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Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 May 2001 12:16:56 GMT
Tiny Gods

Some gods say, the tiny ones
"I am not here in your vibrant, moist lips
That need to beach themselves upon
the golden shore of a
Naked body."

Some gods say, "I am not
the sacred yearning in the unrequited soul;
I am not the blushing cheek
Of every star and Planet--

I am not the applauding Chef
Of those precious sections that can distill
The whole mind into a perfect wincing jewel, if only
For a moment
Nor do I reside in every pile of sweet warm dung
Born of earth's
Gratuity."

Some gods say, the ones we need to hang,
"your mouth is not designed to know His,
Love was not born to consume
the luminous
realms."

Dear ones,
Beware of the tiny gods frightened men
Create
To bring an anesthetic relief
To their sad
Days.

(The Gift, Poems by Hafiz, translations by Daniel Ladinsky)

Pliant is a programming language framework that I mentioned back on 2000/05/22. I downloaded it, and managed to get it to work on my Windows machine by typing a couple of ^C's at the precompile script. I'm now running a Pliant HTTP server on my machine and using my web browser to read the Pliant docs, which are written in a Pliant dynamic web page format. It is a sort of compiled scripting language. You can change the surface syntax and write Pliant code to help with compiler optimization. It provides generic operations on types, which you can define, but does NOT provide inheritance, though there is an example of how to add that to the language. It runs on Linux, Posix, and Windows, currently x86 only. It can also run right on top of a Linux kernel to provide a very thin server. It's a 1.3 meg download, which expands to about 3 megs. That 3 megs includes source and documentation for the compiler and run-time (GPL), most of which is written in Pliant. You "precompile" memory images in 3 different debugging levels, which add another 13.7 megs to the pliant directory for a total footprint on your disk of 16.7 megs. Very neat. [meat]

Tim Slater at Montana State University - Real-Time Science Data Access Page: links to lots of pages on Astronomy, Meteorology, Oceanography, Geology, Life in the Universe, etc. Includes current images of the sun, Mars, moon phase, U.S. weather, sea surface temps, U.S. earthquake map, NASA video feed. Lots of good links all in one place. [tbtf]

Jasper Gerard at the Sunday Times - Swiss police hatch filthy plan to shower the great unwashed: Swiss police were planning on spraying Davos protesters with manure, but local farmers refused to sell it to them. [unknown]

Two new articles in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

  • Driving them off the land - The woes of fighting the U.S. government over grazing rights in Nevada. The judge in the case won't even say which law gives the U.S. the right to bring him to trial. Somebody remind me. Why and how does the U.S. government own anything?
    "They'll put me on the stand and ask how many years I have studied ecology, what college degrees I have," says Cliff Gardner, both describing his past treatment and predicting the way things are likely to go, come February in Reno.

    "I'll tell 'em I've got a high school education so they'll discredit me, see. But what I plan to testify is these people here -- there'll be a lot of ranchers in the audience -- are my peers, they have the know-how to manage the range and make it pay or they'll be put into bankruptcy and driven off the land. But these BLM and Forest Service people, they get their degrees and then they come out here and they're the experts -- they don't have to test their theories against reality the way we have for three and four generations, that's the real teacher. They can be wrong and it doesn't matter. All they have to do is get more money for their department, grow the bureaucracy. And the way to do that is to create a villain, which is the rancher, and drive him off the land.

    "So they become spin doctors. If the studies show what would really help the deer and the sage grouse is more predator control, that the wildlife does better when there's cattle on the land and their so-called preserves go to waste when they fence the cattle off, they just bury those studies, they never see the light of day if they don't match up with their theories.

  • The Last Food Fight - Vin comments on the missing "W" keys and other hijinks of the outgoing Komrade Klinton and incoming Queen Hitlary administrations.

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