I saw this headline on Google news, and found it somewhat disturbing:
Mice
succumb to HIV at last. From the article:
"Mouse cells are naturally resistant to HIV in many ways. Some
of these barriers have been overcome by adding human genes to mouse
cells."
Um... hooray for us, because we've genetically engineered mice so that
they can contract a deadly disease that they would otherwise be immune to?
And next on their list is figuring out ways to make the HIV virus spread
even more quickly in the mice, so they can get sicker faster.
I understand the research significance, but still. It seems a bizarre
thing to celebrate.
Category: Society
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In an attempt to get more fresh air and exercise Laura and I are taking up
tennis, and today we played for the first time. By "played", I of
course mean that we made attempts to hit the ball, ideally toward the other
person, and over the net. It was comical, but a lot of fun, and we seemed to
be getting the hang of things by the end.
I expect that we'll be playing for money any day now.
Category: Life
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It's a good day to die if you are a telemarketer, that is: the
National Do Not Call Registry
is now open. Ok, it would be open if it weren't for the fact
that it's such a fantastic thing that it was
"slashdotted"
before it was even posted to Slashdot.
The new
FTC Telemarketing Sales Rules has some other nice features as
well; I sure won't miss all of the dead calls we get.
Despite all the bitching from the telemarketing industry, I am
convinced that this is a bright day for humanity. I only wish
we could get a similar law for spam, and a way of enforcing it.
Category: Society
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So Apple's WWDC
was yesterday, and I finally watched the Keynote live (via satellite) for the
first time. It was fun to see, and there was some really exciting new stuff
announced. Besides the obvious drooling over the G5 (although I'm not so sure
I like the new case at all) I have a couple reactions.
First: Exposé.
This feature is, in every way, insanely great. The video makes it look a little
weird and jarring, but watching the Keynote demo, it looked like the most
natural thing you could imagine. All I could think when I saw it was, "Wow.
That's exactly how it should be. How could I ever have had to dig
through windows for the one I want?" This is the sort of simple, powerful,
and useful interface innovation than makes me love Apple.
Second: Safari 1.0. I want to
love this browser, I really do. It's fast, it's sleek, it's elegant, it's
tab implementation is very nice (even if they are upside down)... it's almost
everything I want in a browsers. I like Camino quite a bit, but recently it's
been flakey for me, and the development on it seems to have slowed down
significantly, so I'd like another browser, at least for the moment, and I'd
like Safari to be that browser. But. I just can't accept Safari's poor cookie
management. Inexplicably, there is no option to prompt for new cookies, and thus
allow or deny them on a site-by-site basis. Since every browser I can think of
has this, I can only think of two explanations: They haven't had time to
implement it yet, or they have decided that it's not a worthwhile feature.
I sincerely hope it's the former, because as much as I like Safari, cookie
control is a deal-breaker for me.
Category: Geek
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Laura and I have started teaching ourselves German, her for eventual
grad-school requirements, and me because I enjoy languages. We've been having
great fun with one of those cartoon-style audio courses, to soften us up for
real grammar and vocab study later.
In the process, I've discovered that in the course of all of my French
studies, the "foreign language" section of my brain has become
very tightly linked with the "French" section of my brain. The
humorous result of which is that when I don't speak German with a bad American
accent, I speak it with a sort of a French accent. And even better, I
occasionally toss in whole French words on accident.
I'm glad I'm not trying this in a real class, where I'd feel like much more
of an idiot.
Category: Life
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I've just finished reading Dan Simmons' Hyperion series,
and enjoyed it very much. He is good at imagining and describing both
bizarre alien races and cultures, and believable social evolution of humanity
in a variety of situations. I was also impressed by his ability to weave large
plot-arcs, revealed piecemiel, without the story being hard to follow. I
would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good science fiction
series.
My one complaint is the end of the series. I found several of the
"mysteries" revealed at the very end of the last book to have
been painfully obvious (the Observer and the father, for those that have
already read it). As I'm not exactly known for my ability to see ends of
books/movies coming, it's a pretty good bet that if I thought it
was obvious, the hero should have had a clue. So I found the last half of
the last book slightly grating, since every time the hero struggles with
emotional issues surrounding the mysteries, I had to roll my eyes and say,
"Yes yes, poor Raul still hasn't figured it out." I'm not sure if
Simmons intended it that way, so that the reader can feel clever, or if it
was supposed to be a mystery to all. Either way, my patience with thick-headed
heroes is limited, so that frustrated me.
