9 May 2008: How to Pronounce “Myanmar” --- According to the built-in dictionary on the Macintosh, the correct pronunciation is “burma”.

8 May 2008: Dairy Queen's Creepy Advertisement --- My friend sent me an email with a request to go to a petition site and sign up against an advertisement for Dairy Queen. Now if this were the usual crap about sex and violence I would not be signing, unless it were a demand for more sex and violence. But this is something else entirely.

6 May 2008: Measles on the Rise Due to Superstition --- The biggest outbreak of measles since 2001 has been caused by people refusing to vaccinate their children either because of religious reasons or an unfounded belief that vaccinations lead to autism or other diseases. Before the development of the vaccine in 1963 measles was a terrible public health problem; the vaccination program was so successful that transmission of the measles virus was completely halted in 2000. Now, partly thanks to shady opportunists like Gary Null pushing vaccination paranoia, one of the great success stories of modern public health medicine is being undermined, and we are once again facing the possibility of measles becoming endemic in the U.S. for the first time in almost 50 years.

2 May 2008: Does Gary Null Have a Real Ph.D.? --- If Gary Null and his staff took a minute off from threatening to sue me for attacking his credentials to ask me to back up my assertions, this is what I would tell them.

30 April 2008: Security Problems with Evernote --- Evernote is yet another new note-taking application and web service that promises to synchronize your information among your various computers. Rui Carmo demonstrates that as it does so it exposes your data to anyone in the Starbucks running a packet sniffer. (He also lauds it as being "multi-platform", but it's just for OS X and Windows.)

27 April 2008: Student Asks John Ashcroft About Japanese Waterboarding: the Video --- "Since Yukio Asano was trying to get information to help defend his country--exactly what you, Mr. Ashcroft, say is acceptible for Americans to do--do you believe that his sentence was unjust?"

22 April 2008: Student Asks a Good Question of John Ashcroft --- "After WWII, the Tokyo Tribunal was basically the Nuremberg Trials for Japan. Many Japanese leaders were put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture. And among the tortures listed was the 'water treatment,' which we nowadays call waterboarding [...] One man, Yukio Asano, was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor by the allies for waterboarding American troops to obtain information. Since Yukio Asano was trying to get information to help defend his country--exactly what you, Mr. Ashcroft, say is acceptible for Americans to do--do you believe that his sentence was unjust?"

21 April 2008: Gary Null's Goons Threaten to Sue Me: My Response --- A letter from someone representing Gary Null claims that he cures AIDS, cancer, and autism. I'm invited on the show to debate, and in the same breath threatened with a lawsuit for daring to criticize Mr. Null.

18 April 2008: Open Letter to WPFW: Gary Null's Hazardous Broadcast --- I understand that Gary Null raises a great deal of money for WPFW and Pacifica, and that his broadcast is a kind of infomercial that he uses to steer listeners to his commercial website and vast array of products for sale. But I can't believe that anyone who cares about the wellbeing of WPFW's listeners and the reputation of the station would think that this is a good deal, after being informed of the dangerous and irresponsible content of what Mr. Null disseminates.

17 April 2008: Washignton Post Suppresses Article by Sam Harris --- In another act of pre-emptive self-censorship, to avoid a Muslim reaction.

16 April 2008: Dust Mites are not Impressed by Your Fancy Vacuum --- These tiny creatures, that live in our beds, stuffed tigers, and pillows, cause asthma and other allergic reactions in many of us humans. So there has recently arisen an industry of expensive vacuum cleaners, mattress covers, and other gadgets designed to reduce their numbers and help us. None of these things work. The only effective control is to wash your bedding in hot water and keep soft toys out of the bed.

16 April 2008: Viewfinder --- "[...] a novel method for users to spatially situate [...] their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth" Visit the link for an impressive video, and read the brief article in the NYT.

14 April 2008: Brazil's Condom Independence --- Fighting HIV and protecting the rainforest by resisting the pernicious influence of the Vatican.

