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December 15, 2003
Here. Heavy on what’s actually need to make this country more secure — read it and tell me that you don’t think it’s a more sensible program than what we’ve got now.
Also, $30B over 4 years to fight AIDS globally.
Donna at Copyfight aggregates info about how the philosopher Peter Ludlow managed to get banished from the Sims Online server by raking virtual muck. And Farhad Manjoo has an article in Salon that lays out the issues.
Peter Coffee in eWeek meditates on what PowerPoint is doing to us. He begins with Edward Tufte’s piece on how PowerPoint misled the assessment of the risk to the shuttle Columbia. Peter writes:
Bad presentations result from people learning to write with a model of “topic sentence, body, conclusion,” instead of a journalistic model of “lead (conclusion), significance, supporting details.”
Peter says that although media “don’t just transmit facts; they alter both selection and emphasis, creating different realities in the process,” PowerPoint isn’t solely to blame for the bad presentations done with it. In fact, he says, PowerPoint helps you communicate more effectively if you have something “useful” to say and exposes you as a ninny if you don’t.
But the notion that there is a single right way to do a presentation, and it just happens to be the way journalists tell stories, is surely an overstatement. For example, dramatic narratives have been known to work as an organizing principle. Narratives work differently than standard journalistic articles. For one thing, while journalists begin with the conclusion, narratives think some conclusions can only be understood by watching how they unfold from the beginning. Hamlet written as a newspaper article might not work as well:
Carnage in the Court!Elsinore — The castle was littered with bodies, including that of the King, Queen and the Prince, apparently as the result of a fencing match that got out of hand. Reports attributed the outburst alternatively to a conspiracy by Hamlet to avenge his father, a conspiracy by the King to put down a usurper, Ophelia’s brother’s desire to avenge her suicide, or bad fish.
On the other hand Hamlet done in PowerPoints (by Brian Millar) also loses a little something. Which proves once again that while there’s no one right way to do something, there are lots of wrong ways.
December 14, 2003
My Motorola cell phone robbed me! According to the rules I know, my 18 (3,5,K) beat the dealer’s 15 (A,2,2,9,A). Yet the phone claimed that the dealer won, depriving me of those precious … well, it’s a matter of honor!
Dealer’s hand is on top, mine on bottom.
Tony Goodson is the first to point out, in the comments to this blog entry, that if the dealer gets 5 cards, s/he beats you no matter who has the high hand. And I lived in Atlantic City for five years!
For an article I’m writing, I’m looking for sites that provide driving directions. They should either be major and obvious, such as Mapquest, Rand McNally and MapPoint or they should be really interesting.
I’m interested in general mass market mapping sites, also.
Any suggestions?
Good. He’s a very very bad man who should rot in jail for the rest of his life.
If, as we all hope, this ends the insurgency — the image of Saddam cowering like a rat in a cellar has got to be discouraging to his supporters, but I suppose it depends on how much the insurgency is pro-Saddam as opposed to anti-US-presence — it neutralizes Iraq as a political issue in the US. And then as the daily reports are dominated by news from Saddam’s trial about just how bad a person he was, being opposed to the war is going to look like a moral error.
But just for the record: Our president systematically lied to us in order to get us to go to war; we were told we were in imminent danger when we were not. We went in without a plan for getting out or realistic expectations about what we were letting ourselves in for. We have sold the official looting rights to the administration’s closest friends. It all was a cynical distraction from the failure of our war on terrorism. Our unilateralism sets a dangerous precedent and makes us less safe. And we will not know even if the ends justifed the means for years when the ultimate fate of Iraq and the region is clearer.
Nevertheless: We got him! Woohoo!
Here’s Gov. Dean’s comment on the capture.
Dave raises some good questions.
December 13, 2003
Yes, friends, my PC is broken again. The motherboard (Asus P4P800 Deluxe) I put in this summer suddenly lost its onboard audio and NIC. The audio revived when I reinstalled the drivers but nothing seems to be bringing back the NIC. Further, my spare PCI NIC reports the same problem: the drivers install but the system says that it cannot be started. I have flashed my BIOS and it says that the onboard services are enabled. (When I replaced the motherboard this summer, the network capability shorted out within hours and I had to replace the replacement. Hmmm.)
I’ve also noted occasional raster problems since the networking problems happened. ..little flickers of instability.
It feels like a surge problem, but it’s plugged into a Back-UPS Pro 650 which ought to be enough to keep its electrical diet healthy. Might it be the internal power supply? It, too, is only 6 months old and pumps some hefty wattage, although I don’t recall how much.
Consider also that I go through hard drives the way other people go through socks. I get about 1.5 years out of ’em before they grind to a halt. This is true not only of my desktop machine but also my laptop, which is plugged into a plain old surge protector, not the UPS. Am I just in a Bermuda Triangle of computing?
[Two notes: 1. Yes, I am a backup fanatic. Multiple backups every night. 2. The first person who tells me to “Get a Mac” will receive a stinking fish head in the mail, COD. Yes, a cod COD.] [Note: I will admit that that’s a very long line.]
December 12, 2003
When you install a program in Windows, it will (with rare exception) install itself into the Program Files directory. Many programs first create a folder for themselves named after the company that developed the application, so “The Blow Up the Baddies Game” game gets installed into a folder called “Universal Gaming Corporation.”
Similarly, grocery stores cluster cereals by manufacturer, not by type: Post Corn Flakes is many boxes removed from General Mills Corn Flakes. Not only does this make it hard to find some flavors — where exactly are the Post Toastie Apple Swirl Cluster Bombettes? — it also makes it harder to compare prices.
At the New England Mobile Book Fair, a huge warehouse of books that’s not in the least mobile, books are shelved by publisher.
Dare I point out that the user/customer who thinks about her applications by development house, cereals by manufacturer, or books by publisher is rare indeed.
My new bumpersticker:
Think it’ll catch on?
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