How to Write an Epic Poem
http://www.ehow.com/how_3334_write-epic-poem.html

Related eHows:
Write a Short Story http://www.ehow.com/how_3337_write-short-story.html
Write a Sonnet http://www.ehow.com/how_3335_write-sonnet.html
Write a Haiku http://www.ehow.com/how_3336_write-haiku.html
Find a Literary Agent
http://www.ehow.com/how_2716_find-literary-agent.html
Write a Limerick http://www.ehow.com/how_3332_write-limerick.html

http://elisson1.blogspot.com/2005/02/on-friday-we-blog-them-cats.html
Another Friday cat-blogger - see also
http://www.flickr.com/photos/49756365@N00/4193674/ (Marble eyes - cat photo)
see also
http://www.flickr.com/photos/plebon/4149980/ for another cat photo from a
contact of mine.

Readers Digest building garden waterproofing - the home page
http://www.projex.com.au/wolfin/

Collection of links to arty blogs (much in French)
http://awad.over-blog.com
www.fotocompany.com (the other kind of arty pictures ... )
( some pretty flowers at http://www.arcticzoo.com/archives/2004_01.html
along with some other links, thoughts & stuff that it find mildly
interesting )

Some observations from an absorbing discussion thread at Whatever, John
Scalzi's blog.
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003416.html
The state that has the lowest incidence of divorce in the US is
Massachusetts, which as we all know is so flamingly liberal that they even
let the gay people get married, to other gay people, even

I call myself a recovering catholic. Being a recovering catholic is like
being a recovering alcohilic; If you're an alcoholic, you're always an
alcoholic, you're just in recovery; the same thing goes for being catholic.

Getting a Sense of Proportion
(A very dangerous thing, according to Douglas Adams, see HHGG2 )

You are here (Solar System)
http://www.troybrophy.com/projects/solarsystem/index.html
This is a work in progress... 1 pixel = ~1,000 km; images are to scale with
each other (This page does not display properly in Safari and Opera; they do
not support super-wide tables or images, apparently.)
http://www.troybrophy.com/projects/solarsystem/planetaryscale.html
1 pixel = ~1,000 km; planet sizes are approx. to scale

http://www.topleftpixel.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=239
A PhotoShop tutorial on processing a very popular image from topleftpixel.

And the unpleasant bit, not an unexpected set of stories, but good to see
that some people are picking them up.
http://suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/2005/02/in-memoriamtoday-im-going-to-d
o.html
Monday, February 21 was "Presidents' Day" holiday in the USA. This may be
looking at the effect of the current president. Some extracts. (NB these
are US casualties, we're not looking at Iraqi civilians, etc, here.) The
site has links to different sources.

"It's difficult to estimate what the total number is," says John Pike,
director of a research group called GlobalSecurity.org which publishes an
informed estimate that goes well beyond what the Pentagon has released.

"You have to say that the total number of casualties due to wounds, injury,
disease would have to be somewhere in the ballpark of over 20, maybe
30,000," says Pike... [In November 2004]

Information about the number of US casualties in Iraq is available
on a web site of the Pentagon or known as the "War Hub" at www.pentagon.gov.
This information covers only those who are officially US citizens enlisted
with different military services.

Hired security contractors, or mercenaries, and recruits who are not
citizens who enlisted to obtain a "green card," are not counted or
mentioned. A large number of the green card recruits are from Mexico and
Central America. There are no organizations to look after their rights or
help them once they're in Iraq. Most of them are buried in Iraq when killed
... It is estimated that as many as 40% of the US troops serving in Iraq are
green card recruits.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 (UPI) -- A soldier who served in Iraq apparently hung
himself with a bedsheet last week at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, but
the Pentagon did not count that death two days later when it announced "a
very small increase" in the suicide rate from Operation Iraqi Freedom ...
The Pentagon said it is not counting suicides among troops who killed
themselves after they left Iraq ...

Thirty-six journalists - and 18 media support workers - have been
killed since the beginning of hostilities in Iraq in March 2003, according
to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

At least nine have died as a result of American fire, said Ann
Cooper, executive director of the CPJ ... [including] Mazen Dana, a
43-year-old Palestinian [who] was described by Reuters as one of its finest
cameramen ... According to [various] sources, Dana's family, when
interviewed after the murder, had stated to investigators that Dana was
murdered because he was shooting video footage of mass graves of US soldiers
--- i.e., soldiers killed who were not counted in the official Pentagon
casualty figures --- for a television documentary on the subject for
Reuters.

