context counts

Posted on Wednesday, 2004 November 03 by Anton

headline of the week: Warriors lock up young veterans

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a good notation is a good start

Posted on Tuesday, 2004 November 02 by Anton

In keying data from handwritten forms, I’m struck by how badly our digits are designed: there are few pairs for which I haven’t seen an ambiguous case.

I do write somewhat defensively. I write ‘9’ with a single stroke, like ‘6’, so that it cannot be mistaken for ‘4’. I usually write ‘8’ as two circles rather than in a single stroke, so that it cannot become ‘5’ by malformation of the upstroke, nor become ‘9’ by rising too early from the lower loop. By some quirk I tend to begin ‘0’ (and ‘Oo’) by rising from the lower right, so it cannot become ‘6’.

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of course it leaks

Posted on Saturday, 2004 October 30 by Anton

In the basement of the Alameda County courthouse, where I’ve been working, there’s a sign announcing that it’s a felony to bring in weapons including knives longer than four inches. Must be an old sign; nowadays I imagine they’d seize the one-inch souvenir penknife that I bought as a child in Toledo. Can I be alone in wondering how a foot-long bread-knife got into the kitchen of the Registrar of Voters?

Saturday morning I was informally admitted to the building before the screeners showed up. “Dang, I coulda brought my guns!”

Posted in security theater | 1 Comment

oh goody, an obscure question of common law

Posted on Saturday, 2004 October 30 by Anton

(This item was written in October but somehow never got out of “draft” status.)

Constructive Trusts and Restitution After Theft: Rasmusen discusses a legal quandary.

It hits me that this item calls for a law category not under politics. I’m surprised that this is the first such.

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are they trying to be killfiled?

Posted on Friday, 2004 October 29 by Anton

I’m the gatekeeper for two small mailing-lists. For months now, nearly all the spam submitted to those lists comes from addresses of the form word21word@hotmail.com — e.g. in the latest batch chance21sunbird, church21lorraine, cougars21molly1, pedro21bridge. Why?

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movies rented recently

Posted on Wednesday, 2004 October 27 by Anton

Witness for the Prosecution (1957), from a story by Agatha Christie, is of course clever; though the byplay of the convalescent barrister and his nurse is a bit tiresome.

South Pacific (1958). I thought I’d enjoy it more. The plot is a bare sketch of a frame on which to hang the songs, which are stale. (Has time treated Michener’s book any better?) Notable use of color filters for effect, sometimes bizarre; the one point where I find it really successful is where reality crashes into a daydream and the filter suddenly goes away.

Vertigo (1958) lives up to its reputation.

Bell, Book and Candle (1958) is amiable fluff.

The Horse’s Mouth (1958) featured Alec Guinness (age 43, playing sixty-some) as an obnoxious painter. Rather predictable.

Peter Gunn (1958), a tv series about a private eye, remembered mainly for Mancini’s theme. Out of curiosity I put it on my Netflix list. The first disc holds eight half-hour episodes; I watched one and that was enough: nothing I haven’t seen a thousand times. My housemate watched one more episode, and then we packed it up to return.

Gigi (1958), a musical with Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier: disappointingly thin. — I wonder how many movies have three French leads (or two and a half: Caron’s mother was American) speaking only English.

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a party for every taste

Posted on Wednesday, 2004 October 27 by Anton

For my sins I’m doing data entry at, of all places, the Registrar of Voters for Alameda County — and missing Knuth’s talk on Friday! The software, by the way, is from a subsidiary of Diebold.

I thought you might get a chuckle out of the long list of wannabe parties hoping to sign up enough voters to get provisional ballot status. The list also includes the big seven parties which retain their ballot status by having won at least 2% of the vote for one of their statewide candidates in the last general election.

American Christian; American Independent; American National Socialist; Anarchist; Aztlan; Birthday; Black Panther; Boston Tea; California; California Green; Central; Christian Heritage; Citizens; Community for New Politics; Communist; Conscious American African; Conservative; Constitution; Democratic; Environmentalist; Equal Justice; Equalitarian; Free; Green; Green Future; Human Principles; Humanist; Independent; Independent Progressive; Justice; La Raza Unida; Liberal; Libertarian; Middle Class; National; National Unity; Natural Law; New Alliance; New Economy; Parliament Party; Patriot; Patriotic; Patriotic Veterans; Peace and Freedom; Poor People’s; Populist; Pot; Pragmatic; Prohibition; Puritan; Real American; Reform; Republican; Rock and Roll; Socialist; Socialist Labor; Socialist Worker; Technocracy; US Taxpayers; Unlimitism; United Conscious Builders of the Dream; Vernita Baldwin; Vision; Whig; White Panther; Youth International (Yippie)

Posted in politics | 2 Comments