Author: geoff

P.Z. puts things in perspective

Here’s a wonderful rant by Pharyngula:

You don’t find that much arrogance in science. If you want arrogance, you need to go to those uninformed, lying christianists who pronounce doom and destruction and declare who is evil and who is going to hell and whose country must be destroyed and its inhabitants converted to the One True Faith. When I hear people declare that Dawkins is the arrogant one, while they are surrounded by Robertsons and Coulters and Dobsons, I give up on them. They’ve just admitted that they lack any sensible perspective on the world.

Sun alumni blog aggregation

A couple of weeks ago I asked what Jonathan meant by “Sun is going to encourage all the laid off workers to continue to blog — on Sun’s dime”. What’s emerged is actually more useful than blog hosting: after all, it’s easy to find a free hosting service out there.* Instead, Sun is launching a blog aggregation page for Sun alumni, at community.sun.com. So if you’re an ex-Sun blogger, just head over there, click the Register link, and fill in the form. Once we’ve populated it with some content (other than me!), Sun and ex-Sun folks will be able to use this page to find out what their former colleagues are up to.
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* Try http://wordpress.org, http://www.blogger.com/, or http://www.bloggoing.com/

Americans in Paris, 1860-1900

This evening we went to the members’ preview for the new exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts: Americans in Paris, 1860-1900. It’s a delightful collection, showing how a diverse group of American artists journeyed to Paris, absorbed (or occasionally rejected) the artistic revolutions that marked the second half of the 19th century, and returned home to create a distinctively American style. For a dramatic example of the process, check out the way that John Singer Sargent’s seascapes were transformed between 1861 and 1865 from obsessive Realism to near-abstract and then proto-impressionism.
All of the usual suspects are here, including Mary Cassat and Winslow Homer. They’ve even managed to persuade the Musée d’Orsay to let them have Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother.
My personal favourite item in the exhibition is by an artist with whom I was unfamiliar: Cecilia Beaux. Her Ernesta (Child with Nurse) is wonderful: the energy and curiosity of the child is almost palpable.
Cecilia Beaux: Ernesta (Child with Nurse)
The show opens the day after tomorrow (June 25). Highly recommended.

To those Sun employees who are being laid off starting tomorrow, Thursday

I think this must be the first time that the date of a Sun layoff has been announced in advance. If you’re one of those affected, or you know someone who is, please remind them of two important resources:

  • The Sun Microsystems Alumni Association. [SMAA] A Yahoo! Group that puts you in touch with thousands of fellow Sun alumni, and also gives you access to a steady stream of Sun-relevant job postings.
  • LinkedIn. Probably the most widely used professional networking tool right now. I find it to be an invaluable resource. For example, I’ve been using it to research each potential employer by identifying former Sun colleagues who work (or worked) there. If you’re a member of SMAA, you can join the corresponding LinkedIn group and use this logo in your profile: SMAA group logo

Commiserations and best wishes to all involved. The good news is that the job market is pretty strong, and there’s high demand for the kind of skills that Sun folks have.
And good luck to the rest of you at Sun. Please make this RIF the last one!

Parallel worlds?

Here’s an interesting thesis over at SecularOutpost:

One interesting thing about conservative Christianity in the US is the parallel social and cultural reality it has been able to sustain. There are Christian books, music acts, movies — a whole cultural world Christians try to keep pure of contamination by a corrupt secular environment. There are directories of Christian businesses for those who want to shop according to their moral values. […] Ordinarily, I would not be too concerned. Let them create a fantasy world and live in it — it would not bother me as long as it did not significantly interfere with things I care about. But that rarely happens. Inevitably, the parallel ideological reality competes for resources in the real world. And occasionally, the right-wing religious populists get ambitions of taking over the country.

How to win friends and influence people

From Think Progress (via HuffPo, where the European commenters are understandably outraged):

Today, President Bush held a press conference in Vienna, Austria as part of a diplomatic visit to Europe. He was asked by a member of the press why approval for his policies, particularly on national security issues, was so low in Europe. Bush explained that Europeans didn’t take the 9/11 attacks seriously. “For Europe, September 11th was a moment. For us, it was a change of thinking.”
85 Europeans died in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Bush added that “some people,” presumably Europeans who disagree with his policies, believe it’s “OK to condemn people to tyranny.”

