The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Richard Parker:

Here's a blog-safe link to the NYTimes obit that doesn't require a login and won't expire (from their RSS feed):

Steven Gilliard Jr., 42, Dies; Founder of Liberal Political Blog

The "ate up the whole grape harvest" link in the post is broken (missing a trailing 'l').

#8: One thing I've always wondered is why there isn't a direct written form of sign language - something like the alphabet, but encoding the various aspects of a sign for a word, rather than sounds.

There is! It's called SignWriting. It's a relatively new development, but surprising popular for such things as student newsletters. For more about SignWriting, see signwriting.org.

Improper use could result in serious bodily injury or property damage.

Laurence, John McCain was born in 1936. If he runs for President in 2008, he'll be 72. Ronald Reagan was born in 1911, when he ran for President in 1980 he was 69.

The Urban Dictionary suggests:

Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool

1. n. In the collective mythos of scary devil monastery, this is an essential item in the toolkit of every BOFH. The LART classic is a 2x4 or other large billet of wood usable as a club, to be applied upside the head of spammers and other people who cause sysadmins more grief than just naturally goes with the job. Perennial debates rage on alt.sysadmin.recovery over what constitutes the truly effective LART; knobkerries, semiautomatic weapons, flamethrowers, and tactical nukes all have their partisans. Compare clue-by-four.
2. v. To use a LART. Some would add "in malice", but some sysadmins do prefer to gently lart their users as a first (and sometimes final) warning.

As of July 1st California modified their driver license and ID renewal forms to be compatible with the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act. Now, instead of having to sign a separate form and applying a donor sticker to your ID, you can check a single box on your renewal form and you'll receive a California driver's license with an indelible indication of your donor status. You can also sign up as a donor or update your donor profile online.

Argh! Hear, not here.

Lots of (good?) stuff there! One of my favorites is the the original 1963 Bell Lab's record "Computer Speech" (March 3rd, scroll down to #62). If you listen to the MP3 you can here the synthesized "Daisy Bell", with and without musical accompaniment, which inspired Kubrick.

With wealth comes the advantage of being able to afford the services of a topflight criminal defense attorney who can negotiate a great deal.

I recall reading about ergot as a possible cause for dancing mania.

The Whitehouse seemingly doesn't - I'm getting a 404 on that link.

Whoever scrubbed the link from the whitehouse.gov site wasn't terribly thorough, the text version of the page is still available. The original graphic version of Claude Allen's bio is still available in Google's cache, although presumably it'll disappear as soon as Google gets around to recrawling the page.

Greg London asked: On a side note, what does "DLC" stand for?

The DLC stands for the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization founded by 45 prominent conservative and moderate Democrats. More information on the DLC can be found in their Wikipedia entry. The DLC was at the peak of its influence when President Bill Clinton was the DLC chair, the significance of the DLC has since waned somewhat.

Julia Jones wrote:

I've just realised that the Green Card acquired earlier this year comes with one benefit I hadn't known about -- I can now legally donate money to US political campaigns.

What saddens me is that I am actually worried about doing so in a manner that can be connected with my name, address and alien number.

I don't know if it will help, but the identities of those who make individual contributions of less than $200 are not reported to the federal government (contributions of less than $200 are not itemized, they're reported in bulk as a single line item). However, while contributions of less than $200 don't appear in the public database of political contributions, most political organizations maintain their own databases of contributors (even the small contributors) so any donation would probably be recorded. Fortunately political organizations tend to treat those databases as extremely valuable and sensitive assets - I suspect either political party would scream bloody murder if an administration controlled by the opposing party ordered them to surrender their database.

Stephen: Flu Wiki has a What to do FAQ that contains some suggestions for personal and family preparedness for an influenza pandemic. I haven't really looked through their suggestions, however, I suspect they won't differ much from the general purpose recommendations for "planning for natural disasters" available from such places as the Red Cross.

Laurie: I'd hesitate to call it a problem if Rita were only to drop rain on Crawford. However, the predictions don't currently indicate how strong Rita will be by the time it reaches Crawford. They do show 12 hours after landfall (and 12 hours before reaching Crawford) Rita will still be classified as a hurricane and 12 hours after reaching Crawford she will likely have weakened to a tropical depression classification. If Rita passes near Crawford, I'd guess she will qualify as a tropical storm.

Anyone else notice that the National Hurricane Center's three and five day predictions show Hurricane Rita passing directly over Crawford, Texas?

Kathryn, I successfully watched the video in Mac OS X 10.4.2 using Windows Media Player 9.

By dropping an end-quote, you appear to have conflated the links to Jeff Masters's and Steve Gregory's Weather Underground pages.

Steve Gregory at Weather Underground has also been following Katrina closely.

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