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2002.06.09 : 2002.06.15
Saturday, June 15, 2002
Blab. A nostalgic reader harks back to the days when
California industry darling Sun Microsystems was, well, darling.
Re: Sun rocks or sun IS a
rock in the sea of hi-tech stocks, I offer this alternate
view. Well, kind of hard to read but anyway: what happens when a stock
pases through zero? Sun is exploring the idea that we the corporation can
own a portion of the investor!...MOOOO HA ha ha ha ha!
But as to having my best of friends
join this experiment at Sun Labs -- hey, any time! Yes we are small, but...
we have ... a *plan*! MOOOO ha ha ha ha! (Appologies to our friend the
cow...)
Farms? In Palo Alto?
Blab. A reader interpolates The California
Plan, filling in the blank between stealing underpants and profit.
step 2: Make a little tiny
suit out of the aforementioned underpants. Tell everyone you know that's
what you're going to wear when you get to California.
Yes! Great stuff. And that gets us to profit, how, exactly?
Blab. A Californian writes:
it's true, though. I live
in California and I have a ponytail. Though not my own.
Do you keep it in a jar by the door?
Blab. Figuring we will figure out how to move to California one
way or another, this reader expects a delivery.
If you come to California,
please bring a large box of Venture Capital funding. Thank you.
We're not sure they make boxes that big any more. Not since the tulip
bubble burst.
Blab. A trained and expectant reader sends us this.
Faces
from the Ice Age
This is one of a whole mess of alleged images discovered on the floors
of French caves.
The pictures are difficult
to interpret. Sometimes several images are superimposed on one another.
But to the trained and expectant eye they reveal extraordinary wonders.
That's one possibility. We invite our trained and expectant readers to
examine the above image on the left and discern anything even vaguely resembling
the interpretation on the right.
Who knew that Popeye was that old, anyway?
Yow. So our formerly growing fame seems to have come to an explosive
climax with the publication, in one of those quaint analog book-things,
of the story of our involvement with anti-virus research. Robert
Buderi, in Engines
of Tomorrow, a "book" about the roles and achievements of modern industrial
research labs, wastes an most of eight pages on us. Quite a surprise! We
remember being interviewed by Buderi, though it seems like a long time
ago, and we thought it was for an MIT newsletter. But whatever. We can
now become a quirky recluse of whom no one ever hears again.
As a bizarre side effect, we seem also to have become a
Web quiz. Please let us know
your scores. (We only got 60% correct ourself. But we did get the one right
that asked who we were. So there's still hope, if only a little.)
Plurp. In Googling stuff for the above entry, we also ran across
a derivative mention in the Atlantic
Monthly. Must get larger hat.
Yo. Congressman Sanford Bishop of Georgia relieved
himself in a cup last Thursday aboard a Delta Airlines flight. We consider
this above average behavior for a congressman.
Yow. The award for Funniest T-Shirt We've Seen Recently
goes to ...
 Plop.
Speaking of which, we heard somewhere that Michael Jackson had another
session of plastic surgery this week, reportedly to make his nose more
pointed.
This is, of course, false. Michael Jackson hasn't had a
nose of his own for over thirteen years.
 Plop.
After considerable debate, U.S. Catholic bishops have voted 239 to 13 to
bar clerics who have engaged
in sexual abuse from work connected to the church, though they will
remain priests.
After considerable debate.
After considerable debate.
Fortunately, this is only a temporary measure, only affects priests
in the U.S., and is unlikely
to be upheld by the Vatican.
Yow.
Myself,
I'm working on a song called "She Just Wouldn't Listen'', about an abusive
man who lives with a deaf woman, and another called "Angela's Omelet,''
about poor starving Irish boys who kill and eat their mum.
Yo. Did you know about the Google
programming contest? Daniel
Egnor did.
Daniel's project adds the
ability to search for web pages within a particular geographic locale to
traditional keyword searching. To accomplish this, Daniel converted street
addresses found within a large corpus of documents to latitude-longitude-based
coordinates using the freely available TIGER and FIPS data sources, and
built a two-dimensional index of these coordinates. Daniel's system provides
an interface that allows the user to augment a keyword search with the
ability to restrict matches to within a certain radius of a specified address
(useful for queries that are difficult to answer using just keyword searching,
such as "find me all bookstores near my house").
Pretty cool!
Plurp. Sign on a Manhattan building:
REPUBLIC OF ZIMBABWE
Please Use Other Door
 Plurp.
