I just found out that Orson Scott Card’s latest Ender book was published. I had no idea. I use to spend months waiting for these books, hoping to hear any news. I totally missed this one. I guess it just goes to show how much things have changed for me since high school. If you wish to read the first three chapters of the book you can find them here
So I was going through my list of blogs just now, and I relized that I don’t much care about IP stuff. I mean I do, I know why it is important and I fully support the EFF, Larry Lessig and all the others, but I don’t really get motivated or enflamed by the issue. I need to find some blogs on globalization, now thats what interests me. I guess that’s what I get for following links from Larry Lessig’s site to other blogs, I end up with a lot of lawyers and anti-IP law blogs. Time to go out and find other blogs that fit my interests better.
Another interesting factoid from my stats page (ok, so it might only be interesting to me): at this rate of hits I will have I will have almost 1000 page views, or 300 visits. That makes me happy. I wish it was 1000 visits, but thats ok, it will increase with time.
This is one of the more bizzar pieces of news I have read in a log time, the Miss Captivity Pageant.
If Arnold Schwarzenegger ever gets elected Governor of California at any point I am prepared to treat the movie Demolition Man as a prophecy, I will then go buy as much Taco Bell stock as possible. I’m tempted to start thinking of Minority Report the same way after reading this article.
So I have this other idea that has been perclating through my head lately. I have had an idea like this in my head for a while, but since reading about the Earth Simulator it resparked my thinking on the matter. My thought is to build a cluster of computers and a program that modeled the worlds trade, taking into account both foreign and demestic trade, barriers to trade and government distortions to prices. That way you could see the possible outcome of changing trade regulation. Not only would you be able to see the overall changes but see the changes on different sectors of economy. It’s an interesting idea that I wont be able to implement any time soon. I don’t have the know how in either computers or economics (although the economics seems straitforward enough that by the time I graduate I should know how to put something like that togther) nor the money to build a cluster like I’m thinking. Maybe this is what I will work on after I finish my book about globalization.
So I have been thinking about applying for the Truman Scholarship. The first thing I found was that you can’t download the scholarship application with Mozilla, you have to use IE. I guess this is just one more way the government supports the M$ monopoly. Anyways, I finally got the apps and have been reading through them, filling in the boiler plate stuff, and when I moved on the the more detailed, harder questions I started to doubt whether or not I should even bother applying for this. I mean really, when you think about it a 3.36 GPA isn’t that great, and it’s not going to get that much better this semester. I think I’m going to end up with just a 3.5 or 3.66 for this semester, depending on what I get in Accounting. That will raise me up some, but not as much as I would like. And really, I haven’t done that many public service type things. I haven’t had an internship in Washington, I’m not active in school anymore, really, I’m not active in anything right now. So really I’m doubting I’m the sort of person that they are looking for. Before I was questioning it, now I’m really not sure.
I just finished reading this Atlantic Monthly article on Bobby Fischer. It was really quite interesting. It amazes me how somebody so smart and good at what they do can be so insane. If you are at all interested in the life of the best chess player to ever live go read this article. It doesn’t have a lot about his chess, but it was an interesting article on Bobby Fischer’s life.
I have been asked by a few people in the past couple of weeks, “What is a blog?” Halley’s Comment has theperfect answer.
One of the things Halley says is that soon blogs with be A/V, not just text. I have been thinking about this idea lately, of making a blog all A/V. Jill is getting a digital camera for x-mas (don’t worry, she knows it already, I’m not spoiling the surprise) and I have been thinking that it would be neat to use one for backpack journalismbut for a blog, not for news.
However there are problems with the A/V blog. When I’m writing for my blog I don’t do it in one fell swoop; I write some, look at something else on the computer, write a bit more. I stop and go, something that I wouldn’t be able to do if I was video taping myself. Another problem is that it takes more bandwidth and many people on slow internet connections wouldn’t ever want to look at my blog. A third problem would be that search engines wouldn’t be able to see the actual content of my site. Lastly I don’t think they will catch on for the very same reason that video phones never did, I write my blog at all hours of the day, from when I first wake up to right before I go to sleep. I never have to worry if I’m presentable, because people never see me, they only see my words. With an A/V blog that wouldn’t be possible. There are some people who really wouldn’t care if people saw them looking like crap, but the more professional blogs, the ones that aren’t just about personal things, blogs like SCOTUSblog or Larry Lessig’s blog would be more difficult to do, at least more effort would have to go in to getting ready to make a post.
So while an A/V blog would be great, I don’t think it will become the standard for blogging.