Which makes an interesting companion to The Onion.
http://www.theonion.com/opinion/index.php?issue=4108&o=2
The Soapbox By James W. Henley
"I support the occupation but I don't support our troops"

Labels: poetry

 
Hunter S. Thompson, R.I.P.
Hunter. S. Thompson, R.I.P.
February 20, 2005
http://www.whiterose.org/pete/blog/archives/007586.html
Raoul Duke is dead
_10>
So long, Dr. Gonzo. Strange as it sounds, you were one of the last voices of
reason in these f---ed up times.
An Appreciation of Hunter S. Thompson (Achenblog, by Joel Achenbach)
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/achenblog/2005/02/an_appreciation.html

For all of Thompson's theatrics and self-abuse, he could write like
a demon. His prose accelerated across the page like a sportscar with the top
down. He kept himself squarely in the picture, to great comic effect. We
understood that he needed drugs the way other people needed oxygen, that he
had an odd fondness for guns and violence, and that he loathed Richard Nixon
and most authoritarian institutions. Otherwise, he wasn't very complicated.
He didn't gum up his narrative with soul-searching. He really served as a
big eyeball, if perhaps a rather glazed one.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/arts_and_culture/2005/02/21/a_prod
uct_of_his_own_chutzpah.html
February 21, 2005
A product of his own chutzpah
(also see readers' comments here, such as Comments posted by: rdghand
at February 21, 2005 08:47 PM and Chris
at February 22, 2005 06:58 AM )

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=613466
(Obituary)
Hunter S. Thompson
Author of 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' and inventor of 'gonzo'
journalism
22 February 2005
Hunter Stockton Thompson, journalist and writer: born Louisville, Kentucky
18 July 1937; twice married (one son); died Woody Creek, Colorado 20
February 2005.
Hunter S. Thompson in 2003 summed up his life thus: "I was a notorious
best-selling author of weird and brutal books and also a widely feared
newspaper columnist . . . I was also drunk, crazy and heavily armed at all
times." He died on Sunday as a result of gunshot wounds, apparently
self-inflicted.
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/story.jsp?story=613513
(Ralph Steadman's memories)
Home > Enjoyment >> Books >> Features
Hunter S. Thompson RIP: 'I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't
know I could commit suicide at any time'
As his creative collaborator and friend, Ralph Steadman remembers the author
Hunter S Thompson, who has shot himself at the age of 67
Published : 22 February 2005
http://sport.independent.co.uk/general/story.jsp?story=613430
James Lawton: Fear and Revelation in Houston
22 February 2005
Sadness at the suicide of the great gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson will
reach into some of those wilder corners of American sport not completely
flattened by the age of corporate hospitality.
Dr Thompson reserved many of his more spectacular performances for the Super
Bowl and at the Kentucky Derby in his native Louisville, where he often
returned to spread terror among his erstwhile neighbours.
Last year at the Super Bowl in Houston I was told I was occupying a hotel
room once trashed by the great man. His supreme achievement had, apparently,
been to come out of his room, in a state of heightened consciousness,
straddle himself over the barrier separating guests from a courtyard below
and read several passages from the Book of Revelation. The room, if one
remembers correctly, was on the 27th floor.
http://www.independent.co.uk/images/editorial_images/cartoons/050222_600.jpg

http://bottleofblog.typepad.com/bottleofblog/2005/02/aaawww_mama_can.html
February 21, 2005
Aaawww, Mama, Can This Really Be The End?

http://www.gonzo.org/ (The Great Thompson Hunt) A collection of Hunternalia

http://www.network54.com/Forum/284840 Discussion board
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022105Z.shtml
The Proverbial 'Live Boy'
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 22 February 2005
Hunter Thompson is the reason I write politics. Period. He was the most
honest man in the business. Everyone else had and has an angle, a
reputation, or a source to protect. Hunter stripped it down to the raw
throbbing nerve and let it fly.
... My hero died tonight. He was a flawed man, a maniac, in so many ways the
antithesis of what a journalist is supposed to be. Worst of all, he told the
truth. There is now one less warrior on this planet filled with Guckert
clones, drones who get fed shit and regurgitate it wholesale for the masses
because that is what we are trained to eat.
Rest in peace, Hunter. Thank you for everything.
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=1428
Hunter S. Thompson, RIP
Filed under: General — site admin @ 12:45 am

