And Patrick: I see the color difference in other links (e.g. Sidelights) but not in comments, all of which show up as visited. Possibly I need to flush visiteds more frequently, although I'm not seeing the same lossage on Making Light.
re powdered milk's awful taste: does anyone remember doing a direct comparison to fresh skim milk? I worked my way down from whole milk to skim several years ago (I drink a \lot/ of milk and my cholesterol was starting to get high), and don't remember such a change in taste; 2% (which is sometimes the only thing I can get in a sandwich shop) feels richer but not radically different. I suspect that powdered milk (especially the stuff available 40 years ago) was altered by the evaporation process; it doesn't take much to denature some of the protein in milk (remember the skin on milk being warmed for cocoa?), and that could alter the taste toward the repulsive stuff I remember being made up when we ran out of the bottled stuff (delivered, but on Friday in a village with no Sunday shopping, so runouts happened). Somehow my spirit of scientific inquiry doesn't reach this far....
Julia (untangling a crosspost): Orson Welles and John Houseman put on their "Voodoo Macbeth" in 1936 in Harlem, so there was at least one full cast's worth of classically trained african-american actors available.
The link refers to "a cast that was 95 percent amateur", confirming my recollection of Houseman; skimming Runthrough, I find his estimate that of the 750(!) people hired as performers in the ]Negro theater project[, about a sixth had any experience more significant than a small chorus part or appearance as an extra. (The object of the project was to get people off the relief rolls; Houseman mentions the contortions he went through to get a leavening of experienced actors, many of whom had been too proud to go on relief.)
Kathryn: there is a lot of technology that doesn't work that way. As Patrick suggests, tech tends to be emergent rather than resultant(?) (cf the demonstration of aqua regia in The Computer Connection); what comes out depends as much on the imagination of the community it is exposed to as on the imagination of its inventors. This means that getting a sort-of beta out there, and getting people thinking about it, can be an important stage in getting attention for a new product (or a more-popularized take on an existing product -- my first computer job was making it easier to deal with various online search firms' formats; making such searches easier when connect time cost $50-100 (in 1980 dollars), so this looks like an old ]friend[). Sounds like they aren't even charging for it (does a user account cost money?), so putting it out and seeing how many people are interested can determine whether or not to do the additional development cycle.
The early word processors, CAD systems, etc. were Believe-It-Or-Not horrors by today's standards, but even at what they cost they made it clear that they were worthwhile tools.
And I like the idea of putting all of Minneapolis on a stick, considering that they put everything else on a stick....
Possibly-naive question: does building on top of a DBMS make it easier to add improvements such as preferential voting (aka instant runoff)? Or is this an orthogonal issue?
Let's try that again: User Friendly (left off the "").
See User Friendly's take on Verisign....
I'll add one bit connecting Lydy's post to an item earlier in this thread.
If the Greens etc. are serious about getting somewhere with their candidates, they should try putting some of that energy into getting instant-runoff (or some similar form of every-vote-counts balloting) into place; that is the one change that could let votes for a third party (i.e., not just a replacement for collapsed Demicans) not be wasted. I doubt they will -- what I've seen is too much concentrated on self-righteous anger at the existing parties, and not enough at working the system until it tilts towards people instead of power -- but I'd be delighted to be proved wrong. (No, I don't work on this myself. I found a long time ago that when I argued for what I believed in, I was good at persuading people to take the other position. Maybe I should found the Geek Party....)
wrt Patrick's link: I hadn't realized that Arizona still allowed cities to eat their suburbs; that stopped in Boston something like a century ago (possibly because the state legislature was still WASP while the city became significantly Irish (& Italian) and Catholic). Philadelphia was able to go this route longer (until 1954, says my wife, who was born there) because a lot of the neighboring land was farms (the parts that weren't may be why the city outline looks like the letter Y), and I recall reading in the 60's of Texas cities and suburbs fighting about annexation.
