geegaw.com

Fits of uncontrollable laughter

Via Boing Boing, we discovered the highly inconsistent sketch comedy of The Lonely Island (NOT WORK-SAFE). Brilliant! Much to A.'s embarrassment, I've transcribed the lyrics to "Ka-blamo" and "Stork Patrol". (Please don't read them till you've watched the music videos.) The highly untoward song "Zanzabar" is my favorite, but I can't bring myself to type those lyrics. Do not listen unless your stomach is strong.

thoughts on financial planning

Apropos of all the people getting screwed by nationwide budget crises, someone on the Dean boards tried to illustrate our coping mechanism by paraphrasing a story used by Christians --

A man walks up to a river, and sees people floating down the river, drowing. Another man is at the river's edge, trying to save people as they rush by. The first man stops, looks, and continues up river. The second cries after the first "How can you walk away? Come back and help me!" The first responds, "I'm going upstream to stop whoever is throwing them in."

This is how I justify to myself giving money to Howard Dean (going upstream) that I could be giving to charity (downstream), though I am trying to give a little to each.

But, I mean, if you get one of those filthy tax cut checks in the mail, you could give the money to charity or to your favorite candidate (or if you're in tight financial straits, please hold on to it, because times are going to get even tougher) but just keep in mind where it comes from and how there isn't going to be much of it . . . The last tax cut was the kind of money you could fritter away in a weekend: that's what I'm trying to keep in mind.

Blissing out

Fantastic: The art of Matthew Bliss, available online (2 pages: one for paintings, one for sculptures.) The photographs of the sculptures make them look so dreamlike, like the outdoor cinemas of tiny elves. But the sculpture of Bliss's that I do own looks extremely tactile: a scrap torn from the ruins of the far future, defying rational comprehension.

Dean task force

Media alert: I pretty much agree with Arianna Huffington's article Democrats: Profile in Spinelessness, except for one serious omission: she neglects to mention Howard Dean and his spinefulness.

I've sent mail to arianna *at ariannaonline *dot com, and if you agree, please consider doing so too!

shanti3

Went to the Hine Digital Art site to thank Dirk for a mix of Indian music I unexpectedly recv'd in the post, and found this amazing Photomontage feature which randomly juxtaposes several translucent images from Dirk's extensive and lovely collection of antique photographs, found texts, handwriting, and symbols. It's definitely worth clicking "reload" more than once.

BTW, track 3, Sheila Chandra -- "Speaking in Tongues III" -- seems to owe something to Kurt Schwitters, though with a somewhat pared-down vocabulary.

Fie! A pox on fiddleheads!

OK, now I too harbor a personal grudge against fiddleheads. Recently recv'd:

dear geegaw, here is the whole truth of it: i was cooking a rare dinner for just me and desultor. potatoes, we decided -- famous potatoes fried in butter. we bought the fingerling kind that comes with strange pink fractal patterns on the inside. and then, what? meat? or something green? we voted for green, and i selected fiddleheads -- at LEAST in part because you had mentioned them recently. i sauteed them for five minutes according to the second recipe my google search revealed. they were tasty enough, though not astounding. and within six hours, we both YUKED. sincerely, anonymous.

Well, anything that makes a friend of mine yuke, incurs my enmity. (A pox on geegaw.com, too, then! And oysters! And a pox on liquor, while we're at it!)

Here is a simple, tasty, soothing recipe of mine that -- as far as I know -- is perfectly safe:

Blueberry parfait

Fill a tall glass with three layers:

• 1 part vanilla yogurt (I always like Stonyfield Farm)
• 1 part frozen blueberries, right out of the freezer (the local Northwest brand I use is plump and sweet, but I don't know how widely distributed it is)
• 1 part soy milk (Yü is now my favorite brand -- thanks to a tip from JD)

Stir vigorously. Let the icy blueberries melt a little into the drink. Serve cold.

chains of air, web of aether

All morning I was sipping from the same cooling mug of tea (the flavor is called "honeybush," don't snicker) while answering email, and my net connection was was being inexplicably slow, so for an hour or so, with all the new mail alerts firing, there was the horrifying experience of my backlog actually increasing while I was actively working to beat it down. But, I mean, this is good, -- I'm not doing a single thing that I don't think is worthwhile.