After considerable debate,
the Cardinals
decided not to
mutilate the blue dog's
nose
Friday, June 14, 2002
Blab. Concerning our desperate need to move to California,
a reader attempts to help us out by suggesting that we should ...
Go work for Sun Microsystems.
They
rock.
Do they? Our best friend and brother-in-law works at Sun Labs, so it would
be rude of us to say anything bad
about Sun.
Blab. A reader either revises the previous procedure for moving
to California or gives us an SAT problem.
Step 1, steal underpants.
Step 3, profit!
We choose to interpret this as an SAT problem, and invite our readers to
interpolate
to determine what Step 2 must be.
Blab. Proving that the notion of our moving to California is
a sufficiently large and important thought to occupy all the waking hours
of many of our readers, another one writes:
You could also start working
on the "Quote Shakespeare everywhere you go" part, not just the pony tail.
L.
Ah, but that requires work, such as actually knowing Shakespearean quotes.
Was that in Classics Illustrated?
Blab. A reader probes the state of our inner consciousness.
what do you think of brain-fuse?
Um, well, where to start? We signed on to this vital service, which lets
people ask questions and other people answer them. Rather like a newsgroup,
don't you think? Anyhow, one of the several questions we
ROLLERGIRL'S BUFFY TRIVIA.
QUESTION 1:
Who 'killed' the Annointed One in
season 2? and how?
Call us cynical, but this strikes us as an astonishing waste of time. Heck,
we stopped reading newsgroups long ago when they degenerated into
this same kind of trash. And imagine how sexy it is doing this with Web
Technology. Oooh.
But try it out yourself. You have nothing better to do, right? That's
Brain-Fuse,
userid = plurp, password = plurp.
Blab. A particularly nosy reader probes into our embarrassing
private life.
have you ever been geocaching?
Have we ever wandered around random
parts of the world with a GPS looking for a little box full of random
stuff
left there by other people wandering around with GPSs?
No. We already have enough stuff.
Blab. An enthusiastic spammist wants to know something.
We can help you Increase Traffic
!!
Corner Any Market !!
Own Your Exclusive Search Engine Keywords
!
Do you want help getting thousands
of
new visitor's to your website?
New visitor's what, we wondered? Then we decided that we didn't
care, as we already have more readers that we can possibly believe.
We gave considerable thought to what Exclusive Search Engine Keywords
we might want to own. We thought about Plurp, of course, but hardly
anyone ever looks for that. We got pretty excited about owning Bruzzle,
Meep
or Jeeblangieblangie,
but now we're not sure.
So we beseech our Treasured Readers to tell
us what Search Engine Keywords we should pursue for Exclusive Ownership.
Plurp. For reasons that elude us, we seem to have a new phone
company that services our meager apartment. That means that our extremely
meta answering machine message, which was lovingly maintained by the previous
phone company, is now fading into bit oblivion somewhere, and has been
replaced by some mechanical voice from the new phone company droning on
with some unimaginative message.
Clearly, something must be done. And we're just the Enemy Combatant
to do it. Those of you who know our phone number can listen to it live,
so to speak. The rest of you will just have to suck it up and read it here.
(It's the top one.)
This kind of astonishing brilliance is what makes our answering
machine messages one of the most popular search targets on our site.
As always, simpering, brown-nosing praise
on the part of our readers is highly encouraged.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was more of a fan of
blue nosing
Thursday, June 13, 2002
Blab. Concerning our Treasured Reader's detailed plan
for us to move to California, and our happy realization that we're already
working on one of the items, a reader writes:
pony-tail is step 6.
Yes, but it's the only one we can work on without doing anything. We figured
it was a good place to start.
Blab. A reader would be interested in Plurp, if only we
wrote about something else.
We'd be interested to hear
about some of the non-coercive and coercive techniques that He Whose True
Name is Unknown Even To The Highest Members Of The Shadow Government has
been using on you and Helen.
Where to start? How about this morning? As the sun came up (long before
either of us were interested in being awake), there is a thump on the bed
as Him Without Name jumped up. This is part of his morning ritual, in which
he tries to wake us up and heard us into the kitchen to feed him.
We roll over, grumbling, and chase him off the bed. A little while later,
there is a rhythmic ripping sound as The Nameless Annoyance sharpens his
non-existent claws on the photo albums on the lowest bookshelf.
We slap our pillow at the end of the bed. It is the expected response
and he skitters off.
Later, we are awoken by a small, cold, wet spot. The Unnamable Fetishist
is about to sniff our underarm. We are particularly annoyed (if not surprised).
The alarm goes off at 6 AM, followed a few seconds later by a cat who
leaps on the bed, walks over our legs, and starts meowing. Apparently,
meowing is an allowed tactic once the alarm goes off.
