December 2003
December 24, 2003
How the Irish Saved Civilization
With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, Europe lost more than just its imperial government; it also lost thousands of manuscripts - Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil - the intellectual foundation of the Pax Romana. In How...
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December 19, 2003
"The quiche of death"
Zagats outtakes (courtesy of Jennifer)....
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December 17, 2003
Quote boy
Old pal Whit scores some good ink in the latest Time with this catchy pull-quote: "Nothing is more valuable than the user at the moment of desire," says Gartner analyst Whit Andrews. "When a user searches, that user has a...
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December 16, 2003
Semantic values
Here's a quick case study in the value of semantic markup: Froogle vs. Pricegrabber. The still-in-beta Froogle applies Google’s bottom-up, ontology-free ethos to the world of retail, providing merchants and customers with a self-service shopping platform unencumbered by rigid data...
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December 10, 2003
Remail
Lots of discussion in the ID world about Remail, IBM's new research prototype for a next-generation email client. Several folks have compared Remail favorably to Outlook 2003, but I think that's an unfair comparison insofar as Remail is a research...
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December 10, 2003
Gross National Happiness?
The King of Bhutan, a tiny Buddhist kingdom just south of Tibet, is promoting an alternative metric for assessing national development: The concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) was proposed by the King of Bhutan because he understood that development...
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December 7, 2003
Citizen Matt
Walking up the stairway from the City Hall underground parking garage this afternoon, I found myself unexpectedly immersed in a rally for Matt Gonzalez (San Francisco's upstart Green Party mayoral candidate, and prodigal political protégé of my across-the-street neighbor Tom...
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December 2, 2003
A poet is born
A few weeks back, I stumbled across Red Sox Haiku (via a link from Mark Bernstein). I forwarded the link on to my old friend Mike Myers, a lifelong-suffering Sox fan, who was then still stewing in the wake of...
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