St. Francis
A Sculpture of St. Francis Speaking to a Groundhog, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
177 Posts, 340 Links, 8 Publications
A Sculpture of St. Francis Speaking to a Groundhog, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
An interesting topic-map application showing various things around the Semantic Web.
Mark has some thought-out criticism of the Semantic Web: “Look, semantics is hard. Forget the social problems of implementation and the technical problems of the current generation of syntax.
Longish, simple one-page glossary of OE terms, attached to an OE reader.
The Smoking Gun’s best mug shots of 2002 - not celebrities, but real folks, including Bambi, the K-Mart employee in trouble. It’s wrong to laugh, but also, it’s very funny.
A trip out West to spend time with my girlfriend, a vacation, and the preface to the new year.
A picture of the back of a car.
Opinions on Santa from the Morning News, including some by your author.
Useful-looking framework, in Python, for data sharing across a network inside of various applications.
Which I watched on the bus.
I love reference works, and prefer Ulysses Annotated, with its maps and descriptions of the popular music of Bloomsday Dublin, to Ulysses. At least a quarter of my books have headwords, and I would rather take The MacMillan Visual Dictionary to bed instead of a novel.
Coming to a conclusion about my place in someone’s personal history.
“The Web’s First Shaggy Dog Story Archive. ” History, examples, abuse your friends.
Selected responses from an online petition to Wal-Mart stores, urging them to continue selling handgun ammunition.
I have writer’s block, but feel the need to put something new here.
A story about the human side of data processing.
He was there, and then he wasn’t. Click...
A really doofy anti-metadata rant, still making the rounds. The points are correct at the extreme, but it’s a lot of straw-men arguments.
All your Bayes needs, met right here.
Simply great photo site - New York looks like this.
According to the DSM, Huck and Tom have mental disorders!
Home site of the person who created Thought Treasure; he’s a neat, hard-working AI researcher.
Article in IBM’s systems journal expressing a variety of ways to approach computer reasoning. Written by a host of heavy-hitting AI/Knowledge Base types: J.
The protester was a polite 65-year old man, and his sign said, “The Bush family must surely love the poor they’ve made so many of them.
Robot pop-up toilets in London, available after 7PM.
Long, solid article about Polanski’s relationship between the personal - Krakow, Tate - and creative, and how that plays out in his new film, The Pianist.
He had them shoved into his pants the entire flight from Thailand to L. A.
With a needle and thread in my hand.
An interesting idea - take several primary sources and index them collectively to create an overall index of Victorian English life.
The story of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Parks. (Of course, every time you enjoy a CCC park, you’re enjoying SOCIALISM.
Moskowitz is the Borough President of Brooklyn, and an old-school, social-services Democrat. He’s also “Brooklyn Chair of the Loyal League of Yiddish Sons of Erin.
Photos of Helene Grimaud, renowned classical pianist and wolf-hugger.
Helene Grimaud is a Westchester, New York-based classical pianist (who apparently did a fine version of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2). Now 30, she has two interesting traits: one, she practices on a Yamaha.
“I know it isn’t very practical, but the idea is to examine each image as the appropriate movement is playing. It is the music which connects the images into a series, not the gradient nor the form nor the math nor the lines nor an idea.
Depressed, rejected by critics, exploited by publishers, and receiving an in-person scathing from Tolstoy (followed by more depression), Rachmaninoff was brought back to composing by a friendly hypnotist - with the great Concerto #2 as the result.
Recent events related to England’s Basingstoke Canal - yobs lobbing bricks, a fraudulent bailiff, and a single dad swan.
A few weeks ago I attended an oyster shucking contest by accident. The Borough President of Brooklyn, Marty Markowitz, was there.
An essay by Emma Goldman about getting ready for war, which always comes before war. “The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and controls their lives from the cradle to the grave.
A letter from Tolstoy about Indian rights, to the editor of Free Hindustan magazine. The letter was edited by Gandhi.
Useful, lengthy article by Paul Krugman on growing economic disparity. (Via RobotWisdom.
Look at your friends, as little dots interacting, after your email is chewed and swallowed by a computer.
An email search engine to help you “search your memories” - a pain to install, though.
Developer focused on creating free code for good causes.
Autojot indexes every web page you look at and lets you search them later.
I have never seen the program Sex and the City , but its images—particularly those of Sarah Jessica Parker (always all three names—the needless “Jessica” has cost us all gallons of ink and hundreds of column-inches), who plays Carrie Bradshaw, the show’s heroine—have been beamed into my mind from bus stops and subway ads, Ms. Parker looking serious and sexual and cityish in my direction, her every armpit hair waxed or shaved or plucked away.
At least, I think it’s accessible.
After the death of 4 children in a fire allegedly set by drug dealers, talk radio hosts called Baltimore’s mayor Martin O’Malley a nitwit and uncaring. O’Malley drove immediately to the station and began arguing with the hosts.
Iraqis should demand the votes be sent to Florida for a recount.
Kendall writes about preparing good things to eat. Ahhh!
I love Dave Matthews so much no other man will suffice!
Brilliant, recently deceased artist, among whose effects was found the embalmed body of a homeless man.
