Sometimes I wonder why I subscribe to Lee's blog, but then he comes out with statements like this: "The government makes money from them, therefore we'll never get rid of them. Thus it follows that if drugs weren't revenue generating we should be rid of them. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is my main problem with the contemporary conservative movement in this country. Anyone remember back in the good old days, when being a conservative meant believing in limits on state power and the primacy of the individual? It has not become a part of social authoritarians who still claim the noble mantle of limited government. John would swear up and down that he still believes in freedom, liberty, and limited government, but then he'd also be perfectly fine with a SWAT team kicking down your front door, throwing in a flash-bang grenade, then charge in wearing paramilitary gear and pointing MP5's at you just so you couldn't smoke a joint. That's not freedom, it's not liberty, and it sure as hell has nothing to do with limited government. It's doing exactly what liberals do, use the awesome might of the state to guarantee that everyone acts in accordance with the narrow strictures of their own set of social values."2007-01-29T00:27:26Z
Talk about hyperlocal content that's useful - Londonist has reviews of bagel shops in London. Brick Lane and Golders Green Road both seem like a long way to go for bagels, but both seem more tempting than the super-expensive bagels for sale in the West End. Someone needs to make a London bagel map mashup.2007-01-29T00:18:15Z
Let danah boyd free you of your moral panics. Teenagers will always be safer than what the media and/or their parents think they are.2007-01-29T00:13:52Z
XML geeks! Celebrate! XQuery 1.0, XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 have all gotten the W3C equivalent of confirmation or bar mitzvah - Recommended status. Now the hard work begins - getting the tools, getting adoption, getting developers not to turn their noses up. I have Michael Kay's XSLT 2.0 book, but since the only XSLT 2.0 processor I know of is Saxon, it's unlikel I'll be putting any XSLT 2.0 out in production. It'll be XSLT 1.0 for a while.2007-01-29T00:09:26Z
Brian Benzinger has a profile of Footnote, which is a Web 2.0 site that isn't a total waste of time. It's got pictures of lots of historical documents. It's like Google Maps but for (chunks of) culture. As a card-carrying British Library reader, I love the idea.2007-01-29T00:07:06Z
The first step is admitting that you have a problem. Maybe now that Google have taken the first step to recovery from China insanity, they can help in the fight against the tinpot, pretend capitalist government of China - even though Falun Gong organ transplants are Tony the Tiger greeeeat.2007-01-28T23:58:32Z
Ophelia is still hoppin' mad over tha Catholic anti-gay thing. Can't blame her. I supposedly do know something about the Catholic conception of conscience, and if I (a) had my Macintosh handy and (b) had more than half an hour or so free, I'd write something about it. It's interesting and shockingly dull at the same time. Tom Coates is hoppin' mad too.2007-01-28T23:56:57Z
I have a lot of respect for Danny Ayers, but why on earth is he putting SPARQL queries in encoded URLs? Dude, stored queries, HTTP POST, XML-RPC, SOAP, anything but having 900 character URLs. How about returning a namespaced element in the SPARQL results with some kind of ID to call the procedure again?2007-01-28T23:53:25Z
Some people call it being a jerk. I call it revenge. PZ Myers has it bang on. It's never prayer that cures illness, it's medicine. Consider, please, zealots. Ooh, didn't know that PZ has an IRC channel - irc.zirc.org #pharyngula - might visit 'em tomorrow.2007-01-28T23:50:42Z
I have the same problem that Joshua has. I'm an obsessive-compulsive bookworm, apparently. I'm not in the final stages of a Ph.D. though, thankfully.2007-01-28T23:48:00Z
Ivan Pope has some links to interesting bits and pieces from the forthcoming LIFT conference in Geneva. I hope you guys enjoy it more than the last conference I saw you at. 2007-01-28T23:46:52Z
This week, James Randi has a transcript from a conversation with Sylvia Browne. It's instructive if you want to understand human deception. Randi was on Larry King on Friday. Read about it here.2007-01-28T23:38:50Z
Managed, after about an hour of flailing and cursing, to get a podcast recorded with Ian. We chatted about RDF, microformats and other good stuff. I've got it in MP3, and I'll upload it tomorrow. I've got a pretty swish way of doing the podcast thing. You better wait and see.
Warning - it's long, it's geeky, and it's got the same kind of rough hewn production values you've come to expect from the late, great Gillmor Gang, albeit without the four minutes of waffly commercials at the start of each of the nineteen component parts.
It's all about the attention economy. And gestures. And how links are dead. If that hasn't put you off enough, check back tomorrow and you can listen. Probably.
I also write for the Citizendium, an online encyclopedia project. If you know about stuff, you should join in. I occasionally produce audio recordings for The Pod Delusion.
