• "There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life." -- Frank Zappa

• All links in orange open in tastefully small new windows.

• This blog brought to you by Gold Bond powder. Not because Gold Bond pays money, but because America deserves a pimple-free ass.

8-27-2003
Just do IT

Developments from the wired world.

• This Dan Gillmor item is essentially the same argument for corporate blogs I wrote for a client back in May. Gillmor has a good news peg, the Howard Dean campaign, so maybe people will listen. Please remember, folks, that the most under-appreciated aspect of online communication is voice.

• This Washington Post article is the second-reference I've seen to flash mobs. This link is useful to people not in the digerati because you might yourself in the middle of such an event sometime soon. As a general rule, if the style hounds of the Washington Post declare a trend dead, then it's probably ready to hit the rest of America.

• A blogger travels with Howard Dean. Check out this Dean quote as reported by David Weinberger: "The reason we're going to beat this president is that we're going to give the 50% of Americans who've given up on the political process a reason to vote again."

Last November, when nobody had heard of Doc Howard, I thought about driving up to Vermont and looking for a job. Instead I sat on my butt and trolled the Web for IT jobs. Man, that's a decision I'd like to have back.

• I've kept up with Jason Kottke's work for years. Most of the time my interest has been in terms of the you-don't-want-to-know technical aspects of Web design, but on his site currently is a dandy little ditty about the Google calculator, excerpted here :

After verifying that 2+2=4 (contrary to popular belief), I tried to figure out the largest difference between the smallest and largest units of measurement on a given scale, finally ending up with ~3.08 x 10^26 angstroms in a parsec (26 orders of magnitude difference). If you delve into the world of obscure metric prefixes, you can get up to 64 orders of magnitude difference....there are ~3.08 x 10^64 yoctometers in a yottaparsec. If you want to get really ridiculous, you can find out how many yoctometers there are in one vigintillion parsecs (~3.08 x 10^103 if you're curious).

That got me thinking...what's the limit of the Google Calculator's computational ability? 170! (170! = 1*2*3*4* ... *168*169*170) is equal to ~7.26 x 10^306, but 171! doesn't work. 2^1023 = ~8.99 x 10^307, but 2^1024 doesn't work. After some trial and error, the upper limit of the calculator is ~1.797 * 10^308...or basically anything less than 2^1024. My binary math is a little rusty, but that limit seems to correspond to 32-bit double precision real arithmetic. Which makes sense, but it would have been more fun if the limit would have been a googol (1.0 x 10^100). (Regarding other large numbers, neither googolplex nor infinity return calculator results.)

In addition to playing with big numbers, the calculator can help you finally figure out the number of drams in a pennyweight (~0.878 drams/pennyweight), rods in a fathom (~0.364 rods/fathom), or the speed of light in knots (582,749,918 knots)...but unfortunately not the mileage of your automobile in rods/hogshead.

Anybody curious about rods per hogshead is cool in my book.

8-26-2003
Resumption Day:

• Note to bloggers. For more than two weeks, I didn't even turn my Mac on. The world seemed to survive.

• Note to all those old OU Posties. It's nice to have successful friends. Only insightful comment I can muster from this latest alcoholic binge is that when it comes to newspaper reunions, there's more talk of stories than wives or kids. Keep in touch, folks, and write good leads.

• Great factoid via Gregg Easterbrook: "AT&T won a multimillion dollar government contract to run the "do not call" anti-telemarketing system - though AT&T's telemarketing division is No. 1 for most federal complaints about telemarketing."

• Note to my poker buddies: The average American loses $239 a year gambling.

• Note to the Wall Street Journal. Please bring back the dartboard contest. For those unfamiliar, it was a stock picking game that pitted Wall Street hotshots against stocks picked by flinging darts blindly into a wall. Here's the beauty: the darts won 39 percent of the time.

• A note to the American president, and an explanation of why I will only refer to a certain country henceforth as Iraq Nam. We knew this milestone would come: more U.S. service deaths in alleged peace than in war.

• Question to suspended Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore: which ten (or 29) commandments do you follow?

• Another question to Justice Moore. Since your position is based on the moral authority of the Christian Bible, can you explain to me how the Christian Bible contains an apparently plagiarized story from 1,300 years earlier? I'll have more to say on this in a bit.

• Note to Type 181 VW geeks. The Volkwagen Thing did not make the Car Talk list of worst cars of the millennium.

8-8-2003
Memo to:

Memo to Republican strategist Rich Galen: Thank you for the most insightful quote I've heard in a long time. ""A' people hire 'A' people; 'B' people hire 'C' people.'"

Memo to Ann Coulter: There's an old saying "Always Certain, Often Wrong." Ms. Coulter, I wish your world actually existed outside of the inside of super-Republican ears.

Memo to Arnold S. of California: Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.

Memo to Jerry Springer: Did you really think you could run for the U.S. Senate and still keep taping your freak show? Further memo – don't ever make a noise about politics again.

Memo to Scott Peterson or Kobi Bryant or whoever else becomes the media flavor of the week: I totally do not care. I'm more interested in why American GIs are dying in Iraq, why the government isn't a democracy but an auction, and why 600 American jobs move overseas every single day.

Memo to Rolling Rock Brewery: You make better beer than bumper stickers. My "33" tags washed off within weeks.

Memo to readers: I'm in Ohio, continuing my two-month road trip away from the IT world. Essays are in progress. So is fun and family. The more I'm out in the world, the more I wonder why anyone chooses to live in a cube. You have other options than being contractor-dogmeat, you know.

About the blog
Mr. Marshall, who refers to himself in the third person when speaking in italics, wants to be able to say "fo shizzle, my izzle" just once with a straight face.

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Mr. Marshall is a reporter turned web developer turned information architect and interface designer. He spends weekdays in Richmond, VA. and weekends with The First Dumpling in Virginia Beach.