Posts

Tony Judt has an interesting piece about the differences between Americans an Europeans at the New York Review of Books. Some of the statistics cited will certainly surprise you.

The more I learn, the more I realize every day just how poorly understood the brain is. And not just our brains. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve read about chimpanzees that understand fairness and chimpanzees that will literally pay for pornography. Now I read about a man who has been blind from birth but can paint realistic images. Fascinating stuff.

Fred Kaplan has the big picture report. All in all, it seems like things went pretty well.

Christopher Allbritton is posting periodic first hand updates of the elections today in Iraq.

I don’t care how jaded you are, this editorial will make your jaw drop.

The Struts development team have decided to retire the project and put it into maintenance mode rather than building a 2.0 version that broke backward compatability with Struts 1.2. This is really good news. When I look at the path that many other projects have taken, I realize that big new versions sometimes ruin everything or are largely academic exercises. Is anybody really excited about Perl 6? Perl 5 is great at what it does, and so Larry Wall and friends have gone off to make something completely different. Perl is finished. So is Struts. Making a new Struts would just be writing a new framework altogether, and that’s what the Struts developers have decided to do. Now I can keep Struts on my r ...

It seems like far too often I come to appreciate people only after they die. Today I read that architect Philip Johnson had died, and until I read his obituary, I had no idea that he designed my two favorite skyscrapers in Houston, the Republic Bank building (now called the Bank of America building), and the Transco Tower (now called the Williams Tower). The Transco Tower is notable not only for its beauty but also for the fact that it was built a few miles from downtown, so it towers above everything else near it. My other favorite is ChevronTexaco Heritage Plaza or what I always called the Texaco building, which looks like an ordinary glass skyscraper with an Aztec temple planted on top. ...

When Amazon said that its search engine, A9, would be layering on features on top of Google’s index, they weren’t lying. Update: Russell Beattie points out that this new feature was done long ago by some online yellow pages in Spain.

Jeanne at Body and Soul has another powerful post on torture. You may not want to read it, but you probably should.

Apparently even chimps believe in a fairness.