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Monthly Archives: May 2009

Letting a Sleeping Dog Lie

Sunday, May 31, 2009

I love Chelsey’s languid pose and the contrasts between her soft reddish-gold fur, the weathered cedar deck, and the sun-bleached lily leaves.

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Pollen, Pollen Everywhere

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Is there an unusually large amount of pollen in the Boston area this year and has pollen season been especially long?  After running errands yesterday morning I left my blue car in the driveway.  Two hours later it was coated with golden dust.  After this morning’s bike ride my eyes burned and felt gritty.  Every [...]

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Belated Post on Pirate Bay Guilty Verdict

Friday, May 29, 2009

This post waited quietly at the end of the queue during the end-of-semester paper/exams/grading crush.  It’s no longer news that a Swedish court found Pirate Bay’s co-founders guilty of assisting the distribution of illegal content and sentenced them to one year in jail and a $3.6 million fine (which I assume is joint, not several).  [...]

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Google and Orphan Books

Friday, May 29, 2009

Orphan books are books whose authors and publishers have effectively abandoned them. They are out of print but still covered by copyright law and not in the public domain. University and other library collections contain large numbers of orphan books. Google is scanning and converting these orphan books to digital form as [...]

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Seeing the Stars

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Flipping channels last night I found the Bruce-Willis-saves-earth movie Armageddon, one of summer 1998’s two blockbuster hits featuring an asteroid threatening to End Life As We Know It. (The other is Deep Impact.) A few minutes viewing confirmed my recollection that Armageddon is one of the Ten Most Ridiculous Movies Ever Made. [...]

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Brilliant

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Last Sunday’s New York Times reported on captchas, the ubiquitous website security tests that require users to decipher and enter words or letters presented in squiggly type.  In theory deciphering the puzzle requires the application of human intelligence, frustrating automated programs that would access the site for malicious or mischievous purposes.  As the ability of [...]

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Peat Bomb

Saturday, May 23, 2009

After a day of gardening in the hot sun–turning over soil, spreading compost, pulling out weeds–I drove to Naples to buy four bales of peat moss.  I wanted 3.8 cubic foot bales, large, unwieldy and quite heavy it wet.  I paid inside the store, declined the clerk’s offer to “give you a hand with those”, [...]

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