available evidence that “web log” was derived from “weblog” (rather than the other way around) and its usage is comparatively minor, both of which naturally point to “weblog” as the primary usage in any newspaper, periodical or dictionary that values accuracy.
** Here are a few recent news articles that have used “web log” instead of “weblog”:
Finding Comfort in Strangers With an Online Diet Journal (NY Times)
Huffington’s prior punditry influences her campaign’s tone (SF Chronicle)
Names & Faces (Washington Post)
Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs (news.com)
Google News search for “web log”
List of courses available on MIT’s web site for free
List of courses available on MIT’s web site for free. Did I mention free? Free!
A Fun Thing I’ll Do Again
I have hauled in three bluefish from off the coast of Massachusetts. I have sat nervously in a powerless airport terminal for three hours with no food, water, or restroom and luckily getting on what was probably the last plane to Boston (apparently) because my arms are a little longer than the guy next to me. I have gotten gum on my shirt from the seal belt in the airplane. I have spent 7 consecutive days at the beach. I have finished half of a heavy nonfiction book and started another which I am now about halfway through. I have tasted a donut so hot and delicious that I burned my fingers eating it but did not stop to put it down. I have eaten foie gras creme brulee and heard tale of a foie gras donut. I have chuckled at conservative white men in pink shorts. I have flown co-pilot in a 10-seat Cessna. I have cheered for a Little League team from Saugus, Mass. I have browned nicely. I have seen more stars in one night’s sky than in the last 7 years of living in large cities. I have not used a computer in over 9 days. I have consumed far less root beer floats than I would have liked. I have boogie boarded briefly.
Is this enough? At the time, it didn’t seem like enough.
(With apologies to David Foster Wallace)
My foodie friends snicker at my fondness for iceburg lettuce
My foodie friends snicker at my fondness for iceburg lettuce.
Tuned out, dropped out, let’s do the time warp again
I’m back in NYC after being on vacation since last Friday and I feel like I’ve been in a time warp. Even though I experienced the blackout (power came back on about a half-hour before we left for the airport on Friday), I know nothing about what happened because I didn’t read any newspapers or watch any TV while I was gone. I feel so uninformed about something I experienced. There’s probably something to be said here about how dependent we are (or maybe it’s just me, but I suspect not) on the media for contextulizing absolutely everything for us, even things we’ve experienced for ourselves, but I’m still in vacation mode so you’ll have to fill in your own blanks. Nyah nyah.
The Royal Tenenbaums
I’m such a sucker for slo-mo, especially when Wes Anderson does it. Gets me every time. That scene where Margo gets off the bus to pick up Baumer at the dock? I could watch that scene over and over and over again.
Old School
While this movie needed more topless women in pools of K-Y Jelly and Will Ferrell on the screen, it was still a pretty funny update of Animal House.
2003 NYC Blackout
The power went out around 4:10pm or so as I sat in front of my computer. I don’t know the exact time because most of the clocks in the office are electric. Wandered around the 15th floor for a bit, looking out the window at people in the building across the street looking over at our building and down to the street. Reports via cell phone that the power is out in Brooklyn as well.
I grabbed provisions from the dark fridge (a bottle of water) and set off from 45th Street across town and down 30 blocks to 14th Street and into the Village…after 15 flights of stairs. When I emerged from the building, people were everywhere. It’s midtown, so people are usually everywhere, but this was that times ten. I waded through the crowd down 5th Avenue to 34th Street.
Nobody knows what’s going on. A red emergency vehicle is parked, the driver has the passenger side door open with the radio blasting the news out to a crowd of people. Everyone stands listening, heads cocked to one side, looking at the ground, straining for details. I join them for a couple of minutes. The radio says that the power is out. Duh.
I pass a woman saying to another woman that Madison Square Garden is on fire. Two minutes later, I walk past a very intact and very much not burning Madison Square Garden. The crowd is so dense that we’re all shuffling along, no one getting anywhere fast. Someone bumps into the person in front of me. “Hey, watch where the hell you’re going.” People are little scared and seem on edge. I don’t hear the word terrorism, but the air is thick with the thought.
I reach 18th Street. Some shops are open, most are not. The ice cream shop is doing good business. The owner of a bodega has barricaded the door with shelves of food and stands watch with him employees.
A block from home, I see a couple sitting outside at a restaurant, sipping Coronas, watching the world go by.
And now, I leave for the airport. I have no idea if we’ll get there in time.
