Desktop search is one of my obsessions, especially given how much data I tend to generate. Google’s first effort at a desktop search tool left me nonplussed, but the recently released Google Desktop 2 makes quite a few strides in the right direction even if it continues to come up short. The good news is…
August, 2005
-
-
This sort of story always annoys the hell out of me. The writer here, Emily Walker, had prime front page space for this story about the morning after pill and whether or not it reduces the number of abortions. But instead of helping the reader understand whether or not the morning after pill affects abortion…
-
In Pakistan this week, 40-year-old writer Younis Sheikh was sentenced to life in prison for writing a “blasphemous” book that insulted the four Imams. The four Imams are Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Malik, Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal and Imam Shafi, who all lived and wrote in the 8th century. Their interpretation of the Qu’ran and…
-
Tonight I happened to be watching Fox News for an hour before switching over to watch CBS News. During its broadcast, CBS offered up a content-free profile of Cindy Sheehan, the woman who is currently protesting outside President Bush’s Crawford ranch demanding a meeting with him. Now Fox had also mentioned Sheehan, in order to…
-
It is so addictive that my Latin-reading, Medieval-studying wife has taken to IMing me bad World of Warcraft jokes while I’m trying to get work done. A sample, So, an Orc walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder. The bartender says, “Hey, where’d you get that?” The parrot says, “Durotar. They got…
-
I’ve mentioned Fraps before, but until recently I never really used it that much even after paying to register it. Originally I purchased Fraps to record in-game video for Unreal Tournament 2004. The problem is that even very fast machines have a lot of difficulty both running a game full screen and recording it at…
-
Several months ago, some students who worked for me started raving about the MMORPG World of Warcraft, which they’d been playing apparently since right after it came out. Now it wasn’t like I hadn’t heard of the game, but mostly what I knew was how Blizzard had horrible problems with server stability at launch because…
-
At Cliopatra, Greg James Robinson raises interesting questions about the morality of the atomic bombing of Nagaski, just three days after the bombing of Hiroshima. But in the comment sections, Allan Allport notes that the opponents of either/both atomic bombings typically offer a false dichotomy. In their scenarios, the United States has two choices —…
-
This nutty article by James Dobson on how to ensure your son or daughter doesn’t grow up to be gay is making the rounds. Its not anything that Dobson himself says that is so nutty (though there is plenty of Dobson’s usual nuttiness in there), but rather an unpublished manuscript by Joseph Nicolosi that Dobson…
-
Google’s tantrum over this CNet story strike me as a classic example of a corporate public relations disaster. In order to highlight the privacy concerns that some people have about Google, CNet’s story published personal information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt that it obtained through Google Searches on Schmidt. The CNet story begins, Google CEO…