Danny Yee >> Pathologically Polymathic (blog)

December 2002

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the best books I've read in the last year
The Sorrow of Belgium
The Oxford Companion to Food
The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura
A History of the New Zealanders
Independent People
Postmodern Pooh
Grendel
The Complete Sagas of Icelanders
some photos from a short trip - bird-watching in Batemans Bay
2002 Linux Timeline - LWN
UK Law Commission recommends review of Net defamation law - Register
the effects of the Korean election result on US ties - CSM
Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy - Boston Globe review
leeches of Australia - Australian Museum - Fredric Govedich
a reporter's life: an interview with Seymour Hersh - New Yorker [via RW]
Linux and the total cost of ownership - LWN editorial
Public Library of Science gets $9 million for open access journals - NYT/SMH - PLoS
US Fourth Circuit takes different tack on Web libel to Australia's High Court - ZDnet [via link]
Nestle demands $6 million from Ethiopia for 1975 nationalisation - Guardian - Oxfam action
What Dr Seuss really taught us - Louis Menand/New Yorker
"The mother has left, and she's never coming back. It's just us and that goddam cat."
there's now an Australian-localized Google search - Google Australia
oh dear, I just noticed my spelling of "localised" above!
Bill of Rights Pared Down To A Manageable Six - the Onion
some Middle Eastern dictators are welcome in London - The Age
"Syria's President Bashar al-Assad is only a second-generation dictator, not the original, blood-stained model"
ecology, economics, conservation, and ideas - Environmental Histories of New Zealand [review]
Stanislaw Lem and Solaris - Wired [via CR] - The Stanislaw Rem Reader [review]
amusing 1930s "how to find a husband" book - Guardian [via ALD]
"A man whose forehead bulges at and just above the eyebrows is usually good at outdoor games."
some interesting ramblings on Intellectuals - Cosma Shalizi
Towards a new vision for machine translation - John Hutchins - other works
"adherence to [fully automatic high quality translation] as an ultimate goal has been damaging"
history of "the whisky was invisible" mistranslation myths - John Hutchins [via RW]
"It is surely ironic that a joke by journalists about incompetent human translators should be used, in all seriousness, to show how poor computers can be in comparison with human translators."
interesting sounding new sf novel: Harrison's Light - CR
the US wants the EU to accept Turkey - Guardian [via RW]
"Can you imagine the reaction if we told the Americans they had to enlarge into Mexico?"
cross-cultural correlates of the ownership of private propery - Anthro Globe [abstract] - full PDF
"agricultural subsistence, social stratification, social control based on law and religion, large populations and permanent settlements, patriarchal family norms, ..."
"don't be evil": Sergey Brin hand-manages Google's ethical dilemmas - Wired [via WMW]
alternative models for international defamation following Oz High Court ruling - The Age
the dangers of information ownership for science - Physics Today [via /.]
"Research linked to property has a built-in conflict of interest toward the truth"
scientists don't read the papers they cite - New Scientist [via /.]
activists publicising corporate responsibility for Bhopal disaster - RTmark
Australia may face an election fought over civil liberties - SMH
tuning a grand piano in a remote Amazon village - Guardian [via /.]
photo tour of British anti-invasion fortifications from WWII - Pillboxes UK
"we will fight them on the beaches"
conversations between Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim - Andante review [via ALD]
The Salesman as Social Pirate - decent Kuro5hin op-ed
ACLU membership up as a result of War on Terror - QCTimes [via K5]
Australia has a "National Public Toilet Map" - toiletmap.gov.au [only works in Windows IE, NN4.7]
comparative research praises Australian firefighting organisation, clothing - SMH
new (BETA) Google "shopping" search - Froogle [via WMW] - "about" [via /.]
"If you have a question, comment, suggestion, complaint, or personal request that we assist in the transfer of funds from a deposed dictator, please send an email to..."
entomologists in Namibia making do with limited resources - Scientific American
Leonardo a pacifist who crippled his military designs? - SMH/Telegraph
