Friday, January 28, 2005

Future Pundit says....

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

So true

Kevin Drum says:
I would like lead a crusade to forever ban the phrase "speaking truth to power," especially in academic settings. It's always uttered in tones that imply vast moral courage for doing so, and in Stalinist Russia that would have been true. In the 21st century American university system, however, most academics do nothing but speak truth to power, as loudly and as frequently as they can. Their punishment? Tenure, usually.
Chortle.

Friday, January 14, 2005

Don't come around here no more

I think I may be looking for another job soon. There have been more major rumors at work, and I just got an internal email announcing that pretty much all V.P.s in the company are being sacked. The rest of us will be reporting directly to the company's senior management. The rumors are that they have finally sold off our part of the business, or are going to shortly. Anyway, hopefully they will not touch the lower downs until the deal is announced. That way, I won't be leaving this place until after the director of I.T. has left, which will give me some satisfaction.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

Funny

From the LA Times...
But, according to a 1997 poll, only one out of three U.S. citizens is able to name the most basic of Christian texts, the four Gospels, and 12% think Noah's wife was Joan of Arc.
Link via Kevin Drum.

The thing is that this isn't the only thing many people are ignorant of. Every year they come out with surveys showing what people don't know about history, science, etc. I think that it's been this way pretty much forever. People knew more about the Bible in decades past, but they probably as a group knew even less about science, than they do now. I think that this puts the lie to the idea that a well rounded education is necessary for success. Either that, or they are interviewing the same ignorant folks for these surveys over and over.

Friday, January 07, 2005

Miscellany

Just a few items for Friday.

  1. On the software front, I wanted to call everyone's attention to Vi Improved, if I haven't already. If you're a programmer or scripter and need syntax highlighting, this editor has got it. Plus about a million functions and extensions. Also, I'm testing out Notepad++, an alternative to Notepad that also has syntax highlighting, open/close bracket/parenthesis highlighting, and several other features I haven't figured out to use yet. Plus, it has a tiny executable and very few supporting files so it opens super fast, just like notepad.
  2. A little Harry Potter diversion. I think that this was inspired by this. But I found the Harry Potter version before I found the other.
  3. You know, I was sure that processor speed improvements had stopped coming(or at least had slowed down). You still can't buy one that is twice as fast as mine(2.5 GHz) and this is almost two years after I bought mine. So what gives? Here's an explanation.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Not a good sign.

Microsoft is working on it's own anit-virus software. It is code named 'Atlanta'. I'm thinking about Sherman, fires, etc....