two wheels good! four wheels bad!

Posted on Friday, 2003 March 07 by Anton

I saw a Segway today in person for the first time, going up Bush Street in San Francisco, on the sidewalk because the street itself runs the other way.

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stop me before I post again

Posted on Thursday, 2003 March 06 by Anton

I dropped in to a computer store today to price flat monitors. They’ve come down more than I thought. I might even buy one this year – if I get a job.

The houseguest said something about “a reasonable facsimile of caffeine” and naturally I thought: what do you get if you replace a C in a caffeine molecule with Si?

Posted in medicine, technology | Leave a comment

’tis a season

Posted on Wednesday, 2003 March 05 by Anton

Lent began Wednesday; as Rebecca so wisely observes, what’s a Catholic occasion without an Irish joke?

Posted in religion | Leave a comment

close the borders, say immigrants

Posted on Wednesday, 2003 March 05 by Anton

Regular readers can skip over most of this entry; nothing here that I haven’t said before.
Continue reading →

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a trillion here, a trillion there

Posted on Wednesday, 2003 March 05 by Anton

I never hear the US debt limit mentioned except in the context of raising it. Why have a limit at all, if whenever it is approached Congress routinely raises it? I notice that it is already higher than the trigger of the “Ultimatum Resolution” that was going around State legislatures a decade ago.

Posted in economics, politics | Leave a comment

time flies

Posted on Tuesday, 2003 March 04 by Anton

Remember what happened ten years ago?

Posted in politics | 1 Comment

truth has more strangers than fiction

Posted on Monday, 2003 March 03 by Anton

Six degrees of Captain America: some scientists at the University of the Baleares “studied the statistical properties of the network of 6,486 characters in the 12,942 Marvel comic books” since 1961. They found that the network of acquaintance among Marvel characters is “very weakly clustered – about 1.5 times more than a random network. Clustering in real networks is typically ten (or more) times greater than in random webs.” (Naturally, I found the link at a comic strip site.)

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