NPCT

This fantastic map shows the expansion of Walmart locations across the US over time.

One of our very good friends, Holly Dunsworth, is going to be on National Public Radio (NPR) for “This I Believe” this coming weekend as a part of “Weekend Edition.” You can read her essay here. An excerpt:

I believe in evolution. It’s easy. It’s my life. I’m a paleoanthropologist. I study fossils of [...]

There are good cops out there, but sometimes the news makes it seem like they’re all up to no good. Here’s a short video of a good cop doing his job well at a protest in LA. It seemed like it was worth sharing.

In my previous post, I complained a lot about trying to get XML stream parsing working. Ultimately, I just decided to rip the guts out of ejabberd, rather than reinvent the wheel. The relevant files are xml_stream.erl, xml.erl, and expat_erl.c. You can see how to use it in ejabberd_receiver.erl. Frankly, these [...]

Per my previous post, I’m going to start a little Erlang project. I’ll call it “North Zulch,” or “NZ” in reference to the tiny little place where the family ranch is located.
There are three things that I’ve had to solve over and over (or at least cut and paste over and over), in [...]

I’m not much of a runner, but occasionally I get myself psyched up to go out for a few miles. What I do really like, however, is keeping obsessive track of my activity. When the Google Maps API came out, I thought “It would be really cool to use this to create maps [...]

This map is kind of interesting. It’s a schematic view of the US interstate system.

PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS — NIPS*2007
Deadline for Paper Submissions: June 8, 2007
Submissions are solicited for the Twenty-First Annual meeting of an
interdisciplinary Conference (December 3-6) which brings together
researchers interested in all aspects of neural and statistical processing
and computation. The Conference will include invited talks as well as oral
and poster presentations of refereed papers. It is [...]

I have only played one other game in the series, Railroad Tycoon II, but I am a really big fan of that game and I continue to play it today even though it is quite old now. When I heard that there was to be a new version out, Sid Meier’s Railroads!, I was [...]

I just got back from the 2007 Cambridge University water polo tour. This year we went to Pisa, Italy. There are photos here.

There are a lot of neat things that I can almost do with Evolution, my Palm and webcal, but I don’t seem to be able to make them happen. It’s kind of annoying, actually. Even though I use Linux pretty much exclusively, this is the sort of thing that really drives me nuts: [...]

I moved my (neglected) blog to  DreamHost, upgraded it and changed the theme.

This is interesting.

An interesting article here about Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) - a group of current and former police officers who advocate drug legalization. Worth a look. It’s good to see that there is at least a dialogue starting about ending the futile War on Drugs.

Cole, LEAP’s executive director, spent twelve years as an [...]

I’ve recently checked out last.fm and Pandora. They’re both cool, although I’ve found myself so far happier with Pandora’s selections.

Fearing issues with fires from batteries, Virgin Atlantic has banned Apple and Dell laptops from being used in-flight.

The AI Statistics 2007 Conference just issued a call for papers.

Eleventh International Conference on
~ Artificial Intelligence and Statistics ~
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[...]

My friend Sophie is in Australia and posted some beautiful pictures of the Australian coast and the Grampians National Park.

I finally set up a new gallery to replace the one that crashed a few months ago. I’m now hosting with DreamHost, who seem to offer quite good value. These are new pictures. I will put the old ones back up as soon as I can get my hands on the disk. [...]

PhD Comics is always spot on, but the current storyline is particularly relevant: the central character’s relationship is just about to become trans-Atlantic. As I get ready to leave for the US to visit Brenda for several weeks, the topic of this one has come up a few times. Too funny…