Fun with the Google calculator
Instead of replying to my endless queue of unanswered email, I spent some time last night playing with Google’s newest toy, the Google Calculator. Maybe if people would email back solutions to arithmetic problems included in my email replies to them I would more readily respond to my backlog. But I digress.
After verifying that 2+2=4 (contrary to popular belief), I tried to figure out the largest difference between the smallest and largest units of measurement on a given scale, finally ending up with ~3.08 x 10^26 angstroms in a parsec (26 orders of magnitude difference). If you delve into the world of obscure metric prefixes, you can get up to 64 orders of magnitude difference….there are ~3.08 x 10^64 yoctometers in a yottaparsec. If you want to get really ridiculous, you can find out how many yoctometers there are in one vigintillion parsecs (~3.08 x 10^103 if you’re curious).
That got me thinking…what’s the limit of the Google Calculator’s computational ability? 170! (170! = 1*2*3*4* … *168*169*170) is equal to ~7.26 x 10^306, but 171! doesn’t work. 2^1023 = ~8.99 x 10^307, but 2^1024 doesn’t work. After some trial and error, the upper limit of the calculator is ~1.797 × 10^308…or basically anything less than 2^1024. My binary math is a little rusty, but that limit seems to correspond to 32-bit double precision real arithmetic. Which makes sense, but it would have been more fun if the limit would have been a googol (1.0 x 10^100). (Regarding other large numbers, neither googolplex nor infinity return calculator results.)
In addition to playing with big numbers, the calculator can help you finally figure out the number of drams in a pennyweight (~0.878 drams/pennyweight), rods in a fathom (~0.364 rods/fathom), or the speed of light in knots (582,749,918 knots)…but unfortunately not the mileage of your automobile in rods/hogshead.
Andy’s got some more calculator fun going.
Boatmen, a spam poem
alsop the mend
mescal hove cranks
pleader bender hying
tensest estimations horseshoer
bramble addicted illustrious
eventuality polygonal terrors
popularly maturity courtesy
excretion bergman horsefly
scopes advertisements terminated
eta hornblende crimson
adoptions metronome argive
boardinghouse posters hypothyroid
botany couching talker
administering hoydenish bourgeoisie
testifiers sawyer barnes
meeker savers admits
polygonal bateman bessel
schoolroom acts bouncing
bergman posers expeditions
teacart hypodermics audubon
ali takeover adventurers
bottoming sculptor bravo
telecommunicate acknowledge pledge
accumulator icebox exceptionally
tee expedient plungers tamely cradled boob
matrices exhausting sawfish at&t mechanicsremove mail
testings mended boundlessness
advertisement actinolite tainted
administratively meaningfully advanced
crashing body exceptionally
cortege courted arnold
cottony tattle humorous
midst illume covariate
scents imaginate expunging
adair bowler benson
boatload actively pouting
bookseller boom saturdays
creamer policed boniface
euphemism cretinous bonnets
actuators pragmatism sayings
scheme andersen crackling
poop pomade boasters
aegean mien mechanics
pragmatically bra plurals
exhortation plebiscite termed
hovers tension postmen
ibis tenable possums
executor cowboys hypothalamus
accesses telecommunication poles
scrutinize breakers mattered
schoolhouses meanwhile testes pluck porphyry expressively
temporary anheuser schoolhouse telescoped actuality— Gary Milano, [email protected]
Friendster is fighting the creators of fake
Friendster is fighting the creators of fake profiles like Jesus Christ and Smurfette. Friendster’s gonna lose that battle
Insomnia
See the original Norwegian film instead. And Pacino’s schtick is getting a little old.
A chap named Henry Raddick humorously reviews
A chap named Henry Raddick humorously reviews anything and everything on Amazon.
Selling out
Jesus Jones’ frontman Mike Edwards on selling out vs. cashing out:
We didn’t hesitate to accept the offer [to play at a corporate conference] and I can’t think why we should have. I recall from my music-press-reading days that accepting money from The Man is wrong but I can’t remember why, or how it differs from signing a recording contract or playing a heavily sponsored festival.
Like other teens, when I was younger I formed a notion about the purity of art versus payment for art (this correlates inversely with the number of 15-year-olds paying mortgages) that made it an Offence In Rock to accept an honest month’s pay for an honest three minutes’ work. Even then there seemed to be some contradiction between punk ideology and the Great Rock’n’ Roll Swindle.
See also Dave Eggers’ famous sell-out rant in his interview with the Harvard Advocate.
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