Full text of articles from the JAIR, in PDF.
She hates hipsters, and with good reason.
A really nice intro to RDF and related technology, entirely in haiku.
A joint Iraeli-Palestinian protest - Bryan Atinsky documents a protest which leads to violent police action, in addition to nonviolent protesters being outright refused the freedom of assembly. I (meaning me) paid for the camera used to take these pictures, which makes me proud, proud, proud.
The tiger and the lobster fight it out.
Neat collection of essays by John Bart Gerald, drawings by Julie Maas - Nonviolence, Schweitzer, Neruda, and the U. N.
Umm, a site about people in Academia who misbehave, it seems. Yikouch.
This is the spaceship that follows me wherever I go, and appears constantly in my dreams. Finally someone has captured an image, which I can show to my friends.
Right. So the story is about a guy from Michigan who lives in a New York and falls in love with another fellow, who turns out to be well-heeled European royalty.
Okay, yeah, the folks at Google think we should do better text analysis, forget the Semantic Web, but this news search for “java” at Google News shows what a car crash text-only databases can be.
Practical advice on obtaining a perfectly moral bearing. From his autobiography.
I like this Mark Pilgrim. He links to Ftrain, which makes me feel goofy linking back to him today, (the first rule of Web Site Club is that you don’t link back to people who link to you) but he asked his readers with sites to link to him on the anniversary of his receiving a royal screwing by an employer because Mark published personal content on the web, and I’m glad to do so.
When in doubt, sleep on the floor and drink water.
Stealing, and getting people out of jail.
Full textbook on molecular biology, if you have a few spare moments and a desire to understand deep cell mojo.
A collection of stories by Yeats. “'That is true,’ said another of the men.
Rapidly expanding collection of scanned children’s books, from the turn of last century.
Bayard Rustin’s mug shot for refusing to comply with selective service, from The Smoking Gun. Poke around for other mug shots - Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner are there, too, for their various unamerican activities.
The “Well Formed Web” as a replacement for the Semantic Web. It’s a good idea, but I think the idea proposed is just a stopgap way to get to the Semantic Web - that is, you need some way to sort and structure information, and that way is going to look a lot like ontologies.
Regularly updated weblog on the proposed war with Iraq.
“Oh man is she pissed,” he said.
A few days on admitting you’re wrong.
I take my heart back from the East River.
They’re not gossiping, they’re ribbing each other.
A chintzy postcard skyline tourist shot, but I like having it here.
Ah, how they frolic, those cow jaws.
Cuttings from one of the best craft books ever.
Kittens in traditional Japanese costume, some with motorcycles. Watch out.
See it at the bottom of the page. See it!
Kevin Fanning and Sam Brown collaborate on a kid’s story about super-powers.
Zizek’s intro to the Comm. Manifesto, on its 150th anniversary.
Lojban is an invented language, like Esperanto, but with more rules and based on predicate logic. Remember, “when specifying a concept that is not found among the gismu, a Lojbanist generally attempts to express the concept as a tanru.
An eventually-growing collection of woodcuts, lithographs, and so forth, scanned from the author’s unusually large collection.
A story about falling off a truck into sand.
Three details from an allegorical engraving from Breugel’s invention, circa 1569, on the topic of the deadly sin of lust.
The database as symbolic form.
Essay by Paul Ricouer.
Flat, a design shop (oh... pardon ....
Photo taken by a friend, because my hands were laden with bags and I could not reach the shutter. Later I took some pictures of the same scene, but this one was better.
Here is simple code for handling cookie with simple CGI. CGI is written in C.
Nice overview of Smalltalk in its various forms and incarnations.
40th birthday party of the Chairman’s wife, on the corporate dime, complete with a Michaelangelo’s David sculpted from ice spewing vodka from its cock.
Good poem from Jim Esch, a different feeling from his other works.
Whatever happened to Jack and Diane? By the author.
A foundation ontology purports to describe “what exists. ” You know?
Filled with souls and shapes.
Representing infinite possibilities, but devoid of humans.
This last weekend I met a woman who was proud of her tattoo. I’m not sure how the French translates.
Scott Rahin writes in with an update.
One Afternoon
At which point Fremington goes back to the gym.
Davy, “Piano Man” Actually, it’s David Jenkins. “Still in the Navy and probably will be for life,” right?
From the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Mass.
Kombucha is a tea fermented by the addition of a mushroom.
Rats need valentines, too.
Nift: Prolog + OO + other stuff.
A therapist who farms cranberries offers his thoughts on how to avoid getting bogged down by criticism. Bogged down.
On 34th St., I think, or right around there - a huge picture window, and there they are, the massive innards of some skyscraper or hotel.
They raised the rates to 50 cents, the bastards, and still half the calls don’t go through.
Everyone trying to get somewhere...
A book about bunnies for wee ones.
... is a residential school offering free education, housing, clothing, meals, medical/dental care and recreational activities.
That is, making sense of Milton Hershey School, where I spent two years.
Always there, sliding into their destinations, or departing for greater heights.
I have no grace in grilling. The beets fell into the fire, the oil on them flaring up, smoke everywhere.
