Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[I just noticed this didn't get posted when the cron script ran at 5:25 ... "errors loggin in".]

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.

Thomas Jefferson, writing to the Danbury Baptist association, 1802-01-01.

Note: Today is the official United States National Day of Prayer (established by law in 1952, with the date -- first Thursday in May -- nailed down by another law in 1988). Explanation of how this fits with the Establishment Clause (especially after reading the page linked in this paragraph) is left as an exercise for the reader.

Tomorrow, on the other hand, is No Pants Day, a much less controversial holiday (and an international one)! (Un)dress appropriately, y'all.

Dammit, Perrine -- if you're going to do the "I love you soooo much" kneading thing with your claws out, I'm going to have to get up and put some clothes on first.

(She's so good with her claws the rest of the time, but she doesn't seem to realize she's extending them when she kneads.)

Tuesday night, xpioti gave me my first PDA, an old Handspring Visor. When I heard about palmtop devices, I thought the idea sounded interesting but worried about how much computing power one could fit there, and the user interace. When my friends started getting them, I thought they looked potentially useful, with both advantages and disadvangtages compared to my paper DayRunner, and had no idea whether I would find such a thing useful, whether the UI would drive me crazy, whether it would replace my DayRunner or augment it ... it was an "I'll have to try one for a week or a month someday" thing.

Now I've got my hands on one. I'm adapting to Graffiti (the stylus-stroke text entry system) much more quickly than I expected to (though the stroke for '9' is so different from how I write a nine that I still have to stop and think, I'm not making my gestures large enough[1], and I still have to look up most of the punctuation). But despite the poor contrast (especially compared to black ink on white paper), the slower handwriting, and not being able to see as much of what I'd written earlier at a time, I do find I'm reaching for the smaller device that I don't have to physically flip open to the right page to use before I reach for my familiar DayRunner.

Last night I sent the following to a general-discussion mailing list (so a bunch of my LJ friends will have seen it already):

Subject: Tell me what to do with my Visor

I was just given a used Handspring Visor Platinum. It's running PalmOS 3.5.2H1. What does the Elbows hive mind consider essential downloads (starting with free ones) to install, and why? And are there better sites (in terms of selection and/or site useability and organization) to look for downloads than www.handspring.com and www.palm.com?

I've seen such devices in friends' hands, but I'm only just now holding one and starting to get ideas for how it might be useful to me. I'm still at the stage of figuring out what questions I should be asking/Googling.

After spending a day entering calendar events, writing down the stuff I usually record during the day in my DayRunner, and even downloading a book reader and a copy of Free Culture, which John has been telling me I absolutely must read, and then reading the responses so far to my request for suggestions, my impression is this:

This device is really pretty much a Toy out of the box (though as has been pointed out to me, for some people the built-in calendar/addressbook/to-do list are enough to be useful), but it seems that if I install the right combination of third-party software, it'll turn into a powerful and extremely personally customized Serious Tool with a bunch of toys tacked on.

So now I need to spend a while surfing the sites folks have pointed me at, looking for the components that'll make this toy my tool, find the tools I'll need to write my own programs for it, and then spend a week or two asking myself what else I wish it would do. In a couple of months we'll see whether it has become a prosthetic brain crucial to life support, or simply a more powerful toy with some convenient tools folded in. Very early data suggest the former, but the jury is out. That it will at least be useful seems a pretty safe bet.

And since I've got two cradles (a serial one and a USB one), and like to be able to do most things from both the office (where the Windows machines are) and the bedroom (Mac), I need to find out whether hotsyncing to two different computers will completely bollix things up. (I should be able to set up both desktop hotsync apps to store things in the same directory on my fileserver ... unless they keep some of the info in the Windows registry or someplace in the System folder on the Mac.)

Now to look for music tools (an ABC reader perhaps?) and either a spreadsheet or a database where I get to define the records.

[1] When I was in Montessori, I liked to write small. Some of my classmates and I would have contests to see who could write (legibly) the smallest. We got so small that we had to sharpen the pencil again every few letters lest the thickness of the line grow larger than the shapes of the letters. (I'm not exaggerating for effect here -- that's literally what we did. I think we got into an argument once over whether it still counted as legible if a magnifying glass was needed.) We only wrote a few words at a time that small, for our little competitions, but my handwriting in general started tending toward the small size. Then in seventh grade I had a math teacher who couldn't read my handwriting because it was too small, and she insisted that I write larger. The quality of my handwriting started its decline at that point, and I'm disinclined to think that's mere coincidence (not only because of the timing, but also because I later noticed that when I write smaller I write more neatly, even if I'm writing at similar speed). In college I was briefly able to get ahold of narrow-ruled notebooks, and sometimes put two lines of notes per line on the paper when sitting in note-intensive lectures (such as Theatre History, a core requirement that I enjoyed far more than I expected to, enough so that I went back for the second semester of it as an elective). I used to put three lines of handwritten notes per line of normal-ruled paper. Nowadays the smallest I can find is college-ruled, which is noticeably larger. I miss narrow-rule. But I digress. Anyhow, when I'm writing on the Visor, I'm thinking "precision" because a dumb device has to be able to recognize my strokes ... and so I automatically make my motions smaller, which is the opposite of what the Visor wants. So I've got to re-train myself like I did in seventh grade, all over again.