We get out of bed and head towards the bathroom. We are ignored by Him
Who Coerces, who instead waits for Helen's feet to hit the floor, at which
time he weaves between her legs, herding her towards the kitchen and meowing
loudly. It would be impossible for her to go anywhere else.
Our theory is that our behavior has co-evolved. Him Who Lurks tried
a number of things in order to get fed, some of which were sometimes followed
by him getting fed. Success! We do the minimum we can do to get him to
stop annoying us, which allows the pattern to continue.
We wonder how generalizable this lesson is.
Blab. A reader sends us another visually impaired ...
[link]
... to a snippy article about what appears to be a bizarre intermediate
state in Dubya's plan to fund his new Department of Fatherland Security,
which seems to gut Lawrence Livermore Labs (the U.S.'s biggest bomb lab).
But it does have a wonderful first paragraph:
If any more proof were needed
that the most powerful nation on earth is now governed by a junta of panic-stricken,
innumerate provincial nitwits, consider this.
Though, personally, we didn't need any more proof.
Yo. Here's a 1987 U.S. Army document
on interrogation, to complement the one we linked to yesterday.
This is part of the U.S. Army Air-Land Battle Doctrine, which governs basically
all military activities of the U.S. As far as we can tell, it is current
doctrine.
Of perhaps particular interest is the chapter on approaches,
which gives various interrogation techniques, and the surprising (in the
current political environment) chapter on the relevant parts of the Geneva
Convention, which Dubya would do well to have read to him.
Yo. Here's a very
informative article about the risks (or lack thereof) from dirty bombs.
Basically, the conventional explosive is the dangerous part. The radioactive
crud sounds scary but isn't really that dangerous. The pithy quote from
the expert:
I'd rather be a half-mile
from a dirty bomb site than smoke cigarettes.
Yo. Do you want to live life as a black man, but you're unwilling
to undergo either a racial or a gender change? No problem. Play Life
As A Blackman. (Rules here.)
Plurp.
The blue dog
was unwilling to undergo
a category error
Wednesday, June 12, 2002
Blab. A reader helps us out on our upcoming
move to the Left Coast.
How to Move to California
-
Sell everything you own.
-
Buy a big-ass RV.
-
Hook a trailer up to it to haul a couple
Harleys.
-
Park the RV someplace nice for a while
and go everywhere on the bikes.
-
Wear leather and denim.
-
Grow your hair long and wear it in a
pony-tail.
-
Quote Shakespeare everywhere you go.
-
Open up the windows of the RV as you're
going up Highway 101 and crank up the Wagner to 10.
-
Sit on the beach reading Tolkien, Stephen
Hawking and Walt Whitman.
-
Hit the Oregon border; turn around and
repeat.
L.
Well, we're working on that pony-tail thing. That's a first step.
Yo. The various U.S. Government folks interrogating the various
Afghan "detainees" and U.S. "enemy combattants" tell us that they are not
using torture. So we wondered what they might be using instead.
Hints might be found in this apparent 1963
CIA guide to interrogation, both coercive and non-coercive. Torture
does not seem to be a critical tool in the toolkit. Rather, various
psychological techniques, especially over a long period of time, seem
to occupy most of the toolkit. Especially interesting is the chapter on
non-coercive
techniques. The chapter on coercive
techniques is also interesting, especially in that there are plenty
of coercive techniques that do not involve torture per se. (The
alleged background of the guide can be found here.)
Yo. Breaking
news from academia.
"Cats are obviously very
dependent on people for their needs. I think cats have evolved to become
better at managing and manipulating people."
Duh.
Plurp.
The blue dog
thought that cats have
evolved various techniques
involving both coercive and
non-coercive manipulation
Tuesday, June 11, 2002
Blab. A reader with mysterious motives writes:
SO, when do move back to
California?
One possibility is that our Treasured Reader has mistaken us for their
telephone psychic. This happens all the time. So we did as we usually do.
We called our own telephone psychic and asked the question, When will
our Treasured Reader move back to California? Our certified telephone
psychic assures us that the answer is: 11 AM.
Another possibility is that this particular Treasured Reader is Treasured
Helen who, just back from a few idyllic days in Santa Barbara, pines for
the fjords of Central California, having never lived there herself. In
that case, we don't know the answer.
It's a good question, though! California is a lovely place, and living
there could be nice. For us, this question always revolves around the question,
What
would we do there? We have, fortunately or unfortunately, a rather
narrow career, which seems only to be supported in a very few places in
the world.