If you must put down your dog, whisper the names of the buddhas into its ears, and other advice for buddhists who own animals.
This comes highly recommended by a most-favored Ftrain correspondent, who writes of the site: “She strikes me as a person who ingurgitates new ideas and can intellectually feel them out, offering much in return. ” At first glance, it looks great, with an emphasis on intelligent textiles.
Almost like any other.
Two ancient sketches from Deluxe Paint, a drawing application for the Amiga with which I sorely miss playing.
Does the headline not say enough? No picture, though.
Pushkin was of African descent! No one told me this.
The once-ubiquitous antenna of the WTC rising behind.
General info on all 50 United States. Need Oregon’s motto in Latin?
Edd Dumbill’s thoughtful thoughts on the recent RSS fork.
Montaigne - actually his father - predicts HotJobs.com, 430 years before an IPO.
A ramble through the mind of the author, as I decide that I need not live in NYC forever.
Somewhere - I couldn’t tell you....
Stories taking place in Massachusetts
People want to take the RDF out of RSS. Ftrain navigation and metadata is now increasingly being built on RDF/RSS, and I expect to be able to do dozens of cool things because I used an RDF framework.
A new format proposed by some guy. What’s interesting is how the format numbering goes from .
Watch them. Are they sending you a signal?
I’ve seen this RV about 3 times, as it’s driven around midtown.
This is a pal, at the Flaming Lips show in August. He’s a music critic, cool fellow.
Near Trenton, NJ. I don’t know why they cut them.
Snapped on the way to see a client, over a year ago.
Watching T.V. to learn about my grandfather.
Make it now! Make it! At home! Do it! You must!
For some reason, no matter how many times we show the script, no one will put us on the air.
Campy stories of society divas.
Book on adaptive hypertext, articles in PDF.
Researcher into adaptive hypermedia.
This is a useful article about a “generic” hypertext system, which includes a fairly complete version of the two things I’m working on for Ftrain: conditionals and page-tracking. It’s very specific, and doesn’t connect to any other metadata sources.
Ted Pederson is an interesting researcher into computational linguistics at UMN.
Data Mining with Open Source Machine Learning Software in Java.
Animal snapshots galore.
Sweet-looking automatic keyword extractor.
Find all the NGrams in your text, in Perl, open-sourced. Whoo!
The town, the grid of streets.
One evening south of Canal St...
A thesis on the Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer.
Paper on Microsoft’s Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer, “a system for automatic discourse analysis” which “reliably identifies rhetorical relations” in text. It is now 4AM.
Overview of MindNet, Microsoft’s expansion on the semantic network concept. We’ve been hearing about MindNet for years and seeing very little evidence that it’s so great, whereas the free WordNet, designed with similar intent, is something I use every day.
DMOZ POS taggers.
A tool for adding explicit Rhetorical Structure to text.
The sheer number of research projects in play at Microsoft is skull-jarring. The number going on in Beijing is surprising.
I’m reading this and thinking, I need to learn more about mutual information statistic. It’s 3AM, and I won’t be able to sleep until I learn exactly how you can pull noun phrases from a corpus.
A book from 1998 (which means many of the particulars are beginning to go stale) on linguistics & programming.
A picture from the dark.
An essay where a section is added in 12 consequent months.
A shell, ala BASH, for editing XML. To add an @id to every title in your document, you could write: foreach //chapter/title { add attribute “id='t$i'” into .
I remember, in 1998, being so impressed with something Lisa Rein wrote for XML. com about XML and Vector Graphics that I wrote a fan letter to the people at XML.
In a search for more tarsier images, I found the source of my favorite. “The Tarsier can rotate its head almost all the way around and has adhesive pads on its limbs that allow it to cling to branches vertically or horizontally.
A wonderful image received via email, provenance unknown, of one of nature’s stranger jokes.
I’ve just begun to read this amusing novel about an annoying man.
Meet the man who said, “A protest song is a song that’s so specific that you cannot mistake it for bullshit,” and “And if there’s any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there’s any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara. ” Phil, why’d you have to knock yourself off in '76?
Dozens and dozens of Chekhov works.
A collection of visual and textual artifacts, intended to be updated daily.
A man, coming across another man, one of the men having entered into a strange posture.
Rediscover the sheer ignorance and awfulness of PointCast and its CEO, back when “push” was going to be the dominant force on the Web.
Millions (113,633,132) of terms on the web, ranked by frequency. 300 meg download.
“I shall attempt to resolve the antagonisms that exist by analyzing the Monkey Island texts using the tools of Postmodernism and Cultural Materialism and suggesting where the strengths of one theory can be used to balance out the weaknesses of the other. ” Yikes.
A very-unique and clever text editor, written in Python, for editing nested hierarchies of content, then turning them into things.
Peoplesoft, Big Brother’s ASP provider.
A woman and a dog.
A few notes on the book.
Thoughtful feedback re: a Semantic Web idea .
McLuhan and probes and puns.
An eggsalad racehorse for pun-interest.
Jokes ending in puns. All.
There is a pun contest. This man won it.
