Musings

The WashPost reports an amazing level of efficiency by some government agencies—using a secure wiki—that allows officials to swap information and ideas—amazing because such avenues are so often closed and unavailable, sadly—and expensively!

On Sunday, the Post also had an interesting editorial evaluating positions and experience of the major presidential candidates, making a series of excellent points. The editors note:

On some issues, the three leading Democrats are almost equally disappointing.

And, regarding the Republicans:

All three have stained themselves with their expedient transformations from immigration pragmatists to vengeful hard-liners.

Yet, they add:

The first year of campaigning has been clarifying, and not all the candidates have survived with stature intact. But this isn’t a year of seven dwarfs; there are capable people on both sides.

Note: Georgia votes with so many other states on Feb Five, and advance voting began yesterday….

Posted at 6:54 PM | Comments Off on Decisions, decisions…

Big excitement in the neighborhood this afternoon: car fire. Looked like the battery went wonky.

…and we thought we smelled tires burning or tar being laid down…. Then, oops, the fire truck arrived!

But, I guess it’s not much compared to the hotel fire in Vegas….

Posted at 5:14 PM | 2 Comments »

Sorree, low light (and all that)….

Today we finally had the opportunity to watch a leetle kid spend some time with the XO, and she explored, particularly enjoying the Turtle drawing app. I have to admit that our test subject also switched back to a handy Mac laptop after a while….

Once again, great times in Lexington KY….

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

The cold’s slacked off. I swear I took this before I saw RMJ’s gorgeous pictures….

Today the gods and saints and dustmotes smiled upon me and, some lyrical writing by Virginia Heffernan in the NYTimes pointed me to the fine text-generation program Scrivener. [Download it here for a 30-day free trial. Sorry you poor PC people, this is a Mac-only program….]

For years I’ve sought to escape the tyranny of Word, just like Heffernan. JCB got me to try Pages, but two things sent me back to The Evil Microsoft Product:

• 1) I love being able to type in something simple like “sp” and have the autocorrect function do the heavy lifting of making those two simple letters into a Big Word I type perhaps too often: “sociopolitical” (and a long list of other examples—“nv” becomes Nochixtlán Valley complete with accent, and “bofm” becomes Basin of Mexico—it’s particularly useful for place names!), and
• 2) Endnote. I use this program to keep track of references and store all my notes; it easily links to PDFs, too. From special entries you make in the [Word] text, it makes a bibliography that needs highly irritating but relatively minor editing (it is annoying, but still better than other software I’ve tried) to standardize into the proper format.

Then JCB figured out some way to make Pages do the autocorrect thing and I had to rethink (again) my Endnote addiction. But I still found myself in its grip.

Now in one simple sunny Sunday I’m a Scrivener convert. It’s superior for generating text while keeping assorted supporting materials in my visual field—if I want them! After the text is generated (late this spring, I hope; keep your fingers crossed!) I anticipate returning to Word to flex Endnote’s power, and then using Word or using Pages for the final layout, but I think Scrivener helps significantly with generating the kind of document I’m working on. I love Scrivener’s interactive outline & superoutline functions, which the program calls Outliner and Corkboard. In short, the program effectively uses the power of Cocoa to display multiple editable views simultaneously.

For now, I’m going to use Scrivener on this chapter that’s been confounding me, inserting Endnote-renderable asides when necessary, and utilizing the creative support of my New Friend to avoid the straight jacket effects of the other W.

BTW…

…wasn’t that a supremely special moment last night when all the Presidential candidates were on the stage together at Saint Anselm College between the two debates, mixing and chatting (picture or NYT story); I even saw a few hugs!

Posted at 2:26 PM | Comments Off on Scrivener! Hallelujah!

A lovely bottle of bubbly we shared on Xmas Eve; hand-carried to us all by S. from Germany.

The OLPC laptops are making a (positive) difference, the WP reports; kids favor especially using the camera and video capabilities. Their story is from very rural Peru. Give one (or more) here. You can choose to get one for yourself, too!

The snooty discriminating French may bow to market pressure and expand the geographic area that can produce effervescent wines that can legally be called champagne. Well, at the earliest in 2009, and the vines won’t come on line until, um, at least 2015…leaving them plenty of time to reverse or adjust the decision….

The NYT has finally published (dated yesterday; hmm, I was too busy to read the paper and missed it then) an article that explicates the anthropologist’s analysis of Diamond’s “Collapse”—basically too much environmental determinism and an unbalanced argument about human decisions. Diamond is a geographer, and gets it a bit, well, skewed (you’ve probably gotten that from me eight or ten times; apologies for the repetition). Yes, climate change is a factor, but, the complexity of cultural evolution isn’t addressed properly in D’s volume. [Reminder to self: get that MS finished!]

Posted at 9:09 AM | 2 Comments »

Pontil (the indented base) of mold-made (modern) bottle.