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1992213
Possibly his last published piece of writing.
Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray
By Hunter S. Thompson

[some other of his "Hey, Rube" columns:
http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1996493
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/print?id=1919141&type=story 9 November 2004
The pain of losing; ]

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/22/2005 11:58:00 pm

 
a buncha stuff
Byron v Southern Star Group Pty Ltd (1997) 73 FCR 264 (Lehane#J)

<199808>{^(<199707>^)}

[Related proceedings see (1996) 136 FLR 267; 22 ACSR 553;

15 ACLC 191

<199708>

(Noted 15 C & SLJ 197) (CA)

(which affd Southern Star Group Pty Ltd v Byron (1995) 123 FLR 368;

13 ACLC 1,622 (Young#J));

and Byron v Southern Star Group Pty Ltd (t/as KGC Magnetic Tapes)

(1995) 123 FLR 352; 13 ACLC 301 (CA)

(which set aside Southern Star Group Pty Ltd (t/as KGC Magnetic Tapes) v

Taylor (No#2) (1991) 9 ACLC 1,211 (Rolfe#J, 07/06/1991)

(which had related proceedings see (1991) 4 ACSR 133;

9 ACLC 386 (Rolfe#J, 18/02/1991))]

----

{^(STYLE & CONNEXIONS?^)}
{^(Southern Star Group Pty Ltd v Byron (1995) 123 FLR 368;^)}
{^(13 ACLC 1,622^)}
{^(<199701>^)}
{^([Earlier proceedings see Byron v Southern Star Group Pty Ltd^)}
{^((t/a KGC Magnetic Tapes) (1995) 123 FLR 352; 13 ACLC 301^)}
{^((which set aside Southern Star Group Pty Ltd (t/a KGC Magnetic Tapes)
v^)}
{^(Taylor [No#2] (1991) 9 ACLC 1,211 (7/6/1991));^)}
{^(and (1991) 4 ACSR 133; 9 ACLC 386 (18/2/1991)]^)}
{^((123 FLR 352)^)}
{^(<199607,Appl & Cons>Cohen v McWilliam (1995) 38 NSWLR 476^)}
{^(<199703,Refd>Queensland v JL Holdings Pty Ltd (1997) 71 ALJR 294^)}
{^((9 ACLC 1,211)^)}
{^(<199212,Cons & Appr>Group Four Industries Pty Ltd v Brosnan^)}
{^((1992) 10 ACLC 1,437^)}
{^((4 ACSR 133)^)}
{^(<199412,Appl>Perrins Roofing Pty Ltd v Hain [No#2] (1992)^)}
{^(15 Qld Lawyer Reps#7^)}

{^(@ SEE ABOVE?^)}
{^(Southern Star Group Pty Ltd (t/a KGC Magnetic Tapes) v Taylor [No#2]^)}
{^((1991)^)}
{^(Southern Star Group Pty Ltd v Byron^)}

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/index.shtml

http://www.wherethreadscomeloose.com/links.html#20050202
or possibly
http://www.wherethreadscomeloose.com/links.html#20050221

02/21/05
• "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high-powered
mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and
too rare to die."

• Dr. Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson, is dead. Apparently a self-inflicted
gunshot. Very sad.


A few HST links:
• His entry on Wikipedia and a collection of quotes.
• A fansite, The Great Thompson Hunt.
• An archive of all his ESPN.com articles.
• An interview which he postponed for 20 minutes because he was completely
engrossed in the film version of "Sense And Sensibility."
• A February 2003 interview with Salon.
• An October 2004 essay on the presidential election for Rolling Stone.
• An interview in which an equipment failure nicely demonstrates what a
difficult man he could be.
• Illustrator Ralph Steadman's website, from which I took the image
illustrating today's blog entry.
• An excerpt from the biography "Hunter" by E. Jean Carroll.
• A 1991 profile of Thompson.
• A website focusing on his first book, 1960's "The Rum Diary," with photos
from that era and an excerpt of the first chapter.
• The IMDB page for Terry Gilliam's superb film version of "Fear And
Loathing In Las Vegas."
• An interview with Gilliam about the film.