Pun dictionary. Horrid but compelling.
Mesopotamian puns: a dog was the distilled essence of the dog, not a referent to a dog.
The Flaming Lips in Prospect Park, from Sunday night.
Terrible things done with the human language.
An idea for the Semantic Web.
Thorough Wm. James resource.
According to my pal Stacy, who is an adjunct English prof, autoethnography is the hot new trend in cultural studies. Basically, it seems to be the production of autobiographical texts as a means of studying your own culture.
You do not talk about Semantic Web club.
The singularity is a’comin’! And these people are a-waitin’.
Jim Esch gives Linda Thompson’s new album the thumbs up.
Good guide by Dave Pawson, who keeps the XSLT FAQ, on RDF.
A handy-appearing automatic classifier, now open-sourced.
Clay at Milton Hershey.
Speaking impolitely to the dead.
I thought I came up with it, but I'm at least #12 to coin ”celebritize.
Beware... the Vampire impersonator will ruin your life.
Watch as the denizens of Metafilter miss sarcasm so obvious that if it was smeared with sarcasm glitter and had a 50,000,000 watt sarcasm-highlighting bulb shining on it from 4 inches away, it would still only be SLIGHTLY more obvious than it is in its native state.
This is the worst president ever.
Stars, some with planets, within shouting distance.
Victor reminds people of what's exciting about technology and how it's hard at the beginning. He's right, dammit!
A star system with 3 planets.
Recent-content-drenched front page from a progressive economics thinktank.
From CounterPunch - a Gush Shalom activist (Gush Shalom is one of the oldest and smartest peace organizations in the world) describes attempts at consciousness-raising about war crimes inside Israel. War crimes are committed there by the Israeli occupying army by routine.
A weblog about what happens when we get away from files and folders on the desktop and move into... well, who knows?
John Waters keeps a place in the Village: ”I take the subway everywhere,“ he said. ”I ride in the first car, to look at the rats.
A trade-union-centric blog.
A bit bored....
All the blogs that are influenced by Ftrain, which is not a blog but a site, but hey, I give up on that distinction, yaknow? Sorta neat idea.
A weblog be a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Lots of content, crunchy.
Sweet-looking site from the fellow who used to run the excellent economics. about.
My pal Bryan Atinsky gets his ribs bruised by a shithead policeman.
Writers are routinely asked to throw away their rights to their own work in exchange for a modicum of publicity, then screwed by their publishers. Web publishing is even worse than print.
Beautiful map of Wall Street corruption. Via TurksHeadReview.
Wanda Coleman beats up Maya Angelou's new book and gets shunned by parts of the Black literary community. A considered essay on the confusing racial politics of literary production.
Tiny penguins wearing tiny sweaters. For their own good.
Newspaper Columnists are fading fast: ”In past generations, says Carroll, columnists tapped into 'a certain idiom that was largely white ethnic European life in neighborhood bars and pubs. That was best captured by Breslin and Royko.
A guide written by the EU to help Americans understand governance, economics, etc.
And did Booth kill him in a homophobic rage after being set up as a boy toy? Hmm.
Hey, I said, this bottle won’t - ah - what is it? 6 molar hydrochloric acid - won’t open.
An acid, an enzyme. A catalyst, a solution.
Thoughtful meta-review of Bloodchild, and Octavia Butler short story.
Cognition has broken down. There is nothing to describe except warm pressure.
Excellent and well-researched article on early Jewish sports leagues, particularly in Philly and New York. “'The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background,' wrote Paul Gallico, sports editor of the New York Daily News in the 1930s, 'is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness.
Interview with Eric Miller on the Semantic Web, by the departing (damn) New Breed Librarian web ste. Nice job.
“It goes way, way back. ” Jews in sports.
A shell which is also an adventure game. Both a good idea, and a terrible one.
Interview with Vidal, talking about America and suchlike.
A guide to all the Christian swag you'll ever need.
Matt has been my friend for 12 years. His discussions with coworkers on this page are, I'll bet, entirely true.
“One of the blessed crowd.” Also, Yeatsian economics. An essay.
Criticism of my piece on Google and the Semantic Web.
Squarepusher is putting out a song, in October, called F-Train. Apparently, it's wandering the knob-twiddler's file-sharing Internet, in MP3 form, as we speak, but out of my low-bandwidth/Linux reach.
Altruism is best when it’s reciprocal.
A proposal for how IDs might be created for all people in history.
In response, ya see.
Semantic Web weblog.
Just like the title says. Procedural, here's the stuff, technical doc.
CAPAlert (conservative Christian movie review sites) reviews My Big Fat Greek Wedding with this remarkable paragraph: “Now the physical aspects begin. To describe the progression of physical involvement between John and Toula, let me tell you about the old Ford Motor Company torque system.
Not earth-shaking, a few ideas therein.
Semantic Web searching info.
Google builds a semantic connection device.
Detailed, thoughtful, thorough.
A weblog all about the Semantic Web. Haven't looked at it much, but it's quite current.
Google is a Semantic Web app, kinda.
All Google, all day.
Michael Sippey's kid is so cute it's unnerving.
