tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34583402007-04-17T05:13:01.586-06:00Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comBlogger185125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1096965884940878302004-10-05T02:15:00.000-06:002004-10-05T03:26:14.070-06:00

Some people, notably the lackwits at this site, are still going on as if Prof. David Hailey's risible hack job on the Rather/Burkett/CBS memos hasn't been busted wide open by Kevin and Paul at Wizbang. But let's throw some formal logic at Hailey's hypothesis. From what I understand, he's played about with some sort of typewriter font in Photoshop and concluded that because (in his opinion) he

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1096654599037657492004-09-30T21:18:00.000-06:002004-10-04T01:17:54.650-06:00

John Derbyshire has another cute end-of-the-month maths puzzle. Here's how he puts it: Consider the powers of two: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128... Their right-most digits follow a simple repetitive pattern: 2, 4, 8, 6, 2, 4, 8, 6, 2, 4, 8, 6... What about their left-most digits, though? Here are the first 40-odd [actually, it's the first 149 - Ed.]. (Read right to left, line by line. I've just

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1096257952070608632004-09-26T21:44:00.000-06:002004-09-26T23:12:39.643-06:00

Nothing I can add on the Rathergate issue, so instead here's Sunday's recipe for basic meatballs: 200g finely ground minced beef 1/2 egg, beaten 1 tsp onion powder 1 tsp garlic powder 1/4 cup breadcrumbs 1/4 tsp dried oregano 1 tsp Worcester sauce 1/2 tsp Bovril or other beef extract 1/2 tsp salt 1 tsp pepper 3 tbsp vegetable oil Mix all the ingredients, except the vegetable oil, in

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1095756604814214392004-09-21T02:44:00.000-06:002004-09-21T02:50:04.813-06:00

I'm a hardcore wonk when it comes to Memogate, but with the volume of material that Ardolino, Harrell, Allah, Ace, Hewitt, Powerline, Geraghty, Johnson et al. have been putting out I feel a bit Inside Baseball. I actually have a job and a social life, and those two bad boys are seriously cutting into the time I have to study the flood of data that is coming my way thanks to the blogosphere.

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1095660726165909202004-09-20T01:08:00.000-06:002004-09-20T01:26:06.150-06:00

This just in: Woody Allen is not fond of Dubya. Who'd'a thunk it? But if ever a life could be described as islands of comedy against a background of tragedy, it sure ain't George Bush's. For that description, one merely needs to look at Allen's recent filmic output.

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1095652907342187422004-09-19T21:33:00.000-06:002004-09-20T02:00:46.806-06:00

There was some poor witless girl nattering on about the 'epistemology' of the forged memos (she was linked to in Jonathan Last's Weekly Standard article; looking up the link was almost more than I could bear). Dear little thing trotted out the meme that MS Word was designed to mimic 1970's typewriters. To anyone who has more than a nanogram of clue in their whole body, that fails the laugh test

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1095393127886054152004-09-16T21:45:00.000-06:002004-09-16T21:52:10.136-06:00

Tradesports has long contracts on Bush winning the election at a 67.0/67.8 bid/ask spread tonight. Of course the final winner of the election will be whoever cracks a majority in the college, and sites like Election Projection have a much more detailed (nuanced?) analysis of the outcome, but a verdict like this from an efficent information aggregator does not bode well for Kerry.

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1095392595036931542004-09-16T21:36:00.000-06:002004-09-16T21:55:27.023-06:00

The InstaProf points to an excellent synoptic article about l'affaire Rather in The Scotsman. He makes a parenthetical remark about pyjamas although, bizarrely, he spells them as 'pajamas' [sic]. Even more oddly, he insists on using the curious young participle 'spelled' when of course he intended to write 'spelt'. Those crazy Americans and their neologisms.

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1095065678081826242004-09-13T02:50:00.000-06:002004-09-13T02:54:38.080-06:00

By the way, it is highly insulting to imply that I blog in my pyjamas. I live in a tropical country. On the rare occasions that I wear any clothing at all whilst blogging, it is almost invariably a loinskin. At this point I will typically be daubed with woad. To wear pyjamas whilst blogging is simply to invite an attack of prickly heat.

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1095061307919532472004-09-13T01:39:00.000-06:002004-09-15T00:56:38.810-06:00

A bit behind the times, but from the keyboard of the sainted Professor Bunyip, a post that encapsulates my feelings perfectly.

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1095059285077237822004-09-13T01:06:00.000-06:002004-09-13T01:08:05.076-06:00

Fifty days to go until the election. Has any challenging candidate ever pulled back from a deficit this big to win?

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1095051623294478892004-09-12T22:54:00.000-06:002004-09-12T23:00:23.293-06:00

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Analogous: frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora (it is pointless to do with more that which can be done with less).