• Update: Rox Populi has another collection of links, better than mine. (via
Pharyngula)

http://roxanne.typepad.com/rantrave/2005/02/the_good_doctor.html
21 February 2005
The Good Doctor is Out
A Hunter S. Thompson Random Reader

(note: http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/gonzo_gone/ pours acid on James
Lilek's opinion of HST)

NYT Obit
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/21/books/21hunter.html?ex=1266728400&en=d6490
d85ff582f3 5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
Hunter S. Thompson, 67, Author, Commits Suicide


Christian Thompson/Reuters


By MICHELLE O'DONNELL

Published: February 21, 2005
Featured Author: Hunter S. Thompson
A retrospective on the career of the gonzo journalist, including book
reviews, an interview and a book excerpt.
• Photographs


READERS' OPINIONS
Forum: Join a Discussion on the Life and Death of Hunter S. Thompson

Michael R. Brands/Associated Press
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson, the maverick journalist and author whose savage
chronicling of the underbelly of American life and politics embodied a new
kind of nonfiction writing he called "gonzo journalism," died yesterday in
Colorado. Tricia Louthis, of the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office, said Mr.
Thompson had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody
Creek, Colo., yesterday afternoon. He was 67.

Mr. Thompson, a magazine and newspaper writer who also wrote almost a dozen
books, was perhaps best known for his book, "Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas," which became a Hollywood movie in 1998. But he was better known for
his hard-driving lifestyle and acerbic eye for truth which he used in the
style of first-person reporting that came to be known as "gonzo" in the
1960's, where the usually-anonymous reporter becomes a central character in
the story, a conduit of subjectivity.

"Nobody really knows what it means, but it sounds like an epithet," he said
in an interview that, for him, journalism "can be an effective political
tool."

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville, Ky., on July 18, 1937, the
son of an insurance agent. He was educated in the public school system and
joined the United States Air Force after high school. There, he was
introduced to journalism, covering sports for an Air Force newspaper at
Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He was honorably discharged in 1958 and
then worked a series of jobs writing for small-town newspapers.

It was in the heat of deadline that gonzo journalism was born while he was
writing a story about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's magazine, he
recounted years later in an interview in Playboy magazine.

"I'd blown my mind, couldn't work," he told Playboy. "So finally I just
started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending
them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to
do for anybody."

Instead, he said, the story drew raves and he was inundated with letters and
phone calls from people calling it "a breakthrough in journalism," an
experience he likened to "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a
pool of mermaids."

He went on to become a counter cultural hero with books and articles that
skewered America's hypocrisy.

"He wrote to provoke, shock, protest and annoy," Timothy Crouse wrote in his
book "The Boys on the Bus," about the 1972 presidential campaign.

Mr. Thompson's pioneering first-person, at times over-the-top, writing style
influenced a generation of writers.

As a young man, he was heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac and wholeheartedly
followed Kerouac's approach in which the writer revels in his struggles
with writing.

Among his books were "Hell's Angels," "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,"
"Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," "The Great Shark Hunt,"
"Generation of Swine" and "Songs for the Doomed."

Related Links
http://elisson1.blogspot.com/2005/02/gone-zo.html

http://www.livejournal.com/community/note_to_cat/
Monday, February 21st, 2005
11:34 pm
[quextico]
Chester,
I'm sorry you have (apparently) lost the ability to jump either onto the bed
or the windowsill, and instead have to wander around my legs and / or stand
up on the back of the chair. It's also extremely unfortunate that you have
inexplicably lost the ability to make a sound, except for the occasional,
piteous, barely-audible squeak. Such a travesty for an 8-month-old kitten.

On the other hand, I was quite happy to be able to provide a bare shoulder /
arm for you to claw to the bone catch yourself on as your most recent
miscalculated attempt to land on the windowsill resulted instead in a brief
trapeze act on the curtains next to the computer.

Ah. It appears you've regained your ability to leap tall buildings (and
bedframes) in a single bound.

I'm so happy.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/note_to_cat/797134.html#cutid1

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ilwarden/
'The Serpent Wise Deals Death To Lies' (Jeremy)
(earlier blog is http://www.livejournal.com/users/anachronic/ )

http://www.camelotbooks.com/catalog/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=79&pro
ducts_id=1 904
My Eyes Are Nailed, But Still I See
By David Niall Wilson & Brett Alexander Savory
Introduction by Seth Lindberg

http://deliriumbooks.com/nailed.htm

http://memegen.net/viewmeme.pl?meme=1074748476
Memegen lets YOU create your own quizzes and tests that work with blogs or
journals like LiveJournal or Xanga

Book virus
I caught the virus from Womzilla. It goes:

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal...
...along with these instructions.

