could be worse

Posted on Saturday, 2006 June 24 by Anton

A comfy chair, a blue sky, a mild breeze, the season’s first watermelon . . . .

Posted in California | 1 Comment

without questions there can be no answers

Posted on Saturday, 2006 June 24 by Anton

Is there a standard Unix shell command to pause for a given amount of time? One wouldn’t use this from the prompt, of course, but it might have its uses in scripts. Mine is to open a large number of files (local or Web), but not all at once:

cat list-of-files | xargs slow-open &

where slow-open looks like 

#!/bin/sh
for i in $*
  do
    open $i
    pause 60
  done

It seems like unnecessary overkill to write pause in Python.

In unrelated news — I’ve heard that you can discourage vermin from stealing your pets’ food by setting out a sample spiked with emetic. Have you tried this, does it work? What drug is appropriate for a cat? A neighborhood tom has recently found our cats’ dish, and drops in every night as if he owns the place (if I’m not watching).

Posted in neep-neep, pets | 2 Comments

who’s ringing my doorbell at this hour?

Posted on Thursday, 2006 June 22 by Anton

Yester evening a neighbor’s car engine caught fire, and I gave him my extinguisher. Just now he came by to replace it.

Posted in California | Leave a comment

where was Waterloo?

Posted on Wednesday, 2006 June 21 by Anton

I have twice raised the question: “In what country was the battle of Waterloo fought?” Waterloo is now in Belgium, but that state was created fifteen years later. Well, I finally bothered to go looking for an answer to the question . .

Waterloo was fought nine days after the end of the Congress of Vienna, during which the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, which included what we now call Belgium, was created.

Posted in history | 1 Comment

hypothesis

Posted on Wednesday, 2006 June 21 by Anton

Somewhere in MS Word’s infinitely deep dialog boxes there must be a checkbox whose default setting is Do what I explicitly asked you not to do.

Posted in neep-neep | 1 Comment

data integrity

Posted on Monday, 2006 June 19 by Anton

It appears that I precipitated the exposure of a multiple hoaxer on Wikipedia.

In Line of succession to the British Throne I noticed that “The Earl of Amersham” had been inserted and, four minutes later, removed. Curious, I looked up Earl of Amersham and found it fishy on two points: the title was said to be created in 1964 (since 1960 only three non-royal Brits have been made peers other than life barons) and the genuine but extinct title Earl Roberts was attributed to Amersham’s son.

I tagged Earl of Amersham as a likely hoax, and within hours . . . well, you can read for yourself.

Why (you may ask) does an American anarchist know enough about British aristocracy to spot the hoax? I’ve been fascinated by heraldry since I found Moncreiffe & Pottinger’s Simple Heraldry Cheerfully Illustrated in my hi-skool’s library circa 1974; and one can’t study heraldry without picking up some knowledge of dynasties and such.

Posted in heraldry | Leave a comment

policies and proxies

Posted on Saturday, 2006 June 17 by Anton

Putting on my constitutional minarchist hat for a moment . .

The White House and its apologists have often claimed (successfully) that the US Constitution does not restrict its actions outside US borders. I argue in response that, since the US Govt’s authority (if any) is derived through the Constitution, wherever the Constitution does not apply no such authority can exist.

If I were President I’d obviously shut down Camp X and order an end to “rendition”. I was about to say I’d decree a policy that we don’t do anything by proxy that we could not legally do ourselves within the US — but something is scratching at a distant corner of my mind, as if I’m forgetting something.

Can you think of any exceptions to such a policy that would pass the filter of minarchist ethics?

Posted in constitution | Leave a comment