Categories
Diversity

Good news, typical reaction

The next president of Harvard is going to be Drew Gilpin Faust, respected Historian and currently Dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. She’ll be participating in a growing change in today’s universities, becoming one of the 23% of college presidents who are women. Considering that women make up over 50% of college attendance, I […]

Categories
Technology

Pipe me up, Scotty

While I don’t share Tim O’Reilly’s enthusiastic belief that Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet, it is an interesting modern day implementation of an old and reliable Unix construct. The premise is that web services produce syndication feeds, which can then be modified as queries for other web services. Considering the openness […]

Categories
Just Shelley Legal, Laws, and Regs

Hanging up the keys

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. A few weeks back, an 84 year old woman drove her car through a grade school lunchroom, killing an 8 year old. They haven’t come out with the specifics of what happened, but it was broad daylight, good weather, and the school was a distance off the road. This led […]

Categories
Critters

Note to Japan: perhaps a different methodology is in order

As much as I appreciate seeing video of rare and unusual creatures, the films coming from the Japanese marine biologists come with a high price tag. Earlier, they captured a giant squid on a hook and we got to see a giant squid in action just before it died. In the last few weeks, scientists […]

Categories
Books Writing

Finished the Draft

I finished the book draft today. I don’t remember ever being so tired when I’ve finished a book, previously. Perhaps it’s the cumulative effects of all the words written, code samples created, proofs read, edits made, reviews read with trepidation. Next week I need to review the errata for the Learning JavaScript book, so those making the […]