A work of fiction. A Semantic Web scenario. A short feature from a business magazine published in 2009.
“If it's done right, the Semantic Web would be accompanied by widespread knowledge management. ” One moving target accompanied by another?
Google and the Semantic Web, 2 tastes that will mess your mouth up BAD, leave you begging them to kill you, put you out of your misery.
Meaning that the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge is in there.
Google knows who you are. It definitley knows who I am.
Alan Lomax Collection, official site. Sad to only learn about people like Lomax when they die.
They didn't WANT you to KNOW it!
A review of a book, the title as in, “that takes balls,” but with ovaries in for the balls. Except it's got to be “oves.
Zthes is a protocol to allow you to search yourself some semantic thesauri using Z39. 50 protocol returning XML.
Giving up on bicycles, etc.
Well-written, smart weblog focusing on U. S.
It’s 8PM on Saturday. I am visiting a friend in the city.
Ftrain, says Joe, is a cool site. Thanks, says Paul.
The people in the neighborhood with Web sites.
Amazing what people search for, when they set to searching. Written in protective police custody, address undisclosed.
A story by Paul Ford about visiting a friend.
From a blog that links to this site, which I'll leave unlinked: “Take that Ftrain site, for instance. Ninety percent of the time, I don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
Long transcribed speech by Brian Lamb, C-SPAN founder, giving the background of C-SPAN with a decent amount of detail, and answering questions about the channel.
This site has some excellent personal writing. The story is simple: smart, thoughtful woman of about 30 takes job at video store with large porn selection.
Heh.
Rebecca Dravos’ first contribution to Ftrain. A story of pet ownership and potential love, or at least lust, frustrated by circumstances.
Lobsters have tiny violins that scare sharks. Really!
Feedback to the post from Josh Allen (different Josh Allen than the Josh Allen we know best here) on XSLT - this person disagrees with his conclusions. XSLT is a harsh mistress.
Whose all em heehee? (Whose periwinkles are they?
Love Advice for Extraterrestrials, from the redoubtable but unquestionably masculine (in an extraterrestrial sort of way) Xortar Cheemchim, as published in Ranflax Planet 9’s most prominent women’s magazine (in Ranflaxian, the title of the magazine would be “grandmother(1.5)'s tri-shrimp puddin'” or “creem uk lanba lanba hroot,” but it’s a tonal language, so don’t even try or you’ll end up accusing someone of having a labia filled with cottonwood trees).
Anya is great. She lives in Cobble Hill and sees the oddness in the mundane.
Feedback from Josh Allen to other feedback on Josh Allen's post on XSLT. I forgot to mention that the first post had a link to Josh Allen's piece on Weblogs, and that's another Josh Allen, that's the one we know, the one in Maine.
How to create a Weblog in XSLT. This is not how I do it (forget Make; I just do it all in XSLT), but interesting nonetheless.
Oh, whoa. Whoa.
Extensions to RSS1. 0; the threading is particularly useful.
How do we classify genres? I'm asking this question (and Daniel Chandler is trying to answer it) because I want to classify work on Ftrain by genre - essay, fiction, semi-autobiographical fiction, science fiction, bald lying, pseudojournalism.
European Metadata Craziness! Watch out!
Thorough list of RSS-related resources (RSS is a way to summarize Web sites so that other sites can use them. But not just Web sites, really.
Dandy lefty blog.
Enjoyable, mostly-photo Web site.
A page about criminal justice. Pretty great.
Pseudodictionary definition of “sheeple.
Yeah! Yeah!
Audrey Easley is the flautist for the Polyphonic Spree, which is a musical group. She had a great energy.
Usage example for the word “sheeple.
It's a crocheted skull. The copy that leads to the link above read “You will love it because it's so awesome.
Self-conscious project to ensure happiness and well-being engineering for all creation.
Fun read: Jorn on Topic Maps, a bit, and other stuff.
What you do is generate a checksum based on your mailbox ID. Then you distribute that checksum, and people create “whitelists” (but let's call 'em goodlists, instead, okay, and get that color thing out of there, time for a little accuracy in our semantics) with your checksums - NOT your email address, that can't be guessed by looking at the checksum.
Stay awake for 40 hours with no bad side-effects. Then sleep 8 hours and do it again.
Nice, functional resource, clickity click.
Hair buns, timidity, shushing - vicious stereotypes and slander!
A hypothesis regarding portrayals of librarians, intermixed with images of tigers in libraries. A fiction, sort of.
Detailed, informative, amusing weblog based on the fuss and budgetry on the XML-DEV mailing list.
In which I become the most hated man in all of New York for a full minute.
“I told him, 'I'm basically trying to sound like a pompous twit. ' He laughed and slapped the table.
There are Scottish units of measurement here. That includes the lippie, which is a quarter of the Scottish peck.
Tibetan butter sculpture.
Collection of good, usually brief interviews with contemporary lit folks.
A cranky meditation (not really, that’s a pun) on marketing other people’s sacred beliefs and approaches.
A large, important museum of Tibetan Art in in Staten Island, the hotbed of Tibetan culture.
