posts brought to you by the category “genetics”
Das eez kaput! Sometime around 2002 I spaced the entire database
table that mapped individual entries to categories. Such is life.
What follows is a random sampling of entries that were associated
with the category. Over time, the entries will be updated and then it
will be even more confusing. Wander around, though, it's still a fun
way to find stuff.
Mark D. Bokil : Mozedit
I wanted something that would work from within Mozilla Firebird
which had the minimum ammount of features, launched fast, and
previewed html files using the latest CSS.
I too have been "wandering around the landscape screaming
'Nuuukieeee!'"
Phillipe A. Martin : Integration of WordNet 1.7 in WebKB-2
...although WordNet categories have intuitive names (English nouns
or nominal expressions), they do not have intuitive identifiers (the
WordNet API mainly uses numbers). Intuitive identifiers are mandatory
for permitting people to read, write and update knowledge statements
in text files, i.e. outside the graphical interface of a particular
tool. This is a minimal requirement for knowledge sharing/re-use and
also greatly simplifies the development of knowledge-based tools.
Hence, we designed an algorithm to create intuitive identifiers for
WordNet categories based on their names. This algorithm combines
various heuristics we learnt from many trials.
Bloogle : "We will not be implementing or supporting the Blogger
API 2.0."
Is that Thomas Friedman, or just David Frum wearning Groucho Marx
glasses?
Fishing with Saddam
Diego Golberg : Time
On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual:
we photograph ourselves to stop a fleeting moment, the arrow of time
passing by.
via
laura holder
More from the "Separating idiots from their nice stuff department"
: Putting the Fab in Prefab
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is :
derflamminloggin
This is my husband's name for those pseudo-logs that you
can burn in the fireplace.
ex. Honey, it's kind of cold out. Do you want to burn
derflamminloggin in the fireplace tonight?
Scott Andrew LePera : Using the Mozilla SOAP API
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : inchoate
Inchoate \In"cho*ate\, a. [L. inchoatus, better incohatus,
p. p. of incohare to begin.] Recently, or just, begun; beginning;
partially but not fully in existence or operation; existing in its
elements; incomplete. -- {In"cho*ate*ly}, adv. Neither a substance
perfect, nor a substance inchoate. --Raleigh.
web1913
inchoate adj : only partly in existence; imperfectly
formed; "incipient civil disorder"; "an incipient tumor"; "a vague
inchoate idea" [syn: {incipient}]
wn
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : jocund
Jocund \Joc"und\, adv. Merrily; cheerfully. --Gray.
web1913
jocund adj : full of or showing high-spirited merriment;
"when hearts were young and gay"; "a poet could not but be gay, in such
a jocund company"- Wordsworth; "the jolly crowd at the reunion"; "jolly
old Saint Nick"; "a jovial old gentleman"; "have a merry Christmas";
"peals of merry laughter"; "a mirthful laugh" [syn: {gay}, {jolly},
{jovial}, {merry}, {mirthful}]
wn
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : pellucid
Pellucid \Pel*lu"cid\, a. [L. pellucidus; per (see {Per-})
+ lucidus clear, bright: cf. F. pellucide.] Transparent; clear; limpid;
translucent; not opaque. ``Pellucid crystal.'' --Dr. H. More.
``Pellucid streams.'' --Wordsworth.
web1913
pellucid adj 1: transmitting light; able to be seen through
with clarity; "the cold crystalline water of melted snow"; "crystal
clear skies"; "could see the sand on the bottom of the limpid pool";
"lucid air"; "a pellucid brook"; "transparent cristal" [syn:
{crystalline}, {crystal clear}, {limpid}, {lucid}, {transparent}] 2:
(of language) transparently clear; easily understandable; "writes in a
limpid style"; "lucid directions"; "a luculent oration"- Robert Burton;
"pellucid prose"; "a crystal clear explanation"; "a perspicuous
argument" [syn: {limpid}, {lucid}, {luculent}, {crystal clear},
{perspicuous}]
wn
Yuuichi Teranishi : eldav.el
"provides an interface to the WebDAV servers for
Emacs. ... [note that] SSL is not supported (because `nd' does not handle
it.)"