If the men are darker, it is pastes in slender strings they'll eat, or
tubes, always farinaceous, as the dictionary says; but more often on
Anglo-Saxon fare the potato takes place before any foreign macaroni or
spaghetti.

http://www.ehow.com/how_3334_write-epic-poem.html
How to Write an Epic Poem
Related eHows:
Write a Short Story http://www.ehow.com/how_3337_write-short-story.html
Write a Sonnet http://www.ehow.com/how_3335_write-sonnet.html
Write a Haiku http://www.ehow.com/how_3336_write-haiku.html
Find a Literary Agent
http://www.ehow.com/how_2716_find-literary-agent.html
Write a Limerick http://www.ehow.com/how_3332_write-limerick.html

http://elisson1.blogspot.com/2005/02/on-friday-we-blog-them-cats.html

http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003416.html
The state that has the lowest incidence of divorce in the US is
Massachusetts, which as we all know is so flamingly liberal that they even
let the gay people get married, to other gay people, even

I call myself a recovering catholic. Being a recovering catholic is like
being a recovering alcohilic; If you're an alcoholic, you're alway an
alcoholic, you're just in recovery; the same thing goes for being catholic.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/49756365@N00/4193674/
Marble eyes
Taken by Gina's Photos!

Labels: poetry

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/22/2005 09:57:00 pm

 
HST linx and other things
Entry for 21st February has a bunch of HST links: "One of God's own
prototypes. Some kind of high-powered mutant never even considered for mass
production"
http://www.wherethreadscomeloose.com/links.html#20050202

Another tribute:
http://roxanne.typepad.com/rantrave/2005/02/the_good_doctor.html

NYT HST section
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2005/02/21/books/authors/index.html


Be your own Christo! (cheering up after HST links)
http://www.not-rocket-science.com/gates.htm

the HOMELAND SECURITY Collection
by John Douglas
http://www.redrat.net/work/photographic/homeland_security/collection.htm
"you haven’t lived ‘til you’ve seen a small platoon of nude, armed, and
dangerous Douglas clones poised for action"
and another artistic thang
www.carolcohen.com/pages/coglass1.html

I've already used the line "Paranoid? Moi?", so I'll just have to repeat
myself.
http://www.monitoring-spy.com/realtimespy/features.html


Have you pointed me to this before? Spotting which is 'real' and which
'fake' smile.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/index.shtml


_____________________________________________________________________

Warm & fuzzy in NYC
http://rion.nu/v5/archive/000830.php

and not
http://www.bananaguard.com/index.php


[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/22/2005 06:40:00 pm

Thursday, February 17, 2005

 
Other kinds of fireworks elsewhere
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called-jeff.html
see also http://rampagingpms.blogspot.com/

(also see frinstance Friday ... Toy Blogging for February 11th (following
Hunk Blog on Thursday))

http://www.boxjamsdoodle.com/ (I'm looking at St Valentine's Day version)

http://www.livejournal.com/users/catelin/179683.html Attitudes

http://www.strangeradiation.com/gallery/gates (photos of Central Park with
"The Gates")

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1409903,00.html
Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn't
"calculating": there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives
at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see
numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a
motion, and five is a clap of thunder. "When I multiply numbers together, I
see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape
emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without
having to think."


Heaven
Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen
Aspect, May 2004, $24.95, 343 pp.
ISBN 0446529834
Since Ian Stewart is an enormously published Mathematician and science
writer, and Jack Cohen a biologist who has worked with SF authors before,
this work is extraordinarily interesting to Mathematical Biologists
http://www.livejournal.com/users/xopher_vh/6304.html
What I Want: I want to awaken from this terrible dream, and find him
sleeping contentedly beside me, and not for the first time, or the 100th.
[tag: Valentine]

Thought you might like to know. Testing the new Google Maps service with some locations in Noo Yawk, I got the following response: "We could not understand the location Times Square." (I saved this as an image file too, just to show people.)
[tag: Google]
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/17/2005 12:42:00 am

