Thursday, December 25, 2003

Research With Sea Slugs and Yeast May Explain How Long-Term Memories Are Stored. By tinkering with an unusual protein in these creatures, scientists have found a surprising possible explanation for the way the human brain stores long-term memories. By Sandra Blakeslee. [New York Times: Science] Proteins with two conformations, one self-reproducing, as the basis of long-term memory? One wonders if prion diseases, so much in the news, are yet another evolutionary subversion of a powerful functional innovation. 10:41:05 PM

'Get Me Rewrite!' 'Hold On, I'll Pass You to the Computer.' Two researchers have created a program that can automatically generate paraphrases of English sentences. By Anne Eisenberg. [New York Times: Technology] I'm happy with this story, and not just because I'm quoted. It's nice to see a newspaper story on computational linguistics that gets the point, doesn't hype, and doesn't ridicule. Behind this clever and fun research, lurk unsettling questions about writing. Is the different between plagiarism and originality just a matter of granularity? 10:37:19 PM

Now you can see what I am trying to read (thanks to Hanna for the design inspiration). Except that I spent the whole afternoon hacking the design instead of reading. Bad, bad. 8:47:14 PM

Duh. So many configuration options, and having the most obvious come unset by some accident wasted more effort than figuring out how to do Frontier includes. 8:43:31 PM

I found out why today's posts were not showing up. They were being upstreamed, but only published to their category pages, not to the home page. Somehow, the "Post to Home Page" check box on the NetNewsWire blog editor was not checked, and I didn't notice. Maybe the update to NetNewsWire 1.0.7 did that. I've checked the box for this item. We'll see if it works. 8:40:43 PM

By dint of Google and experimentation, I've finally the critical pointer to how to include my (changing) reading list in my (rarely changing) Radio homepage. Unfortunately, this and the previous entry seem to be stuck in local storage rather than upstreaming normally. Could the change in theme be the reason? Later: more theme switching, but today's entries, including this one, are not upstreaming. This is losing its charm. 7:39:31 PM

While the rest of the house enjoys their Christmas presents, I'm trying to change my blog layout to list books I am reading. The default Radio template is a complicated nest of tables, but fortunately Bryan Bell created a CSS-based theme that makes changes easier. One current problem with Radio is that changes to templates and even posted items don't seem to always upload. Quitting Radio and restarting sometimes works, sometimes does not. I should investigate this in the Radio bulletin boards. Later: I've found and ordered the new Radio book. In the meanwhile, I remembered the Radio>Publish>Weblog Home Page, which uploaded the changes to my home page template. But there are still some problems with uploading new or edited items that I can't understand. Maybe it's a bug in the interaction between NetNewsWire and Radio. It doesn't always happen, but somehow this particular entry doesn't seem to appear even after several edits, restarts, and forced upstreams. 2:33:23 PM