10 April 2008: Gradual School: "The IT Guy" --- Needs to get out more.

1 April 2008: Gradual School: "The New Guy" --- Demographics.

28 March 2008: The Dynamics of Human Body Weight Change --- How fat you are is determined by how much energy you expend and how much you ingest, isn't it? According to research performed at the NIH by Carson Chow and Kevin Hall, it's not so simple. They model human weight and body composition with a set of differential equations and apply an averaging technique to smooth out the daily fluctuations. There are two sets of solutions to the model: your weight and body composition (how much blubber and how much muscle) can have a unique solution or an infinity of solutions. Experiments might determine which type of solution is relevant, but those have not been done yet, and will be difficult, as they will require independently perturbing the fat and lean components of the subjects. The research directly addresses still unknown questions such as whether a patient will regain fat after liposuction or maintain a reduced weight.

27 March 2008: Toxic Substances Make Males Less Attractive To The Opposite Sex --- It's about fish. But I love the title.

27 March 2008: Gradual School: "Two Ducks" --- Too late.

25 March 2008: Snakes Actually on a Plane --- After returning from an airplane trip this gentleman reached into his luggage and felt a sharp pain. He had been bitten by a nearly foot-long canebrake rattlesnake. It is not known how the creature wound up in the luggage. The man is in stable condition in hospital.

21 March 2008: Scientific Success and Beer --- The more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely he is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher.

21 March 2008: Filipinos Advised to Use Good Hygiene During Crucifixions --- Health officials in the Philippines have advised people taking part in the annual Easter crucifixion rituals to get tetanus vaccinations before they flagellate themselves and get nailed to crosses, and to practice good hygiene. They should also check the condition of the flagellation whips, ensuring that they are "well-maintained", and make sure that the crucifixion nails are properly disinfected.

20 March 2008: Gradual School: "The Physics Department" --- We're the smartest.

17 March 2008: Indirect reply to "Apple's iPhone SDK Prohibits Real Mobile Innovation" --- "The heart of the problem are the radios. Both the EDGE and Wi-Fi transceivers have significant power requirements. Whenever that hardware is on, your battery life is going to suck."

14 March 2008: Apple's iPhone SDK Prohibits Real Mobile Innovation --- There has been general cheering about the Software Development Kit for creating iPhone and iPod Touch programs, and a significant amount of criticism from developers concerning the restrictions in the SDK. In this category an article by Hank Williams stands out as a thoughtful explanation of why one restriction is particularly critical.

10 March 2008: Addendum to "Muslim Censorship of YouTube" --- Google agreed to remove content from YouTube to satisfy the demands of the Pakistani government.

10 March 2008: .Mac Doesn't Trust You --- Anyone who is still reckless enough to use Apple's mail servers needs to read this...

".Mac is nuking e-mail from some ISPs.

But they are doing so in such a way that they are actually denying their own customers service – even when sending via authenticated and secure links or their own webmail."

4 March 2008: 2008 Democratic Primary --- Battle of the Symbolic Attributes!

27 February 2008: Everything you know is wrong --- Butterfly eyespots do not scare predators because they look like big eyes.

25 February 2008: The Serbs' Self-Inflicted Wounds --- Confused about the recently won indepedence of Kosovo? Wondering if it's true that Serbia had its territory stolen from them, as it claims? Here is a little history lesson.

21 February 2008: How Stereotypes are Reinforced --- --

15 February 2008: Adrian Holovaty Interview --- Followup to the note about chicagocrime.org and everyblock.com: an interview on the latter's origins and future.

13 February 2008: Your Tax Dollars --- Today I took the periodic sexual harassment awareness training required of federal employees. This has been streamlined and now usually requires one to merely view a sequence of web pages. I learned many things on these pages. For example:

• "It could be sexual harassment if a person stares at your body frequently.
• It’s probably not sexual harassment if a person glances up as you walk by."

13 February 2008: Starbucks Deal Brewed with AT&T Has Hints of Apple --- In this article in Tidbits Glenn Fleishman unravels the meaning behind Starbucks' new relationship with ATT. A customer downloading a song or movie from the iTunes store while at a Starbucks may in fact be served the file locally from a server installed in the store, allowing a movie to be transferred in a few minutes rather than hours.

8 February 2008: Muslim Censorship of YouTube --- YouTube is owned by Google, which has been famously cooperative with the Chinese government in censoring its search results returned to Chinese citizens. Perhaps those experiences have taught them that they can bow to demands for political censorship without risking their market share nor the embrace of the techno-literati.