But overall, the real substance of the plot and the ending were open and
interesting enough that the above was only a minor annoyance in an otherwise
great read, and in no way spoiled my enjoyment of the series.
Category: A & E
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I've recently learned that Googlebot has been busily crawling my blog (thanks
to zeuropa, no doubt). And yet
curiously, my blog doesn't appear anywhere on Google. I have no idea why
it's refrained from adding me to the searchable index, and of course they
are very closed-mouthed about why crawled sites aren't indexed... maybe it's
a conspiracy, and They suspect that I
know too much.
But the more curious question is, why, if I'm not cool enough to be
indexed, does the Googlebot keep coming back? Clearly, Googlebot has become
sentient and, for whatever reason, enjoys reading my blog.
Of course, now it (and of course They) will know that I'm on to the secret.
If Google calls, you haven't seen me.
Category: Geek
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My sidebar is actually starting to look like a real blog sidebar! Maybe a link
to some photos next; I haven't decided. How much junk can I manage to
squeeze into that tiny space?
Category: Geek
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After a lot of frustrating attempts at debugging my Blosxom installation, to
figure out why plugins weren't working right, I finally discovered the problem:
I'm stupid. When I started using dynamic blog page creation, I made a new copy
of the script in my web/cgi-bin directory. But I made all my debugging changes
to the old version, in the static directory. Surprise surprise, it never made
any difference when I made changes.
But now I really am running the latest version (instead of just
having an inert copy of the latest version to confuse myself), and all is
well. Even more exciting, I spent a couple of hours with trial and error,
and Programming Perl, and I managed to hack a plugin to deal with
non-existent urls for writeback posters intelligently, so people's names
won't be links to nowhere if they leave info blank. To progress! (however
slow and painful)
Category: Geek
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When I started doing CSS web development, I thought that IE was the enemy. I'd
make a site that looked fine, but WinIE would mangle it. I cursed, I railed,
but I began to learn the workarounds. The voice-family hack, and the
child-selector override. And in a strange way, I owe IE thanks for making me
learn more about CSS than I otherwise might have.
But now I have seen the enemy, and it is Netscape 4.x. When I'm making a
personal site, with relatively simple layout, I ignore it. Who cares? I
do clean design, so those who want to use NN4 can turn off style sheets and
get the content. If they think it's ugly, too bad; it's their decision to
use a stone-age browser.
Sadly, that mentality doesn't get me very far when I'm making a commercial
"web application" that has to render readably in old browsers,
because I don't have the luxury of writing off that segment of the
population.
So on behalf of myself and all the other people out there in my position,
who really hate supporting (at least partially) NN4 but have no choice, I
submit a request to the virus writers of the world: make yourselves useful!
Surely it can't be that hard to write a virus/worm that will search for NN4
on an infected machine, delete it, and automatically install Netscape 7, or
Firebird (that's "Mozilla Firebird, the web browser formerly known as
Phoenix" to all (three) of you FirebirdDB zealots), or IE6, or just
about anything made in the last few years. And to be nice, be sure to
import their bookmarks, to make the transition smoother.
Sure, it'll cause problems, and people will be upset and complain, but
as someone who will encounter none of those problems, but who will reap the
benefits of ridding the internet of a big chunk of cruft, I am willing to
pay that price.
Category: Geek
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In the middle of the afternoon, access services decided that
I am no longer a person. Why? Because it's apparently too much
trouble for the powers that be to check against graduate school records
when they make the axe list to give to access services. So despite the
fact that I'm still a student at the university, receiving
a degree doomed me to wander, adrift, from locked room to locked room.
I guess this gives me incentive to finish my fall registration (since
of course I need a schedule to get a valid card again), and begin the
exciting process of re-requesting specific room and building accesses.
Here's to bureaucracy!
Category: School
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According to Fannie Farmer, when whipping cream you must "be careful to
whip just until soft peaks form: cream that is beaten too long will begin to
turn to butter, often quite suddenly."
If only I had thought to consult it before I had a bowl full
of butter.
Category: Random
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The tradition of freezing some of your wedding cake to eat on your first
anniversary is highly overrated. Unless you enjoy eating cardboard, I guess.
On the other hand, it's impossible to say enough good things about spending
your whole anniversary realizing that you are at least as happy as the day
you were married.
Category: Life
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