Halley comments on Bob Graham. - ``Graham makes you feel like you're in good hands. I liked what he said about Sea Biscuit. I think the same thing -- the movie's about working together to get through these hard times. The horse takes on an symbolic role in that movie, becoming a symbol of the underdog triumphing over adversity, thanks to the hopefulness and dedication of his team of jockey, owner, supporters -- especially the guys in the cheap seats routing for him. Graham said he wants to restore the sense of "oneness" in America. Yes, sir. And a sense of fairness. I agree.''#

Halley also comments on Women, Voting, and the Last "Election" - ``This was the thing that burned me up the most about the debacle referred to as the last presidential election. It was clear to me, as we came closer and closer to watching the election slip out of the hands of the people and into the pockets of the justices' robes in the Supreme Court, that none of us count. Women spend a lot of time feeling their opinions don't count. Interesting for all of us to get a dose of it. I just hope it doesn't happen that way ever again.'' - That's an awesome way of thinking about it.#

Don Park is a funny one. I love it. - #

``I am neither gay nor religious, but their issues are interesting to me because they are so complex. I must have peeled away much of the issues in my sleep this morning because I was woke up with this seemingly clear and amusing understanding of what religious people are basically saying:

_Gays are misusing the product designed by God._

Does the customer have the right to misuse, abuse, or even destroy products? Answer is yes for me. I don't care if Steve Jobs hand-assembled an iMac just for me. If I own it, I can do whatever with it and damn the warranty. This raises the following question:

_Am I bought or leased?_

If I am just leasing, I can't misuse the product. Religious people seems to be saying that we are all leased from God. As for me, I don't care because the supposed owner hasn't pounded on my door asking for rent yet.''

From Razib of Gene Expression. Two articles about a course on "How to Be Gay" being taught at the University of Michigan. One is Pro and One is Con - `` "We don't know what [Mr. Halperin] does in the classroom," the state AFA president says in an interview. "It is outrageous that Michigan taxpayers are forced to pay for a class whose stated purpose is to 'experiment' with the 'initiation' of young men into a self-destructive homosexual lifestyle." ''#

Russell Beattie writes about Bill Bryson's new book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" - ``Basically in the introduction, Bryson talks about how he was in a plane over the Pacific and realized he had absolutely no real idea about science at all, so he started a three year long quest to learn about the hard facts of science and the fascinating lives of the scientists themselves. Some of the anecdotes are very amusing - I'd copy/paste them here, but of course the eBook is heavily DRMed. Just about every scientist except Einstein is a real loser in one way or another. It's quite nice to know.'' - I plan on getting it eventually.#

Ted Leung loves it when more people find out that Lisp macros are such a good idea. Yes, they really are. Continuations are great as well.#

Dan Hon writes about "leaks" - what is it?#

Jen Chung has a link to an article about "The Penis has a barometer for total health" - ``"Maybe the penis is like a barometer of what could happen to your heart and to your brain for stroke," says Dr. William Steers, professor and chairman of the urology department at the University of Virginia. Dr. Irwin Goldstein, at Boston University's School of Medicine, adds, "Go in IC (intensive care) and ask how many men were impotent before your heart attack, and more than 80 percent in any study had erectile dysfunction way before their heart attacks."''#

Tony Pierce writes a letter to his space alien admirers. - ``thanks for writing me so much. here on earth we dont have porn ads on the top part of our emails. believe it or not, but people here will read the emails without advertisments. so naturally, i thought your emails were what we call Spam. [...] The United States. i live in the United States of America. im sorry that i just call it America. its a lazy american thing to do. i know that theres south america and central america and the usa is in north america, but when i write it as "america" i am sorta saying, "yes i know this is arrogant. we are arrogant. and we're probably going to stay this way for a while."''#

Tony Pierce honors bukowski - ``he was also an unabashed alcoholic who said that alcoholics were amateurs, that he was a good heavy drinker. he lived into his 70s and when i say lived i mean lived. he fought he fucked he wrote and he wrote. he went to his stinky job year after year and he bitched but he didn't whine. big difference. read any of his dozens and dozens of books and if you took a shot every time you read him whine you'd barely get a buzz. i adore that.''#