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : raconteur
Raconteur \Ra`con`teur"\, n. [F.] A relater; a storyteller.
web1913
raconteur n : a person skilled in telling anecdotes [syn:
{anecdotist}]
wn
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : malediction
Malediction \Mal`e*dic"tion\, n. [L. maledictio: cf. F.
mal['e]diction. See {Maledicent}.] A proclaiming of evil against some
one; a cursing; imprecation; a curse or execration; -- opposed to
{benediction}. No malediction falls from his tongue. --Longfellow. Syn:
Cursing; curse; execration; imprecation; denunciation; anathema. Usage:
{Malediction}, {Curse}, {Imprecation}, {Execration}. Malediction is the
most general term, denoting bitter reproach, or wishes and predictions
of evil. Curse implies the desire or threat of evil, declared upon oath
or in the most solemn manner. Imprecation is literally the praying down
of evil upon a person. Execration is literally a putting under the ban
of excommunication, a curse which excludes from the kingdom of God. In
ordinary usage, the last three words describe profane swearing,
execration being the strongest.
web1913
malediction n : a curse that invokes evil (and usually
serves as an insult); "he suffered the imprecations of the mob" [syn:
{imprecation}]
wn
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : mudguts
Most likely the younger sister of a skank, a mudguts
typically has at least two inches of stomach showing. To be a true
mudguts the stomach must also fall two inches beyond the top of her
short skirt. A beer gut for young women. Muddy for
short.
ex. For a sixteen year old she must drink a lot of beer.
She isn't pregnant, so she must be a mudguts.
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : hommie
hopper
Girl or woman who sleeps with a lot of guys for no
reason.
ex. Karen is the class's worst hommie
hopper.
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : gelid
Gelid \Gel"id\, a. [L. gelidus, fr. gelun frost, cold. See
{Cold}, and cf. {Congeal}, {Gelatin}, {Jelly}.] Cold; very cold;
frozen. ``Gelid founts.'' --Thompson.
web1913
gelid adj : extremely cold; "an arctic climate"; "let's get
inside; I'm freezing"; "a frigid day"; "gelid waters of the North
Atlantic"; "glacial winds"; "icy hands"; "polar weather" [syn:
{arctic}, {freezing}, {frigid}, {glacial}, {icy}, {polar}]
wn
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is sentient
| source : web1913 | Sentient \Sen"ti*ent\, a.
[L. sentiens, -entis, p. pr. of sentire to discern or perceive by the
senses. See {Sense}.] Having a faculty, or faculties, of sensation and
perception. Specif. (Physiol.), especially sensitive; as, the sentient
extremities of nerves, which terminate in the various organs or tissues.
| source : web1913 | Sentient \Sen"ti*ent\, n. One who has the faculty of
perception; a sentient being. | source : wn | sentient adj 1: endowed
with feeling and unstructured consciousness; "the living knew themselves
just sentient puppets on God's stage"- T.E.Lawrence [syn: {animate}]
[ant: {insentient}] 2: consciously perceiving; "sentient of the
intolerable load"; "a boy so sentient of his surroundings"- W.A.White
John Dean : Military Tribunals, A Long and Mostly Honorable
Tradition
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is arcanum
| source : web1913 | Arcanum \Ar*ca"num\, n.; pl.
{Arcana}. [L., fr. arcanus closed, secret, fr. arca chest, box, fr.
arcere to inclose. See {Ark}.] 1. A secret; a mystery; -- generally used
in the plural. Inquiries into the arcana of the Godhead. --Warburton. 2.
(Med.) A secret remedy; an elixir. --Dunglison. | source : wn | arcanum n
: information known only to a special group; "the secret of Cajun
cooking" [syn: {secret}] | source : gazetteer | Arcanum, OH (village,
FIPS 2330) Location: 39.99155 N, 84.55382 W Population (1990): 1953 (829
housing units) Area: 2.6 sq km (land), 0.0 sq km (water)
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is Argus-eyed
| source : web1913 | Argus-eyed \Ar"gus-eyed\, a.
