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esommer.net : blog : archive : 2003 : 05
 | so i lied |
| Today, the United States of America, through the mouth of Paul Wolfowitz, are saying to the world, Hey, so we lied about the reasons for attacking Iraq. Is there a problem here? Are you, like, gonna do anything about it? Huh? |
| Colin Powell, whom i always kinda liked in this administration, all things being relative, stands before us today with a choice; either he's a fool or he's a liar. bumm rap, huh. |
| +---------------------------------------------+ |
| | SPECIAL INCOMPREHENSIBLE ISSUE | |
| | ...NOW EXTRA TURGID! | |
| | | |
| | In the spirit of at least the first | |
| | Matrix, this issue sort of makes sense | |
| | until you think about it. Unlike the first | |
| | Matrix, I have removed all the | |
| | entertaining action sequences. | |
| +---------------------------------------------+ |
| i had to laugh. |
| i wonder if it was something in the moment, or whether i'll laugh again in a couple months seeing this. i had to laugh out loud sitting in a train looking at this, even though strangers were looking at me. |
|  who knew? The well-liked and still-living German poet and author and general all-round good guy Hans Magnus Enzensberger has written a children's book about math, with great illustrations by Rotraut Susanne Berner -- a beautiful book. i was off on a daydream about translating it .. but of curse, they already dun that: |
| for instance, there are so many paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes. who knew? |
| standing on the end of platform 6 in the Kölner Hbf, looking at the Dom in the morning sun, getting into a fas'-fas' train to Stuttgart, floating over the old-school bridge, seeing the Museum Ludwig pseudo-industrial roof architecture, in the sun again, embedded in trees. Man, i love the sun, the trains, Cologne, the Rhine, & architecture. |
| Listening to Kante, Best of both worlds. Has an old recarding of a caribbean poet reciting. very fine. |
| In the wee hours of the morning, when everything is still. |
| I lay styarin at the darkness, trying to find the way. |
| .. |
| The life became morning. |
| The morning became day. |
| .. |
| Speaking for myself, I wish the darkness had stayed. |
| this is not America .. or so i thought. |
| here i am in the bahn, it's a beautiful day out, and they can't open the window cz that wd mess up the air condition, and they can't turn that off. |
| boy scouts. robert heinlein. have spacesuit, will travel. |
| we are speeding along next to the autobahn in the sunshine, i am listening to Puddle of Mud, and we are passing the cars at 250 km/h & more -- this is the way it is supposed to be. |
| THE SINCEREST FORM OF CRUSHING YOU IN THE MARKET |
| "You don't have to look too far to see that this is almost a
direct copy of Quartz." |
| Apple exec Phil Schiller, on how the next version of Windows
continues Microsoft's highly successful strategy of copying
the Mac OS, The New York Times, 12 May 2003 |
| To which i'd add: but the MacOS has a real unix underneath, and Windows has .. what, exactly? well, soitanly not a real OS, and i say this as a one who's "teaching" Operating Systems 101 right now, where i'm learning a lot again, like to say to myself in the morning as i fire up w2k because that's what all my customers use, yo, this is not an OS. fork(), anyone? |
| Umberto Eco points out that the Statue of Liberty is not only a gift of France, but bears a french face. So next to renaming French Fries to Freedom Fries, he helpfully suggests replacing the Statue with a likeness of Condoleeza Rice. |
|  saw a documentary about the Holy Loincloth or whatever it's called being a fake done by Leonardo da Vinci the other day. That man was so cool. There was one Scientist who advocated the theory that the shroud is actually the first photograph ever made, centuries before photography was invented, er, re-discovered. That man was so cool. |
| more acc-list on the Sedgway: |
| At 15:57 06.05.2003 -0700, Peter Crozier wrote: |
| What may be even cooler is the wheel chair this guy is working on - using the same technology - that can climb stairs. The chair has four wheels on two axles, and the back axle can swing up and over and become the front axle. Furthermore, when the back axle passes over the front axle, it can stop there and balance on two wheels (sort like the transporter). This has the added benefit of raising the wheelchair rider up by a couple of feet bringing them up to eye level of a person standing. Stair climbing is done by the back axle going up and over, encountering the next stair before pulling the lower wheels into an upright balanced position and the process is repeated. Maybe ACC is thinking of one these. |
| now, /that/'s a cool application! |
| so, how stable is it, really? |
| a long time ago a friend of mine had an idea, about trains. |
| trains are very cool, i'm typing in one right now. the thing that makes trains slow is the stops. on a cross-country trip here in olde europe, about half of the travel time is spent slowing down for a stop, stopping at a stop, speeding up after a stop. |
| what if trains didn't stop? |
| people wanting to get off could go to the door, hop into a sedgway cart, detach & coast down to perambulation speed. |
| people wanting to get onto a train would go to a cart station, check out a sedgwayCart (i'm going to trademark this term now .. done.) speed up to train speed, attach, & transfer into the speeding bullet train. |
| if you build it they will come. |
| i thought the sedgway was very cool when it first came up (last year?). cool tech, nice design, looks funky to see people floating around like that. |
| on second thought, though, it is really quite a shame; i mean, what form of transportation is it competing with? |
| walking! |
| do we really need to get fatter yet in the 'first' world? |
| i hope they come up with variant that competes with the car as transportation. |
| "Santorum? Is that Latin for asshole?" - Sen. Bob Kerrey |
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