Rimsza has a good point about not letting peripheral areas become separate towns leeching off the central city, but the counter-question is whether annexation hastens the point at which the city becomes so cumbersome that it becomes too hard to manage. (If there is such a point -- anyone with a paratime traveler is encouraged to do a study of truly comparable cases. I wonder whether the absence of alternatives to run to makes people more willing to work out what needs to be worked out to keep all of the city going.)
It shouldn't surprise anybody that Shrub is getting us into his very own Vietnam; his father spoke repeatedly of the first Gulf war helping to "shake the Vietnam syndrome" -- by which they meant, as far as I could tell, the notion that foreign interventions were always chancy enterprises to be undertaken only in the most desperate circumstances, rather than an opportunity to make clear that nobody should mess with the U.S.
But I'm glad that Cleland is still being heard; the smearing he got in 2002 was a good demonstration of how quickly Shrub and his friends will abandon truth when it's inconvenient.
Mitch: the difference is that the claims of the 90's crackers are partly bull ("learning about systems" - that's what a lab is for, not the rest of the world) and partly connected only to their tiny ]peer[ group - the point of a good hack is that everyone can appreciate it (cf "MIT wins Harvard-Yale game"). Your observation about pranks later being considered crimes doesn't fit; none of the reports of hackers involve anything like the sheer destructiveness of crackers. (Which meant hackers didn't put on the crackers hypocrisy of "helping people learn about problems" that crackers did/do.)
Mitch says:
Actually you are indeed mistaken here: the meaning of the word "hacker" that I'm referring to is someone who loves computers and knows a lot about them and is constantly exploring computer systems and technology to learn and to improve themselves and the technology.
And FROM THE EARLIEST days, this included breaking into systems and crashing them. If you want to learn how the alarm clock works, you have to take it apart, and sometimes you can't put it back together again. Sometimes you just smash the thing and look at all the pieces.
This, of course, is still radically removed from cracking; it's more like learning anatomy by dissecting. And even so it points more toward destruction than accounts I've read of the computer hacker culture in its early days; I would have said that you often learn very little from crashing a computer (except, if you're lucky, what you did wrong).
I suppose "hacker" may have varied from place to place, but when I was hanging around MIT in the 70's the point of a hack was not to be destructive; the points of hacking were to gain access where it was barred (not to foul the barred area, simply to be there - MIT was also known for "tunnel hacking") and to make other people go "wow!". (MIT had a long tradition of sometimes-damaging pranks (although the worst one, welding a streetcar to its tracks with thermite, is usually held to be an urban legend), but these predate that sense of "hack".) A good hack was specifically not destructive or even vandalous - except perhaps to the pretentious; I've never seen the connection made in print, but if you remember Khedron the Jester from The City and the Stars you know the outer bounds of what was considered acceptable by other hackers. (Consider "No Knife"(?), which was snuck into an exhibit on modern art and treated seriously by people who didn't realize that "James Tetazoo" was the MIT equivalent of "Simon Jester".)
Going closer to the origin of this discussion: I work with people who from my viewpoint are mundane. (As far as I can see; except for the one who does road rallying, I have no idea what that collection of mostly-Russians does in their off-hours.) On the rare occasions that I try to explain conventions or fandom to them, the first thing I have to say is a polite form of "everything you know is wrong" - because the audience conventions and the audience fandoms are the ones that need mass doses of publicity to make their economics work, so they're what most people think of on hearing those terms. If Burke's blog is not directed solely to the choir, I'm inclined to excuse his use of a term for which we vocalists have a very different meaning.
I'm also reminded, looking at the splatter of terms and interests, of a Holmes essay (IIRC from The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table) about the difficulty of even two people conversing because in such a small group there are actually six people; the ]real[ two ("known only to [their] Maker"), and each person's image of himself and of the other person. "Fandom" has a degree of commonality and a substantial degree of divisiveness - don't get me started on Ted White's definition of fandom. (But do read Mike Glyer's "The Men who Corflued Mohammed.) And fans talking about fandom are all too likely to talk to each other's images, which can raise the noise factor close to infinity when more than a few are gathered together - it's almost an inherent part of being the sort of conversational, participatory oddball who winds up in fandom.
