The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear - NYTimes.com
The café operates on the honour system: Grab what you want, drop your money into an old streetcar fare box next to the doughnut counter and waltz out.
At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.
Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com
… the result will be an open culture of trust which gives scientists a real incentive to outsource problems, and contribute in areas where they have a great comparative advantage.
Patrick Watson
Reading up on the upcoming Polaris Music Prize reminded me of Patrick Watson, last year’s winner of the prize. His “Close to Paradise” album is inventive with intriguing lyrics, unique sounds, and an often driving piano track. Particular stand out tracks are Luscious Life, Drifters, and The Great Escape. The album is well worth considering and I’m looking forward to listening to the short-listed artists for this year’s prize.
At one moment the patient experiences a painful phantom limb; at another he sees a mirror image of his intact hand and the pain disappears
How the Mind Works: Revelations - The New York Review of Books
Toronto, in my opinion, is uniquely a city of neighbourhoods, and the most important person in my job is the neighbourhood cop.
Stop the presses! Crime rates are falling
A typically clear analysis from Jeffrey Simpson on the divergence between the actual rate of crime and the attention devoted to crime by the media. Statistically, Canada has never been safer – particularly in Ontario.
It is one of Canada’s pathetic ironies that the two provincial premiers least concerned about greenhouse gas emissions govern the provinces most at risk from climate change.
One might suppose that such a recurrent chain of blunders would gall a politically potent segment of the population. That it has evidently failed to do so in 2008 may be the only important unreported fact of this otherwise compulsively documented election season.
Stoooopid …. why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks
I think this is a legitimate problem. How do we teach children to focus? I’m sure my abilities are waning.
globeandmail.com: New law puts green screen on government decisions
My new favourite photo of the kids
Fantastic tool for keeping track of content to read. Especially with the offline access from the Apple App Store application.
Kelly and I are very happy to announce the arrival of Owen Bruce Routley. He arrived Tuesday morning just after four weighing a solid 8lbs 8ozs.
Although there were some challenges with the delivery, both Owen and Kelly are recovering well and should be home later this week.
Stuck in the middle
A recent press release from the federal government entitled “Making a Strong Canadian Economy Even Stronger” contains a sentence that struck me as odd.
As a result of actions taken in Budget 2007, Canada’s marginal effective tax rate (METR) on new business investment improved from third-highest in the G7 to third-lowest by 2011.
Fair enough, tax rates are projected to decline. But notice how they phrase the context of this reduction. Moving from third highest to third lowest is, in a list of seven countries, a change from third to fifth. Not a dramatic change – we were near the middle and we still are.
Creationists and their old tricks
TVO’s The Agenda had an interesting show on the debate between evolutionary biology and creationism. Jerry Coyne provided a great overview of evolution and a good defence during the debate.
The debate offered a great illustration of the intellectual vacuity that characterises creationism (aka intelligent design). Paul Nelson offers up an article by Doolittle and Bapteste as proof that Darwinism is unravelling. I suspect he hopes no one will read past the abstract to discover the reasonable debate scientists are having about the universality of a single tree of life. He certainly doesn’t want you to notice that the entire article is couched within evolutionary theory and not once does it claim that Darwinism has been falsified.
Here’s the hypothesis that Doolittle and Bapteste are evaluating:
“that there should be a universal TOL [tree of life], dichotomously branching all of the way down to a single root.” p2045
They then establish that gene transfer often occurs between lineages, particularly among prokaryotes, and consequently this universal tree of life does not exist. Certainly this complicates the construction of molecular trees and shows the importance for pluralism of mechanism in biology. But they write much more about the overall significance of this work.
“To be sure, much of evolution has been tree-like and is captured in hierarchical classifications.” p2048
“…it would be perverse to claim that Darwin’s TOL hypothesis has been falsified for animals (the taxon to which he primarily addressed himself) or that it is not an appropriate model for many taxa at many levels of analysis” p2048
And the crucial quote in this context:
“Holding onto this ladder of pattern […] should not be an essential element in our struggle against those who doubt the validity of evolutionary theory, who can take comfort from this challenge to the TOL only by a willful misunderstanding of its import.” p2048
Stikkit from the command line
Note – This post has been updated from 2007-03-20 to describe new installation instructions.
Overview
I’ve integrated Stikkit into most of my workflow and am quite happy with the results. However, one missing piece is quick access to Stikkit from the command line. In particular, a quick list of my undone todos is quite useful without having to load up a web browser. To this end, I’ve written a Ruby script for interacting with Stikkit. As I mentioned, my real interest is in listing undone todos. But I decided to make the script more general, so you can ask for specific types of stikkits and restrict the stikkits with specific parameters. Also, since the stikkit api is so easy to use, I added in a method for creating new stikkits.
Usage
The general use of the script is to list stikkits of a particular type, filtered by a parameter. For example,
ruby stikkit.rb --list calendar dates=todaywill show all of today’s calendar events. While,
ruby stikkit.rb -l todos done=0lists all undone todos. The use of -l instead of --list is simply a standard convenience. Furthermore, since this last example comprises almost all of my use for this script, I added a convenience method to get all undone todos
ruby stikkit.rb -tA good way to understand stikkit types and parameters is to keep an eye on the url while you interact with Stikkit in your browser.
To create a new stikkit, use the --create flag,
ruby stikkit.rb -c 'Remember me.'The text you pass to stikkit.rb will be processed as usual by Stikkit.
Installation
Grab the script from the Google Code project and put it somewhere convenient. Making the file executable and adding it to your path will cut down on the typing. The script reads from a .stikkit file in your path that contains your username and password. Modify this template and save it as ~/.sikkit
---
username: me@domain.org
password: superSecret
The script also requires the atom gem, which you can grab with
gem install atomI’ve tried to include some flexibility in the processing of stikkits. So, if you don’t like using atom, you can switch to a different format provided by Stikkit. The text type requires no gems, but makes picking out pieces of the stikkits challenging.
Feedback
This script serves me well, but I’m interested in making it more useful. Feel free to pass along any comments or feature requests.
Yahoo Pipes and the Globe and Mail
Most of my updates arrive through feeds to NetNewsWire. Since my main source of national news and analysis is the Globe and Mail, I’m quite happy that they provide many feeds for accessing their content. The problem is that many news stories are duplicated across these feeds. Furthermore, tracking all of the feeds of interest is challenging.
The new Yahoo Pipes offer a solution to these problems. Without providing too much detail, pipes are a way to filter, connect, and generally mash-up the web with a straightforward interface. I’ve used this service to collect all of the Globe and Mail feeds of interest, filter out the duplicates, and produce a feed I can subscribe to. Nothing fancy, but quite useful. The pipe is publicly available and if you don’t agree with my choice of news feeds, you are free to clone mine and create your own. There are plenty of other pipes available, so take a look to see if anything looks useful to you. Even better, create your own.
If you really want those details, Tim O'Reilly has plenty.
Stikkit Todos in GMail
I find it useful to have a list of my unfinished tasks generally, but subtley, available. To this end, I’ve added my unfinished todos from Stikkit to my Gmail web clips. These are the small snippets of text that appear just above the message list in GMail.
All you need is the subscribe link from your todo page with the ‘not done’ button toggled. The url should look something like:
http://stikkit.com/todos.atom?api_key={}&done=0
Paste this into the 'Search by topic or URL:’ box of Web Clips tab in GMail settings.