May 2009
24 posts
5 tags
Thoughts on Google Wave
Google announced a new collaboration/communication product/platform/protocol called Google Wave on Tuesday. It’s only available to developers as a preview right now, but some more information, place to sign up for beta-testing when it becomes available, and a video from the conference session are available here.
Reactions have ranged from great excitement, to some level of skepticism to some...
The National | All your bases belong to US →
To meet their obligations to the United States, the British needed to remove the natives without appearing to violate the rights of colonised people enshrined in international law. The solution was a breathtakingly cynical act of bad faith. As a UK Foreign Office legal adviser described in an internal memo, all the British had to do was “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos are not...
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Obama is Ahead of the Dalai Lama →
From the NYT article discussing the poll:
About 80 percent of people in France, Germany, Italy and Spain have a positive view of Mr. Obama, a ratio that declines only slightly, to about 70 percent, in the other two countries surveyed, Britain and the United States. The only politician who comes close is Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who gets a positive rating from two-thirds of those in...
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My Heretofore Implicit Thoughts on Meat Eating
I don’t eat a lot of meat—maybe once or twice a week. It has been a semi-deliberate change over a long time, but I never fully thought through my entire justification for it. (I used to cite my unpleasant experience of driving through a gigantic industrial ranch in Kettleman City, California, off I-5 as one of the key reasons.) Now I can rely on someone else who has put in the time to write down...
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Presidential Proclamation of World Trade Week 2009 →
I meant to link to this last week. Last week (May 17 – May 23, 2009) was World Trade Week. A notable part of the proclamation:
Imports can also benefit the United States by increasing consumer choice while lowering prices for millions of working families. In addition, imports can support employment for retailers, distributors, the transportation sector, and domestic manufacturers which rely on...
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Pizza Links
We make pizzas at home regularly now—having a Kitchen Aid mixer certainly facilitates all things baking. Two links, for your and our enjoyment:
Guide to Making Inexpensive and Delicious Homemade Pizza
New York Times Healthy Pizza Recipe
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WatchHow an artist can make use of a tiny little digital canvass is truly amazing. This is the story behind this week’s cover of the New Yorker.
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Civic Duty Follows Me across State Lines
I served on a jury for a criminal trial once in San Francisco. The trial was about three days and deliberations took more than one day. I was subsequently summoned again within less than a year after that, so I got out of that obligation. Some time shortly before moving to Colorado, I was summoned again and had to report. This time I got out of the trial during the voire dire process. Under a...
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Love and Logic at Work
Susanne and I started using Love and Logic philosophy for our parenting. One of its main components is giving babies/kids choices to empower them. At 9-month old, Xander doesn’t get too many meaningful choices. At bath time, I usually offer him his rubber duck ducky (which has been his trusted friend in the bathtub for many weeks). I began offering the ducky along with a rubber elephant (which can...
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Did you know that blueberries aren’t purple...
I’ve never cut open blueberries until yesterday. I always just pop them whole into my mouth, or get blueberry yogurt/kefir/etc, which are blended to the light purple color. To feed Xander half pieces of blueberries, I sliced them open. To my great surprise, they were light green, with some tiny seeds inside.
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“That’s lovely!”
That has recently become one of my most oft-used phrase during meal times. The proper intonation for usage has to be dripping with sarcasm, as in, “that’s lovvvvelyyyy!” Some examples:
Oh, are you stroking your hair with your blueberry oatmeal covered fingers? That’s lovely.
Oh, you’re squishing grains of rice on to your forearm. That’s lovely.
Are you flapping your arms when your hands are...
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Official Google Research Blog: The bar-bet... →
This is really interesting. A piece of evidence that the iPhone is changing people’s behavior.
This user-variability for conventional mobile web search is much lower than for computer-based search, confirming the hypothesis that mobile web users query over a much less diverse set of topics. The surprising news is that iPhone users, on the other hand, had a higher variability than computer based...
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A Long Waiting List for the IPE Course
I just checked the enrollment for the international political economy (IPE) course I will be teaching in the fall. The enrollment limit is 40. There are 40 students enrolled and 17 students on the waiting list. I doubt that it’s my reputation that has resulted in the long waiting list.
The Unbundling of Qwest-DirecTV
We cancelled our TV service through DirecTV at the end of March. The termination was to be effective on April 11 and the TV actually went blank on the 14th. The “retention service” people called me when I canceled the service to coax me into not closing the account. I was driving at the time and relented to putting my account on hold for six months instead of fully closing the account.
Life has...
H&R Block’s 2009 Withholding Calculator →
A while back, I tried to revise our W-4s and found myself to be completely incompetent to do so. Sometime thereafter, I found H&R Block’s withholding calculator, and I just got around to plugging in the numbers. The calculator form was very easy to follow, mostly requiring me only to simply copy numbers from our latest pay stubs. I can now fill out our W-4s and increase our take-home pays!
