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Angus King Tours The Country
01.08.2003
Driving back home in the pitch blackness today, I heard a fun interview with the outgoing governor of Maine, Angus King. I have always had a soft spot for the man, who ran as an independent and was a very popular governor. A lot of people in the tech crowd may have heard of , giving eve...
The Three Gorges
01.17.2003
The gorges spectacular. I had wanted to wait until I had some photos to post, since it seems a little reckless to rely on just my breathless prose style. But the pictures have been slow in coming, and time is passing. Thank goodness for the Internet: there are of the Three Gorges to...
Down The Yangtze
01.23.2003
You can (more borrowed pictures) at any desired level of comfort. At the top of the top end are the foreigner-only custom liners, a gorgeous deluxe riverboat in the shape of a giant dragon, or one of several sleek wedding-cake cruise ships without even a hint of scary Asianness to...
Live From The Superbowl
01.27.2003
The musical acts were fun to watch, even if the actual game itself wasn't (Oakland, dammit, what happened?) Celine Dion started things off with a pre-game "God Bless America", and as she hit her final note, the camera pulled back to reveal a huge wall of fireworks engulfing ...
Among The Biogeeks Of San Diego
02.03.2003
I'm in San Diego, sitting in the lobby of the Westin Hotel with a bunch of other computer addicts. Everybody is here for the bioinformatics conference, and the O'Reilly people have set us up a wireless network. We come like moths to the flame. If you are wondering what I know about biology, the ans...
Automated Checkout: Interfaces Attack!
02.10.2003
And of course, if you actually want to steal anything, all you have to do is .
...
Wolfram Speaks
02.10.2003
The O'Reilly Bioinformatics conference was a happy old pot luck. Proteins over here, starches over there, a vector-space model or two in the soup tureen. There were biologists just getting into computing, and programmers just getting in to biology, and a very smart few who had been doing both for m...
False Pretenses
02.16.2003
Not only is Iraq supposed to be more of a threat, but we're told that it is such an threat that we must act right now, without taking the time to build United Nations support, even if we could easily build that support by agreeing to a harmless (if ineffective) ...
The Future Is Boring
02.22.2003
Of course, this lousy track record has never deterred people from making predictions. It's especially fun when you get to revisit old ones, and see how well they fared . Over at LA Weekly, they've a 1979 issue predicting what the world would be like in 2002. The...
White Elephant
02.23.2003
There's a dispiriting in the Washington Post this week entitled "Space Shuttles Bound to Technologies of the Past". It's not dispiriting for what it says - there are good points, and quotes from knowledgeable people - but rather for a certain kind of attitude towards technology that shows the s...
French Week Begins!
03.13.2003
It's French week here at Idle Words, where the salute the country that made them great. Every day for the next seven days, the and I will be manning the barricades (right next to the ) for our beleaguered French friends, a daily . If you're looking for liberty fries, you came to the...
French Week: Day of the Crêpe
03.15.2003
2 cups crêpe batter (see below)
2 tbsp. butter (of course)
1/4 cup sugar
3 meringues
1 shot chartreuse
1 orange peel (for zest, pesticide free)
6 macaroons
1 shot cognac
1 tablespoon peanut oil
...
French Week: On School Lunches
03.16.2003
Take a look at these two school lunch menus, both for the week of March 24-28, 2003. The menu on the left [ ] is from a school in the town of Montigny le Bretonneux, just southwest of Paris; the menu on the right [ ] comes from a school in Pittsford, New York.
...
Van Gogh In Art Class
04.06.2003
I have been roaming the Internet like a wild panther, and came across some interesting art lesson plans on teaching Van Gogh, at least in those schools that still offer art classes. An :
Provide students with a landscape photo (from magazine, or digital pic...
The Chemistry Of Art
04.07.2003
A lot of the information here is cribbed from the fantastic website called . Visit!
- Indian Yellow. This was a beautiful, transparent and intense deep yellow, imported from India. A big improvement in the yel...
Best Practices For Time Travelers
09.29.2003
When John Titor on IRC chat in October of 2000, he was enjoying a neat kind of double billing - as his 38-year-old self sat downstairs in the kitchen, typing away, a two-year-old version of himself lay sound asleep upstairs in bed. The elder Titor had been sent back in time by the U.S. Army,...
The Moon Wears A Sombrero
10.13.2003
I flew in to Charlottesville last Thursday night in astonishingly bright moonlight. I didn't realize it, but the hunter's full moon was on duty, and it had lit up the cloud tops right out to the horizon. You could count the rivets on the wing. There was a thick layer of stratus cloud just ...
Halifaxus Remotus
10.18.2003
Hurricane Juan Nova Scotia just a few weeks ago, and now every major park in the city is closed, the paths blocked by fallen trees. My own ninth-floor window overlooks the block-sized Public Gardens, and out of forty trees there are five that are lying on...
The Bay Of Fundy
10.20.2003
Tides turn out to be one of those things that the more you learn about them. Luckily, the reason for the extreme tides in the Bay of Fundy is pretty simple. The Wikipedia :
I wanted to see a place calle...
The New York City Marathon: Now It Can Be Told
11.04.2003
To prevent an anxiety meltdown, I have laid everything out the night before: battered shoes with Official ChampionChip Marathon RF tag securely attached, running shirt with Official Marathon Race Number securely pinned, running shorts with $20 in cab fare tucked into a...
A Morning In Iceland
11.21.2003
Hringbraut kee...
100 Years Of Turbulence
12.17.2003
If simply getting airborne is the criterion, honors have to go to the New Zealand eccentric Richard Pearse, who in 1902 built a that enabled him to reach an altitude of several dozen feet and crash into gorse hedges.
If powered flight without a...