Sitting up here in the People's Republic of Seattle and looking eastward over the continental US, the view is pretty grim. The newest Paul Krugman article begins with a quote from the Financial Times: "The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum." The other editorial today was by Adam Cohen: For Partisan Gain, Republicans Decide Rules Were Meant to Be Broken -- about Republican ruthlessness and indifference to the spirit of the law, exploiting all the loopholes they can find for their own political gain.

But as the economy slides into collapse, fewer people I know have the resources to do anything about this. You can't really agitate for change while trying to hold down two jobs, or while hunting for one, or while filing bankruptcy. About this I do worry.

kill the utility monster

"Fiddleheads are my new culinary enemy," writes Desultor, because they apparently contain an unidentified natural toxin. Well. I'm sad to say that a couple weeks ago, fiddleheads became my new culinary friend: like okra, they manage to be at once deliciously crunchy, slimy, and a little bitter -- divine! . . . And what if the ones I had were undercooked, and properly cooked ones are even better?? (Permalink to the large version of the accompanying header photo.). Well, the proof of the fiddleheads is in their eating. . . .

But anyway, Desultor, I hope you did not personally suffer.

It was a wonderful weekend that involved a lot of sleeping and sneezing. My email is back! --

for some doubt may be made whether a Toad properly pisseth

The second elegaic couplet is about toad-stones.

The mind is an ancient toad
struggling to prize
the poison-jewel from between its eyes.

Email difficulty this weekend

UPDATE: Dialtone went down too, fixed now. Sorry!

I totally forgot that the *ahem* usual account I use to answer geegaw mail will be down all weekend, which means that if you sent any email between now (7:30pm) and the last time I checked my messages (around noon) I didn't get it.

In the interim, please direct any correspondence via either my cell phone or to (geegaw@g**g*w.com), which now forwards to a different account. I do apologize for the inconvenience.

It's sunny and, believe it or not, hot in Seattle today. Enjoy the weekend!

Never pay for poem again gxyzql

I am sneezy, ahead of schedule on work, and behind on email. Misread the title of a spam message as an exhortation to "Feel, young Geegaw!"

My first elegaic couplet, metaphors hopelessly mixed:

a wave

timing its ebb

to the rain's metronome

ripples with droplets as it climbs toward home

Introducing Dialtone

It's time for a new diablolical game. It's like "Telephone," but for the diablog. The game is called "Dialtone."

Basically, from here on out, any new diablog posts aside from the most recent post, will be hidden.

Your task, should you choose to play the game, will be to post a response to that post in the diablog, without knowing the earlier context of the conversation.

Thus, while Dialtone is going on, the function of the diablog will not be to comment on posts made in the main body of the blog; the diablog will instead be entirely self-reflective, commenting only on itself. (And it doesn't have to be profound or literary or even funny. Really.)

Finally, at some aforementioned future point in time, all posts shall be unveiled, and we will for the first time be able to read them in their collective unity.

Sound okay? Make sense? Give it a try! (P.S. you can post more than once, if you like.)

coupling

I was talking to E. about this passage from The Beauty of the Husband, which speaks to me of accomplishment, and is still, somehow horrifying:

There was a branch I used to watch from my back kitchen window
and gradually began to keep a record of it
almost every day
in elegiac couplets,
for example:

Foaming against its own green Cheek it cools in brief

or seems to cool each Underleaf

(this was in spring, or
here's one from early October:)

Dull whitish and deadly as that Chalkline marked on the Door

by Homer who likened Carpentry to a Stalement in war [sic]

(or an overcast morning:)

Whose Shadow in abstract Rain appears to be

lashing the Wall at some secret Velocity

(Just before a thunderstorm:)

