WiReD 4.05 (May ’96), “Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe),” on Yahoo[!]:
Starting with the ad hoc categories she inherited from Yang and Filo, Srinivasan began slowly and deliberately steering Yahoo!’s ontology toward completeness. Mainly, it’s been a matter of adding new categories and reorganizing hierarchies as the Web evolves from containing only specialized, technical information [...]
Krugman, “The Obama Agenda,” NYT (7 Nov ’08):
This year, however, Mr. Obama ran on a platform of guaranteed health care and tax breaks for the middle class, paid for with higher taxes on the affluent. John McCain denounced his opponent as a socialist and a “redistributor,” but America voted for him anyway. That’s a real [...]
DPA, “Queen Baffled at Delay in Spotting Credit Crunch,” Sydney Morning Herald (6 Nov ’08):
Prof Garicano said afterwards: “The Queen asked me: ‘If these things were so large, how come everyone missed them? Why did nobody notice it’?”
Her Royal Hghness must’ve been awfully upset to ask “How come”; but, then, losing lots of money does [...]
FT (van Duyn/Bullock, “New York Governor Urges State Spending Cut,” 28 Oct ’08):
Mr Bloomberg, addressing a securities industry gathering, said he was already seeing a direct impact of the financial crisis. He said he had dinner on Monday night in a usually full Italian restaurant in Brooklyn in which only three tables were being used. [...]
Exaggeration, it seems.
Dow, 9 Jan 1970 – 24 Oct 2008:
Harvard Crimson (Vascellaro, “Faculty Tries to Combat Grade Inflation,” 6 Jun ’02):
The [Boston] Globe story—which was picked up by news media nationwide—focused on the 91 percent of Harvard students who graduated with honors in 2001 compared to 51 percent of Yale and 44 percent of Princeton [...]
Dan Froomkin (White House Watch column, “Bush Just Makes It Worse,” WP, 10 Oct ’08)
Although Bush didn’t announce it this morning, there are signs that he will eventually sign off on a radical, but at least theoretically effective, next move—even though it violates his core political principles and is exactly the approach his administration rejected [...]
John McCain, on the virtues of presiding while seated:
Offshore drilling:
“I’m sorry Congress is gridlocked again on offshore drilling,” McCain said. “When I’m president, we’ll all sit down together and work this out.” [Schmidt’s Sausage Haus und Restaurant, Columbus, OH, Jul ’08]
Palin:
“She stands up for what’s right, and she doesn’t let anyone tell her to sit [...]
“Shorter” Krugman:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shouldn’t have been private, so even though they were just nationalized let’s say they were “deprivatized.” And besides, Bush isn’t Thatcher.
And Putin “deprivatized” Yukos.
“Don’t be evil” is too passive and, above all, too simple. A minor mod like this…
Google may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Google must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Google must protect its [...]
Peter Van Dijck’s excellent 2003 “Themes and Metaphors in the Semantic Web Discussion.”
A gloss on it + an ASCII version (of some version) of it here.
That is the considered opinion of the Société pour l’administration du droit de reproduction mécanique des auteurs compositeurs et éditeurs (SDRM) on the subject of the USSR’s national anthem. SDRM just billed the filmmaker Jean-Christophe Soulageon a bill for EUR1000 because someone whistled seven seconds of the commie anthem “L’Internationale” in his 2004 film Insurrection [...]
The Nexis search that DoJ White House liaisons ran on job candidates:
[first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or [...]
Social Fiction:
Can you explain PrimatePoetics in one sentence?
Great apes using human language are creating a new literature.
[...]
Is PrimatePoetics real? Or is it a prank? Or are you just extremely gullible?
We are not gullible: science knows that all apes have language, even dialects, in the wild, and that the great apes have more of it. The [...]