Extremely observant; watchful; sharp-sighted. | source : wn | argus-eyed
adj 1: having very keen vision; "quick-sighted as a cat" [syn:
{hawk-eyed}, {keen-sighted}, {lynx-eyed}, {quick-sighted}, {sharp-eyed},
{sharp-sighted}] 2: carefully observant or attentive; on the lookout for
possible danger; "a policy of open-eyed awareness"; "the vigilant eye of
the town watch"; "there was a watchful dignity in the room"; "a watchful
parent with a toddler in tow" [syn: {open-eyed}, {vigilant}, {wakeful},
{watchful}]
Brian Aker : myperl
"creates a poor man's stored procedure for MySQL
using perl. You can store perl in a column (or just pass it directly to
the myperl function). ... myperl() be default only returns 254
characters. Making this do more is in the next list of things to happen.
At the moment most calls to modules causes mysql to core (Something is up
with the loader). Keep in mind that this is still experimental. At the
moment I bet this has a bug or two in it and I have no idea exactly how
fast this is. If people find it useful I will probably add more to it.
Have fun."
Damian Conway : More answers (modulo Larry :-) regarding the [
Perl6 ] 'given when' construct.
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is denouement
| source : web1913 | D'enouement
\D['e]`noue`ment"\, n. [F. d['e]nouement, fr. d['e]nouer to untie; pref.
d['e]- (L. dis-) + nouer to tie, fr. L. nodus knot, perh. for gnodus and
akin to E. knot.] 1. The unraveling or discovery of a plot; the
catastrophe, especially of a drama or a romance. 2. The solution of a
mystery; issue; outcome. | source : wn | denouement n 1: the outcome of a
complex sequence of events 2: the final resolution of the main
complication of a literary or dramatic work
Sandra Tsing Loh talks to The Treatment
about "Us and Them". (real evil g2)
Sandeep Krishnamurthy : Understanding Online Message
Dissemination
"An Analysis of "Send-this-story-to-your-friend"
Data"
Simon Fell : MS Word 2 SOAP
brian d. foy : Creating a Perl Debugger
NY Times : Beyond Hypertext - Novels With Interactive
Animation
"It's a chance to explore not only the message of
the particular work but the form in which it's created. You're
interacting with the story as a maker of the world."
Henning Behme : Dynamic XML with AxKit
Margot Magowan : "Pussy has so much potential,
it's a shame to limit it to the immature and
derisive mocking of weak boys. Let's give it a shot in the arm! I
envision hit songs featuring "pussy" -- "Who Let the Pussies Out?" or
"The Real Slim Pussy" or "The Real Shady Pussy." Hallmark-type cards that
read "Thanks for being such a pussy!" Colloquial expressions: "You da
pussy!" "Stand up and fight like a pussy!"
Andrew Odlyzko : Content is Not King
"Content can be profitable. Numerous media
companies are doing very well. Content can also be of value to a network,
even aside from providing traffic for the network to carry. However, it
is probably best to think of content as either catnip or icing on the
cake; something to attract new users, or enhance user experience. That is
what broadcast TV programs do for the advertisers who pay for them. That
may also have been the main role of the Web and browsers in bringing more
people to the Internet."
Rohit Khare and Adam Rifkin : The Origin of (Document) Species
"Whereas the first explanation implies a passive
Web that accommodates all document formats equally, the second argues
that the medium itself favors evolution from information capture towards
knowledge representation. The key is that the Web can be leveraged
reflexively to capture a document's structure and semantics -- that any
community can define its own ontology, or adopt, extend, and combine
others. In this context, we argue that the emergence of XML-based formats
does not merely represent a slew of new competitors, but an ecosystem of
interdependent document species."
The Globe and Mail on "Renaissance Man" Paul Greenlaugh
Mr. Greenlaugh is the new president of the
Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design
, although the article seems to spend more time reliving the glory days
of Garry Kennedy. Some items not mentioned in the article : During the
last "official" president's tenure it was as much the students as the
faculty that drove her away. Whether this was a good thing or not is
another story; one thing is sure, she had *no* idea how to talk to twenty
year old art students full of piss and vinegar. Eric Fischl is still
hated and generously slagged by the painting faculty. The story goes that
Garry Kennedy managed to secure the current location after making a very
convincing argument that the school should, in fact, be housed on an old
aircraft carrier that was then anchored in the harbour. The guy who ran
the print shop and printed the "I will not make any boring art" print now
does
now does all his
work on the web
and is one of the best teachers I've ever had. He is also the guy who
saved
this print
when, after a almost two months of work and a second all-nighter of
etching, I discovered that I hadn't grained the biggest stone in the
department evenly.
