Campaign Mo

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David Mason had an interesting observation about the New York Times’ observation regarding the Clark campaign’s “getting legs”:

It reminds me of the feed they get from Wall Street every day about why investors bought or sold… its all best guesses at some sort of collective feeling.

I think about that as I watch the BBC news’ business brief every evening on telly. The market is up X percent on news that blahpositive. Had the market been down that day, they would have looked around for blahnegative, which one can certainly find on any given day, to explain the downness. Some days the nexus is real, but often it’s classic post hoc reasoning, carried out nearly every day, in full public view, by otherwise intelligent people, in an attempt to explain that which may very well be random.

Not to imply that all your hard work is resulting in some random swing, Dave. My interpretation is that the Clark campaign’s great legs are a result of Dave’s hard work.

Resolutions

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At this time of the making of resolutions, let us remember the words of Samuel Pepys, who was smart enough on this day in 1664 to realize he was over-promising:

At my office til 12 at night, making my solemn vowes for the next year, which I trust in the Lord I shall keep. But I fear I have a little too severely bound myself in some things and in too many, for I fear I may forget some.

Methinks Pepys could have benefitted from a Palm. So home and to bed….

Color Coding

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It was a little thing, but I finally some color coding to make the libxml API docs a bit more readable. DV’s new docs build system has proven more robust and easier to work with than the old way it was done, but we lost color coding that helped break up the page and improve readability.

I haven’t been doing much free software work lately, but what time I’ve had I’ve been spending on the libxml/libxslt docs. With Shaun at the helm, the GNOME docs system seems totally under control, and doesn’t need any of my attention. I’ll have to spend a bit of time there as the 2.6 release gets closer, but I feel so free not having to spend a lot of time on CVS build chores just to see where things stand. They stand fine.

Cool Cave

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Caves are other-wordly in terms both aesthetic and scientific. The aesthetics are obvious, but the science is becoming increasingly important, as biologists study the weird single-celled critters that live beneath the Earth’s surface. Stephen Jay Gould once famously observed that the total biomass of single-celled organisms living in the Earth beneath a cow pasture is likely larger than that living in and above it. That makes all underground organisms important, but cave critters and other deep-rock organisms are especially so, because they have evolved entirely different metabolisms, gobbling up their dinner in completely different ways than the bits of life up here with which we are more familiar.

For that reason this cave is exceptional, undisturbed by human visitors until now:

While the snowy river of calcite may be the cave’s marquee attraction? “the eye candy,” Boston called it? much of the scientific interest is focused on an unassuming black dusty crud stuck to the ceiling.

The crud, which Boston described as a sort of black mud crust, seemed at first to be an annoyance as the cavers struggled to keep from disturbing it and contaminating the pristine calcite.

But Boston, a biologist who specializes in the unusual organisms that grow in caves, found that the black crud was really a byproduct of single-celled organisms living on the walls and ceiling of Snowy River.

The microbiology of caves may be invisible, but it is vitally important to the science to be done there, Corcoran said.

Moon Landing

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And while we’re bombing away at Google, it’s a travesty that Phil Plait’s moon landing page isn’t ranked higher on Google. I think we should all link to it as well, though that’s a tougher sell.

And as an aside, isn’t it sad than nine out of the first ten hits for “moon landing” on Google are about the question of wether or not it was a hoax? Wouldn’t it be great if when you typed “moon landing” you actually got something about the moon landing?

Louiemail

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My in-box doth overflow with the mail of Luis, as he wades through the thickets of bugzilla with Excalibur raised on high.

It’s a wild and improvised thing, back to the roots, like John on rooftop:


“On behalf of the group I hope we passed the audition.”

You go, guy!