Bits and Pieces
jlynch | June 8, 2006After seven years of using PalmOS devices, I switched last week to a HP iPAQ hx2495 (which runs Windows Mobile 5). So I'm wondering, gentle readers, what software do you have on your Pocket PC (if you have one) that you highly recommend. I'm especially interested in high quality freeware.
jlynch | June 7, 2006Bush performs the U2 song "Sunday Bloody Sunday". Someone has waaaaay too much time on their hands. Impressive though.
jlynch | June 5, 2006Steven Colbert's commencement speech given at Knox College is here and there's partial video here.
And when you enter the workforce, you will find competition from those crossing our all-too-porous borders. Now I know you're all going to say, "Stephen, Stephen, immigrants built America." Yes, but here's the thing--it's built now. I think it was finished in the mid-70s sometime. At this point it's a touch-up and repair job. But thankfully Congress is acting and soon English will be the official language of America. Because if we surrender the national anthem to Spanish, the next thing you know…
jlynch | June 3, 2006I've been a bit quiet over the past few days - primarily due to a writing deadline that I need to hit. (Who says academics have the summer off!) While today would look like an ideal day to get some blogging done, instead I'm just going to kick back and celebrate my birthday with family.
And as in inverse birthday gift, I give you this poem by the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney. It's called "Strange Fruit" and is one of a series of poems that Heaney has written about bog bodies, corpses mummified in peaty soil.
Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune…
jlynch | June 1, 2006As I expected, Ed comments on the Washington online poker law that I posted on yesterday, and raises an interesting point:
[H]ow are they going to know who's gambling without tracking all of their activity online? Money transfers to the gambling sites are all handled by offshore operations like Firepay and Neteller and those transactions are not traceable by the government (they can track your money going to the pay service, but not where it goes from there, and those services can also be used for lots of perfectly legal money transfers). The only way they can know is to violate our privacy…
jlynch | May 31, 2006Slashdot reports, that the Seattle PI reports, that:
Beginning next month [June 7th], Washington residents who play poker or make other types of wagers on the Internet will be committing a Class C felony, equivalent under the law to possessing child pornography, threatening the governor or torturing an animal. Although the head of the state Gambling Commission says it is unlikely that individual online gamblers will be targeted for arrest, the new law carries stiff penalties: as much as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.'
So, poker is equivalent to "child pornography, threatening the…
jlynch | May 28, 2006Last night I watched Richard Linklater's movie Waking Life (2001). Overall, I wasn't terribly impressed, especially when it featured a chemist (Eamonn F. Healy of St Edwards University) spouting on about evolution. This piece, by Robert Solomon (Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin), on the other hand, struck me as offering a good statement for the relevence of existentialism.
The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century. I'm afraid we're losing the…
jlynch | May 27, 2006PZ and Grrrlscientist are doing it, so why not. If you compare our graphs, you can detect the elements we all share due to Sb's site design.
[Websites as Graphics]
jlynch | May 26, 2006About twenty-five years ago, I read Gerald Durrell's book My Family and Other Animals (1957), an account of his early life in Corfu. One part made a distinct impression on me - his account of watching geckos on the walls of his house. To me, as a teenager in Ireland, this was the height of the exotic, after all Ireland has only one type of native reptile, the Common Lizard, Lacerta vivipara, and I had only seen one on a single occasion (slow worms, Anguis fragilis, are a recent localized introduction). To the twelve-year old me (in wet, cloudy, overcast Ireland), Durrell's experience of sun…
jlynch | May 23, 2006In twelve days, I turn 38 - something I'm happy about considering I had a heart attack at the age of thirty two. As of today, my age is apparently equivalent of a dog that is ~5.428 years old and I am thus still chasing cats. Such is life.
jlynch | May 23, 2006Lloyd Bentsen died today at the age of 85. You will remember that Bentsen, while running as Democratic VP candidate, countered Dan "Potatoe" Quayle's self-comparison to John F. Kennedy with, "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" (link).
jlynch | May 22, 2006OK, I'm going to get grouchy here, but ...
I don't understand the fuss about Barbaro, the horse that broke a leg at the Preakness on Saturday. His survival chances after surgery are the third story on Yahoo News, and ESPN this afternoon were acting like they wer reporting surgery on a President or somesuch.
(As an aside, I also heard a dumb thing being said by an ESPN reporter. Apparently, because the lower limbs of horses have no muscles, the limbs are unable to pump blood back to the heart. Someone needs to take intro biology again, methinks)
People are turning up holding vigils. Vets are…
jlynch | May 18, 2006In today's New York Times, A.O. Scott has a wonderful review of The Da Vinci Code which is described as "Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence". The review features a number of observations that you don't read every day, for example "movies ... rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Jesus or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema such matters are best left to Monty Python."
In short, the movie gets panned. Not surprising really. I thought the book was overated, pseudo-historical, chewing gum for the brain.
jlynch | May 14, 2006I've been away for a while, visiting friends in San Diego and wont be back in circulation in meatspace for a few days. However, I hope to resume regular blogging in a day or two. In the meantime, you could do worse than checkout Jason Rosenhouse's blog EvolutionBlog which has joined us here at ScienceBlogs. Jason's a mathematician, but we don't hold that against him :)
jlynch | May 5, 2006Caught "Jazz at Lincoln Center Presents: Music of Miles Davis" last night at the Mesa Center for the Performing Arts. Great show, with Eddie Henderson (trumpet/leader), Jimmy Cobb (drums), Wayne Escoffery (tenor saxophone), Dave Kikoski (piano), Edward Howard (bass), and Steve Wilson (alto sax), featuring such Davis classics as "So What", "On Green Dolphin Street", "Someday My Prince Will Come" and "'Round Midnight." All very laid back and a great way to end a semester. Jimmy Cobb was the drummer for the Kind of Blue sessions (1959) and at 76 is the only surviving member of the band, so that…
jlynch | May 1, 2006This more or less encapsulates everything that is wrong with this country. Not only the sheer mind-numbing vapidity of the family, but the fact that this is seen as "news". Argh!
jlynch | April 29, 2006One last poem for National Poetry Month. I had a number to possible poems that I was considering, but in the end settled with Donagh MacDonagh's "Dublin Made Me" - I have a love-hate relationship with Dublin in that I loved what it was when I was growing up there and hate what it has become (a generic European city). MacDonagh expressed the arrogance of city-boys like me.
Dublin made me and no little town
With the country closing in on its streets
The cattle walking proudly on its pavements
The jobbers, the gombeenmen and the cheats
Devouring the fair-day between them
A public-house to half…