dsandler.org/wp

AP: Shareholders
Approve Palm Unit’s Spinoff. “Palm, now joined by rival
Handspring, will be renamed palmOne Inc. The spun off division, which
develops the Palm operating system, had already been acting
independently as a subsidiary for more than a year and will remain as
PalmSource Inc. […] Beginning Wednesday, PalmSource stock will begin
trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol PSRC, and the
new combined company of Palm and Handspring, under the new ticker symbol
PLMO.”

George Lakoff on how
conservatives are using language to shape issues. Small example,
regarding Schwarzenegger’s immediate and resounding popularity with
conservatives:

He didn’t have to say a word! He just had to stand up there, and he represents
Mr. Discipline. He knows what’s right and wrong, and he’s going to take it to
the people. He’s not going to ask permission, or have a discussion, he’s going
to do what needs to be done, using force and authority. His very persona
represents what conservatives are about.

Fire, women, conservative thinktanks…

I mean, maybe they scanned all the pages. What do I know? Dave has it on some authority that indeed the pages were scanned, by
cheap foreign labor. I’m used to feeling guilty about consuming goods and
products created in sweatshops; I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard
of sweatshop-produced data.

Todd wonders why I haven’t
mentioned Amazon’s fulltext
searching of their books. Here’s what I told him:

Re: Amazon’s searching: I’m a little less impressed with the whole
arduous book-scanning endeavor, because, frankly, I doubt they scanned a
single page. I figure almost all the books you can search, all the
books that Amazon’s selling, are in current print, which means that
their publishers are rolling paper pulp under rubber offset printing
rollers right now. The rubber is transferred ink by a lithography plate
wrapped around another roller; the lithoplate was etched by exposing it
to UV light (could be visible light; this process varies depending on
the chemicals used on the surface of the plate) underneath a
photonegative of the page printed on celluloid; the negative was
generated by a digital printer (dye, or ink, or laser), from digital
prepress data (PostScript, generated by Quark or TeX or whatever).

So, basically, the publishers have the text of all these books in
digital form already. It’s just a matter of Amazon getting a hold of
the files, and this falls under the umbrella of business development,
which is truly a terrifying and magical force. (There’s some
postproduction required to extract the text, build the search engine,
blah blah, but this is more straightforward. You can license or buy
technology to cover almost all of that.)

I have to admit that the public availability of these texts is a really
interesting development; the corpus linguist in me, for example, is
delighted at the opportunity to analyze so much text in an automated
fashion.

Except, of course, you’re not allowed to do that. So, you know, I’m
less excited. In fact, as it turns out, I really don’t have much use
for the service, in its current form, at all. So I haven’t used the
service, yet.

It turns out that Daylight Saving time ended on the same day that the
first serious cold front came through Houston. Last week, 6:00
PM meant 80° and afternoon sunlight. Today it means 50° and
a sky dark as pitch.

Not that I like the Marlins, but thank you, Florida.

Rain! Blessed rain! Don’t stop, don’t ever stop!