“Steve Burns,” or (so PARANOID) someone writing to impersonate Steve Burns (who COULD do such a TERRIBLE THING), describing a journey into FlamingLipsLand, a journey I shared.
The squirrel that sounds something like me has been singing about squirrel love again. Click HEARTHEIRNEXTSONG to hear the squirrel's voice crack painfully, and to hear the lines “I got the best nest in the old oak tree/So come on up and squirrel with me/In the dark.
The argument between Israel and Palestine over the provenance of Falafel. Falafel Queens, which is mentioned in the article,IS the best falafel in Israel.
The subject is a little icky, but the interviewer is a pretty amusing self-conscious Ftrain rider, and I feel an affinity for what she sees in Bushnell.
Her name is Precious, she's studying biochemistry with the goal of being a neurosurgeon, and has a big, big basket on her head. The world is an interesting place filled with a variety of people, some of them who have baskets on their heads.
At 93 J. K.
Dumb even for a rock star: Bono said, “Anyone who's interested in investing in Ghana has only to look at these people, the smartest, hardest workers anywhere. ” Referring to the notion that the corporate world exploits low wages, he said, “I think as long as the employees of such places and the governments are exploiting the corporate world in a sort of symbiotic relationship, I think that's fine.
David Fremington describes a day 8 years ago.
A review of New Rose Hotel, the Movie. “Instead, what's on the screen is so dreadful that it inspires the ontological question 'What are films and why is this not one of them?
A large helping of links on Africa.
A good token effort.
William Gibson's best short story, I think - transational tech, sex, and the redemptionless hollow ache of those who deserve no better.
Somehow it happened that they made a movie of New Rose Hotel and I never, ever found out about it. Damn.
A more or less perfect Weblog - news, organization, elegance, content. Yikes.
Beautiful big site about corporate hoo-ha and transgenics and all the other stuff people do for themselves, hoping they don't get caught.
This is an administrative notice about the design of this site, and you should ignore it unless you care about Reader Services or printing out sections of Ftrain.
Broad portal filled with Africa news.
A tracker - ala SoundTracker - but for video. Any which way run the images until reels the mind.
Man killed by giraffe!
Useful-lookin' weblog about the Social Sciences; links to a wide range of sources. And, whoa, coincidence, it's obvious that Paul Nijjar reads the thing, go Paul Nijjar!
I am an occasional contributor to The Morning News. Here is a list of stories, in reverse chronological order.
The thriving Nigerian film industry. Via RobotWisdom.
My neighbor wanted Joy Division. I needed something with some redemption, so we put on some Johnny Cash, Live at Folsom Prison, opened beers, lit up nasty-smelling cigars, and cursed our landlord.
Nothing beats having your work discussed in a language you can't understand. “Ik durf te wedden dat u Ftrain voor het eerst ziet,” indeed.
Pictures of sheep.
A Sunday night walk down Court St.
12. 8 million people are going to starve in Africa.
A place for all the things that need a place.
Scary U. S.
911 reasons to hate America.
Nixon and Hoover - Quakers!
Thoughtful, well-sourced article on racism in NYC post Sept-11.
A weblog focused only on rape.
Reflections on the music I listened to this afternoon, and the afternoon albums of two friends.
One of the best bands I've heard in a long, you might even say long-ass, time.
Coney island, snacks, and anger.
A short series: David Fremington, he of the large frame, has decided to go to the gym, with vivid energy.
The first track from the album “Oat Songs in the Dropsy.”
Respect and fear while waiting for the gym.
An album of songs intended to be used in the background.
An extraordinarily bad, stupid precedent to set.
A reminder that the Beatles are not a musical group, but a lifestyle choice.
Walter Perry gets upset about standard data vocabularies.
Surviving a nuclear war: wear a hat.
A handy guide, with a foreward by no less than pro-nuke loon Edward Teller.
Excellent Raymond Lull resource.
How to create overlapping hierarchies, which is something I often run into when building Ftrain. I know you don't care, not one bit.
Manipulated speakers generating random sketches. Ah!
A collection of writing, created by a variety of folk, and pleasant to look upon, is released to the world in a digital format.
The ultimate Wobblevision.
Pat Hayes on different approaches to logic for the Web.
Opinionated review of spreadsheet history and present state-of-the-art.
Sowa on Semantic Web standards. Ouch.
Tanya Reinhart on the proposed Academic Boycott of Israel (short version: Academics are just as political as everyone else, and an international academic boycott is a valid idea).
The Gowanus Canal runs through a small section of Southwest Brooklyn, passing a block from my apartment. It is a waterway of jokes, legendary for its funk and as a place to dump gangsters.
59 systems of color, richly linked and explained.
Using machines for good causes (like lowering recidivism, keeping people out of jail, etc).
“Agent-based computational economics (ACE) is the computational study of economies modelled as evolving systems of autonomous interacting agents. ACE is thus a specialization to economics of the basic complex adaptive systems paradigm.
Steve Burns fans discussing Ftrain in a Steve Burns context. Please share your own feelings.
“Mondeca provides a software solution enabling enterprises to efficiently and intelligently organize business content. ” All that and directed graphs.
