Nothing and Some More

Say it with Spray Paint and The Bench (via GMT+9)

Sometimes, Serendipity

Some things in life are serendipity. In 1973, I followed my former husband to Cambodia, where he was on assignment for CBS News. On the way, we stopped in Saigon, and at a cocktail party there, I met Stanley Cloud, the Time magazine bureau chief. Because his stringer war correspondent in Cambodia had just been deported, he asked if I wanted the job.
There are certain sights I'll never forget, like watching the Royal Cambodian Ballet practice on the royal palace's open-air terrace. A completely serene, surreal moment in utter, chaotic hell.

Speaking of Cambodia, PP traffic, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Education quickies:

• TCO: Total Cost of Ownership – a case for Linux in Schools
• Linux from Kindergarten to High School
• Knoppix is great (really you should try it, there is even a french website: KnoppixFr about it)
• Viva Village: a new way to learn languages
• what ELearning could be
• online interactive Music Theory tutorials (via the Scout weblog)
• iVia an open source Internet subject portal or virtual library system (somewhat related : AsTMa? a specific language to deal with Topic Maps)
• an example of a research blog
• Et Mario, un directeur d'école avec un cybercarnet

Freshmeat quickies:

• KXL, a (Japanese) X11 video and audio library
• White Dune, a VRML editor
• WxBasic or using basic to play with WxWindows (WxPython and/or Pythoncard are great too)
• rlcompleter2 to have completion in your Python prompt
• Plus PythonMagick to use ImageMagick with Python (great for image galleries)

Meta-blogging quickies:

• Blog fatigue
• a review of NPR show on blogging
• why we blog (in education)
• LiveJournal's Demographic Stats
• Mark Pilgrim's influences: All other things being equal, people would rather read what everyone else is reading.

Creating a Culture of Ideas

One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking.

Dolores, la Grande Rousse, a fini ses recherches sur la connaissance et le savoir.

Christophe présente les questions de Maria: une preuve que la société est devenue plus exhibitioniste (donc d'une certaine facon malade) Après la télé-réalité, la toile-réalité ?
Pendant ce temps, Mouche se pose (encore) la question: Encore une fois l’assimilation weblog = journal intime est faite. Ici c’est même un truc d’adolescents. Pourquoi ? Pourquoi cette perception du weblog ? Parce que c'est la majorité des sites qui s'auto-qualifient de blog et que les journalistes sont pressés ? Parce que c'est facile de présenter la chose sous cet aspect ? Parce que c'est un reflet de la réalité ? Parce que personne ne s'entend ni sur la définition ni même sur le nom ? Parce que y'a confusion entre la marque, la forme et le fond ? Parce que les outils s'y prettent, à la confusion ?

Christophe, toujours, vante l'agrégateur alors que Biz le compare à une vulgaire mosaïque qui permet de regarder 30 chaines sur le cable en même temps. :-)

Speaking of RSS and aggregation, Effbot the aggregator is now version 1.0.2 (and easy to tinker with, it's Python. Plus there are even a making-of: the EffNews project). Other useful tiny scripts to build a home-made aggregator: RSS Parser (in Python) and blagg (in Perl), the cousin of blosxom (blosxom v0+6i is out and can do static rendering now, get on the mailing list if you want to play with it). Of course, there is a pyBlosxom.

Want to have your home-made aggregator filter automagically all the news that interests you so you can read even more feeds? Check the work of the anti-spam world: abstracts of the Spam Conference talks, some Spam Conference notes on this Conf and one talk: Paul Graham: Better Bayesian Filtering (this is the sequel of the great A plan for Spam)

Want to track conversations around your blog ? Easy !! BB gives you the recipes, and Ben Hammersley presents the various tools, and Trackback in motion: various experimentations

The blogverse appears to have missed this, but the death of Vladimir Sukhomlin is something of massive interest.

Daily pick of Instapundit: Democracy in Iraq, an historic perspective

Small farmers seen gaining little from subsidies

The estimated billion dollars a day that taxpayers in wealthy countries pay in farm subsidies ends up largely in the hands of families that do not need it, according to a report issued Thursday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

(I can't find the OECD report: Farm Househould income issues in OECD countries: a synthesis report ==> 404... Can you ?)

Advogato: Intellectual property issues everywhere and in the W3C in particular.

Innovative usage of pills and condoms: New Uses Found For Unwanted Contraceptives in Philippines

The country's health secretary, Manuel Dayrit, was quoted this week as saying that contraceptive pills are being used to fertilize plantations of orchids, while condoms have found a new role as party balloons.
Dayrit attributed the novel uses for the items to the fact that the supply is so abundant, the pills and condoms aren't needed.
But in the mostly Roman Catholic Philippines, birth control acceptance levels are also relatively low. The church opposes artificial birth control methods.

In case you never really understood Dot Per Inch, Jonathan Delacour and his readers have a great explanation of DPI

Soon, you'll be able to buy my books: CafePress will offer print-on-demand books (comic books, booklets and perfect-bound tomes), audio CDs and DVDs in early 2003 (via Boing Boing and The Comic Journal)

No CD though, because I talk quickly and you might get the wrong impression: You talk too fast

All over the world, speakers from some geographic regions tend to speak more slowly than those from others. And in every country that has been studied, people from the slower-speaking regions are stereotyped as stupid. This pattern was uncovered by Finnish linguists Jaakko Lehtonen and Kari Sajavaara, who had reason to be interested because Finns are thought to be slow and dull by neighboring Swedes.

Excellent!! I'll be watching more West Wing