Grasses

Blue Fescue
Mexican Feather Grass (Nusella Tenuissima)
Juncus Effusus
Carmen's Japanese

Dante's Inferno

8.94-96 :: To Reader

Reflect, reader, how I lost my courage
When I heard them speak the awful curse,
For I did not think I ever would go back.

10.103-108 :: Shades' Knowledge

"When things approach or happen, our intellect
Is useless; unless others inform us here
We would know nothing of your human state.

"So you can comprehend how wholly dead
Shall be our knowledge at that moment when
The door of the future has slammed shut."

1.76-78 :: Virgil's Question to Dante

"But why do you turn back to so much grief?
Why not bound up the delightful mountain
Which is the source and font of every joy?"

Draft Bruce

This looks dead in the water. Or else the numbers are only being updated periodically.

torta del casar

On filet mignon:

jibjab

A friend just emailed this link to me. Apparently, it was on Fox News this weekend (according to their blog.) I guess I'm about 4 days removed from the latest hot general audience Fox News content. Sounds about right.

Project Patriot Tax Blog

That was a chore. Converted my old page to a blog. Haven't finished updating it yet. One thing that it does that is sorta clever is alternate the style for successive posts automatically. It's redefining all the different post elements -- what with the comment and alternate page tags -- that's a bitch. Also took me forever to work out kinks between inline and block displays.

And the poster should really read CAFE standards, not MPG standards (though the latter probably makes more sense to more people.)

How many animated gifs on this page?

http://j-walkblog.com/blog/docs/platform.htm

One -- check the page source.

Microsoft to Pay Stockholders Special One-Time Dividend

By GARY RIVLIN

Microsoft announced plans to pay shareholders a special dividend of $3 a share, a payout worth $32 billion.

Hmmm. That's $180 that just fell out of the sky. Not bad.

Zimbardo Experiments

Ordinary people in dark sunglasses whomping ass on ordinary people in orange jumpsuits all in the name of social science. Newly topical after Abu Ghraib. Now with it's own nice little web site.

Broken Windows Theory

Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California. The car in the Bronx was attacked by "vandals" within ten minutes of its "abandonment." The first to arrive were a family--father, mother, and young son--who removed the radiator and battery. Within twenty-four hours, virtually everything of value had been removed. Then random destruction began--windows were smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped. Children began to use the car as a playground. Most of the adult "vandals" were well-dressed, apparently clean-cut whites. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in. Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, the "vandals" appeared to be primarily respectable whites.

Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding. Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx--its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of "no one caring"--vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behavior is costly. But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers--the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility--are lowered by actions that seem to signal that "no one cares."

-- "Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety" by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, Atlantic Monthly, March 1982

Fundamental Attribution Error

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.

-- Malcom Gladwell, The Tipping Point, p. 160

Schelling Point

Mentioned in Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds. Surprisingly, not a web page on Google (easily found at least) dedicated to the concept. A pretty good description here:

I was then reminded of something economists call a "Schelling point," after the Harvard economist Thomas Schelling. Schelling had the insight that certain places, numbers, ratios, and so on are more prominent in our minds than others. He asked people to say where they would go to meet someone if they were told (and knew the other was told) only the time and that it would be somewhere in New York. Most chose Grand Central Station. How to divide a prize? 50-50. And so on. The existence of these prominent places and numbers and such permit us to coordinate our actions in contexts where a more "pure" and "formal" rationality would fail. These prominent things are called "Schelling points."

Src: here

Bub and Bob

A tribute page to Bubble Bobble music, including the indescribable Hillbilly Rodeo Re-mix.

Red Tide

Sign-printed pressboard
stapled to a stake
warning against the water
the dinoflagellates

And if bacteria could read
it would read Aviso
as it looked upon a beach
thickening with people

And at night the tide glows
the lurid green of
photoplanktons

And at night the beach flares
with the red
of bonfires

Color Match

Brilliant idea. Very Clever.

AM List

phone, lj
Rx, check
hgp -> flies and the transforming principle
business plan
clean bath, closet
sweeper - edit
email mc

New Google Toolbar

I notice Blogger has a fancy new editor for the post page. But it doesn't seem to be compatible with Firebird yet, though it is compatible with Netscape 7 (where I first noticed it.)