We could try being a university professor. But we are likely too old
and too entrenched in industrial research to compete well with the young
bucks fresh out of grad school. We could try doing some kind of administrative
stuff at a university, like being Provost of the College of Creative Studies,
or maybe Head Fundraiser. But these seem to involve lots of, like, social
interactions and not much technical stuff. Ick.
We could try working at some other industrial lab. It'd be easy (in
principle) to go work at IBM Almaden (south of San Jose). The only trick
there would be picking the project and getting the timing right. We haven't
quite figured out how to do that in the twenty years we've been working
at the IBM Watson lab in New York.
We could try working as Sun Labs (in sunny Silicon Valley), or maybe
Microsoft Research (in rainy Redmond). But they're pretty tiny. And there
pretty much aren't any other labs left these days.
So it's a Hard Problem, and we
invite Clever Ideas from our Treasured Readers.
Blab. Weirdly, we seem to have a reader from Glasgow, now in
California, whom we would have visited (in one place or another) when we
were there. Had we only known.
Note these all come from
a born and bred Glaswegian who now lives strangely with lots of other "furners"
in California. I I hope they do not sound too picky.
Did you actually try the lemonade
in Glasgow. :-) It is clear and bubbly and probably devoid of any contact
with lemons. Very nice though. ( more importantly did you try Scotlands
real national drink "Irn Bru" )
I have never once been into the Glasgow
City Chambers either. Not even on a school trip. Lived in Glasgow 20 years
even went to Strathclyde University which is right around the corner from
the building.
Gorbels -> GorbAls
( Gorbels sounds like some quaint
area in Paris .ie not the Gorbals. "The bluebells of the Gorbels" )
Glasgow was not only Mackintosh but
the wonderful architecture of my fovourite Alexander Greek Thompson.
You probably walked by one of his churches walking to the Gorbals.
Hawick may be difficult to pronounce
( i have relatives who live there so i learnt at an early age ). You missed
a better one right by Glasgow. How do you think Milngavie is pronounced?
( This is of course forgetting about
all of the tiny highland villages with more consonants than vowels )
The Hawick festival is called the
"Common Riding"
Milngavie is pronounced Mull-guy
A really nicely written travel log
of Scotland though.
Stuart MacMillan
So many questions! Let's see.
-
We did not try Glaswegian lemonade. It is amusingly stereotypical that
it does not involve expensive lemons.
-
Yes, we did try Irn Bru. Our keen palates intuit that it is a bubblegum-flavored
creme soda. Good stuff, if full of lots and lots of sugar.
-
Shame on us for misspelling Gorbals. This gaffe is now corrected.
-
Next time we go to Glasgow, we'll be on the lookout for Thompson.
-
We actually did learn to pronounce Hawick. (Last time we learned
to pronounce Aberystwyth.) We love Scottish pronunciations. Gaelic
is fun.
Thanks, Stuart!
Blab. A reader wishes we were less of a taskmaster.
Give Dave a rest so he can
post, eh?
Geez, no kidding! Nothing since, like, last
Thursday!
Blab. Turning now to the end of the pile of Blabs that
we found beneath our mail slot when we returned
from vacation, a reader with questionable reading habits attempts to
convince us that we should give up on blogging and start a fun new hobby.
"A GPS device and a hunger
for adventure are all you need for high tech treasure hunting. Here you
can find the latest caches in your area, how to hide your own cache, and
information on how to get started in this
fun and exciting sport."
I stumbled upon this site while looking
at wilwheaton.net - Occasionally he has something noteworthy to say.
Um. Geocaching is kinda old, actually, going back to at least 2000.
That is, ancient. And wilwheaton.net
is, um, previously blogged.
Blab. From the Office of Homeland Haiku.
Haiku of the Director
Attacks will occur
Sometime, Somehow, Somewhere, so
now I’m off the hook
Thus endeth the lesson.
Blab. An old colleague somehow stumbles across us.
Steve,
How are you...
Is it true you are living in Boca?
Remember me from the crypto conferences...
David
Isn't that cool? It's common for technical colleagues to find each other
via their research Web sites. But via blogs?
Plurp.
The blue dog
was living
in Boca
Monday, June 10, 2002
Blab. Unable to let it go, that member
of the Plurp legal staff submits further unwarranted analysis
of our random writing.
