Archive for the 'General' Category

Due diligence

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

This is very interesting (thanks to Simon Elegant) from a report on cleaning up China’s air:
One of the most surprising findings was that “the kinds of technology
currently being adopted in China are not cheap. They’re not buying
junk, and in some cases the plants are employing state-of-the-art
technology.”
The findings suggest that emissions levels from Chinese
powerplants, he said, [...]

Sarah Palin on education

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

On the one hand, I’m really glad no one is transcribing what I say. On the other hand, I have no idea what this means:
You mentioned education and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is [...]

Candy and babies

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

It’s hard to imagine 13,000 hospitalized babies due to the milk contamination scandal in China.
And even “big white rabbit” candy, which I’ve been eating since my first trip to China in 1983, has melamine.

Adobe Soundbooth

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Tomorrow Adobe will announce the next version of their video processing software (CS4, if you’re keeping score at home). It’s supposed to include AVCHD support (hurray!) and include Adobe Soundbooth, which will provide automatic speech to text conversion (hip-hip-hurray!). I just downloaded the Soundbooth beta and may play with it tonight to see if it [...]

Still not in my price range, but definitely getting closer…

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Nvidia to Offer Its Chips in the New Cray Desktop - GigaOM

Google Audio Indexing

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Now just for political video, but I’m glad to see that this is in development.

Now we’ll see how RAID works…

Monday, September 15th, 2008

My Buffalo Terastation network attached drive seems to have a broken drive. I’ve ordered a new one (or as close to the original as you can now get), and I guess I’ll have a chance to find if RAID 5 is all it’s cracked up to be.
I’d already been considering getting a DROBO, which [...]

A disappearing number

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Last night I saw a very interesting play, “A disappearing number” by a theatre (they’re British) group called Complicite. It was loosely about the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy, along with another story about the star-crossed relationship between a British mathematician named Ruth and her mathematically illiterate Indian American businessman husband. It [...]

In principle, yes…

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

from Language Log:
Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev won a luxury car at the All-Union Championship in Moscow?
Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all it was not Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev, but Vassili Vassilievich Vassiliev; second, it was not at the [...]

They don’t miss a trick

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

This would have been appealing as we waited to be screened in Berlin…
I think the Obama campaign could appropriate the University of Illinois’ slogan, “Always Thinking,” which apparently they no longer use…