Oddly enough, my taste for very sharp pencils and very fine lines eventually left me frustrated with a device I had to sharpen so bloody often to keep it comfortable (and back then the 0.1 mm mechanical pencils weren't around, at least not any that I ever saw), so I switched to ball point pens because they never needed sharpening, and just adjusted to never having a really fine line, but never having it get any worse. This raised eyebrows when I got to college and people noticed that while most students liked pens, all but one of the math majors preferred pencils, and I was the oddball in the math department.

But my wishes for precision and control and a comfortable feel, evenness of line and reliability, do leave me picky about my pens. I use cheap disposables most of the time (though I've got a Cross in my DayRunner), but I definitely have my favourite brands and detested brands. I've not yet found the perfect pen (can I have something that makes a perfectly even, extremely fine line like a Rapidograph and feels like one as it does so, but writes at any angle to the paper, as a felt-tip does, with ink that dries so quickly that I never need to worry about the dreaded southpaw smudge, and a barrel custom fit exactly to my hand?), but I'm always picking up unfamiliar pens and trying them out when I see a display.

Fountain pens are a whole 'nuther thing, and probably warrant their own journal entry (even though it'll be shorter than this footnote).

In my most recent "link sausage" journal entry, I mentioned a page about thermoacoustic chillers (the "HumCooler") that I had previously linked to last June, and I mentioned that the previous link was dead. Well as of yesterday it's back (though with a slightly different URL), so I've edited the June 2003 link sausage entry and this week's link sausage entry to point to the new location, and I'm mentioning it here in case anyone who was interested when they saw it a couple of days ago wants to go chase the link now. I don't expect anyone to just happen to notice the edit days after the entry was posted. :-)

• Still dreading 17-year-locust season on the East Coast? drglam posted this link to cicada recipes. (No, I'm not going to try them myself. I'm a vegetarian. But y'all let me know how they are, ok?)
• A Dr. Fun cartoon that Fred sent with the note, "Why didn't I think of that?" and which made me go, "Doh! Of course!".
• You can't beat the classics (because if you do, whatever you did becomes a classic). Here's a brief account of one way of dismissing door-to-door religion salesmen.
• Really awesome chain mail (caution, slow to load -- a bunch of other photos there).
• Crime-fighting ape dies (BBC). "South Africa is mourning the death of Max, a 200kg gorilla who shot to fame after braving bullet wounds to overpower an armed robber in his zoo [in 1997]. The crime-fighting primate died in his sleep, according to Johannesburg zoo." (thanks to hasfartogo for the link.)
• Transgenic Tombstones (Guardian Unlimited): have a sample of your DNA inserted into an apple cell from which a tree is then grown. "Tombstones are dead, but these trees are living, they are a symbol of life. They could be extremely comforting for people." Of course, regulations on transgenic organisms are a bit of a hurdle. One person called the 20,000 pounds each tree would cost, "cheap for eternal life".
• Simson Garfinkel writes about Robot Sex (Technology Review -- thanks to Fred for the link): "Whether or not you think that gender belongs in our mechanical creations has a lot to do with your vision of how these creatures will fit into our future. It certainly takes more effort to make a robot that's gendered than one that's asexual. But engineers just want to have fun. Building gender into robots might be a way for the robots' designers to express their own playfulness and creativity. Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll discover another reason why gender might be a good thing for our robot servants: gender will make robots more compatible with their human masters." What I find interesting about this is how these ideas mesh with observations about how many people react to transgendered, intergendered, or just gender-ambiguous individuals, the presence of a "sex" box on forms where sex is irrelevant, and the oft heard complaint from genderqueer (and some other transgendered folks), "why is it so important to people to figure out whether I'm male or female"? But I suspect others will find different aspects of the gender question interesting. "'you can't avoid it.' Just think about the classic robot of Star Wars, R2D2. 'Most people would agree that it's a boy,' says Kidd. 'But I can't think of anything that makes R2D2 gendered.'"
• I don't recall whether I've mentioned "brain fingerprinting" here before or not, but here's a Guardian article about it. "Unlike discredited lie-detecting techniques, which measure changes in breathing, heart rate and other variables to determine if suspects are trying to deceive their interrogators, brain fingerprinting is designed to discover if specific information is stored in a person's brain. The technique exploits the fact that the brain emits an electrical signal known as a P300 exactly 300 milliseconds after it is confronted with a stimulus that has special significance to that individual - for example, a victim's face."
• The person who posted this to a mailing list I read described it as, "Meyers-Briggs for Gen-Y". It's a computer dating service that offers a free personality test (which, yes, has four axes and two possible values for each axis). As with any such online, self-administered, brief personality test, I'm pretty sure it's value is almost entirely as entertainment, but it's cute. It labelled me "The Peach". (vamp_ire also mentioned this site recently.)
• And finally, a link that has me headed back to bed to hide under the covers and try not to think: silmaril pointed out this story of an attempt to make Macedonia look better to the US by luring seven Pakistanis to Macedonia, then having police kill them in a murder staged to look like an ambush, and claiming the seven victims had been terrorists, all in order to "present themselves as participants in the war against terrorism and demonstrate Macedonia's commitment to the war on terror." I weep for my species.