An intense tribute to Bruce Springsteen from Tony Pierce - ``one of the classic cliches in rock conversations is "i like his old stuff better." in a way it says that the artist has lost his mojo, but in another way it identifies the critic as either being 1) stuck in the past 2) unable to flow with change or 3) a lazy snob. i plead guilty to all of the above, but that doesnt mean that the boss hasnt hit the wall.''#

News about Pirate - Python on Parrot, for those not in the "Know" - ``Right now, pirate supports a good deal of python. The two biggest things that are still missing are classes (because parrot classes aren't quite done yet) and exec/eval/import (because those things require a compiler -- and without classes, pirate can't compile itself). None of the builtin functions exist, either, and the types are borrowed from perl. :) [...] As a special bonus, it currently runs dog slow! The microthreads example runs about 8-9 times slower on pirate than on regular python. But that's not parrot's fault: the generated code is completely unoptimized.''#

From Let Me Get This Straight is Matty recording some of the best quotes from Straight Eye for the Queer Guy - ``'Yellow' is a color. 'Red' is a color. 'Tangerine' is a fruit. And if I'm not mistaken, 'lemon chiffon' is a dessert.''#

One of the straight guys from Straight Eye For The Queer Shows has a great bio. ``Nando knows about reality shows, because he lives in reality.''#

Jen Chung at Gothamist writes about how many New Yorkers are throwing out lots of food and says something very funny, ``Gothamist read the Department Of Health's press release about food safety and we do like the DOH's "If in doubt, throw it out!" slogan. That can apply to so many things in our lives besides blackout food: Magazines, last year's fashion trend, people.''#

Jorrit Wiersma adds to the conversation about electricity privatization with word of the situation in Holland. - ``This is an issue in Holland as well. Our power grid isn't privatized yet but privatization is popular these days (it has already left our railway system in disarray). Some of the arguments that are raised by kuro5hin have also been raised here (surplus production isn't interesting on financial grounds, maintenance and upgrading are neglected in favor of marketing). One of the obvious arguments against privatization is that a business will listen more to its shareholders than to its clients in sectors where monopolization is easy (electricity, public transport). Furthermore, the clientele of something like an electricity company is dominated by large industrial users. So even if the electricity company listens to its clients it is probably the industrial clients that it listens to.''#

Michael Feldman really likes Aggregators. - ``*I AM IN LOVE WITH MY AGGREGATOR.* It has not only changed the way I keep up with the news, it has changed my life. It is now the first thing I check on my computer in the morning and the last thing I check before I shut it down. When news breaks, it is usually on the aggregator before it hits CNN or Fox. I follow the latest postings from Scripting News and Slashdot as they are posted. I follow obscure and important developments in my field, educational technology.''#

Michael also post on "Leftist Leaders in Loony Laughfest" - ``Cuban president Fidel Castro reportedly startled his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chavez, with a practical joke when they met yesterday in Paraguay. He persuaded a Paraguayan MP to warn Chavez to watch out for an ambush and then jumped out at him from behind a door. Witnesses said Chavez looked nervous when MP Juaqn Carlos Galaverna told him about the ambush and even more scared when Castro made his sudden appearance. ''#

Andrew Grumet is ever in search of the best blogging workflow. - ``In theory deleting should help one keep track of what they've read and haven't read. But we do that perfectly well with newspapers, which have a much more complicated layout. I think I was using "delete item" simply because it was there. The new experiment: no deleting.''#

The Blog Herald re-affirms that Dave Winer can never please. - ``However Winer will only attract further criticism with a snobbish attitude taken to bestowing "scholarships" to bloggers (a scholarship being something bestowed upon normally from a high, from those of authority, on those below) with further ingrain the growing belief that Winer and his fellow group of self appointed blogging elite are nothing more that; a self appointed, self focused group of blogging carpetbaggers whose relevance may only be amongst their own small clique. His continued promotion of a hierarchical structure of a blogging elite through his actions and words will only continue to add fuel to the backlash he is already receiving.''#