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

 
HMAS Sydney 2 (sinking in WW II)
www.naa.gov.au/Publications/research_guides/guides/ sydney/pages/intro
duction.htm

www.naa.gov.au/Publications/research_guides/ guides/sydney/pages/appendix1.htm
www.naa.gov.au/Publications/fact_sheets/FS111.html
The Sinking of HMAS Sydney
A Guide to Commonwealth Government Records
The National Archives of Australia
The loss of HMAS Sydney with its full war complement of 645 virtually
without trace remains to this day Australia’s single worst naval disaster.
The circumstances surrounding the loss have never been fully explained ...

www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/hmas_sydney/
HMAS Sydney II and the Kormoran
The loss of HMAS Sydney, 19 November 1941
The most grievous loss suffered by the Royal Australian Navy occurred on 19
November 1941, when the cruiser HMAS Sydney was lost in action with the
German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran off the Western Australian coast. None of
the Sydney's complement of 645 men survived. The Kormoran was also sunk in
the action.
www.navy.gov.au/spc/history/ships/sydney2.htm
NAVY: Sea Power Centre - Australia: HMA Ship Histories
HMAS SYDNEY (II)
(also see www.navy.gov.au/spc/history/ archives/kormoran/kormoran.htm
RAN History - Archives ... images of original documents relating to the HMAS
SYDNEY / KORMORAN engagement on 19 November 1941.)
A nice private site is at
members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/HMASSydney/HMASSydney-1.html
[tag: history]
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/16/2005 07:44:00 pm

 
Neil Gaiman's Cats and Inflated Self-Assessments
See Cat update, under the letter about "Creatures of the Night" by Jamilah
www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2005/02/ hi-ya-yo-yo-yo-yiiiiiii-ha.asp

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

www.phule.net/mirrors/unskilled-and-unaware.html
Justin Kruger and David Dunning
Department of Psychology
Cornell University

Abstract
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it ...

(The lemon juice-video camera story is a new one to me!)
[Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. © 1999 by the American
Psychological Association For personal use only--not for distribution
December 1999 Vol. 77, No. 6, 1121-1134 ]
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/16/2005 07:09:00 pm

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

 
A Lie will go around the world before Truth gets its boots on
Not explaining this fully, but just a reminder.

Things like Scottish Play v Real Macbeth, and Richard III's stage & historical records connects up with things like Teresa's comments at Common fraud (December 03, 2004)[ nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005850.html ] and various discussions here and over there about how just ignoring facts & truth, and repeating what you want people to believe will often eventually pound itself into the local unconscious as 'common sense' or accepted, unquestioned belief.
Also connects with the technique of The Big Lie, and what I'm coming to believe is a defining part of humanity; what I think is called story or narrative or plot. Just throw random images down, and people will start to make up connexions & stories. (Possibly something to do with our development of a sense of time, causality, logic & so forth in pre-human days.)
Is another reason for disliking many attitudes seen in books, films, computer games, and the assumptions they make, which are starting to bleed into people's real decision making. Also connects to feminist attempts to push such unstated assumptions in language out into the light, and sometimes out of it altogether.

[tag: humanity]
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/15/2005 07:19:00 pm

Thursday, February 10, 2005

 
Mostly from Astronomy Picture of the Day
Shadow Set in Wyoming
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050127.html

Shadow Rise in California
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030822.html

The Belt of Venus
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap011209.html Also visible in
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010501.html
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990308.html
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990325.html
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990418.html
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010308.html
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010601.html

Aslan Shrugged: Author's Note
rebecca.hitherby.com/archives/000490.php
February 02, 2005

Periodic Table Horoscopes
www.themanwhofellasleep.com/horoscopes.html

Looking back, the HQ (Virtual) of the Travis Tea Fan Club would be the Travis Tea Room, on Travis Street (a bit north of the Texas Historic Landmark of Magnolia House) in Cameron, the county seat of Milam County, Texas.

Fulminate: An explosive salt of fulminic acid, especially fulminate of mercury.

[tag: astronomy]; >[tag: sky] ; >[tag: photography]
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/10/2005 05:33:00 pm

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

 
useful

Top 10 Excel annoyances
http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/01/11/xcel_annoy.html

Handy Tips for Working with Excel 2003
Frank Rice
Microsoft Corporation
December 2004
Applies to:
Microsoft Office Excel 2003

http://windows.ittoolbox.com/documents/document.asp?i=2820
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/odc_xl2003
_ta/html/OfficeTipsWhenUsingExcel.asp


[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/02/2005 05:46:00 pm

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