spoof celebrity cartoon Beowulf - Cornell student [via RW] - Seamus Heaney's translation [my review]
not as interesting as I'd hoped Google Zeitgeist for 2002 - Google
evangelical Christians among least-liked groups in United States - Data Lounge [via Rotten]
from a survey organised by an evangelical organisation!
conservative Iranian judicial official resigns in protest at death sentence - BBC
US media molly-coddling Kissinger - TomPaine.com
"As an experienced prevaricator, are you in a better position to ferret out the lies of other government officials?"
the EXIF format for digital camera meta-data - EXIF.org - EXIF library project [sourceforge]
for viewing camera settings - allows automatic rotation of photos
water has always been political in California... - CSM [via Google]
on my "to read list": Jose Saramago's The Cave - IHT review
major defamation precedent: Dow Jones loses appeal - the Age - Austlii [full decision]
a superb novel of adolescence in wartime Flanders - The Sorrow of Belgium [review]
memorandum of Kissinger's 1976 meeting with Pinochet - MemoryHole [via RW]
Israel appropriating more land from Palestinians to expand settlements - SMH
with (typically) four quotes from settlers, but not one from a Palestinian
Sony to ship StarOffice with PCs in Europe - CNN [via WMW]
Indian Linux users in upbeat mood - biz.yahoo
"a four-day visit by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates last month drew welcome attention to Linux"
flying around Baja California HOWTO, with photos - Phil Greenspun [via RW]
brief legal perspective on "assent" in software licensing - Linux Journal [via LWN]
a useful literature in translation site - babelguides.com - my world literature reviews
an index of online book reviews and interviews - BiblioReview [via CR] - other sites [updated]
this site indexes reviews from scores of sources (mine among them)
obituaries (1995) for writer, anarchist George Woodcock - Canadian Literature - Workers Solidarity
Hinduism as a product of the colonial encounter - Pankaj Mishra in the Boston Globe [via ALD]
Keith Bradsher's High and Mighty: SUVs - Washington Monthly review [via ALD]
"the bigger the SUV, the more of a jerk its driver is likely to be"
the Literary Review Bad Sex Prize 2002 - Guardian extracts
sounds like fun: The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide - IHT review
a breakdown of the cost of books - Salon [via CR]
after inflation, "the average price of mass-market paperbacks has gone up almost 40 percent" since 1975
Sydney still surrounded by fires - SMH - ABC
one minor effect: my modem connection keeps dropping out, so updates here may be less frequent
new evidence on 1984 Bhopal disaster - New Scientist
fires around Sydney causing power failures - SMH
and in the middle of it all, through the haze, a partial solar eclipse! - photo [Robert Beveridge]
a gloriously erudite encyclopedia - The Oxford Companion to Food [review]
Henry Green: "one of the literary enigmas of the twentieth century" - New Criterion
the best film I've seen in the last year - Jafar Panahi's The Circle - BFI review
also notable: Mulholland Drive, My Mother India, Beneath Clouds, Gosford Park, Last Orders - details
the extravagant expanding universe - Economist review
the end of the road for politically activist Australian band Midnight Oil - The Age
review of book debunking bad medicine - Guardian [via ALD]
why free software's long-run TCO must be lower - Brendan Scott [via link]
Doc Searls on the "intellectual property" debate at Comdex - Linux Journal [via LWN]
the scourge of Arial - Mark Simonson
"Arial gets chosen because it's cheap, not because it's a great typeface"
Henry Green's 1943 novel of firefighters in the London Blitz - Caught [review]
Zipf's law relates the frequencies of words to their "rank" - explanation
religious organisations and film censorship in Australia - a study of four films
Last Tango in Paris, The Life of Brian, Hail Mary, and The Last Temptation of Christ
encomium for increasingly passionate Paul Krugman - Washington Monthly [via ALD]
Spanish Internet censorship law - Index on Censorship
"... was returned 15 times by the country's legislature, and drew more than 65,000 public comments"
Australia's prime-minister copies Bush, threatens pre-emptive strikes on neighbours - SMH
but we don't have any aircraft carriers, Mr Howard, or nuclear weapons!
National Book Awards judge reads fewer than 50 of 400 submissions - Slate - CR - Guardian

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