Paul from Paul’s Posted Notes has received his free Elliott Smith CD, From a Basement on the Hill, and he’s done the required listening assignment, and blogged about it over here. He’s also gone above and beyond, and started his own “mini-contest,” so do pay him a visit.
Today’s Burning Question: Who should replace Dan Rather?
Finally, a poll whose results I can relate to:
The Contortion Home Page
In today’s e-mail, Daily Inbox sent me a link to The Contortion Home Page. It never ceases to amaze me what a hairless monkey with a too-big brain can do if he works hard enough at it – I mean, I can still put my foot behind my head, but this is PFR!
(PFR is a codeword that The Lady Janet and I use for “pretty f***ing ridiculous”, it’s along the same lines as “No BFD”… just thought I’d share this handy tool – hey, maybe it’s the next LOL!)
Curvature Blyg
Curvy finally got her free Elliott Smith CD and blogged about it on her Blyg:
She says, among other things, elliott smith “*is what jewel would sound like if she were male, a better songwriter, and could play more instruments.” Insightful.
Quote for the day
“Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
45% of Britons don’t remember Auschwitz?!
I’ve grown tired of hearing “Never Forget” as a slogan to describe things like 9/11, but maybe I’m wrong. I’m flabbergasted to learn that in a recent poll by the BBC, “Among women and people younger than 35, 60 percent had never heard of Auschwitz.”
Didn’t know how to spell Auschwitz, sure, but never heard of it? Wow.
See Ya in the Funny Papers! – Part III
Our local paper recently ran as a guest column a fairly substantial article I put together about my take on the local school budget crisis, from the position of a failed school board candidate who’s working on the budget committee.
So today, I’ve got my first fan letter: Spin on school district finances misleading. (According to this guy, I’ve “joined the establishment.” What’s next, turning Republican?)
Project for The New American Century
You may have heard of this group, whose Statement of Principles informs the Bush administration’s agenda. Scary stuff.
Jeff Hawkins on Design
As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s entry about Jeff Hawkins’ book, On Intelligence, here’s a good article in Business Week: The PalmPilot’s Creator on Good Design.
My Current Read – On Intelligence
I’m reading a great book that’s got me very excited. It’s called On Intelligence, and it’s by the guy who invented the Palm Pilot and the Treo, Jeff Hawkins. I got my copy as an advance readers’ galley from the big BEA book show last summer, and I’m finally getting around to reading it. You can get yours from Amazon — just click the little cover over there.
It’s ostensibly a book about human and machine intelligence and how they work or could work, but it’s also a great little philosophy lesson. His basic premise is that intelligence and understanding are created when you have a system that can anticipate patterns by recognizing them and coding them hierarchically as invariant models. It explains a lot of complex stuff pretty elegantly, in that Occam’s Razor sense, and it makes a lot more sense in 100 pages than 100 words, so if you care anything about how the brain works, or the history of AI, just go get the book and read it.