Several years ago, we discovered this lovely after-dinner wine, a variety of sherry, as I understand it. The grape is called Pedro Ximénez, and is often referred to simply as PX. The wine has a rich raisin backnote and makes for some fine sipping. Especially when it’s nippy out.

Posted at 5:10 PM | Comments Off on Fluid: fortified

AP reports that this current year is likely to be the first in which US households spend more, on average, on cell phones than on land lines. [Read the story here, at Wired, or here, at CBS News.]

How much of a push have those expensive iPhones given to this statistic?

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Phone costs

SE of Woodbury GA on Cove Road is an abandoned dish installation, visible on GoogleEarth.

Note on a twisted world: I’ve seen lots of ads for batteries on TV, but I don’t ever remember seeing one for rechargeables.

Is this just “the best of” capitalism?

Speaking of the free market, look at this table of changes in food prices since November 2006. So why is dairy up so much more than even meat? I’m mystified.

Maybe it’s because the meat figures are subsumed into a category with fish and eggs? Or does it have to do with agricultural subsidies skewing things behind the scenes, as it were?

And how is it that apparel prices have dropped? Is this a China/Asia factor?

Posted at 6:36 PM | Comments Off on Market shifts?

So many topics today!

Number One has to be the machine above! Cool on every front! More later, I’m sure, as we find the time to dig around in its innards—which are quite transparent! My short take on the OLPC machine (yours for a small donation—really!) is that now I see why Bill Gates has so much money! If this is all it costs to have a machine and have software unburdened by huge royalties, then I’m more than ready to move on. This machine is not a toy, it’s a tool, more powerful than many machines, and more portable, durable, better at just about anything you can name. Record music. Do a calculation. RSS. IM/Chatting. Share composition of a document. Powerful!

And, remember, you’ve gotten 2-two-dos for Four-Twenty-Something (that is, approximately $423, or $200 for each machine, and the remainder to ship yours to you!). Get yours here!

Next: Fun Xmas Party! But private, so I’ll move on, except to say that many people examined and loved the OLPC!

Third: I have true admiration for the statistical concept of average, and the insights it can give, but these figures from the WashPost on the financials of the average household here in the US have little resemblance to that of any I know that I’m staggered. Who do I know that spends $3600 a year on furniture and household equipment? This must mean a staggering number of households are spending oh so much more than my acquaintances do! Consumer credit average: about $21,500. Whew. Don’t think that high figure represents many (any?, no I can think of two…) of our friends, but spread across the nation with an average income of a smidge over $55K, not hard to see why we’re hearing so much about the credit crunch/squeeze/Problem!

Four: Big snow in Lower Michigan. Sorry, Kids, since it’s Sunday, no Snow Day from school.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 3 Comments »

If…*

You’d think that by now biologists agree on what a gene is and have moved on.

Apparently not.

And the reason is both historical and scalar.

It’s historical in that the term was originally used in biology and genetics in a particular way that made sense at the time. Then, as research continued, scientists uncovered additional complexity in the role of genes and genetics. In addition, they began to look at genes from new scales and perspectives.

Thus, while a geneticist tends to still see genes as locatable regions of genomic sequences, those who delve into phenotypes and function tend to find that an insufficient definition. For example, DNA, that old workhorse considered the master molecule of life, is now seen to be sometimes quite passive (meaning other factors can act or dominate), and just plain multifunctional in ways that weren’t known when the locatable regions concept was developed.

If you want to read more (I’m not being sarcastic!), check out this 2007 paper by Evelyn Fox Keller and David Harel in PLoS ONE, one of the free, on-line Public Library of Science journals (hence: “PLoS”).

My take on this: see, scale makes all the difference (sorry to flog this idea, but, as I’m sure you’ve discerned, this is one of my truths).

Corollary: it may be difficult to match your language and concepts to the scale of analysis. If you’re using the words already in use, they may no longer suffice if defined in old ways. On the other hand, if you introduce new vocabulary, you may introduce layers of confusion. Still, the latter may well be the best choice.

Philosophical question: does this topic link somehow to my current “off-duty” reading that has settings in China, Tibet, and Turkey?—three different volumes….

Keller, Evelyn Fox, and David Harel (2007) Beyond the Gene. PLoS ONE 2(11): e1231. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001231 [Apologies to AFK if she’d prefer to be “Fox Keller, Evelyn”; I see both in the Google-able world.]

Sidebar: I see pink champagne, rechristened rosé champagne of course, is très chic, but I remain a prosecco gal! (Especially at those prices!)

Okay, one more. How could I not link to this, on a huge ice skating rink in Mexico City’s main plaza, created atop forty-six miles of chilling tubes, energized by ten truck-generators? Did they make the rink because the US border is harder to cross these days?—so they import the cold?

* If your eyes are sharp and your screen is good, you’ll see ice—the picture is from several years back, but right here in good ol’ ATL….

Today’s vocabulary—peripeteia

the sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances, often used referring to fictional narrative.

Posted at 7:16 PM | 1 Comment »