abstractplain

Yahoo! News - Ways to fix your life: Quit your job - via kottke.

Wow. I went back to audioscrobbler after a year of non-use and found they had united with lastfm. Audioscrobbler seemed to be having some problems, but literally a couple of clicks into the Last.FM site and I had radio streaming to me based on my profile of music I listened to (albeit last year).

Last.FM - Your personal music network.

The winamp plugin has since stopped informing audioscrobbler of tracks played from my own machine. I think that’s why I gave up with it the last time.

Last.FM is legal! They pay a radio broadcast fee. but, but! legal radio playing music I might actually like. It’s like being very, very young again and hearing bob harris.

The Internet Classics Archive: 441 searchable works of classical literature - classics.mit.edu

see also Great Books and Classics

1. Arthur Schopenhauer’s The Art of Controversy.

Another copy, with a better index of the strategems, but side to side with german.

this first one via metafilter. Here are some others I had kicking around.

1. Thirty-eight dishonest tricks which are commonly used in argument, with the methods of overcoming them. From “straight and crooked thinking”, by Robert Thouless, 1930.

2. logic and fallacies.
   And another logical fallacies site.

If you don’t know why you’d want to know and understand the fallacies, it should be at least to detect when you’re being misled - e.g. by a newspaper or politician.

Hmm, I did find a link to the transcript of the python skit but it’s not as good as seeing it done.

Finding dependencies with JarJar.

Some Firefox features you may have missed - MozillaZine Forums (4 pages, so far). Mostly about tabbed browsing shortcuts, but also a nice tip about “interactive keyword bookmarks”, which sound a lot like Dave Bau’s quicksearches, only generated automatically by the browser.

Might be better to RTFM, or a guide, e.g. A beginner’s guide to FireFox.

video of guy’s fingers doing tricks with a tiny skateboard. shrug.

More violent societies have more left-handers, hinting that lefties thrive in environments where fighting is important “While there is no suggestion that left-handed people are more violent than the right-handed, it looks as though they are more successfully violent.”

via kottke’s remaindered links.

Walmart.com - How Walmart Is Destroying America And The World: And What You Can Do About It Available for pre-purchase, online, from Walmart.com. List price: $10.95. Wal*Mart price: $7.55. You saved $3.40.

via metafilter. Here are search results for metafilter posts on walmart over the last year. make good reading, though it would be great to have some filters, and some summary of arguments.

“We can’t have it all, and worse yet the desire to have it all and the illusion that we can is one of the principal sources of torture of modern affluent free and autonomous thinkers.” - Barry Schwartz - Less is More, a brilliant downloadable mp3 (25meg) talk from pop!tech 2004. Click “toDownloads” underneath the picture, then click “continue without registration”, then click “click here to download mp3″. Don’t worry about the slapbass introduction, or the fact that it’s hosted on an “it conversations” site. essential listening.

Great read! Harvard Gazette: Academic turns city into a social experiment. via boingboing.net , to which i time out.

As commanded: “Just make sure the code you execute in those dying milliseconds doesn’t rely on the information that triggered the assertion failure in the first place.”

In fact, this was from the only physical book I could find, buried in a drawer. (the book that is, not me).

Page 123

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Downloadable mp3s for a bollywood sampler CD.

Someone’s done a cd cover (pdf). via boingboing

Yoz Grahame’s Cheerleader: Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog. Some good ideas. Somewhat focused on moveable-type blogs, but the principles remain. I turned off comments but I would like to put them back on, hence the digging up of this year old article and this one on club vs lojack solns.

On the Thought: Good Essay on Design - ” Elliotte Rusty Harold’s XOM Design Principles describing the principles he used for designing his Java library for creating and manipulating XML is also a great read about design in general and design decisions in particular.” via Bruce Eckel.

Boing Boing: Moment of pirated Chinese DVD zen.

“Dozens of American and foreign movies were on sale for 6RMB, about 75¢! [..] Obviously, these are copies, fakes, pirate booty. But how good are they? For the sake of journalistic thoroughness, I bought 35 of them.”

Here’s an excellent “what’s new” about the wikipedia project and its satellites. Some notes on Wikipedia from Simon Willison’s weblog. I was about to post as much as it seems not many people know about the dictionary, and about the other language versions of the resource. Interesting link to the vandalism problem, and to the impressive Wikitex module which can render music notation, chemical formulae, etc, from text sources.

The blog post is so more concise and useful than yet another beginner article on the subject.

Slashdot | Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor. I didn’t notice that neal stephenson’s interview (the questions for which were collected from slashdot) had taken place.

I am reminded of “spiderman vs jesus” from rec.arts.comics.xbooks - http://www.sadinoff.com/fun/quotes/xvy.txt

BioMotionLab1.6 walker (flash).