Saturday, December 28, 2002

PreCC: A Prettier Compiler Compiler is an infinite-lookahead compiler-compiler for context dependent grammars. It "can be thought of as yacc with parameters, arbitrarily complex compound expressions, infinite lookahead and a neater way of dealing with attributes"
The Cocktail Compiler Toolbox
Lrc is a system for generating efficient incremental attribute evaluators. Lrc can be used to generate language based editors and other advanced interactive environments.
Micro Attribute Grammar System
FNC-2 Attribute Grammar System
Lecture on Attribute Grammars, more
Attribute Grammars Home Page
Universal Basic Income
ExtroTech Webring
Transhumanist Politics

Thursday, December 26, 2002

"It overcrowds us. We organize it. It falls apart.
We organize it again and fall apart ourselves.
"

--"The Duino Elegies", Rainer Maria Rilke

Word of the Day:
anacoluthon - A grammatical interruption or lack of implied sequence within a sentence
(Thanks to James)
"Only someone completely distrustful of all government would be opposed to what we are doing with surveillance cameras." -- NYC Police Commissioner Howard Safir, 27 July 1999
Hiding the killing in the Gulf War

Katinka Matson

Tuesday, December 24, 2002

Let Freedom Reign
"He who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep
pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom to us
by the awful grace of God.
"
Aeschylus, 525-456 BC
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Thought Police
"In ancient Greece it was a custom to break a slate of burned clay into several pieces and distribute them within the group. When the group reunited the pieces were fitted together (Greek symbollein). This confirmed the members belonging to the group."
Words of the day:
autocthonous - indigenous
quiddity - essence
telos - goal
threnody - mournful poem or song

Sunday, December 22, 2002

Saturday, December 21, 2002

"The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users."
Neural Networks in Plain English
"While it may shock some to hear it, libertarians are philosophically opposed to both liberty and equality... The LP tends to politically support liberty on some issues, but never philosophically... While libertarians champion liberty in some arenas, such as free speech, they do so not for the sake of liberty as a coherent ideal; they do so for reasons of their own convenience." --Liberty and equality: a rebuke of libertarianism

Friday, December 20, 2002

Mathematics vs. Matter: The Philosophic Roots of the Rejection of Physical Causation in 20th Century Physics
1 2 3 4

Thursday, December 19, 2002

Safeguards to be eliminated: "routine oversight; paper records of surveillance; internal reviews of investigations; and publicly available summaries of basic information, such as the number of new probes opened in a year." --NY State of Surveillance
More surveillance

Tuesday, December 17, 2002

Saturday, December 14, 2002

"For decades, [physics] students have been taught to avoid asking probing questions. An attitude of "shut-up-and-calculate" has dominated the field. The result is widespread confusion, and a strange unwillingness to ask clear and direct questions..." --When will we emerge from the quantum tunnel of obscurity?
"Hell is not the place of evil; rather, Hell is the absence of any standards at all." --Kenneth Tynan
The Edge Questions

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

"In The Creature from Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin formulates succinctly the financiers' compelling interest in war: 'All that is necessary ... to insure that a government will maintain or expand its debt is to involve it in war or the threat of war. The greater the threat and the more destructive the war, the greater the need for debt.'" --Nicholas Strakon
"We're now in a situation where you've got powerful newspaper executives like Al Neuharth, the former chairman of the Gannett chain making idiotic statements like, 'There are no more secrets in the world.' From the highest mountain to the lowest valley... Pete Williams is now a reporter -- the guy who lied again and again during the Gulf War and lied directly to me. I can honestly call him a liar and never lose a libel suit. He is now a reporter for NBC. Bob Woodward, the hero of Watergate, sits on stories" --An investigative journalist's take on media censorship in the first Gulf War (deja vu)

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

Former attorney general Ramsey Clark tears apart a Pentagon spokesman over America's ten-year bombing of Iraq
Hundred of billions of dollars are going towards doing things like this
If you're sick of hearing nothing but right-wing propaganda on mainstream radio listen to Democracy Now
What I've been listening to over the last few years, more or less in order, from newest to oldest... (mostly EBM)

Monday, December 09, 2002

How the British created Hinduism
Crime rate in the UK higher than US and most other developed countries.
more
The journalists "just hung around our base all day. Whenever we had some special operation, we'd offer the journalists some facility to go on patrol with our special forces and off they'd go – you know, 'we're on patrol with the special forces' – and they wouldn't realise we were stringing them along to get them out of the way." --What's really been going on in Afghanistan
America's influence on prospective EU members

Sunday, December 08, 2002

"Searched 674 nearby stars, found nothing."
"Searched five closest galaxies, found nothing."
"Searched all sky, found nothing" yet...
"Many people would never consider writing a prisoner. I would have never thought to do so when I was in the free world..."
Refusing military service in Israel

Saturday, December 07, 2002

"May the Lord bless everyone who beats your children against the rocks!" --Psalm 137:9 Contemporary English Version of the Bible
Wacky Uses
"An amateur photographer... was arrested on Tuesday in his home city of Denver - for simply taking pictures of buildings in an area where Vice President Cheney was residing... The agent told Maginnis that his "suspicious activities" made him a threat to national security, and that he would be charged as a terrorist under the USA-PATRIOT act"
The FCC wants to eliminate rules that restrict companies from monopolizing markets.
--how to act--
(Thanks to Jesse)

Friday, December 06, 2002

"Thomas Pynchon on bad acid couldn't dream up the paranoid nightmares now pouring out of Washington..." --Why you should join the EFF right now, by John Perry Barlow
Because of a mistaken interpretation of a Supreme Court reporter's notes in an 1886 railroad tax case, corporations are now legally considered "persons," equal to humans and entitled to many of the same protections once guaranteed only to humans by the Bill of Rights - a clear contradiction of the intent of the Founders of the United States. The results of this corporate personhood have been:

Unequal taxes
Unequal privacy
Unequal wealth
Unequal trade
Unequal media
Unequal regulation
Unequal responsibility for crime
Unequal protection from risk
Unequal citizenship and access to the commons

Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights

To Sell a War
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” - Herman Goering at the Nuremberg Trial

Thursday, December 05, 2002


**************************************************
*********David Fincher is making Hard Boiled *********
**************************************************
Info on the original here

Tuesday, December 03, 2002

"Look more closely, though, and the “us” and “them” distinction collapses. Right-wing Christian leaders like Franklin Graham may denounce Islam as a “wicked religion,” and Muslim fundamentalists may defame Jews, but in fact their visions are far closer than either camp would admit."
"Fox isn't in any conventional sense ideological media. It's just that being anti-Democrat, anti-Clinton, anti-yuppie, anti-wonk turns out to be great television"

Monday, December 02, 2002

"Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry." -- William Butler Yeats

Sunday, December 01, 2002

It doesn't get geekier than this
"Networked minefields detect rude attempts to clear them, deduce which parts of themselves have been removed, and signals their remaining munitions to close the hole using best-fit mathematics"
"The mines, which can hop, then redistribute themselves, frustrating the enemy and quite probably terrifying him in the process."
GoogleCookin
christmas lights - WARNING: For indoor or outdoor use only.
mattress - WARNING: Do not attempt to swallow
Anti-Personal Mine - WARNING: DO NOT EAT
Blockbuster Rental DVD - "Be kind - rewind."
Dumb Warnings