this view of mortality

Posted on Monday, 2002 May 20 by Anton

Stephen Jay Gould is dead of cancer at sixty. Somehow he always seemed like a youngster to me (despite photographs) – perhaps because I never knew until now that he had two wives and two sons.

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feel safe?

Posted on Sunday, 2002 May 19 by Anton

What Went Wrong, an article about last summer’s Intelligence failure. (Old link dead; two new links)

“If I were an average citizen, I’d be pissed at the whole American government,” says a senior official who has worked on counterterrorism.

I usually am anyway, of course, so I can’t tell the difference.

Posted in security theater | 1 Comment

to everything there is a season

Posted on Saturday, 2002 May 18 by Anton

A little-appreciated advantage of the French Republican calendar: only three months have no R.

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every measure leads to a countermeasure

Posted on Friday, 2002 May 17 by Anton

Fun with Fingerprint Readers in Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram (link from Monty Solomon)

2015: Newer link.

Posted in technology | 1 Comment

we want our two hours back

Posted on Thursday, 2002 May 16 by Anton

Accompanied my One True Ex today to see The Triumph of Love. Normally she loves pretty movies with no plot, e.g. Gosford Park, but Triumph has just enough plot to make the crap script stand out.

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everybody’s doing it

Posted on Thursday, 2002 May 16 by Anton

I am somehow disappointed to find that Volokh knew before I did that Duncan Frissell, with whom I exchanged some interesting mail on and around the Extropians list back when, has a you-know-what.

Posted in blogdom, futures | Leave a comment

what family doesn’t have its ups and downs?

Posted on Wednesday, 2002 May 15 by Anton

If we persons of pallor are all descended from Charlemagne, we could still one-up each other on what fraction of our ancestry is royal, or how few of the links in the chain are female.

If a genie offered me three wishes, my third (after a godlike physique and knowledge of all human languages) might be for a genealogical database covering the last million years. It would be fun to find out, for example, who are my most distant living kin.

Posted in history, sciences | 1 Comment