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Thursday, January 08, 2004 |
Babel's children. From The Economist: Babel's children. It is hard to conceive of a language without nouns or verbs. But that is just what Riau Indonesian is, according to David Gil, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig. Dr Gil has been studying Riau for the past 12 years. Initially, he says, he struggled with the language, despite being fluent in standard Indonesian. However, a breakthrough came when he realised that what he had been thinking of as different parts of speech were, in fact, grammatically the same. For example, the phrase "the chicken is eating" translates... [mirabilis.ca]
9:12:09 PM Permalink
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Breaking News: Bush to Announce Manned Mars Mission!. AP is now reporting that President Bush is about to announce plans for a manned Mars mission. [Martian Soil]
On the one hand, this is pretty exciting: going to Mars is a
dream, what an adventure. But it won't come to pass, in whatever way
Dubya suggests. First, he won't pay for it. Second, he'll put it too
far down the road so we'll get sidetracked along the way. Third,
congress, even the spendthrift Republican congress, won't pay for it.
Fourth, we already have a space station going round and round with
nothing to do. Fifth, we already have a makework space shuttle with
nothing to do. Sixth, it just doesn't make any sense; it'll take us
decades to get anything useful out of a moon base, let's do that first.
Seventh, when you look back at the past forty years in space, the
really exciting stuff has been in the robots: Voyager, Viking,
Pathfinder, etc. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo were fantastic, and I'm grateful I got to see them, but
deadends. Their main benefit was to get us going, to give us a new way of looking at the planet, but they've lead to nothing.
An editorial in today's Wall Street Journal had a great closing
paragraph, with this line: "That -- protecting Earth and the
civilization that dwells on it -- is the one vital reason to have a
space program involving humans. It is so important, nothing else comes
close." These are the wisest words I've ever read in the Journal, and
they've haunted me all day. We can protect the Earth (and I believe the
author also means its life) much better with a well-planned space
science program and a small base on the moon. Planning on Mars -- as
cool as it would be -- is premature at best.
8:53:59 PM Permalink
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The Rules of Unix.
Via Jeffrey Veen, Eric Raymond's rules that make up the Unix philosophy:
- Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.
- Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness.
- Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected to other programs.
- Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.
- Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only where you must.
- Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.
- Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.
- Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.
- Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data so program logic can be stupid and robust.
- Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
- Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
- Rule of Repair: When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.
- Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.
- Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can.
- Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.
- Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for “one true way”.
- Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.
They're from The Art of Unix Programming which you can read online.
8:31:42 PM Permalink
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TiVo to Go -- Finally!!!. Huge TiVo news has been coming down the CES newswire, here are the highlights: TiVo is committed to launching a few new products in 2004, including the long-awaited HDTV DirecTiVo which they are still claiming first quarter 2004 for... [PVRblog]
3:24:32 PM Permalink
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The 10 Commandments as Practiced by Judge Roy Moore
I haven't read Mad Magazine in years and years, of course, but via the Skeptic Hotline comes this terrific piece from the January issue:
"THE 10 COMMANDMENTS AS PRACTICED BY JUDGE ROY MOORE."
(From Mad Magazine, page 44, # 437, January 2004)
"I. Thou shalt have no god before mine."
"II. Thou shalt not worship graven images--like the U.S. Constitution."
"III. Thou shalt take the Lord's name and vainly attempt to use it to advance
thine political career."
"IV. Remember the Sabbath Day--so you can watch me getting free publicity and
denouncing my critics on all the Sunday morning talk shows."
"V. Honour they father and thy mother--but not necessarily thy Founding Fathers."
"VI. Thou shalt not kill--except for the separation of church and state."
"VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery--but thou may be unfaithfull to the
principles thou swore to uphold as an officer of the court."
"VIII. Thou shalt not steal my two-and a half ton monument from the
courthouse rotunda where I installed it in the dead of night."
"IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor--unless your
neighbor is a liberal, atheist, or fellow Alabama Supreme Court Justice."
"X. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods. But exploiting thy religion to
covet higher office is A-Okay."
9:03:57 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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