Patrick: Ah yes, Minicon. While Teresa was moderating the Whither panel, I was listening to the technoid in the back rant and wondering where he learned arithmetic (or biology). I won't get into ]costuming[ ]paranoia[; I think there's too much already said.
Kip W: Secrest's biography of Sondheim says he was performing music at an early age, but his first creative work was as a lyricist - not surprising considering he grew up around the Hammerstein household.
Doug, Andrew: my recollection from around the time of my one biochemistry course is that Meselson is the one who actually worked out how DNA reproduces, and demonstrated it by inventing a massively useful analytical technique. He also gets points for applying science to at least one of the more bizarre claims of the Right: "yellow rain".
<thwack>I spend enough time fighting with the insides of a computer and lose track of the centuries.</thwack>
I'm also appalled at not thinking of Sondheim; as an excuse, he's not solely (or even primarily?) a musician (much of his orchestration was done by Tunick et al.), even if he's the sort of genius who creates New York Times crosswords in ink. Hindemith influenced many other composers; Britten may not have moved music forward in the same way but brought in audience members and would-be performers without dumbing down. Any any time you hear a French horn that sounds like you'd be willing to have it in your house, thank Dennis Brain. (Yes, that's reaching as far as influence over everything, but amid all the arguments over what music should sound like he demonstrated that there was no excuse for playing the horn badly.)
I thought it was Grace Hopper?
I'd agree with several of Xopher's musical nominees, but would argue that Mozart and J.S. Bach need to be on the list (fitting his "great in the first sense" definition at least -- it looks like most of the responders were working on the second definition, or the subset of the first that includes "obviously influential"). Both poured out huge quantities of music massively better than what was going on around them -- and did it while living in the world, not isolating themselves as later composers often did.
(I won't start on Watson and Crick versus the people who actually figured out the double helix.)
It occurred to me that one of the reasons for the current popularity of "Judeo-Christian" is that the New Testament is rather shorter on "don't"s and on endorsements of violence than the Old. (I'm not a Bible expert; can anyone point to anything (aside from what happens to Jesus himself) more violent than the high priest's slave losing an ear in Gethsemane (which Jesus condemned)?) Regardless of the original intent of either the various writers of the Old Testament or the coiner of "Judeo-Christian", they've been publically taken over by the smugly divisive. Not unlike what's happened with the U.S. flag; as Teresa pointed out recently in that context, there are many people who invest the flag with something other than their own narrowmindedness -- but, as with "J-C", by and large they aren't the noisy ones.
The New Testament, for instance, doesn't say anything about homosexuality. (I just wish that somebody had asked whichever bishop publically complained about the Episcopalians "endorsing someone who lives contrary to the law of God" whether he was wearing any mixed-fiber clothes.) Or think of how many people would be honest enough to shut up if told "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Just too ]vegetarian[ for red-meat reactionaries....
Was it your intention that the comments present as a new page rather than a new window? I like the result: it's now possible to get back to the comments from the interesting links people put in, where previously it wasn't because the window the comments used to come up on (in IE6) had no Back (or anything else that comes on the menu bar).
Nancy: why is it hard to believe that the Fundies really believe in demons, black magic, etc.? The figures I've seen recently suggest that half the U.S.A. doesn't believe in evolution; once you're talking about belief instead of thought, discarding reason becomes easy even when it's not compulsory.
I'll grant the possibility that some fraction of the Fundy hierarchies don't believe in anything except their own power (cf Piper's discussion of the different levels of the church of Styphon in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen -- but that's a tiny fraction of the total.
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| 2003 | 18 |
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