I wonder if this is part of the new emphasis on diplomacy that Andrew Sullivan was talking about.
(On the other hand, perhaps “change of thinking” simply means “hysterical abandoning of our Constitution and values”, in which case Bush was quite truthful.)

Cringely nails the "Net neutrality" issue

Cringely gets to the heart of the matter.. Right now, it’s all about VoIP:

One thing ISPs supposedly aren’t allowed to do is to ban packets completely. If they tried that by, for example, restricting all Internet video or VoIP phone service to a particular provider, the courts would fill with lawyers filing Restraint of Trade lawsuits. So the ISPs take the air carrier approach of not denying passage to anyone, but wanting to give priority boarding to their most loyal frequent fliers. That’s the heart of their argument.
But the other position ISPs like to take is that of the common carrier, which supposedly doesn’t know the difference between one packet and the next, and is therefore not liable if some of those packets carry kiddie porn or terrorist communications. The ISPs, you see, want it both ways.
And they’ll probably get it, because they have the lobbying clout.
[…]
Where this Net Neutrality issue will hit home is for Voice over IP telephone service, which becomes pitiful if there is too much latency. That’s what this is all about, folks: VoIP and nothing else. The telcos want to use it to keep out the Vonages, Skypes, and Packet8s, and the cable companies do, too. It is a $1 trillion global business, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the ISPs will do anything to own it, but it isn’t about movies or music or even AJAX apps — at least, not yet.

UPDATE: There are also some excellent pieces on the topic over at Jim Lippard’s blog. Too many to link individually….

Delicious Library – promising, but…

Over at present simple, badaunt writes about Delicious Library:

I discovered that Delicious Library is a way to catalogue your books. Just point any FireWire digital video camera, like an Apple iSight®, at the barcode on the back of any book, movie, music, or video game. Delicious Library does the rest. The barcode is scanned and within seconds the item’s cover appears on your digital shelves filled with tons of in-depth information downloaded from one of six different web sources from around the world.

So of course I downloaded it, plugged in my iSight, and started playing.
Basically it works. Wave the bar code on the book at the iSight, getting the angle and lighting right, and the lookup takes a couple of seconds. Great. However, like badaunt, I can’t imagine actually scanning my whole collection. It would take forever, it would require a fair amount of manual intervention (see below), and when I’m done, what use is it?
But I’d love to be able to use it as an adjunct to blogging. For example, I’ve recently been on a Jack McDevitt kick: I picked up Chindi at an airport bookstore, enjoyed it, followed with Omega, and over the next few weeks I worked my way through another four or five of his books.
Now, it would be brilliant if I could have prepared that last paragraph by scanning a few McDevitt books into Delicious Library and clicking a button to generate a chunk of HTML with thumbnail covers, links to Amazon.com, and so forth. (XMLRPC upload to the blog would be nice, but cut-and-paste is adequate.) However right now Delicious Library offers no easy way to work with the data in the library. The Export... option just dumps out a ton of stuff from the Amazon.com page in plain text; Print... just lists thumbnails and titles in a PDF, and Mail... generates an email message per book with the cover and a link.
What I’d like is the ability to define a template, using predefined variables for the various fields of the item record (title, author, publication date, publisher, Amazon cover thumbnail URL, etc.) Then on command the app could simply expand a copy of the template for each selected item in the library, replacing the variables as appropriate, and dump the whole lot onto the clipboard, ready for me to paste into my WordPress composition window.
I mentioned manual intervention earlier, and I have to say that the bar code scan approach is by no means foolproof. For example, I just tried to scan Jack McDevitt’s Infinity Beach. The application read the UPC – 099455007993 – and mapped it into The Lone Ranger Vol. 2 DVD. Eventually I discovered that the way to correct this was to update the “Details” field labelled amazon® # with the ISBN – 0061020052 – and then instruct the app to Reload details from Amazon.com.... In the first dozen books I tested, I ran into this twice, which is somewhat depressing. Oh, well.
The price is OK ($40; the demo version allows up to 25 items), but Delicious Library needs to be a little more open and extensible to meet my needs. Maybe it could be AppleScriptable…?
UPDATE: Mike, the Major Domo at Delicious Monster Software, assures me that they’re working on the features that I suggested. He also provided a workaround for the scan error (look inside the front cover…). I’m impressed, and I’ve volunteered to be a beta tester.