Timely Snow

Watching the double tragedy of hurricane Katrina unfold, it’s been eery to see how much the bumbling of the war in Iraq predicts the course of the second tragedy—the one where the U.S. government fails to meet minimum standards of competence. The same lack of communication between people on the ground and those who have centralized decision-making power, in both cases leading to needless deaths. If so, it suggests that one can predict what will happen next.

The New Yorker: Fact.

An article about the people behind my favorite travel guides, the Lonely Planet series. Worth reading if only for the sentence:
“Like Benjamin Franklin and the Norway rat, he is a citizen of the world.”

Here’s a link to Google Map of our new address. If you’ve just moved to a new location, Google Maps are a real godsend, allowing you, for example, to get a map of “grocery stores near 1041 Arlington, Ann Arbor.”

My wife is going to Bolivia for 7 weeks to study Spanish in Cochabamba

What once was home—thoughts on returning to an old place.

Starting up again in Ann Arbor

When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands buttered side down. Therefore, if a slice of toast is strapped to a cat`s back, buttered side up, and the animal is then dropped, the two opposing forces will cause it to hover, spinning inches above the ground.

Finally, the practice of programming is changing. Gartner recently caused a stir by saying there would be 235,000 fewer programmers in the US ten years from now. This would have been like predicting in the 80s, that there would be fewer typists in the US by 2004. Such a prediction would be true in one [...]

logos OPML directory

Oskar van Rijswijk has a great collection of OPML files on his site. Just browse his OPML directory in FeedDemon, then click any of the OPML links to create a new FeedDemon channel group.

Up until the words “up until the words,” this posting was generated from a program called FeedDemon, which is a [...]

There’s an online archive of movies and video that’s potentially a very interesting historical resource .

The image comes from a movie from 1951 called Beginning Responsibility: Taking Care of Things that “Instructs children how to care for toys, clothing and other property; to have a definite place to keep belongings, and how to store [...]