This Wind at Night carrying it all over the Sky like Quartets

or Dido surviving between Lightning Sets

(early November:)

All but bare: dangling like Bits of Bone

in an All Souls Wind just five

you see those Souls seeping up the numb

Shafts, see Souls come oaring out of the Dark alive

(late November:)

Terrible Rinse, yellow Leaves, Cradle of the Shape of Fire

through early dirty drenching Snow as Mortals in tragic Attire

(expecting spring:)

Brighter than Bite

it bangs March Light too tight

(or not:)

Against this Wall, the way Brothers tear at

one another's Heads with their Love, it fought

Well I won't bore you with the whole annal.
Point is, in total so far, 5820 elegiacs.
Which occupy 53 wirebound notebooks.
Piled on four shelves in the back kitchen.
And would take maybe a night and a day and a night to read through.
With fervor.

. . .

Also. Recent reading: Samuel Beckett's Collected (on loan from E.). Good Work: Where Excellence and Ethics Meet. (On from my employer's corporate library, believe it or not.)

From "Blue Hour"

to abandon yearning for the body
to be unquiet
to be visible to oneself
to become endlessly what one has been
to cross the field without breaking the snow
to enter into itself and to stay awake
to expose ourselves to whatever may happen
to forget once having known it
to hide, safeguard, entrust to a protected place

to know not only what is, but the other of what is
to know that the great bell is the great bell

- Carolyn Forché, from "On Earth", in Blue Hour

Clearinghouse, not charnelhouse

asparagus soup with crab and morels
sauteed fiddleheads with baby shiitake

Recipe for epiphanic sensation: while I am reading the sequel to the Artist's Way in Bailey-Coy Books this afternoon, speakers start playing Beth Orton. Instantly hooked. Time to jump back on that bandwagon.

The teacher from my high school I wrote about, whom they thought had SARS, is fully recovered now. Whoo!

Genres. Daydream about writing an abecedarius, i.e. (in English) a 26-line acrostic where the first line begins with A, the second with B, all the way through Z. Inspired, kind of, by Carolyn Forche's abecedarian hymn "On Earth" in her new book. From which an excerpt is coming soon.

Nota: Trickle is most useful as time capsule. Write a post, but set its start date for sometime in the future, and then when you've totally forgotten about ever having written it, boom! There it appears, right on your index page. . . . It's also useful to space out the entries for my fotolog, so I can upload a bunch of photos at once and have my header graphic automatically rotate every other day.

Just bid eBay for a shoulder bag big enough to carry papers and books, the rationale being that I will be able to carry around an assortment of Dean flyers and buttons, which my current bag can't comfortably hold. I'm attempting this new "ordering stuff sight unseen" thing as part of an effort to avoid buying items that are new, whenever possible.

Nota: They've reissued A. R. Ammons' Garbage with really gorgeous new cover and spine (photo does not do it justice). Maybe it's time to finally get it?

and Waggish has a new header graphic . . .

Eggy learns something, for once.

From a variety of slang dictionaries, incl. The Online Dictionary of Playground Slang:

eggy adj. 1) really good, marvellous (exclamation) 2) being irritated on a minor scale

When Stewart coined this nickname, I had no idea of its implications. But am pleased, since the latter definition fits me pretty well.

Nota. I have sampled every single Kettle Chips flavor I know of, including the rare Burgundy-and-Aged-Cheddar, and found them all good -- until today. Their Jalapeño-Lime-Tequila flavor tastes like pad thai and chow mein pureed together in a blender with a shot of gin! It's a crime against the brand.

...

I must give the new goofy 60's-battle-of-the-sexes-farce Down (EWAN) With Love a very high recommendation (EWAN), and not just because I have a seven-year (EWAN) habit of slavering over Ewan (EWAN! EWAN! EWAN!) McGregor either; it was a first, and very pleasant, introduction to the engaging Renee Zelwegger. Today's romantic-comedic heroines just seem infinitely more appealing to me than the actresses of just two or three years ago. There's just something so screwball about them. Looking forward to seeing Kate Hudson play opposite Owen Luke Wilson soon . . .

