Ramblings & ephemera
From Jonathan M. Gitlin’s “Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does” (Ars Technica: 24 September 2008):
We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that’s not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a [...]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, history, politics, science | No Comments »
According to Mickey Kaus’ Why write about the Edwards scandal? (Slate: 4 August 2008), these are the 6 stages of any political scandal:
… the natural progression in cases like this: 1) Too horrible and shocking; it can’t possibly be true; 2) It’s not true; 3) You can’t prove it’s true; 4) Why are [...]
Posted on September 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | No Comments »
From Sam Anderson’s “A History of Hooch“, a review of Iain Gately’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (6 July 2008):
Elizabethan England had a pub for every 187 people. (By 2004, the country was down to one for every 529 people.) The Pilgrims’ Mayflower was actually “a claret ship from the Bordeaux wine [...]
Posted on August 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | No Comments »
From Sam Anderson’s “A History of Hooch“, a review of Iain Gately’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (6 July 2008):
Aztecs liked fermented sap, but had a legal drinking age (52) higher than their average life expectancy - although every four years they’d hold a New Year’s festival called “Drunkenness of Children,” at [...]
Posted on August 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | No Comments »
Jerry wrote this & sent it to a client;
A fat footer is a means of showing secondary navigation, or
showcasing primary navigation, or reinforcing selected pieces of your
navigation. Here are some examples:
On a long-scroll blog page, put some choices at the bottom:
http://bokardo.com/
Put sales and branding at the top and navigation at the bottom:
http://www.dapper.net/
Promote the pages you [...]
Posted on July 25th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Tech Help, Technology | No Comments »
I recently posted this to my local Linux Users Group mailing list:
Thought y’all would find this interesting - from http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/05/26/fundraising_excel/index.html:
“A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, politics | No Comments »
From Brian Gibbs’ letter printed in Wired (January 2005):
The explanation that the decline of brands is due to competition, informed consumers, and constant innovation is insufficient. There’s another factor wreaking havoc. Over the years, brands have lost their meaning because advertising campaigns developed by creative types have been clever and witty, but often not relevant.
Once, [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business | No Comments »
From Holt Sorenson’s “Incident Response Tools For Unix, Part Two: File-System Tools” (SecurityFocus: 17 October 2003):
Various commands change the MAC [modify, access, and change] times in different ways. The table below shows the effects that some common commands have on MAC times. These tables were created on Debian 3.0 using an ext2 file system contained [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Tech Help, Technology | No Comments »
From Steven Pinker’s “What the F***?” (The New Republic: 9 Octobert 2007):
The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “How to Crash the Oscars” (7 March 2006):
If you want to crash the glitziest party of all, the Oscars, here’s a tip from a professional: Show up at the theater, dressed as a chef carrying a live lobster, looking really concerned. …
“The most important technique is confidence,” he [...]
Posted on July 26th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: InfoSec Management, Writing Ideas, security | No Comments »
On the CWE-LUG mailing list, someone asked a question about creating a program that can be extended with plugins. I thought the answer was so useful that I wanted to save it and make it available to others.
On 2/17/07, Mark wrote:
I’m a young programmer (just finishing high school) who has done a fair [...]
Posted on July 26th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Tech Help, Technology | No Comments »
From Ask Yahoo (5 March 2007):
There are only so many ways to construct a story.
Writers who believe there’s only one plot argue all stories “stem from conflict.” True enough, but we’re more inclined to back the theory you mention about seven plot lines.
According to the Internet Public Library, they are:
1. [wo]man vs. [...]
Posted on July 26th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Language & Literature, On Writing, Writing Ideas, art | No Comments »
From Avi Rubin’s “Voting: Low-Tech Is the Answer” (Business Week: 30 October 2006):
Unfortunately, there are three problems with electronic voting that have nothing to do with whether or not the system works as intended. They are transparency, recovery, and audit. …
Electronic voting is not transparent - it is not even translucent. There is no way [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, law, politics, security | Comments Off
From Northrop Frye’s “The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy” (128):
The moment of discovery or ‘anagnorisis’, which comes at the end of the tragic plot, is not simply the knowledge by the hero of what has happened to him … but the recognition of the determined shape of the life he has created for himself, with an [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, On Writing, art | Comments Off
From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don’t want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military…. Otherwise you are trying to freeze an [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, security | Comments Off
From James B. Stewart’s “The Real Heroes Are Dead” (The New Yorker [11 February 2002]: 58):
… he was simply following the “Eight P’s,” a mnemonic that had been drummed into them in the military: “Proper prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”
Related posts
Word of the day: cunctative
Why so many Google projects & betas?
Why people don’t [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Language & Literature, Writing Ideas | Comments Off
From Peter Norvig’s “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” (2001):
Researchers ([John R. Hayes, Complete Problem Solver (Lawrence Erlbaum) 1989.], [Benjamin Bloom (ed.), Developing Talent in Young People (Ballantine) 1985.]) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, [...]
Posted on September 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Teaching, Technology, business, education | Comments Off
From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
Here we’ve got the canonical Tim O’Reilly definition of Web 2.0:
“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society | Comments Off
From Wikipedia’s “MacDonald triad” (26 July 2006):
The MacDonald triad are three major personality traits in children that are said to be warning signs for the tendency to become a serial killer. They were first described by J. M. MacDonald in his article “The Threat to Kill” in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Firestarting, invariably just for [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, law, science | Comments Off
From Eric Steven Raymond’s “Varieties of Open-Source Licensing” (The Art of Unix Programming: 19 September 2003):
MIT or X Consortium License
The loosest kind of free-software license is one that grants unrestricted rights to copy, use, modify, and redistribute modified copies as long as a copy of the copyright and license terms is retained in all modified [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, law | Comments Off