I never mentioned this site, but I love it dearly. All about programming, particularly functional programming, which is the kind of programming that people in academia, especially those who spend a lot of time writing papers that say “functional programming is actually better than [programming paradigm X]” while the (business) world ignores them, use.
Interview with yours truly about character and narrative on the Web, in which I sound kinda pretentious. But hey.
Suggested by a friend; has a group of kids who form an art-rock band called “Gandalf's Pikestaff.
A New Kind of Hype. Stephen Wolfram proclaims self genius again; writes big hoo-ha cellular automata book proclaiming to reinvent science, 99.
“Our goal is to give joy and relief to people through interaction (with the robot),” Wada said.
Supergenius literary sci-fi. Not to be missed; beats the pants off your average cyberpunk-type.
When a manual on the Web gets semantic links added automatically, everyone JUST GOES CRAZY. With subtitles.
Connecting SWI-Prolog to SQL, allowing an SQL database to be used as a db of prolog facts and converting prolog statements to SQL queries.
External tables (text only) for SWI-Prolog.
Results for a search on “Semantic Web” for FirstGov.
Oklahoma, Memphis, and Bucksnort, Tennessee
“Scott,” I said, as he walked across the threshold. “If I could only tell you - ” “Well, you know,” he said, “I have time to listen.
The puzzle piece with the frayed edges is the last one you need.
I had dinner on 47th St. with a friend from high school, his sister Sandra, down from Alaska, and an ex-girlfriend I hadn’t seen in 10 years.
A very important update regarding Ftrain.
Prologue: Training I found a kid’s bike—a BMX, half-buried in snow—in front of our porch. I showed it to my brother, who took it to the basement.
Some MP3s to listen to.
Fireland is on hiatus.
Interesting shrink.
The story of Nathan Barley, all cut-up-like. Beautiful and profane.
A bibliography of books related to “A Sense of Place.
Handy, straightforward oral history interviewing guidelines.
NYC hoaxster - creator of the Cathouse for Dogs, troublemaker.
Thorough site on the East River - politics, ecology, maps.
Ftrain is on shore leave for a while.
$4.50, fiberglass, red, 2 inches long.
Excellent, well put-together Web site on Theravada Buddhism; a very strong editorial vision matched with a passion for the materials and a rarely seen diligence for editing and linking.
“The arm belongs to the boy's father. The uncle killed the father in this basement, and in doing so he maimed the father so horribly that even his ghost cannot show his face.
Paul Ford used a machine to define the way shadows fell, and thus to fool eyes into believing that something existed which did not.
Scott and Paul investigate the appearance of music. Illustrated with copious orange oscillations.
Riffing off Ftrain, a writer describes his own Wobblevision experiences.
How to make a Wobble Vision. This was originally written up by my friend Steve Pav, but his copy is down for the time being.
One last look at Abe Lincoln in 1901 before he was buried in several tons of concrete. He was still recognizable.
Paul Ford has his picture taken.
A photo session.
The words were lost; he speaks to an unknown secretary.
A narrator is called by himself, 40 years from now.
Lobster boy “explained” by CMU administration.
Painful-to-read article about trying to interact with Lobster Boy.
“Lobster” performance artist has been attacked by fraternity members! “Three of the four arrested who could be reached denied damaging the property.
A beautiful and honest web rant - Jim goes ballistic over a critic of Wordsworth. “It made my thumbs sweat.
“It is time to stop seeking excuses for the British defeat at Isandlwana, and to start instead to think of it as a Zulu victory. ” Cool site on 1879 Anglo/Zulu war.
A variation on the vertical theme.
Actually, most female drummers are billed as “quiet and mysterious”, which is generally a polite way of saying “obese and surly.
Our own “chronological chauvinism” attributes the digital age we are living in today as the biggest technological change in the history of the world. And that may well turn out to be true, but the late 19th century was the greatest period of technological change to date in terms of things that affected huge numbers of people's lives in very fundamental ways.
Belief and chronology.
Within its boundaries
Stories of one’s place in the wider world of human behavior.
It’s a happenin’ town.
In particular Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, and Prospect Park
Place in three dimensions.
What happened in the future.
The fourth dimension of place.
The illustrated story of a sea which became a woman.
There's more than one way to do it. From Philly Indymedia.
It's “Bad Babysitter,” Without a question.
From my friend Melanie Darning.
Ryokan was a Zen monk. He wrote love poems to Teishin.
Oscar and Hammerstein song. “You've got to be taught how to hate and fear.
The story of Ryokan.
Load 16 tons and what do you get? I'm sure he sang other songs, but that was more than enough.
“Oh, the white folks hate the black folks/And the black folks hate the white folks/To hate all but the right folks/Is an old established rule. ” God in heaven, please send a new Tom Lehrer.
Ryokan wants to give the moon to the thief.
All manner of response, wherever, is encouraged.
Steve Burns, some new music, and familiar squirrels that have learned to sing.
Bringing together anti-racism and anti-globalization into a good package.
Where other Web content of value is promoted.
Two bookstores on Court St. in Brooklyn, a dog, and a policeman’s beard.
