gregladen | July 7, 2008Thanks to Evan I am now aware of LOLcode. I knew there was a proposal, but I had no idea how much it had advanced. LOLcode is being developed in a series of projects that I would divide into two categories: Bleeders and sneakers.
Bleeders are implementations in a particular interpreted language (so far all LOLcode implementations are interpreted) whereby the syntax or other important aspects of the interpreter 'bleed through' to the LOLcode implementation. The bloodies of the bleeders are simple translators, while others strive for more. Sneakers are implementations where the LOLcode is…
gregladen | July 6, 2008
The Carnival of Cool Homeschoolers #3 is HERE at Homeschooled Twins.
Carnival of the Godless #95 is HERE at The Atheist Blogger.
Carnival of Space #61: Tunguska Edition is HERE at the bat page or something...
Carnival of the Liberals, 68th Edition is HERE at Atheist Revolution.
Bookworms Carnival - Edition #13 (Relationships) is HERE at caribousmom.
The 225th edition of the Carnival Of Cats is HERE at House Panthers.
Carnival of Education (178th Edition) is HERE at An (aspiring) Educator's Blog.
The Carnival of Homeschooling - Celebrating July 4th is HERE at about.com
And please…
gregladen | July 6, 2008Sourceforge.net has announced their 2008 Community Chocie Awards Finalists.
You get to vote (if you are a member). The final projects for Best Project category are:
Drupal
Firebird
FreeMind
KeePass Password Save
OpenOffice.org
PortableApps.com: Portable Software/USB
Sphinx
XAMPP
XBMC media center
XOOPS Dynamic Web CMS
There are several other categories, such as Most Likely to be Accused of Patent Violation....
...That group includes a zip clone, Moodle (most likely to be accused because of it's position of strength against a very very nasty, vicious, mean --- sorry Kara --- competitor!)…
gregladen | July 6, 2008 OA pillars The following are excerpts from the journal Nature regarding the Public Library of Science. These were located with a simple search for the phrase "Public Library of Science." For each item, I provide the source, and a selected bit of text. I have no selection criteria to report, but I do have a reason for doing this: To give an interesting view of the history of PLoS as a concept and an entity, and to some extent, the reactions to PLoS from various quarters.
I ignored passing reference to PLoS or redundant items.
Personally, I find this textual sequence fascinating. I…
gregladen | July 6, 2008I don't think you see this too often. It is my first. An LOL cat used in an actual commercial advertisement, in this case for an esoteric software development tool on a techie web site:
gregladen | July 6, 2008The Carnival of Cinema: Episode 81 - On the Bloggerfront
Carnival of Education (178th Edition)
Carnival of Homeschooling - Celebrating July 4th
Festival of the Trees
Friday Ark #198
The 90th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle
Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival: The Fourth Of July Everything is Just Fine We've Got It Under Control In America Edition
The next Tangled Bank Blog Carnival will be hosted HERE. No, don't click on that ... here!, where you are looking right now. Send me your posts!!!! We're slated to put it up on July 9th, so hurry with the submissions before it is TOO LATE…
gregladen | July 5, 2008I was looking for something else and came across this instead. I've seen this in person. There is probably a group like this in your neighborhood, check them out!
gregladen | July 5, 2008
The House of Commons (U.K.) Select Committee on Science and Technology investigated Open Access publishing alternatives, and pursuant to this obtained written evidence from Nature Publishing Group consisting of answers to specific questions about "pay to publish." Here are excerpts from the document. Given the current discussion on Open Access publishing, this may be of interest to you.
Nature Publishing Group's Publishing Model: Evidence to the House of Commons, April 2004.
Question: You stated that, under a pay-to-publish system, Nature would have to charge authors between £10K and £…
gregladen | July 5, 2008 Hans Reiser asks for a new lawyer (see below) This first item is not exclusively Linux at all...
Remember the effort by Firefox to break a downloading record? They did it. Guinness has given Firefox the record, officially. Over eight million hamburgers sold...
The de facto registrar of superlative achievements has credited Mozilla for officially setting a record for downloads in a 24-hour period: 8,002,530 copies of Firefox.
Mozilla's Download Day on June 17, whose server-crippling success delayed its official start, sought to popularize the open-source Web browser. Mozilla, which…
gregladen | July 5, 2008 PLoS The flap that started with the ill advised commentary by Delcan Butler started out looking like it MIGHT be an Orwellian, perhaps Nixononian attempt by a well established publishing icon in the fields of science to damage an up and coming competitor, the Public Libary of Science in particular, and the Open Access Movement more generally. As time goes by, however, I start to get the impression that it does not merely look this way, but may actually be this way.