...

If I were a journalist, I wouldn't be able to print any quotes I couldn't verify the source of; but I'm not! Thus:

"Every time they do this, we grow," said Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi. "If they want to get rid of us, they should just shut up."

Very busy, and a busy day ahead to boot. More later.

The hand is filthy, but the pool of spit remains.

My throat is hoarse from cheering. (Another volunteer named Andy actually lost his voice.)

My palms are red from clapping and bruised in one spot from clapping a little bit too hard.

My knees handled all the jumping up and down just fine.

The before-the-speech part was great, too; Jim and Patti and Ezra were there, and the entire Dean Outreach crowd, and some other folks whose names I recognized from the web.

The hall was filled past capacity, and hundreds more people waited in the lobby and were listening over the P.A. system. And when Dean walked onstage, the crowd just went bananas, whooping and yelling and clapping and thumping and flapping Dean signs over their heads.

He talked about fixing the economy, and preventive health care and social services, and it being important to steer people away from going to jail, and how many Democrats don't even like the Democratic party all that much these days (loud murmur of agreement from the crowd) and that, in order to get people to vote, we need to really stand for something; and then he used that bit from the debate -- here is a vague reconstruction of his ending remarks --

The great lie that people like me tell people like you is "elect me and I'll solve all of your problems."

But the truth is that the future of this country rests in your hands, not in mine.

You have the power to balance the budget. You have the power to help the environment. You have the power to bring us our dream, which Harry Truman put in our platform in 1948 health care for every American.

It's time to take our party back and it's time to take our country back.

You have the power.

You have the power.

You have the power.

And after the speech, he shook my hand! -- I was standing a little bit aside, not wanting to interrupt, and John Taylor kind of steered me toward him and made a gap in the throng and said "This is a volunteer" and HOWARD DEAN SHOOK MY HAND!

This is what Howard Dean's hand feels like: thick, warm, solid. It was a handshake of integrity.

I really want this election to happen. Oh how I want it to happen.

today today today

3 hrs till my volunteer shift at Town Hall begins: I can hardly wait!

best . . . bumper sticker . . . ever

Seen on the Daily Show:

HOW'S MY DIPLOMACY? * * * * * * * * * * CALL 1-800-EAT-SH*T

day of formals

Took a steep road up the hill, at twilight -- so my camera was no good, but I wish I could paint what it for you. Leaning over a construction site, the dark red stain of a Japanese maple against the dimming sky. Just above it, the full moon slipping out of a halo of cloud. Also, what the unmowed grass looked like when parts of it caught the last light.

There are months when I do seem to wobble around a bit: like a raw egg set spinning. I need to remember that good long walk can set me back on my axis sometimes. And if you ever want a tour of my neighborhood, let me know.

(Bookmark for later: Who would've guessed that an unassuming cybercafe on Capitol Hill would have such tasty gourmet sandwiches?)

drip drip drip

Looking through old files always feels sad: where does the time go? A note to myself, dated December 1998:

portFOlio! that is the answer.

country goodness and green teaness

Now that there are dozens upon dozens of Howard Dean blogs out there, I've started googling trying to suss out the competition's blogs, and the strange thing is, there doesn't seem to be many of them. I found one legit site for Edwards, one for Kucinich, John Kerry's blog (this cracked me up) and Bob Graham's blog (I assume this is not the same Bob Graham who's running for president).

No fan sites for Mosely-Braun or Sharpton yet -- it's that damn digital divide -- googling for Gephardt just turns up a post titled "Why Gephardt Won't Make It"; and for Lieberman, "Cruel Lieberman" and "Say No To Lieberman."

I guess we know where the blogosphere's vote is going.

Hey, did you guys notice that teapot tempest last year about John Kerry's $75 haircut? I concur, $75 is really not that high for a really good cut. Stylists' prices are outrageous these days, which is why I only get mine cut every 4 months or so.

