I’m so demanding

From 1990 to 2001 most of my working day was spent in WordPerfect 5.1. Now every office manager says “We have to use Messy-Word because it’s the staaaandurd.”

Is it too much to ask that the standard of 2003 offer the same features and ease-of-use of an ‘obsolete’ competitor?

Yup.

Posted in neep-neep | Leave a comment

what you gonna do with those shoes?

BBC: Decoding Iraq’s symbols of celebration (thanks to Lee Gold for the link)

Posted in humanities | Leave a comment

humanity sneezes with me

So it looks like the Chinese pneumonia may be the newest mutant of the common cold. Maybe a vaccine for the latter will emerge from efforts against the former.

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corpus inhabebile?

What’s a Latin term for someone to whom habeas corpus does not apply? Anyway, MoorishGirl reports that an Intel engineer, naturalized 14 years ago, is among the ‘disappeared’.

Update:

Aug 6: Mike pled guilty today to one count of his three-count indictment. He admitted attempting to enter Afghanistan with members of the “Portland 6”. We hope that justice has been served, and our focus now shifts to support for Mike’s family in this difficult time.

2004 Oct 24: This item formerly linked to www.freeMikeHawash.org, which naturally is now dead.

Posted in constitution, security theater | Leave a comment

seek converts

Thanks to Dr Frank for citing this piece – “If you want peace, preach to the unconverted” – which more or less expresses my feelings about the street peaceniks.

November update: The column itself is no longer available for free, but Frank quotes it at length.

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another day

Damn — five weeks and still my knee is sore.

Around 2pm today the clouds were curiously regular: all about the same size and shape, and all with flat bottoms. My companion and I thought simultaneously: “They’re Magritte clouds.”

My wall-calendar shows holidays in various countries. For April 25 it says:

Anzac Day (AUS.)
Orthodox Good Friday
Festa della Liberazione (I)
S. Marco (cliccate)
Kyon Ho, Reformer of Korean Zen (1849 – 1912)

(Emphasis added.) Looks like the editor got some information from the Web.

Posted in California, me!me!me! | Leave a comment

that symmetry guy

The eminent geometer HSM (Donald) Coxeter of Toronto died a few days ago, aged 96 years. His book Regular Polytopes (1963) sits on my reference shelf. For you non-mathematical types, it was Coxeter who sent MC Escher an article on hyperbolic geometry, inspiring the famous Circle Limit woodcuts.

Posted in arts, mathematics | Leave a comment