Ogden Nash
A Tribute to the Poet, Ogden Nash (1902-1971) by Bob Gardner - Ogden Nash is one of my favorite poets. I quoted one of his poems on my first day of summer camp when I was 12 years old, and was forever thereafter known as "Ogden" at camp. Mumble's 3/15 edition has "The Ostrich". I remember a bunch of them, though I may have the spellings and line breaks wrong. Here's one of my favorites:
The hunter crouches in the blindAnd one of the classics:
'Neath camoflage of every kind.
This grown up man,
With pluck and luck,
Is hoping to outwit
A duck.
The panther is like a leopard
Except it hasn't been peppered.
Should you behold a panther crouch
Prepare to say ouch.
Better yet, if called by a panther,
Don't anther.
Friday, March 16, 2001 by Jerry Pournelle - A good Saint Patrick's day rant. Will likely move here next week. My favorite paragraph:
I am not one of those who believes there is no role for government this world. If the government went away tomorrow my neighbors and I might not notice for a while, but there are places within a mile of me in which anarchy already surfaces from time to time; at which point no matter how law abiding my friends and neighbors may be, we'd have to institute some kind of government as defense, to quarantine the anarchy. And once you begin hiring people to defend you, or organize to defend yourselves, you have government. And as Adam Smith observed, there are those enterprises with great payoff to all but little to any individual and those are proper matters for government. I think with Jefferson that government is best when it governs least, but I do not agree with Thoreau when he said that it is even better if it governs not at all, and neither did Thoreau.
Goodlatte, Boucher want to fry Web spam by Todd Jackson at The Roanoke Times - two U.S. representatives have introduced H.R.1017, the Anti-Spamming Act of 2001. The bill basically makes it illegal distribute email with fraudulent headers or software designed to create such email. If spammers followed this law, we'd at least know how to send responses back to them. Don't see how it would stop spam, however. I'm very wary of any such laws. We of the net can handle spammers all by ourselves, thank you very much. Besides, what this law covers is already covered by existing common law against fraud. Lots of Slashdot discussion. [/.]
Could hydrogen be the fuel of the future? by Marsha Walton at CNN - BMW has 15 750hL sedans running on liquified hydrogen. I remember reading about hydrogen as a fuel over twenty years ago. But it was in Lyndon LaRouche's Fusion magazine, so maybe it was all hogwash. It's safer to store, if you use hydrides to chemically bond it, it burns cleaner, you can use it in a conventional engine if you change the carbeurator (what's that? cars all use fuel injectors nowadays) and the timing (hydrogen burns faster than gasoline). Of course the way we'll use hydrogen fuel in the near future is with fuel cells and electric motors, not internal combustion engines. Much more efficient way to convert the stored energy to motion. Internal combustion engines waste lots of it in excess heat. And, of course, you can run a fuel cell on gasoline by adding a chemical process to extract the hydrogen. The oil companies might go for this one. Lots of Slashdot comments, including this one from Chester K.:
They'll never become widely accepted. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you can figure out why.
Honda Unveils H2 Fuel Cell FCX-V3, Will Debut at CA Fuel Cell Partnership at Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Letter - Honda is already demonstrating fuel cell technology in an automobile. They expect to ship around 2003. [Google]
PowerBook G4 Diary: The Final Analysis by Andrew Gore at Macworld - Macworld likes the new Titanium Powerbook so much that they gave it five mice. It is a nice machine. I look forward to getting one of these and running OSX on it.
How to Obscure Any URL at pc-help.org - You too can generate URL's that are unreadable by humans, but work fine for browsers. [grabbe]
How DMT Works; A Simple Explanation by J. Orlin Grabbe at Laissez Faire City Times - A good simple non-mathematical explanation of how the Digital Monetary Trust works. Tells how the DMT browser maintains security while communicating with the DMT server to perform the four basic banking functions. [grabbe]
Will the browser be easy to use? DMT thinks so. We have 9- and 13-year-old girls using and testing it now.
Zero-Tolerance for Individuality in Schools by George Justin Mallone at Laizzez Faire City Times - Schools nowadays drug into submission anyone who displays the intelligence and individuality that education is supposed to encourage. This has got to stop. Best solution, eliminate the very concept of the government school.
There are those who don't back down, who won't be drugged, threatened, intimidated, or brow-beaten into compliance with the system. And when these brave individuals who are some of the best among us, those young people who are truly our freedom-loving-comrades-in-spirit, confront their oppressors by pointing out their lies and questioning their authority, the teachers and establishment boot-licking "experts" are shocked, shocked that a mere youth would dare question them. And hell hath no fury like an authoritarian pissed at a subject under their jurisdiction (see Stalin, Hitler, etc., for historical examples).