Anyway -- since I continue to be in a frivolous mood -- here's Reason Why I Heart Joe Trippi Part LXI: a comments thread from the Dean blog where Joe himself participated.

Fist WTCPosterChild chides Joe on his reckless Diet Dr. Pepper consumption:

Clinical case studies shows that, among other symptoms, Aspartame ingestion results in "mind fog", feeling "unreal", poor memory, confusion, anxiety, irritability, depression, mania, and slurred speech. [Neurology 1994]

And Trippi responds:

WTC Poster Child -- wow that describes me to a T!!! Confusion, depression -- the staff will swear to the mania and irritablity part -- though I am not showing signs of slurred speech yet! The Pepsi thing is from a political squabble that is over two decades old with me -- so its principled consumption -- nothing to do with the taste. The diet part is....well lets just say I am on a diet. And trust me -- when I am on the road with the Governor -- at least once each trip he turns to me as I zip open a can of the stuff and says "Joe I am worried about your health" -- So I guess the good news is I am working for a doctor. I suppose I could start drinking buckets of Green Tea -- hmmmmmmmmm thinking about it...... Trippi

And then - in a comment a little later on, Trippi sneaks this paragraph in:

Sitting here reading -- and sipping on a freshly brewed cup of Green Tea -- wow I am really going to have to rethink this!

Now is that adorable, or what?

Ay, there is the contact strip

Days when one can just slide through life, surrounded with comradery and sympathetic understanding, but at the end of the day feel just so tired and humiliated and battered by a thousand natural shocks? Well, luckily chocolate soothes all ills, especially the Godiva kind.

To tell you the truth, there had been a little friction between me (amateur, completely lacking in political experience, like many of the internet-based grassroots Deanizens), and the officially sanctioned folks with their decades of campaign experience and relative computer naivetë. The folks at Dean HQ, like Joe Trippi and Zephyr Teachout, seem to really "get" this whole Internet thing but I'm not sure it's fully trickled down just yet. Nevertheless, everything ended well and I'll be there inside the hall hawking Dean wares dressed in a suit and hoping for my chance to get into a group photo with the good Doctor; but (as the Ftrain.com motto goes) "I have much to learn," especially about how the political world works: it's pretty darn different from the low-budget volunteer world.

Profile of Joe Trippi, Our Rock Star. Also, another article pointing out that what differentiates Dean from other failed Democratic contenders is that he's almost inadvertently built a network of internet-based grassroots supporters, and that his ability to leverage this may be a big determinator of his success in the primary: Howard Dean and His American Dream Team (LA Times reprint).

Is any Penitential Sacrament
effective medicine for the inept,
the subtle, the indomitably adept
folly of being human? Grace of God!
When most contrite, I am most platypod --
Rise Christ! Give these feet wings! My need is exigent.

-- John Wheelwright, "Holy Saturday"

Stevens vs. Hemingway: the citations

I've been holding off on blogging this story for a couple years due to lack of documentary proof, but Toadex seems to have found some in a book of Hugh Kenner's essays. So here it is: the Wallace-Stevens-vs.-Ernest-Hemingway Bar Brawl Story.

Here's a story Hemingway wrote in a 1936 letter, recounting, of all things, a "Wallace Stevens evening." Stevens having come to Key West "sort of pleasant like the cholera."

It starts with "my nice sister ... crying" over Mr. Stevens "telling her forcefully what a sap I was, no man, etc." [...]

Next, out in the rainy street, our hero "met Mr. Stevens who was just issuing from the door haveing just said, I learned later, 'By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now I'd knock him out with a single punch.'" This is hardly the Stevens we know, but Hemingway was not following his own counsel against putting real people into stories. The Mr. Stevens of the story next "swung that same fabled punch but fertunatly missed and I knocked all of him down several times and gave him a good beating." The location of Stevens's fall was "a large puddle of water."

Someone then requested that Hem take off his glasses, desiring "a good clean fight without glasses in it." Next "Mr. Stevens hit me flush on the jaw with his Sunday punch bam like that. And this is very funny. Broke his hand in two places. Didn't harm my jaw at all and so put him down again and then fixed him good so he was in his room for five days with a nurse and Dr. working on him."

