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an eddy in the bitstream

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Decision ’04

every blog is an election blog, right? politics, shmolitics. but this usa presidential election seems to matter more than most. as if the fate of the world hinges on it.

i wonder, though, if what we lefties are hoping for is not so much a way to avoid a conservative future but a way to forgive the weak-willed past. every dem who talks big now sided with the poor evidence of a puppet president, hungry for war, 2 years ago. our lone voice in the wilderness went down in a freakish plane accident about the same time. did we not protest loud enough before? did we not make our voices heard? did we not say ‘no’ with enough persistent force?

or is it just that half our fellow americans think gwb is doing a fine job as it is. that’s what boggles my mind.

and here’s what grieves me the most: no one is talking publically about why it is that “terrorists” (a pegorative normally spelled s-c-a-p-e-g-o-a-t) would attack the usa in the first place. that seems to me to be the most important issue. what is it about america’s way in the world that angers so many nonamericans? and how might all americans be implicated in that discussion?

perhaps that’s why it never happens.

SWISH-E and ranking algorithms

I’ve been actively making noise on the swish-e discussion list for over a year now. It’s a great open source indexing and searching tool. Love it. Loooove it. How’s that for Geek Love?

Part of the power of swish-e (the product is UPPERCASE, the command is lower, and I’m a lazy typist…) is in the libxml2 parser from the GNOME project. That thing flies. I’ve since started using the libxml2 tools in my other work as well.

Part of my work with swish-e has been in improving the ranking algorithm. I found a wealth of info on that subject, thanks in part to the success of google — which makes it easy to find information about what makes google work so well. How’s that for the tail wagging the dog? Or something like that.

Anyway, this has led me down the road of natural language query and methods of relevance ranking. Pretty dense stuff. My wee brain starts to twist and shudder. But I found this a good start and this even more helpful.

I have an email in to the developer about the open source status of the NITLE Semantic Engine, which looks like a really interesting idea. The author wrote this article about vector ranking, which I found very lucid.

MOTU for sale

UPDATE: it sold. good luck to the next owner; make lots of good recordings.

Shameless consumerism. I’m selling the audio system used to record several projects, including the Brett Larson debut record, and several House of Mercy recordings (with Peter Rasmussen at the helm). I’ve listed it on ebay but you can find pics here.

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