Cox Crow

Your capital goes home at night and looks for another job because it is no fun to be a cog in the machine.

My Summer project, to finish all of the books I’ve started, is proceeding apace — a good thing now that it’s Fall — and I’ve just finished Guns, Germs, and Steel. In the chapter “Blueprints and Borrowed Letters,” Jared Diamond discusses first the area in which writing arose by independent invention, and then those in which it was adopted by duplication or memetic transfer. Or, as he puts it, by blueprint or idea transfer. While I find all languages interesting, it is most amazing the differences in approach by those who were inspired by the mere idea, particularly Cherokee and Hangul (한글).

As the story goes, Sequoyah and Sejong brilliantly leaped thousands of years of linguistic evolution.

Speaking of lessons to learn, sometimes those lessons don’t trickle down to the ignorant folks talking to the customers. And thus we get this cartoon from Rhymes with Orange.

How is it that Matt McNamara, the teenage twerp son in Nip/Tuck, lives in Miami, and yet somehow avoids getting a tan?

In the wake of the response to the past two natural disasters, I’ve heard a lot about “lessons learned.” I would like to point out that the simple recording of lessons to be learned does not mean that you have yet learned them.

We won’t know that until you stop making the same mistakes twice.

Why do people reflexively suggest traffic lights or curve straightening for traffic problems? Why don’t they define the problem well before proposing solutions?

There was a crash at a 90-degree turn at the intersection of NYS Route 311 and 164 in the town of Patterson. I’ve almost hit other cars there. What causes the accidents is that the turn is approached at too high a velocity for the turn. The curve is further constrained by rock and earth on both sides. There is nowhere to go if an oncoming driver enters your lane. The solution is to widen the road, right? To straighten the road to improve the sight lines? To add more warning signs?

How about putting in rumble strips to slow the vehicles, thus enabling the drivers to maintain control — and stay in their lanes — as they go through the turn.

I read The Quiltmaker’s Gift to the girls last night. It’s a good story, and beautifully illustrated. There’s an accompanying website to illustrate the link between quilting and generousity.

“Our new logo is one of the most articulate symbols of the new Quark, and I feel proud to have led the team that worked on it,” said Susan Friedman, senior vice president of strategic relations at Quark.

That’s really sad. You couldn’t find anything to articulate, could you?

Dear WordPress Authors, in particular the author of the routines to invalidate my input. Stop multilating what I write. A blockquote element MAY be nested within another block-level element. Stop it!

Is humor allowed in patent filings? Apple’s latest, for a camera integrated into a laptop casing, notes

For example, although the locking mechanism was described as including both a hidden locking feature (hook) and an exposed locking feature (plunger), it should be noted that in some cases the plunger may be hidden. As should be appreciated, plungers may be unsightly and potentially dangerous. A protruding plunger may result in the plunger being accidentally sheared off when it comes into contact with some other object. Also, if the plunger is accidentally slammed on a finger, or if the plunger hooks on clothing, it can cause injury or damage, leaving a negative impression on the user.

In 1996, I was asked what the next big thing would be. For some reason I was thought knowledgeable about these things.

I said, “Directories.”

I’m seeing some novelty in the spam hitting my journal today. They exploit flaws in web applications produced by Major Corporations to insert HTML bits into those resources. To increase their page rank, probably, but the technique is somewhat interesting: using percent-encoded HTML within the href. This HTML is then passed in the query string portion of the URI. The applications do not validate user input, and allow the markup in the URI to bleed onto the page, to close an attribute or an element, and otherwise modify the text on the page.

I’ve noticed a pattern in gasoline prices since I started driving in 1990. Prices remain steady for a while, then they go up. They remain at that higher price for a short period of time, and then fall a bit. But never back to the price from which they were increased.

To take a recent example, before Katrina hit, prices down the street were around $2.799 per gallon. After Katrina, the prices jumped to $3.499 per gallon. Yesterday they fell to $3.199 per gallon. Buyers are relieved that prices went back down, and will accept this as the new norm.

It will be.

I have some statistical questions. Perhaps some freakonomicist would deign to answer them.

It is often asserted that teachers and college professors are more liberal than the general population. Perhaps nationally, but are they locally? I personally know teachers who are That is, does the distribution of college professors on the political spectrum reflect the distribution of the colleges themselves? Colleges tend to concentrate where the population does. For example, California (343) and New York (286) have a tremendous concentration of colleges compared to Alabama (71), and more than double that of Virginia (106). One would expect that teachers in a given area would tend to reflect the attitudes of those in that area: Do they?

This afternoon, during an earnest discussion with Larry Staton about school vouchers, I supposed that teacher salaries in New York City are higher than those in the metropolitan suburbs because of certain risks that those teachers assume. Is this so? A similar question may be asked of firefighters and police officers.

If you’re looking for a game of Texas Hold’em, or any other variation of poker, go off-line, you idiot. Poker is a game of human interaction.

Now listening to the John Roberts Confirmation Hearings on WNYC-AM. Very interesting. You could also watch the hearings on C-SPAN, but you’ll need RealPlayer or Windows Media Player.

The New York Times, as the paper of record, has complete transcripts.

The Little Sister turned three today. Over the weekend we celebrated her little life with a trip to the City on Saturday, and a long lunch al fresco with the family on Sunday. The trip was somewhat eventful, but all-in-all a normal weekend in New York City.

We took the train in, arriving at Grand Central Terminal, then walked up the escalators, through the Pan Am Building, across 45th Street, and under the Helmsley Building. As we emerged on Park Avenue, we saw what looked like preparations for a parade on Fifth Avenue, so we wandered over that way.

Whatever parade it was hadn’t started yet, so we walked on up Fifth. The Little Sister hadn’t seen St. Patrick’s Cathedral, so in we went. Edward Cardinal Egan stopped on his way out to view the parade to say that our daughters are beautiful. We already know this, but he appeared delighted to see two such lovely young ladies. I suppose that’s what happens when one wears a spinny dress.

We left the cathedral and walked uptown. Of course, we had to stop in the World of Disney store because, well, it was there. On our way out, we saw the parade passing, and walked uptown with it. The Plaza is undergoing renovations, so we went straight to F. A. O. Schwartz, where we danced on the Big Piano and found that it was Raggedy Ann and Andy‘s 90th birthday — so the girls had their picture taken with them.

And then we were off through Central Park to 7th Avenue and a brisk walk downtown to the Lunt-Fontanne Theater for Beauty and the Beast.

After the show a strap broke on the Big Sister’s sandle, so we were back over to Fifth to look for shoes, then to 8th for dinner at Ciro’s. And then home.

It was a great day.

I heard an extraordinary story on All Things Considered this evening: a timeline of the events before and after the arrival of Katrina. They ask, what went wrong?, and illustrate what happens when the best laid plans of mice and men run afoul of the Elements.

The plan is the first casualty.

Jon Udell brings up the problem of redirecting RSS URIs again. The problem is the same as for any other URI, as is the solution. What complicates the solution is that some folks don’t have control over their hosted namespace, or wouldn”t know what to do if they did.

I can’t fix the former — except for in my particular domain — but I can help alleviate the latter. Thus, this redirection refresher course to instruct the general public in causing HTTP redirects with various, well-supported scripting languages, in the event that they may not modify the web server configuration.

With regard to RSS, Roger Benningfield notes a feature of Atom that echoes my proposal from way back when.