Posted by mark.
Sep
24
Posted by mark.
I think free speech is the greatest thing about the USA. It’s what makes this country a true democracy and it’s the benchmark of any country claiming that they are a democracy. Holding free and fair elections is only part of being a democracy. The other part is free speech and freedom of information.
So it’s really cool to see Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia University – and it’s even cooler to see Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, exercising his own right to …
Sep
24
Posted by mark.
From my (non-red-headed) brother:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22289183-2,00.html?from=public_rss
REDHEADS are becoming rarer and could be extinct in 100 years, according to genetic scientists.
The current National Geographic magazine reports that less than two per cent of the world’s population has natural red hair, created by a mutation in northern Europe thousands of years ago.
Global intermingling, which broadens the availability of possible partners, has reduced the chances of redheads meeting and producing little redheads of their own.
It takes only one red-haired parent to produce ginger-headed babies, …
Sep
24
Posted by mark.
I have this little 64 bit dual core opteron that I’m busy torturing with way more traffic than it’s creators intended. I sometimes edit code on my live servers – only when I’m sure it’s not going to break anything and only when I’m wide-awake and fully caffeinated. Today I tried to edit a file on a live box. In the time that it took ViM to delete the file and rewrite it to disk during the save operation (about …
Sep
23
Sep
23
Posted by mark.
Here’s a new way of looking at the world. It’s called a Dymaxion Map or Fuller Projection, invented by Buckminster Fuller in 1946. This particular views shows all our land masses connected – it makes the world look as small as it’s becoming.
Sep
22
Posted by mark.
“Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.” – Drew Carey
Sep
21
Posted by mark.
While Googling a quote from Aldus Huxley, I came across this article announcing a new painkiller called Soma. I noticed the date was 1959. It seems Time Mag has put their entire archive online dating back to 1929. How totally cool. Their search UI is horribly buggy, but I managed to dredge up this interesting pre-McCarthy tidbit titled Rough on Russians.
Sep
21
Posted by mark.
The biggest freshwater fish caught by a woman record in the UK has been smashed. This old man was safely released after having his weight verified by the lake bailiff.
Details on “A Welsh View”.
Sep
19
Posted by mark.
I rode my bike down to this little singletrack that leads to Issaquah creek mouth today on South Lake Sammamish and it’s nuts down there right now. The Muckleshoot tribe is doing their yearly salmon harvest. The whole south of Lake Sammamish is covered in gill nets they’re using to harvest the salmon – courtesy of the 1974 Boldt decision which gives them rights to half the salmon catch every year.
I chatted to one of the tribe members and they’re …
Sep
6