This site is epic and perfect; I discovered it because its founder sent me a poem for the Ftrain poetry anthology. Example: “dot-com boyfriend/girlfriend - A sexual or romantic partner who requires a high level of investment, on which you will never see any return.
Jokes without the humor, for comic effect.
So I can put it in an online anthology.
Collections of words, images, sounds, cooing birds.
A very kind reader recently sent me the audio file that went with this piece; I thought it was lost forever. Classic Ftrain Scott Rahin/Paul Ford interaction, resurrected from the digital graveyard, plus hardcore trombone fury.
Not recommended for larger, chromatic harmonicas.
A story about the Google of the future.
New York Literary Assistance center.
A Boston Terrier with an amazing face. An unhappy-looking Santa.
Ways to help keep Ftrain rolling.
They lead civic activities, and some are friends.
Where the birds come to roost, on Ftrain.
I still need a few years.
Dog is my copilot! A Web site for people who have the dog problem.
A CMU student is living for 3 months in a house he built in silence dressed as a lobster attached to an umbilical cord doing exercises and blowing on a horn. See pictures.
Hmm. It's #6 that bugs me the most.
Folk dance like a wave of the sea.
He is, in addition to being a musician, a strident progressive, and has persistently encouraged the other birds to be more accepting of the pigeons, among whom he ranks many of his closest friends.
An extremly inexpensive animal experience.
Mike and Jill are friends. Nothing naughty, just friends.
Ali Handro writes on love, frisbees, and dog shit, and the reader squirms and shivers.
Ali Handro on a cabbage patch doll and a moment of terror. Excellent as usual.
Scroll to 09 January - “Tomorrow I go in front of the judge, again. ” Excellent personal narrative about alcoholism.
Poignant, strong personal narrative about a socially lost classmate, by Dervala Hanley.
Perhaps someone who is in the field of research of mental illness would be interested in your work.
“A good example is: Are all elves physically or energetically sensitive to metal/iron? No.
I asked for advice in 2000, and received it. The images are beautiful.
2 artifacts from the day.
Good article on Jill Fraser, who spoke in West Chester, PA critiquing corporate management practices. By Jim Esch.
I keep a file called messages on my computer that holds all my phone conversations, story ideas, quotes, and phone numbers. I add to it as the days go by, when I’m working. It’s over a year old, and 32,000 lines long. This is a collage made from bits of it.
A piece I wrote with words of one sound each. No more, and of course no less (or else there’d be no sound at all).
Background on the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons.
Or maybe it's something with a birthday cake.
I must be doing something right.
It is rude to stare at ladies in the street.
Measuring your life as a ratio to Studs
Resources on the Armenian Genocide.
I was trying to create an image for my piece on the Terkel, a unit of self-worth.
A field of barley, my ass.
It's bouncy hokum, but I love it.
The Matewan Massacre of 1920: now in tasty cake form.
It's BHM over at MonkeyFist. How are you celebrating?
Brilliant Bangs' meandering, implicitly Lorca-comparing essay on Astral Weeks, which is the best album on Sundays.
Why Dean Baker is the best economics commentator out there, by a former economics professor. Dean Baker has a Terkel rating of .
Some moments of recall.
An experiment, in which I write things over time, slowly, perhaps, eventually, the slowest writing ever.
It's the picture that gets me.
I feel that this is perhaps the finest poem ever written in the English Language.
Where I’d like to take Ftrain. Some options.
A vision of circling creatures, which can be recreated by machine.
Some ideas which came out of some programming and problem-solving exercises. Half-coherent.
What are Ftrain Reader Services? Why don’t they work?
A collection of utilities to make reading a given Web site more interesting.
Jim Esch is feeling under the weather in more ways than one, and does something fine with it.
Advice for particular features in Reader Services
A poem on squirrels.
Within a margin of error, what's a median mean?
Erase your reader record and start again.
Take a short note on a page.
Save your reader record via a bookmark
I watch your every move, but you remain a number disconnected from flesh and life.
Create a link to a given page that links back to your own site
I wore opposing stripes. She wore a Tina Turner wig. Osgood glued my hair to his chest.
Sing Goddamm! Goddamm!
“Acre for acre you're talking the same amount of zombies.
The Emergency Wardrobe Alert, and how to cope. Good advice for fuck-ups like me, freely given. Learned from repeated and painful experiences. Including a recipe for fried socks.
In which I become an 11-second accidental stalker.
Interactive Fiction, looked upon all serious-like.
The tired lad.
A work of autobiography by Scott Rahin
Dimensions, voices, sound, time, language.
Arrivals and departures.
A list of things which Ftrain needs done to itself.
Scott and I head over to Boyd’s and see his 3-D theramin.
A programmer looks at the relationship between data the real world itself.
A collection of bad parrot jokes.
Buddy, the best thing about the Clinton administration, was hit by a car.
Peter Marshall: The Atlantic Ocean is the major body of water on Africa's west coast. What major body lies off Africa's east coast?
A collection of random notes on works in progress.
... is closing.
I sat at the Science and Technology Library, typing on a borrowed laptop, the desire for a cigarette pervading all my humors.