Finally, "I have promised not to tell anybody and the official story is that Mr. Stevens fell down a stairs."

That's the story. It omits the shabby detail that Stevens was 56, Hemingway 36.

Such boisterous devotion to the sun. . .

A vindication

After a week of not quite getting into every volunteer shindig I hoped for (no techie modeling gig, no Amazon blogs usability study), I finally got into something! Here's the call for volunteers:

We are looking for 16-18 volunteers to help out on May 14th at the Gov. Dean rally at Town Hall. Volunteers are needed to wave signs, pass out fliers and direct drivers to parking around Town Hall between 4:00-6:00 pm and between 5:45-7:30 pm. Volunteers will get a free t-shirt, reserved seating and possibly - time permitting - the chance to meet Dean after the rally. Space is limited so volunteer before the slots are filled.

If you can spare two hour before the rally please e-mail me at mooredj2001@yahoo.com or call me at (206) 235-7026

If you're interested in this, I'd sign up quick -- slots are going like hotcakes.

My favorite M.D. (hint: it's not Doogie Howser)

Between the Democratic candidate debate last weekend and yesterday's meetup, the Seattle4Dean list was just peppered with new membership requests today. So in the spirit of Dean-boosting, here are some anecdotes I read on the Dean board:

From a newspaper interview with the homeless guy who stopped Dean on the street without knowing who he was -- whom Dean then took to a congressional shindig so he could get a fried catfish dinner:

"He said, 'You hungry?' I said, 'Yeah.' He say, 'Come on.' And then when we got to the place with the fish fry, one of the people didn't want to let me in. And he says, 'That fella there - he's with me.'"

And then there was the one about the lady who skinned her knee and needed a band-aid:

Actually, I think I do have one, Dean said, fishing in his pocket for his wallet and producing a dog-eared bandage.

Not to mention the woman who collapsed outside a Ben and Jerry's, whom Dean helped without even telling her who he was. . . .

And by the way -- some online poll is accepting votes for Bush vs. Dean in 2004. An opportunity so nice I took it thrice.

the bright nails scattered on the ground

1) "Initial testing results came back negative indicating that Mrs. Cook is free of the coronavirus but final results will take a couple more days."

2) The diablog's performance had gotten really bad. To those of you who saw CGI timeouts and were forced to hit "Post" multiple times, I apologize. The problem should be more or less fixed at this point -- or complain to me if it isn't.

3) I am seeing neon-colored rods float in front of my eyes.

4) Sometimes it seems that -- since I have been lucky enough to lead a privileged life -- the hardest task is to walk through at least some of the doors that life generously opens. . . .

5) And thanks to Anita for reminding me that Ophelia Z. was actually a guy. Does anyone remember DeadAt32.com? Someone told me that guy was involved in a hoax too, though I can't quite seem to recall the details.

6) I don't know how those people pull it off. Each year I find it more difficult to keep my online and real lives from encroaching on each other.

In case you were wondering why I've been so preoccupied

Came back from the Howard Dean meetup to find that my old high school (in Taipei) has been shut down due to SARS.

A cheerful quote from Dr. Henry Niman, a surgeon at Harvard Med School: "If you're over 50 and go into the hospital with it, odds aren't you won't come out."

So I called my parents. My dad has fully recovered from his bout last week with viral bronchitis. But when they come visit us this summer, assuming that visitors from Taipei will even be permitted at that point, they want to keep their distance.

There is a global WiFi network of human feeling. To this belief I cling.

a few sordid deceptions I'm embarassesd to admit I remember

November 22, 1996. The author of the popular site Jessa's Journal makes a confession that her life as described in the journal is pretty much fiction -- "me if i were who i wanted to be" -- and that in reality, her so-called boyfriend is nothing of the sort, and that she's in fact married to some other dude whom she's never mentioned.