Nova wonders if intelligence is relative... - ``Is there a universal standard of intelligence, or is intelligence relative? What is "intelligence" anyway and how can it be measured? Is intelligence simply the ability to solve logic problems, or math problems? Or is it the ability to think creatively? Or to be irrational as well as rational? What exactly is intelligence anyway? [...] Would Picasso be judged as "intelligent" on the SAT? Similarly, would a painting-test result in Einsteing being judged as intelligent? Intelligence, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So ultimatley any standard for intelligence would be totally relative to the party inventing the standard.''
Reminds me of something I linked last week, an article about Octopus intelligence. Re-quoted - ``Until the 1970s, researchers tried to classify the intellectual abilities of different animals and rank them within a universal intelligence scale with humans at the top. That view crumbled as it became obvious that the abilities of different animals were tuned to the circumstances in which they live. Rats learn some things slowly and others very rapidly. Just one experience with a novel food that makes them ill will put them off that food for life, even if they only become sick many hours after eating it. It's a useful memory feat for an animal that survives by scavenging. Honey bees remember the location of a flower that is producing nectar after a single visit and with just a few trips will learn at what time of day the nectar flow is at its peak.''#

Accordion Guy has a good set of humour. - ``Like the way it takes a heart attack to convince some people to change their eating and exercise habits, the big blackout has started to convince some people to find ways to conserve electricity. Power conservation has become a virtue and conspicuous consumption of kilowatts has become a vice, to the point that people running air condtioners are getting overly defensive.'' - And this is perfect, ``He comes off more as a petulant emo rock teenager who really needs that new piercing than a guy with a respiratory ailment.''#

Dave Winer has some great questions for Presidential Candidates. - Favourites, ``4. Did Bush lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Does it matter? Was the war in Iraq a good idea? [...] 9. Do you have an email address? Do you read your own email? What should we do about spam?''#

From The Daily Flight is the very neat Blogstakes - ``According to the website, "Blogstakes is a unique new kind of sweepstakes with two winners for every prize : a person who entered and the site that referred the winning entry. So if the prize is a truck, then the winning entry gets a truck and the blog that sent them gets a truck too."''#

Derek thinks "The Dating World Sucks" - ``There ought to be a class for people who positively suck at talking to members of the opposite sex. [...] you really have no constructive feedback loop on what it was that made it "not work" for them in the first place. Sure, you can try and approach the problem "scientifically", trying slightly variant versions with different people and seeing which ones garner the best/worst responses, but that's not exactly the point of the entire operation, and certainly isn't an efficient use of a scarce resource (that being "available members of the opposite sex") '' - I think there's a very ample supply of members of the opposite sex, provided you put yourself in lots of places and don't waste experimentation on potentials that actually have promise. (live near you, etc) A habit I have imprinted in myself is that I will talk to at least one person I don't know every time I go somewhere where I know a low percentage of those there. Works out well enough. I sound like an asshole in the paragraph. Punch me in the face.#

From Little, Yellow, Different is some resentment of all the "Queer" shows on TV these days. There is a mock dialogue from "Boys Meet Boy" - ``*James:* Well, after 30 minutes of posturing and mock-drama, I have made my decision on who to eliminate! I eliminate.... the token black guy!''#

Charles Miller has great things to say about RedHat. - ``I tried getting Websphere installed on a Debian box last year, and it turned into such a battle of incompatible libraries that I had to give up. So RedHat it is. The problem is, moving from Debian to RedHat has *a great deal in common with a lobotomy*. When running a RedHat box, I always feel *part of my brain is missing*. It's the simple things: like the fact that I had to ssh to my Debian box at home to read the man-page for tcpdump, because the RedHat 8 RPM didn't include the manual.'' - ``RedHat are quite obviously not ready to play with the adults yet. If you are considering RedHat Linux as a solution, walk away now.''#

Charles Miller also warns about using Regular Expressions for too much. - ``Regular expressions are a very powerful tool. They're also very easy to mis-use. The biggest problem with regexps occurs when you attempt to use a series of regular expressions to substitute for an integrated parser.'' - He talks about how MT-Textile barfs at you too much. On that note I will remind myself to mention some day that I wrote a very quick and happy version of Textile in Scheme that deals with lots of the perl version's problems.#

Brent Simmons writes about how "mail reader type aggregators" are like the "Web Services Browsers" of the future, except today. And that they're a pretty good idea. I know I like them.#