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1095045886497097092004-09-12T20:38:00.000-06:002004-09-12T23:01:14.336-06:00

There appears among non-technical people some confusion as to the significance of the fact that the font pitch in the purported memos is the same as Microsoft Times New Roman. This is an attempt to explain that significance: The fact that the letter spacing in the 'memos' matches Microsoft's Times New Roman is absolutely dispositive of the falsity of these documents. Not only could these

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1094973814371855612004-09-12T01:16:00.000-06:002004-09-12T01:23:34.370-06:00

Jeff Harrell at Shape of Days, who is proving to be pretty much the go-to guy for coverage of the technical aspect of the fake memos, has an interesting post. He says he's had people saying that the reason the memos look like they've been created in Microsoft Word is because Microsoft designed Word to adhere to orthodox typewriting standards. OK, sure. Ya frickin' morons. Microsoft Word did

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1094846120164133932004-09-10T13:30:00.000-06:002004-09-10T13:57:25.950-06:00

In an exchange I had with Jeff Harrell of the excellent Shape of Days blog, we discussed how anyone could have ever thought that these memos were genuine. Anyone who, like Jeff and me, has had experience of the development of desktop publishing and word processing can spot them as fake a mile off. The thing that initially perplexed me was that the forgery was just such an amateurish job. This

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1094833651261480922004-09-10T10:26:00.000-06:002004-09-10T13:56:22.456-06:00

I said this wouldn't be the Internet election. I was wrong.

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1094028655324931392004-09-01T02:19:00.000-06:002004-09-09T22:14:49.706-06:00

John Derbyshire has a little maths problem at the tail of his August Diary in National Review Online. Here it is: Draw a circle of radius 1 unit (foot, meter, mile, whatever). Inscribe an equilateral triangle in the circle, the three corners all on the circle's circumference. Now inscribe a smaller circle in the triangle, its circumference just touching the sides of the triangle at their

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1093937870453683972004-08-31T01:37:00.000-06:002004-08-31T02:10:46.053-06:00

Sorry for all the bad language. But sometimes it's apposite, y'know?

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1093933004739894052004-08-30T23:55:00.000-06:002004-08-31T01:06:45.273-06:00

On a lighter note: here's what I had for supper tonight, with enough leftovers for lunch tomorrow. It's my interpretation of a bunch of cookbook recipes: Chicken Tabouleh Salad 1 cup Bulgar wheat 2 cups water 1 large or 2 small boneless, skinless chicken breasts 1 cup chopped parsley 1 cup chopped cucumber 2 tsp finely chopped mint leaves 1/2 cup finely chopped spring onions 2 tbsp

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1093931516275926952004-08-30T23:18:00.000-06:002004-08-30T23:51:56.276-06:00

I suppose using Blogger is faster than mimeographing your own newsletter and handing it out to hoi polloi. Only fucking barely, mind you. So get your own website, you cry. Problem: to get a credit card that US companies will accept over the Internet via the bank into which my salary is paid requires a level of bullshit that frankly makes me want to kidnap senior bank executives and play with

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1093927708849853712004-08-30T22:34:00.000-06:002004-08-31T01:35:47.330-06:00

I missed the John McCain speech at the RNC. I saw bits of it in highlight. I still think he's poison, but I admit his utility in attracting a segment of the electorate that otherwise would not vote Republican. Then there was Rudy. Rudy Giuliani. Oh. My. God. I think that was one of the best pieces of political theatre that I have seen in the past thirty years. It's not often I get teary-eyed

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1093588795826139222004-08-27T00:25:00.000-06:002004-08-27T00:46:20.766-06:00

One John Perry Barlow (whose blog title is 'Conversations With My Friends', most of them imaginary, one assumes) has writen a truly bizarre post in which he threatens to disrupt the Republican Convention by, get this, guerilla dancing. As Dave Barry would say: I am not making this up. Further comment on this would be otiose, really. I am literally non-plussed as to how a purportedly rational

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1093587084275444142004-08-26T23:57:00.000-06:002004-08-27T00:43:49.416-06:00

Big Media is in the hubris -> nemesis stage right now. God help them. It may not happen right away, but absent a miracle, their influence can only head in one direction: down. This isn't the Internet Election (that's 2008), but we're close. And I don't think either side has truly grasped the extent to which the disintermediating effects of the new technologies render their existing

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1093240284089107862004-08-22T23:47:00.000-06:002004-08-22T23:51:24.090-06:00

After reading this post and its subsequent comments on The Mudville Gazette (shortly to be blogrolled), I wish that I, as a non-US citizen, not domiciled in the US, could send some cash to help stop John 'disgusting traitorous scumbag' Kerry winning the election.

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458340.post-1093225993118650162004-08-22T19:52:00.000-06:002004-08-23T10:40:03.413-06:00

The Kerry/SBVT fracas continues apace. From my perspective, this is hurting him badly. The allegations are widely known, despite the attempts of the mainstream media to suppress them, and they are starting to gain traction. Most of the Americans I know in Costa Rica are fairly die-hard Democrats (the letters page of the local English-language rag makes Mother Jones look like Frontpage Magazine)

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18137696227587506004noreply@blogger.com