November 16, 1998. Net diarist Kim Rollins posts an entry revealing that she has left her boss, sysadmin, and husband of nine years, Wil Shipley, to run off with another man -- a plan she had been completely successful in hiding from the outside world. Her goodbye note said: "I didn't want to let anyone know how badly I wanted to escape until I was sure I could go through with it. . . . Five hundred people and I lied, if only by omission, to you all, day after day." (from the Rollins-Shipley Crisis archives)

Early July, 2000. Original camgirl Jennifer Ringley runs off with her best friend's fiance, Dex, with whom she subsequently has boisterous, repeated s*x on camera.

November, 2000. A blogspot-based love quadrangle explodes: Thunderstruck's wife Love Shack Baby! wants to leave him for either his friend Island Jack or her good friend FlutterByMee: she posts a whimsical poll to her blog where users can select which of the three options they think she should take.

So, where are they now? Ex-Jessa has a livejournal that, at first glance, is not too strikingly different from any other livejournal. I guess things between Kim Rollins and her "boy" didn't work out, because she was spotted in an ad on Salon personals. Jenni and Dex are still together, according to her latest diary entry, living a pretty regular domestic life. And as for Love Shack Baby!, she seems to have sunk without a trace, and who can blame her.

. . .

The smartypants Ezra suggests an in-place quicksort as a way to do yesterday's coding problem in O(n log n) time -- a solution that definitely gets better as the size of the file scales upward. (Though we do know the size of the file is going to max out at 16GB -- there simply aren't any more unique 32-bit integers after that point!)

a coding question for you

(After reading Programming Pearls . . .)

You have a 4GB read-only text file containing an unsorted list of about a billion unsigned, 32-bit integers that are randomly, uniformly distributed across the range of all possible unsigned 32-bit values. No integer appears twice in the file.

You have about 150MB free RAM and just about enough disk space to write a second copy of the file.

How would you sort this file (and write a sorted copy of this file to disk)? The combination of unique elements and a non-sparse array would seem to point to using a bit vector. The problem with bit vectors is that they require a lot of memory - to create one that could store any 32-bit integer would be about 4 billion bits (512 MB) and we only have 150 MB free. So the best solution I can think of is to use a bit vector that's only a quarter as big (i.e. that stores 2²⁸ integers) and make four passes through the file. This is a O(n²) algorithm but since we know we're only going to make 4 passes, its performance in this scenario is close to linear.

Can you think of anything better?

This entry composed in pico, which seems to ease revision

Paul pointed out that the Dalai Lama wrote an editorial in last week's New York Times, The Monk in the Lab, which cites some scientific studies that seem to show that if we practice mindfulness meditation, we can become happier and more nonviolent -- the editorial theorizes that this, in turn, could help tip the balance toward world peace.

And while, rationally, I know that no amount of downward-facing dog is going to keep Bush from attacking whatever country takes his fancy, I still find I have to force myself to be skeptical about His Holiness's advice -- I have this bogus superstitious belief in the universal network of human feeling that makes me wonder if our minds aren't somehow, obscurely, interlinked after all. . . 

Toadex found this page listing Harold Bloom's "Western Canon", with each book's title hyperlinked to the appropriate Amazon.com search page. Skimming down this list is like having the strings of my conscience plucked by a series of tiny, painful pins. The Book of Questions . . . Seven Gothic Tales . . . A Tale of a Tub. All these and more are on my to-read list.

And it would be optimistic to estimate that I'd read through even 3% of that daunting panoply. Though I've made a little headway in the smaller categories (over 20% of the modern Russian, thanks to a certain college lit class), hurray!

(Some machine learning and spam bookmarks: Jim's Bayes-based procmail filter, Bayes's Theorem, Spam Assassin, Vipul's Razor/SpamNet.)

4th, trickle, etc.

The problem with Trickle is that it doesn't allow much for interactivity - that is, dialogue with the diabloggers or with recent blog memes. Maybe via some sort of predictive/AI module that can see into the future. Jim, can you add this in?