The 2000 Massey Lecture : The Rights Revolution
"In Canada, rights have become the trump card in
every argument from family life to Parliament Hill. But the notorious
fights for aboriginal rights and for the linguistic heritage of
French-speaking Canadians have steered Canada into a full-blown rights
revolution. This revolution is not only deeply controversial here, but is
being watched around the world. Are group rights — to land and
language — jeopardizing individual rights? Has the Charter of
Rights empowered ordinary Canadians or just enriched constitutional
lawyers? When everyone asserts their rights, what happens to
responsibilities? Michael Ignatieff confronts these questions head-on in
The Rights Revolution, defending the supposed individualism of rights
language against all comers." Live 20h30 EST and re-broadcast next week.
(real evil g2)
NewsDaemon
is the [PHP] code that run
daily.daemonnews.org
and has been just been open sourced by it's authors. see also :
Über phpCMS
"Meanwhile my homepage assumes a size, with which modifications at the
layout become difficult. For this reason I decided to write a content
management system." [babelfish]
Personally, I'm a bit tired
of all this
self-congratulatory drivel
. Still, if you're wondering what
this is all about
I will hazard a guess : Every year, thousands of college kids head North
for the tree-planting season and, as stereotypes go, it has become
something of a Canadian rite of passage. Generally, the blocks of land
you plant on have been cleared in one of two way. Acid-crazed locals,
driving massive Frank Miller inspired monstrosities, will flatten
everything in sight or they will clear 20' paths creating massive piles
of dead forest on either side. The latter are called wind rows and they
suck, in part because they only have "openings" every couple of hundred
feet making it ripe territory for playing head-games with yourself.
Anyway, the story
I
was told was that on the last day of the previous season a foreman was
walking through a block of wind rows checking trees when he passed an
opening and saw flagging tape being pulled along the ground. He poked his
head into the next row and saw that the tape stretched as far as he could
see. The foreman followed the tape -- lots of it, all different colours
-- for a couple of rows before he found himself standing in front of a
planter wearing nothing but his boots and his planting bags. And several
rolls of flagging tape whose ends had been tied to his penis. see also :
Andrew Cohen : OK, Canada, let's bury U.S. obsession
.
I, for one, am less than impressed with 120seconds.com
Aside from the fact that the site seems to be
little more than an exercise in gratuitous plug-in usage, it is almost
completely forgetable. I remember seeing a link to the site from the main
CBC site
a couple months ago. The link disappeared a day later --bad-- but even
worse, until
Michael
and
Ed
each mentioned it a couple days ago I could not for the life of me
*remember* what the site was called. 180 seconds ... no, maybe 90 ...
well, it's a bunch of something .. oh forget it. 120 seconds?? I've been
known to be a little dense sometimes, occasionally describing Montreal as
an island surrounded by water, but I can't see any connections here. Two
minutes of what, exactly? Is it supposed to represent the attention span
of their target audience? Maybe instead of buying all the propellor heads
new versions of Flash to make the site still more annoying, the CBC could
spend some money promoting the damn thing and telling us what it is.
CBC : Scientists break speed of light
"It [a light pulse] raced so fast the pulse
exited a specially-prepared chamber before it even finished entering it.
... The key to the experiment was that the pulse reformed before it could
have gotten there by simply travelling through empty space. This means
that, when the waves of the light distorted, the pulse traveled forward
in time. " My head hurts.
MozillaZine : Creating a Mozilla Skin, Pt. 2 - The Menubar
National Graphic Design Image Database
I would have never thought
to make <a href =
"http://www.tamaraskitchen.com.au/books/risotto.asp">risotto with
plums and kangaroo meat</a>. Then again, I wouldn't have
thought to make <a href =
"http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~plragde/food/gar-ice-cream.html">roasted
garlic ice cream</a> either.
