Bruce Ralston provides some perspectives on the military nominees on the CBC's Greatest Canadians popularity poll (any bets that Pierre Trudeau won't make the top of the list?). Given how badly Canadian history is taught in most public schools nowadays, it'd be risky to bet on anyone who hasn't appeared in the Toronto Star in the last ten years getting much support...
A real world view of playing with fire, uh, I mean XML. If those three letters mean nothing to you, the article would also be less than illuminating.
This is very amusing. If you don't know Firefly, it won't make much sense. You've been warned.
Dagger Six: *heavy gunfire sounds in the background* Angels, we got some local color happening, a grand entrance would not go amiss!
Static: Dagger six, Angels three-six, roger.
Dragon Lady: How is he able to quote a tv show while being shot at?
Jackal: Shit just gets in your head and stays there.
I've recently started a small wine cellar, and I've also started keeping records of the wines we drink. Being a bit of a geek, I had to put it all into a database (but I'm only somewhat geeky, so it's not available online). So much, I can hear you thinking, for the romance and mystique of oeneology, eh? Yeah, well, I'd like to spend my wine-drinking budget on good stuff that's worth drinking, and avoid buying poor quality vinegar. My memory is not what it should be for this sort of detail, so putting the information into a database made some sense (if only to me).
As I've been typing information into the database, I'm trying to include information from reviews . . . which means I need to de-jargonize the high-falutin' nonsense that wine reviewers publish. I've also discovered that no matter how many awards a particular wine may have won, I'm often left wondering if the judges were drinking the same thing that I was when I get around to trying it. Even reviewers with whom I seem to have a certain compatibility of taste sometimes leave me scratching my head.
Billy Munnelly, for example, is the opposite of a wine snob. He's a determined wine popularizer and evangelist (oengelist? vinvangelist? vinularizer?), who publishes a bi-monthly newsletter (Billy's Best Bottles) and an annual book on good, inexpensive wines available in Canada. I've found his recommendations to be very helpful, although he's much more fond of "fresh" and "lively" wines than I am (see his site, or his book, for his definitions of those terms).
Vines magazine, I've found, isn't particularly useful to me, in that several wines they've lauded to the skies were pedestrian or worse in my glass. No fault of theirs: my tastes are highly idiosyncratic, but it's good to know how similar a particular reviewer's tastes are to yours in order to give proper weighting to any published review.
In keeping track of the wines, I'm also trying to come up with some sort of simple numerical rating system with an idea of using the price and rating to come up with some rough number indicating the "quality:price ratio" of any given pair of wines. If a wine that I'd rate an 8 out of 10 costs $15.95, is it better (for certain metaphysical meanings of the word "better") than a wine rated as a 9 but costing $24.95? In general, the more expensive the wine, the less chance it'll ever be found in my basement, but I do recognize that a typical $15 bottle of wine will taste better than a typical $8 bottle of wine. The increase in quality isn't linear, by any stretch of the imagination, and (worse) varies from year to year.
Steve H. is a Miami lawyer with a blog. Yes, that must already be two-and-a-half strikes against him without even trying. In spite of that, he's one of the funniest commentators in the blogosphere and this entry is both brilliant and amusing.
When confronted with a moral problem, nine out of ten people will look around to see what nine out of ten people are doing, and they will follow suit without further deliberation. It's amazing how powerful the herd instinct is, in creatures as intelligent as human beings.[. . .]
The herd instinct helps frat pledges discard their common sense and self-respect, and it's also what drives frat brothers and prison guards to perform acts of sexual sadism. For that matter, it explains how Hitler got the Germans and Poles and other Europeans to load Jews into cattle cars and send them to the gas chambers.
I have always had problems with the herd instinct. I am not a joiner. I don't like discarding my own judgment when someone less intelligent than I tells me to do something I think is wrong or stupid. To a certain extent, that makes me defective, and in other ways, it's a virtue. On the whole, I'm glad.
The Times reports a concern that a new battlefield centre at Waterloo will further obscure the fact that Napoleon lost that particular battle.
This story has fascinating overtones (and undertones). Lieutenant Chontosh is a brave man. This he has proven. Lieutenant Chontosh is also a fantastically lucky man, which is proven by the fact that he survived his exploit.
I'd be willing to take bets on what most of his men were thinking while he was conducting his highly unconventional flank assault. . .starting with something like "What the F*** is the friggin' LT doing?" and ending somewhere in the general region of "F***. He survived? F***. How'd he manage that?"
Bravery on the field of battle is an amazing thing, but it also draws all sorts of unwelcome attention from certain quarters — usually the ones opposite you looking down their battlesights in your general direction. A genuine hero is wonderful — as long as he's not sharing your particular two-man trench.
Update: link corrected.
In his New York Post opinion piece, Ralph Peters points out that most of the Arab nations critical of the US handling of the Abu Ghraib situation have much worse records of justice.
As an American, I want my country to be held to higher standards — we can live up to them. Proudly. But we don't need any more hypocritical charges from states with no standards at all. [. . .]
All those who opposed the removal of Saddam, from the BBC to Egyptian state television to The New York Times, act as though the events in Abu Ghraib prove that they were right all along.
No. They weren't right. And no amount of disingenuous "reporting" or feigned shock on the part of newsreaders can change the fact that America behaved nobly and bravely in Iraq — or that we continue to struggle to do the right thing, if sometimes ineptly.
I forgot to add this yesterday when I had the article called to my attention: L. Neil Smith, SF author and Libertarian radical, on the practicalities of carrying a concealed weapon. Not something I've ever needed to do, but interesting as a purely theoretical topic.
Reason contributing editor Cathy Young on the ongoing Abu Ghraib scandal.
Dong Resin, who emits quotable material at a fairly high rate, is back online at his blog. Much of his writing is scatologically enhanced, so if this bothers you, don't go there. So to speak.
Sample screediness:
Blogs, cds, laptop computers — I see them all in terms of what it was like before I could do what they let me do — namely, kill large swaths of my life dead without even noticing until I see all the dandruff on my keyboard and inhale deeply enough to be upset by my own stink.
Visitors since 17 August, 2004