I also notice a photo option. Let's see how this works:

Hmmm... is it working?... oh, I see. You have to have your own server. Rats to that.

Squarespace

Interesting idea and it does have a really smooth interface. Still, it seems cluttered to me for some reason. I think the problem is that it tries to give you too much at once.

Spathiphyllum Blooming

My Sweet Pablo is blooming. My Sweet, Sweet Pablo.

Browser Stats

From w3schools.com. The upward trend with Mozilla (and downward trend with IE) is encouraging.

Browser Statistics Month by Month

2004	IE 6	IE 5	O 7	Moz	NN 3	NN 4	NN 7
July	72.0%	8.1%	3.4%	12.2%	0.3%	0.3%	1.5%
June	72.4%	8.3%	2.3%	11.8%	0.3%	0.3%	1.4%
May	72.6%	9.2%	2.2%	11.0%	0.3%	0.3%	1.4%
April	72.4%	10.1%	2.1%	10.3%	0.3%	0.3%	1.4%
March	72.1%	10.7%	2.1%	9.6%	0.4%	0.4%	1.4%
February	71.5%	11.5%	2.2%	9.0%	0.4%	0.4%	1.5%
January	71.3%	12.8%	2.1%	8.2%	0.4%	0.5%	1.5%

Micropayments

The revolution is coming... very slowly. Some sites:

Peppercoin
Bitpass
Paystone
PayLoadz

Apache Broken Image Problem

Just wasted a couple hours tracking down a trivial problem with my local server. Well, maybe not wasted. I learned a little more about servers. But I just needed it to load one damn file.

Anyway, I found a link to the fix on a discussion board. Followed the directions and added the following to the httpd.conf file:

EnableSendfile Off
EnableMMAP Off
Win32DisableAcceptEx

That seems to have done the trick. Now back to my CSS background problem.

Sick Pelicans

Listening to NPR, just heard a local report about sick pelicans, which reminded me that I did notice a couple pelicans hanging out on the beach on my way out to the water a couple days ago. I remarked to myself at the time I don't remember ever seeing anything like this before. It turns out that there have been a number of sick pelicans found on local beaches. Sea World has been collecting them and trying to nurse them back to health. Several have died. I guess they are about 2/3 their normal weight. Now that I think of it, they did look a bit sickly. But that could be retrospective coloring. A wildlife official interviewed said they didn't know what the cause was, but speculated it might be a parasite or a shortage of fish.

Blogger Ads

Multi-tasking, listening to Le Show and trying to figure out how some people remove the ads from their free Blogger sites. The trick? Put a BODY tag in the comments section of the template. For instance, in here:

----------------------------------------------- */
Blogger Template Style (modified)
Name: Minima Blue
Designer: Douglas Bowman
URL: www.stopdesign.com
Date: 28 Feb 2004
----------------------------------------------- */

Why does that work? Apparently, Blogger's code for inserting the ad look for the first body tag and inserts the adbox there. The extra BODY tag in the commented out section lures the script for the ad there, where it, too, is commented out.

I haven't applied it here since I think the ad is part of the terms for free service and it doesn't bother me on this site so much.

Source: Blogger Forum

AM List

phone
hgp -> central dogma
qfr - finances, taxes
china blog -> little red book
sweeper -> data validation, display
emal -> l, mc
gym
clean closet/bed

AM List

phone Z -> cover letter
qfr - finances, taxes
hgp -> central dogma
unity -> bamboo shadow
china blog -> m gift, z gift, little red book
sweeper -> data validation, display
gym
clean

Today

phone Z -> cover letter
call on sublet
hgp -> dna (discovery, Crick)
gym
unity -> bamboo shadow
sweeper -> data validation, display
china blog -> mfa temp
poker

Chinese Souvenirs for Matt

Talked to Matt today. He said if I was going to bring him something back from China, he would like anything from North Korea. I told him I would do my best, though it may have me diverted to Guatanamo as I tried to re-enter the country.

Week of July 5

M : 3-7p B / 8-11 W
T : 3-7p B / 8-11 W
W : 8-11a B / 8-11p W
T : 8-11a B / 8-11p W
F : 3-7p B / 8-11 W
S : 3-7p B / 8-11 W
S : 3-7p B / 8-11 W