I will be truly surprised
if I find any website that is as lame and
annoying as
the Bell Canada site
between now and
The Big
Move
. All I wanted was to order a second phone line and find definitions or
descriptions for the list of inane and ambiguous product "names". Instead
I got trapped in a
Cube-like
maze of frames, useless (not to mention vanishing) navigation menus,
non-existent text-links and excessive numbers of graphics ( particularly
of smiling jackasses. ) Oh, that those too too solid roll-overs would
melt! What should have taken five minutes took over an hour! Anyway,
speaking of cubes...
Randal Schwartz : Have You Ever Meta-Index Like This?
I had the opportunity of attending the Boston
Perl Conference in April and one of the best parts was watching Randal
Schwartz heckle Lincoln Stein from the back of the room.
PHP Knowledge Base
<a href =
"http://e-gineer.com/e-gineer/phpkb/view.phtml/qid/657">How can I
check if the user has Javascript enabled in their
browser?</a>
Floyd Abrams
"There is no obligation from the city to fund the
arts. But the First Amendment says, according to a wide, sustained,
continuing body of case law, that the funding process may not be used to
coerce institutions such as this to do the bidding of its political
leaders. So while New York never has to fund any museum, once New York
starts down that road, it cannot violate the First Amendment by a process
of coercion, sanction, threats, retribution and the like." Mr Abrams is
the legal counsel for the Brooklyn Museum of Art
Not very important
CyberNotes
"CyberNotes is published every two weeks by the
National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC). Its mission is to
support security and information system professionals with timely
information on cyber vulnerabilities, hacker exploit scripts, hacker
trends, virus information, and other critical infrastructure-related best
practices." Courtesy the nice people at the
DOJ and
FBI
.
Le Monde on transporters
"Il y a deux ans, l'Autrichien Anton Zeilinger et
son équipe ont réussi à faire ce que Charles Bennett avait imaginé. A
quelques mètres de distance, le jumeau d'un photon a été recréé à
l'identique. Mais, et tant pis pour les inconditionnels de Star Trek, le
photon original a, comme le prévoyait la théorie, disparu dans
l'opération, comme si à chaque téléportation à bord de l'Enterprise, le
capitaine Kirk disparaissait à jamais et laissait la place à un double."
wtf?
-
dude, where's my car
This document uses
CSS
kung-fu and a small amount of JavaScript for rendering its
contents. Efforts have been made to separate the form from the
content so if you are viewing this in a text-based browser it
shouldn't be an issue.
On the other hand it may look funny if you are viewing it in a
browser with incomplete
CSS
and/or JavaScript implementations. Internet Explorer 6 comes to
mind.
It's not that I don't love you. However, my time is limited and
I no longer feel very good about spending it working around any one
browser's inconsistencies with little, or no, confidence that they
will ever be fixed or otherwise made more inconsistent at some
later date.
On the other hand, if something is down-right
unreadable
please let me know and I will endeavour to fix it.
-
yes, we have no bananas
This page may not validate. It's not that I don't care, it's
just that I'm not aware of it yet. Part of the reason that I
rewrote the entire back-end for managing this site is that the old
stuff made it too easy for these kinds of mistakes to slip through
the cracks.
See also :
W3C::LogValidator.pm
-
it's the software, stupid
Use the source, Luke.
Sundays seem to be the day that Thomas Friedman likes to show the world just how much he is suffering from "I-am-the-story-itis" and otherwise losing his grip on reality. I was going to write something the other week when he waxed poetic about Europe, smoking and GMOs but Tom Cosgrove did a better job of it than I would have.
Today, Friedman is likening the U.N. Security Council to a poof-ball professional sporting event and suggesting that France be replaced on the U.N. Security Council by India. Now, I have nothing against India being on the Security Council, per se. But Friedman's suggestions ignore two important, not to mention "serious", issues.
The first is that giving India a permanent veto on any subject that comes before the council (Kashmir, anyone?) is practically an open invitation for Pakistan to start lobbing nuclear weapons at its neighbour to the East. I'm sure Friedman has some clever and witty solution to this problem; something along the lines of : "Let them eat Big Macs".
