Author: gulley

Did we bring the attack on ourselves? This is not an idle question these days, but a seminal one, critical to all further discussion. Did we bring the attack on ourselves? Truth or Consequences by William Saletan in Slate cuts the concept of “consequentialism” to ribbons. Found via Matt Welch.

Some evidence of the changing world from Google.com. Google Searches Related to 9/11 Terrorist Attacks.

It’s always good to see what other people are saying. We’ve been blowing it in the intel department for years. That goes for our government and us. Time to read sources like Al-Ahram Weekly, an Egyptian paper, to see which way the wind is blowing. Inasmuch as they’re willing to write in English and post to the web, there’s a lot we can learn very cheaply about what the world thinks.

Simon Schama’s essay in the Guardian. “… the best, the only revenge, when you’re fighting a cult that fetishises death, is life.”

MATLAB Programming contest rankings – mastermind

Read this and see if it annoys you as much as it annoyed me: Seumas Milne write in the Guardian They can’t see why they are hated. It’s good to read stuff like this, but that shouldn’t keep you from detesting it. I wonder if Mr. Milne thinks that the English simply don’t get why they are so disliked in Northern Ireland? Found via kottke.org.

I was reading a column in Fortune.com and came across a reference to William Faulkner’s Nobel acceptance speech. I read it. I felt better.

WebReview.com: August 24, 2001: This Old Blog: Home Improvement for the New Home Page

Walter Mossberg from The Wall Street Journal writes about GoToMyPC.com, a useful-sounding remote control service for running your home PC from any terminal in the world. Yet another cool service that is both valuable and extremely dangerous from the point of view of security. Incidentally, I keep up with Mossberg’s columns with Spyonit.com. It’s a great service.

Send your name to Mars. NASA will put your name on Mars for free. No catch. But it’s a pretty cerebral kind of stunt. Your name will be data-compressed and encoded on a CD-ROM that then gets mailed to Mars. Catch this snazzy marketing line: “Everyone on Earth who has ever dreamed of being an explorer on an alien planet will want to go along for the ride as we explore the surface of Mars” invites Dr. Ed Weiler, Associate Administrator for the Office of Space Science. That’s seems like a stretch, but then again, it’s a pretty irresistible gimmick. Hats off to the Mars minders.