I think it is very important for people who are interested in defending Open Access as a concept and perhaps PLoS in…
gregladen | July 4, 2008 Nature (left) vs. OpenAccess A number of bloggers, including myself, had recently responded to a news item in Nature by suggesting that anti-OpenAccess and anti-PLoS position taken by the author, Delcan Butler, constituted an attack of one company against another. How silly of us to have done so. Here's what we should have been thinking instead:
There were also quite a few comments to the effect that the article was self-serving given Nature's business interests. That completely ignores the overall balance of Nature's coverage, which in my opinion is broadly supportive of open access…
gregladen | July 4, 2008Ding dong.
The mo'fkr died on the Fourth of July. Probably on purpose.
Early on, his habit of blocking nominations and legislation won him a nickname of "Senator No." He delighted in forcing roll-call votes that required Democrats to take politically difficult votes on federal funding for art he deemed pornographic, school busing, flag-burning and other cultural issues.
In 1993, when then-President Clinton sought confirmation for an openly homosexual assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms registered his disgust. "I'm not going to put a lesbian in a…
gregladen | July 4, 2008 Cletus From the National Center for Science Education:
Over the protests of leading scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Institute of Biological Sciences, Louisiana's governor Bobby Jindal signed Senate Bill 733 into law, twenty-seven years after the state passed its Balanced Treatment for Evolution-Science and Creation-Science Act, a law overturned by the Supreme Court in 1987. News of Jindal's approval of the bill was buried in a press release issued on June 25, 2008, in which Jindal listed seventy-five bills he…
gregladen | July 4, 2008 (... makes me laugh .. )
The previous Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival was Four Stone Hearth Number 43, here, at Swedish Extravagaza. It was the Lard Edition. Go check it out. The home page for Four Stone Hearth is here. The next edition, due on or about July 16th, will be at YOUR blog if you want it to be (the position is still open). Just let Martin Know at the 4SH home page.
BIOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY
Neuroanthropology
Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1
In our continuing exploration of facile examples of 'evolutionary' explanations for…
gregladen | July 4, 2008 Ana One of my favorite commenters, and a good friend off line, known to you as Ana, is having a birthday today. Born on the Fourth of July, she is one of the most patriotic individuals I've ever met in my life. In a radical overthrow the government if necessary kind of way. Although we fight sometimes our love and friendship always wins. Happy 25th plus/minus birthday Ana!
Now that you've been introduced, I can tell you an Ana story.
One year, quite a few yeas back, I was having one of those down periods ... life was ruined, everything sucked, you know the story. It was Christmas…
gregladen | July 4, 2008 Leavitt Henrietta Swan Leavitt
You were born on this day in 1868, in Lancaster, Massachuetts. You figured out how to use Cepheids with the ultimate result of understanding the size and, in the end, the fundemental nature of the Cosmos. The Big Bang theory is based in part on your contributions to Astronomy.
As a woman working in Astronomy in the early days of that science, nothing important will ever be named after you. Sure, there's an asteroid named after you, but for chrissakes, PZ Myers has an asteroid named after him. Sure, there's a crater on the Moon named after you, but I…
gregladen | July 3, 2008 The Earth Today The Earth has moved as far from the sun as it typically gets, and like a ball that has been thrown into the air, stopping at its maximum height before plummeting back to earth, The Earth has slowed down to as slow as it typically gets.
Starting some time today, The Earth will begin to fall back towards the sun. Hang on, its going to be a wild ride!
Astronomers call this moment in time Aphelion
gregladen | July 3, 2008In OpenOffice, the OpenSource office suite that beats the pants off of Microsoft Office in so many ways it is not funny, has long been able to save documents as pdf files. "So what?" you say, "I've always been able to do that with thisorthat add in."
Don't interrupt me. OpenOffice has always done this seamlessly and flawlessly out of the box as a simple menu item under 'file.' .. file --> save as pdf.
Now there is an extension (like an add in) that will allow PDF editing in the works. Its inbeta stage now as Sun and only works on certaindeveloper buidls fo OpenOffice, so nobody can…
gregladen | July 3, 2008I have a partially written half baked (eventually to be fully baked) post expanding on Open Access publishing and the PLoS - Nature controversy (which is heating up quite nicely). But I may or may not finish it. What I do want to point out now is that I've made a couple of changes in my earlier post on the Nature commentary on PLoS by way of correction. There are two simple points to make here:
1) My own criticism of "peer review" is really meant to be a broader critique of the publishing process overall. Furthermore, my belief is NOT that the situation with science publishing is totally…
gregladen | July 3, 2008I've noticed, of myself, lately, that I never have a knife or a bottle opener handy, but I was once the guy who always had a knife or a bottle opener handy. That is generally true of archaeologists, and I used to be a full time archaeologist. Originally, I assumed that my lack of preparedness came down to that .... my ever increasing distance with involvement in archeology. But now, I realize this is not the case. It really is more a matter of National Security.
There is a link between the pocket, the belt-slung case or holster, the kit bag, and the backpack. They are all places where…