The second is the idea that, however borked the U.N. already is, a U.N. Security Council without any European representatives would somehow be better. This is where the annoying little right-wing pencil-necks in their Topsiders and comb-overs start having seizures and sputtering that if Britain and Russia aren't European enough for me then they don't know what is! I can only presume that what they're trying to say is that the former is "Old Europe" before it went sour and Russia is the culmination of all the potential inherent in whatever the "New Europe" is supposed to be.
Britain, for all its charm, is only barely beginning to consider itself part of Europe and would probably integrate the pound with the U.S. dollar before it did the same with Euro. Europe has so far done a remarkable, if nascent, job of putting a thousand years of squabbling, back-stabbing, bloodshed and two World Wars in the past and just getting on with it. I am pretty sure that if you scratched the surface you'd find reasons for any one country to be upset that any other, especially France, had a seat on the Security Council but I'm also pretty sure that Europeans as a whole would balk at the notion that England holds its interests to heart on anything with the possible exception that Russia is part of Europe.
Let's back up for a second. There are lots of things to fix with the U.N. and with the general bad behaviour of any one country, both past and present. The whole idea of a permanent Security Council has always struck me as not unlike wanting to have your cake and eating it too. I am not so naive as to believe that the U.N. would have ever survived the chaos that a vacuum at the center would have invited. Look the Security Council, in its current form, is a product of history and not very hard to parse: 1) the winners 2) the ones who were too big to push around (translation: they either already had nuclear weapons or were fast on their way to getting them) 3) not German. (That France and Germany are doing anything in concert is amazing enough on its own, but we'll save that for another day.)
This is pretty much why everyone else still wants nuclear weapons. Period. But Friedman seems to think that we should set up some kind of standardized test to measure "democracy and seriousness" as the criteria for membership. Presumably a day will come when all countries are democratic; just some will be more democratic than others.
(I don't give it too much credibility, but apparently some of the more hawkish hot-heads are suggesting the U.S. "liberate" China when everyone else on the Axis of Evil has been redeemed. If the mere mention of that idea doesn't give Americans pause to wonder that they're not being led by idiots, I don't know what will.)
Friedman's primary grievance with France seems to be that they've never thought America was god's gift to civilization, that it has always looked after its own interests and (warning, news flash!) just generally acts wily and duplicitous. Excuse me if I point out that almost perfectly describes the problem that everyone else has with America these days. Or to put it more bluntly : no one trusts that the Bush administration is pursuing policies for the reasons it says it is.
That may be difficult to understand for people who enjoy saying things like "When the President says jump, I don't ask 'how high?' but rather 'when should I come down?'", but there you go.
It is true that without America's participation in the second half of World War Two, Hitler's army might have conquered Europe. (The bit about the U.S. "winning" the First World War is just such conceited and self-congratulatory drivel that I'm not even going to go there.) But it carefully ignores two salient facts:
1) America had no interest in participating in the first half of the war and had to be dragged in by force and not conviction.
2) Anyone who's read any history knows that it was only due to accidents of circumstance (Hitler's over-estimation of the British radar system during the Blitz and his three week detour to crush the Yugoslavians on his way to Moscow which, it turned out, was the window during which the Russian fall became winter) that there was even a Britain and a Russia left to liberate by the time the Americans decided to do anything.
The clever wits in the Brooks brothers jackets are probably foaming at the mouth, by now, ready to accuse me of actually being a hawk on Iraq despite myself. If I didn't think that the people who are championing the war were largely the root causes of it, if I believed that the war was going being fought for principles (there is some not unconvincing evidence that the NATO bombing of Serbia served as an effective deterrent against any further genocide like that seen in Bosnia) rather than carefully scripted sound bites designed to mask raw national interests, and if I believed that the U.S. was going to stick around and fill the vacuum in the aftermath (in fairness, they have in a few notable exceptions like Kosovo) I just might be able to get behind the idea.
Put simply, I do not have any confidence that the current U.S. administration is acting in good faith and the fact that Saddam Hussein is a "bad guy" doesn't go very far to balance out the scales.
Whatever else happens, though, by his deft and skillful use of the "Survivor" metaphor to describe foreign policy Friedman has all but assured himself the 2003 Shut the Fuck Up Award.