“Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea— massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.”

— Gene Spafford, 1992

Headline of the day


Heck, I could have told them this years ago:

Leaders pay tribute to Arafat

Oh, wait, they’re using the other definition of “pay tribute”.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first ask for directions


When I got up this morning, I realized that I was only two lessons away from the end of my first pass through Rosetta Stone‘s Japanese Level I course. At a conservative estimate, that’s 120 hours that I’ve spent learning to recognize, comprehend, and read realistic Japanese phrases spoken by natives. I have a great deal left to learn, but I’ve made substantial progress, to the point that this morning’s lesson was merely daunting rather than discouraging.

It looked something like this: ガソリンスタンドにはどうやってきますか。ガソリンスタンドへの閉鎖されています。って右折します。ブロックって右折して、ブロックって右折します。ブロックって左折するとそこがガソリンスタンドです。

Forty variations on asking directions to a place and being told how many blocks to go and which way to turn. New vocabulary. New kanji. Long, detailed instructions, fortunately accompanied by clear pictures. And I understood most of them right away. I figure I’ve got another 80 hours of drilling as I go back through Level I’s different modes, and then it will be time for Level II, which really piles on the grammar and vocabulary.

Self-study software can’t replace a good face-to-face language course, but the best software is definitely better than a bad course, and there’s a lot to be said for having infinitely patient native speakers available anytime, anywhere. I’ve been quite impressed with Rosetta Stone, both their learning model (which feels oversimplified at first, but is in fact quite sophisticated) and their quality control (I have spotted exactly two errors in the transcription of several thousand phrases, and both were trivial).

Update: turns out this specific lesson is included in Rosetta Stone’s free online demo, which uses pretty much the exact same Flash code that the purchased product does. It’s Japanese Level I, Unit 8, Lesson 10, titled ~にはどうやって行きますか.

sec2pdf: getting started


I often say that I’m not a programmer, I’m a problem-solver who occasionally writes code to eliminate annoyances. One recent annoyance was what passes for “state of the art” in creating star maps for the Traveller RPG.

more...

Um, "what he said"


Dean Esmay answers John Perry Barlow. Personally, I gave up about halfway through the original, bored to tears by Barlow’s frankly one-dimensional characterization of the people he’s trying to “understand”.

The first one's free


Just got back from lunch at Patxi’s, and discovered that Connie had never heard of such a thing as “Chicago-style deep-dish pizza”. Of course, I had to share the leftovers.

There was much rejoicing from her office.

Yours for honest political cartography


The red-blue map is deceptive. The shades-of-purple map is actively counterproductive. The area-adjusted-for-population (“cartogram”) shades-of-purple map is simply absurd.

  1. Human beings are good at comparing shades of gray.
  2. Human beings are poor at comparing shades of color.
  3. Common forms of color-blindness render "shades of purple" indistinguishable.
  4. Human beings are good at comparing lengths.
  5. Human beings are poor at comparing areas.
  6. Human beings are even worse at comparing volumes, so don't even think of going there.

What to do? Produce two maps: one in which percentage of support for Bush is represented from 0% (white) to 100% (black), and another in which the same is done for Kerry. When the data becomes available, do this at the precinct level.

If you really feel the urge to adjust for population, then on both maps, project each county/precinct up by the number of residents who voted for that candidate, and publish the results as a true 3-D map (QuickTime VR, VRML, whatever) that can be rotated and zoomed. Resist the urge to project the opposition candidate’s areas down; comparing the length of lines going in different directions isn’t a good idea either.

Update: Source of and links to a bunch of deceptive El-04 maps here.

Update: this one is much closer to useful than the rest, although the perspective makes it difficult to fairly compare populations (give me a 3-D walkthrough!). Thanks, Bill.

county-level El-04 results with population on the Z axis

A fond farewell to Election 2004


Bad Haiku Edition:

Hatred and contempt,
empty suits, money, and Moore,
still can't rock the vote.

And they're calling us dumb?


Love the cover of today’s UK Daily Mirror (“Britain’s brightest tabloid newspaper”), with its wonderful headline “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”, subtitled “U.S. Election disaster”.

Scroll down a bit to see how intelligent and sophisticated their target audience is:

"Oi! I'm a mum...and I'm calling my baby Tallulah Lilac"
"Zara's palace love-in"
"Bridget Jones's Diet"
"Posh drops the pout"
"Harry Potty"
"Astro diet: use your stars to lose weight"
"Revenge of the bunny boiler"
"The night Richard offered sex with Judy for £3,500"

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”