The neatest thing about your
posted reply to my objection about Helenisms, is that if I point out that
'built of' in your formal definition implies 'older' all I will be doing
is proving your point about legalistic objectors. Bugger bugger, bugger
(Allowable legal term in my country ever since a particularly famous Toyota
Advertisment)
Actually, we figured the neatest thing about our position is that we could
change the definition of Helenisms however we wanted (being the progenitor
of it and all). Not that we would, of course. ;->
Blab. A reader who runs a large automobile manufacturer writes:
Congratulations on the Commencement
Speech giving! That would be a high point of any life, I think. Go go Steve
White!
Yours,
Mr. Ford
Why, thank you, and that's certainly very nice of you. We must admit, though,
that we took it with a large grain of salt. We feel greatly honored and
all, and it was awfully nice of the faculty to invite us. But we don't
actually remember any of our commencement speakers, so we don't have much
confidence that anyone will remember us.
Then again, maybe one really smart kid, faced with a choice between
championing
his or her creative vision and doing something easier some years hence,
will have a few brain cells pre-channeled and decide to do it anyway.
That would be nice.
Blab. A reader wants us to know about the latest Old Media trends.
And we treasure our readers for this.
Blog
Wars: The empire strikes back?
--RAO
This NYT article talks about how War Blogs (we were unaware there was
such a thing) are garnering more popular readership than are, um,
traditional blogs. (Now there's a weird term!)
To which we reply: Who cares? The Old Media gets so worked up! The wonder
of the Web is that we don't have to worry about anybody else's readership.
We have our own. So there.
Anyhow, seems more like Blog Wars: AotC to us.
Blab. A reader sends us this cheerful thought.
We always worried about the obesity and late nights.
Plurp. Well, looks like the U.S. Government caught
a guy who might have wanted to make Washington D.C. unlivable. (But,
uh, wasn't it already?) We feel much better now.
The cynics among you will be unable to avoid noticing that (a) the guy
was actually arrested over a month ago, (b) the U.S. Government desperately
needed a PR coup on this topic, following a week or so of bad
stories about the FBI and CIA having bunches of information about terrorists
before 9/11 but not acting on it, and (c) what happened today was that
he was declared an Enemy Combatant and turned over to the DoD. That latter
development means that the Government need not reveal their evidence, need
not examine countervailing evidence, etc. So we might never know what actually
led them to conclude he had it in for D.C.
Nevertheless, we wish to encourage this patriotic rounding up of Enemy
Combatants and the subsequent positive PR. Readers are encouraged to complete
the following, so as to increase the number of Enemy Combatants that can
be rounded up.
Part 1. Please read
this carefully. Upon completion, you will be deemed a threat to all right-thinking
peoples everywhere.
How to Build a Dirty
Bomb
 |
Step 1. Build a big
bomb. Use fertilizer and stuff. Or C4, if you have some around. |
 |
Step 2. Smoosh a lot
of dirt around it. You can also use radioactive stuff, which is easily
obtained from old watch dials and former Soviet states. If it doesn't stick
very well, use duct tape. |
 |
Step 3. Light the fuse. |
 |
Step 4. Run. |
Part 2. Please complete
this form.
Part 3. Thank you! Your status
as an Enemy Combatant has been confirmed. Based on the additional information
you submitted above, you will be assigned a PR priority. A lawful representative
of the U.S. Government will contact you according to your PR priority to
take you into custody.
Plurp.
The blue dog thought that
duct tape
part must be
Classified
Sunday, June 9, 2002
Plurp. So that commencement
address thingie went pretty well. Our talk (the final form of which
is here)
got a few unexpected chuckles from the audience, and some really unexpected
spontaneous applause at this Autonomic Computing line:
Computers are too complicated.
You shouldn't have to set them up, and configure them, and tune them, and
upgrade them, and fiddle around with them when something goes wrong. They
should just plain work, like your refrigerator does.
Maybe we struck a nerve. Anyhow, there was quite a bit of enthusiastic
applause at the end. Go figure.
Several people blatantly flattered us afterwards, which became quite
embarrassing. One guy made up for them all, though, by claiming to be an
expert on giving speeches and then giving us some free advice: Get the
fricking hair out of your face. Only he didn't exactly say fricking.
We hold our Treasured Readers responsible for that hair thing.
We hung around the reception afterwards and talked with a dozen or so
eager and very smart students in computer science, physics, math
and the like, plus a few faculty members. Surprisingly, we actually had
relevant things to say. We like smart people.
Plop. Autonomic Computing my wrinkled Aunt May! The stupid hotel
in which we stayed on Sunday night had some 1890's PBX that allowed voice
calls but interfered with modem negotiations, and we couldn't get hooked
up.
We hate computers.
Plurp.
The blue dog
liked smart
computers
 |