7 February 2008: In memory of chicagocrime.org --- Adrian Holovaty's influential chicagocrime.org was one of the original map mashups, combining crime data from the Chicago Police Department with Google Maps. At the time Google had not yet released the mapping API, forcing the programmers to reverse-engineer Google's obfuscated JavaScript. Eventually the site helped influence Google to make its API public, with the results that you can see everywhere today, and its slashdotting forced the development of the cache system for Django, the popular open-source web framework in which chicagocrime.org was written. All chicagocrime pages will redirect to the new EveryBlock.com, its successor and a superset. Chicagocrime.org will wind up as part of an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, called 'Design and the Elastic Mind'.

4 February 2008: HyperPort from Danny Goodman --- "As Mac OS X users know, HyperCard requires Classic Mode. But with the arrival of Leopard, Classic Mode is no more [...] If you've worried about losing data you've accumulated in HyperCard stacks [...] you can use HyperPort before you upgrade to export the data and then import it into your choice of nifty current Mac OS X applications."

31 January 2008: Precision ---

31 January 2008: Phonics and Politics --- Garrison Keillor: "There is much evidence that teaching phonics really works, especially with kids with learning disabilities, a growing constituency. But because phonics is associated with behaviorism and with conservatives, and because the Current Occupant has spoken on the subject, my fellow liberals are opposed. [...] It is morally disgusting if Democrats throw out Republican programs that are good for children."

7 November 2007: The mangrove rivulus --- It can become a hermaphrodite and produce clones of itself; it has been found living inside coconuts and in beer cans; it can breath and eliminate waste through its skin, and can do so for months inside hollow logs, a behavior that biologists unfortunately term "logpacking".

6 November 2007: Finder Bug --- Another way to lose your data in OS X, this time in the new 10.5 (Leopard) Finder (but related bugs go back perhaps to OS X 10.1). This doesn't affect me, because I've not used the Finder for years: I use the command line to manipulate files.

5 November 2007: Spotted Snakes --- An appreciative summary of some of the python goodness discovered to be an official part of OS X 10.5 (Leopard), including interfaces to Apple's specialized network services and graphics subsystem.

30 October 2007:  Highlights of the Ars Technica review of MacOS X 10.5, also called "Leopard". --- A volatile mixture of the impressive and the infuriating.

26 October 2007: Some not terrible but rather weak backup advice. --- Jamie Zawinski's strongly-worded advice about backing up your hard drive may be a useful kick in the pants for all those too-many souls who just refuse to get the message. You must back up. But the article is a little confused on the details.

19 October 2007: The Best (and Worst) of Leopard --- Matt Neuburg offers his opinions on some features of Apple's next OS X version, due to ship on October 26th, 2007.

16 October 2007: Professor Hill's Too-Clever Op-Ed --- I still don't know who was telling the truth in 1991, but after reading this I find myself leaning toward the Justice and away from the Professor.

10 October 2007: Jimmy Carter Endorses "Blood for Oil" ---

28 September 2007:  Blade Runner: The Final Cut --- Might this interview with Ridley Scott finally put to rest the tiresome debates? Wired: It was never on paper that Deckard is a replicant.
Scott: It was, actually. That's the whole point of Gaff, the guy who makes origami [...].

21 September 2007: Thanks, Ameritrade --- A guaranteed way to reduce your exposure to identity theft.

4 September 2007: The Good Shepherd --- A review

20 June 2007: How Dilbert Gets Made --- A photographic tour generously provided by Scott Adams showing how he creates his comic.

18 May 2007: Falwell --- Christopher Hitchens nails it again.

13 Mar 2007: Using mutt on OS X --- Apple's Mail.app has numerous faults and fails to scale to large mail collections. I use mutt. Here is an excellent and detailed article on how to configure and integrate it into OS X.

15 Feb 2007: Python 2.4 Decorators --- Python 2.4 has been out for a while, but I had never quite figured out one of its prominent new features, the "decorator" syntax, until I discovered this clear and carefully written tutorial by Phillip Eby from back in April 2005. Now I not only understand these fancy decorators but I realize that I want to use them.

13 Feb 2007: Apple's "Lose PDF in Web Receipts Folder" button --- I never noticed, but in recent versions of OS X there is a convenient button in the print dialog, part of the PDF drop-down menu, that offers to "Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder". It will lose your receipts if you use it regularly. This is not as dramatic as Apple's Mail.app losing mail, but it's pretty amateurish.