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Wednesday, July 16, 2003 |
The Perl State of the Onion
State of the Onion 2003. Larry Wall's annual report on the state of Perl, from OSCON 2003 (the seventh annual Perl conference) in Portland, Oregon in July 2003. In this full length transcript, Larry talks about being unreasonable, unwilling, and impossible. [Perl.com Perl.com]
I always think here's something a little too cute for me about reading Larry Wall. I'm always, by turns, fascinated and put off. This is fun reading, though he really doesn't seem to say anything except that Perl 6 is coming and we don't really know what it is. Still there are, again by turns, some great and awful jokes. My favorite: what the bug's friend said to the bug after the bug hit the windshield.
4:55:05 PM Permalink
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Sad Clown. "The Day The Clown Cried." Even unfinished, the breathtaking scope of it's...awfulness has for thirty years both attracted and repelled would-be producers and distributors. (script, zipped Word doc) Just the concept is startling, like some kind of hellish Sad Lib -- Jerry Lewis plays a clown in Auschwitz who leads children to the gas chambers. Harry Shearer, one of the few to see the film: "You are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. 'Oh my God!' -- that's all you can say." Can this movie ever be made? [MetaFilter]
3:26:54 PM Permalink
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Faith-Based Science: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?. Chet Raymo writes: Now that we have been introduced to the idea of faith-based social programs and faith-based public-education (vouchers), surely it is time for the administration in Washington to make its move on faith-based science. Let's get the government out of science. Shut down the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Close shop at the national labs and observatories. Stop federal funding of research in our universities. Let faith communities sponsor science. Provide tax support for faith-based ''scientific'' groups such as California's Institute for Creation Research. Let local school boards decide what gets taught in the science classroom without interference from the federal courts. Nearly half of Americans believe the Earth was created sometime in the past 10,000 years; why isn't that view taught in public school science? Almost half of Americans profess faith in astrology; why doesn't astrology get equal time with astronomy? [SciScoop]
12:38:07 PM Permalink
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Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
The first William Gibson novel I've read in a few years. Not science fiction, set in 2002, but reads as if it were science fiction. Cayce Pollard has a sensitivity to corporate logos: sometimes they engender allergic-like reactions in her and other times she approves, so companies use her to advise and test new logos. In London on a freelance gig, it turns out that the company who hired her is also very interested, as she is, in a series of movies which have been appearing on the internet, origin and source unknown. A net community has coalesced around these videos, and she's hired to help find their origin. Gibson really gets net culutre here, or what I know of it anyway, and portrays it well. Given the theme of the story, it's not suprising that he really focuses on brandnames a lot, especially for clothing, and that loses me a bit. The story is fascinating, the characters well drawn, and it's unusual fiction.
11:15:32 AM Permalink
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Here's one of Marshall's latest: "With each passing day it seems [president Bush's] public statements show not so much a pattern of lies as evidence that when he's not doing press availabilities he's living on some other planet. Misstatements are becoming so par for the course that his public pronouncements now seem more and more like a verbal equivalent of what the immortal David St. Hubbins once called a 'a free-form jazz exploration' in which the individual words aren't supposed to distract us from the larger truth the president is trying to convey." [Davos Newbies]
9:31:07 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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