But thanks to the diablogger who sent the "poetry is dead" link. I agree that poetry is not dead. The middle-aged author of the editorial infers the worldwide failure of poetry from his own growing apathy toward it, a conclusion that hardly seems justified; especially considering that contemporary writers like Anne Carson and Jorie Graham are producing work that, as far as I'm concerned, stands alongside the greatest poetry of the past century.

The media love those sorts of pronouncements. Every decade or so, Time seems to run another article declaring that "Feminism is dead."

I have a big work deadline on May 28th so I expect to be pretty busy for the next couple weeks at least; I may be able to finish ahead of schedule, but I'm not sure. In the meantime, the site will suffer, and I'm sorry. After that, I plan to spend the month of June on vacation. I'll be updating every so often, but not every day.

Quick music rundown: I like the new Arab Strap album, don't really care for the new Kristin Hersh solo album or the Throwing Muses album, and haven't yet heard the Lisa Germano album because I wanted to order it directly from her when I have the time.

I miss writing email and blog entries! Catch you later,

My third post using Trickle

Snowflakes and Eggs. Aww. A feel-good vignette from the anti-war movement.

I stashed away my amended "No IraqSyria War" button because I didn't know what to do with it. I'm embarassed when I run into a Queen Anne Neighbor for Peace on the sidewalk because I don't know what to talk about with them. And I skipped out on the Poets Against the War "Where do we go from here?" meeting, which was just as well, because I'm not really sure where we go from here. To the election, I guess.

P.S. CafePress is selling Military Bears. Proceeds go to "the families of those who serve." It's cute and I fear that these families will need it, every so often I keep up at night thinking about fields of choking black smoke and radioactive ammunition.

My second post using Trickle

(I really wish MT would let me set my own default Primary Category. Anyone know how to do this?)

I'm fairly sure I got over 100 spam messages today, though I lost count at around 70.

In the year 2005, will your anti-spam arsenal be the same? In a word, no. The article provides a good overview of the anti-spam technologies in use today and the companies that are selling them, and the author quotes the Gartner report that predicts the marketplace will narrow to 5 or so leading providers: "Just as Tumbleweed, Sendmail, and many others welcome signature subscriptions from your choice of antivirus lab, so in the future such products will offer a subscription to anti-spam logic from one of the leading anti-spam logic vendors."

My first post using Trickle

Some sordid spam scams from the FTC spam site:

• Nigerian scams. "According to State Department reports, people who have responded to these 'advance-fee' solicitations have been beaten, subjected to threats and extortion, and in some cases, murdered."

• You may get an email from an adult entertainment site that claims to offer content for "free" and doesn't require a credit card number for access. All you have to do is download a "viewer" or "dialer" program. However, once the program is downloaded onto your computer, it may disconnect your Internet connection and reconnect to an international long distance phone number, at rates between $2 and $7 a minute.

• Countless work at home schemes require you to spend your own money to place newspaper ads; make photocopies; or buy the envelopes, paper, stamps, and other supplies or equipment you need to do the job. The companies sponsoring the ads also may demand that you pay for instructions or "tutorial" software. Consumers deceived by these ads have lost thousands of dollars, in addition to their time and energy.

And here are some other things spammers have been charged with, from Law enforcers tackle spam:

• Unauthorized use of logos of well-known financial institutions including Radian Bank, Prudential, and Fannie Mae, to induce victims to disclose sensitive financial information such as income, mortgage balances, and home values.

• [Due to e-mail spoofing,] One unaffiliated third party was swamped with more than 30,000 bounce-back and angry "do not spam me" e-mails intended for the defendants.

• Used spam and the Internet to sell a service they claimed would reduce or eliminate spam from consumers' e-mail. The claims were false. In fact, using an undercover account to test the claims, the FTC found it received more spam after signing up for the service.

• Offered laptop computers for sale via Internet auction houses, including eBay. The FTC alleges that Silverman accepted only cash, checks, or money orders for payment from winning bidders. In many instances he failed to provide the computers or provide refunds to his victims.