http://tom.idealog.info/ tom Tom Intermediate Form blog, a grad student writing about current events, computer science, and whatever else interests him. http://tom.idealog.info/blog/20040617-1087474713.shtml Well, Reagan is barely in the ground, and already people are trying to minimize the tremendous amount of people that turned out to see him off. Drudge reports about the NY Times' Frank Rich: [quote] On Public reation to Reagan Death, Rich claims: 'The dirty little secret of the week: The outpouring didn't live up to its hype. 'There... 2004-06-17T08:18:33Z http://tom.idealog.info/blog/20040612-1087056351.shtml During the concert to celebrate the dedication of the World War II memorial, one of the pieces that was played was "Hymn to the Fallen", which was originally part of the score to "Saving Private Ryan". At Reagan's funeral, the recessional was "Mansions of our Lord", from the film "We Were Soldiers". ... 2004-06-12T12:05:51Z http://tom.idealog.info/blog/20040611-1086968598.shtml I'm by no means a literature critic, but surprisingly I do have two poems that I consider my favorites. One of them is Tennyson's "Ulysses", and the other is "The Sons of Martha" by Rudyard Kipling. So it was with much dismay that I read Chris's blog post bashing the latter poem. While Chris did a damn good job formatting... 2004-06-11T11:43:18Z http://tom.idealog.info/blog/20040328-1080493660.shtml The above brings you to a great link in which Penn and Teller interview Normal Borlaug and compare his work (saving a billion people before 1970, and he didn't stop there) with that of the anti-GM crazys. Well worth watching. As you might have guessed from the URL given above, there's a bit of... 2004-03-28T12:07:40Z http://tom.idealog.info/blog/20040217-1077045105.shtml Google released a press release today claiming that their search index now contains over six billion items. While this may seem staggeringly large to some, it actually seems somewhat small to me. Consider this. I estimate that, between my blog, my web site, and various mailing lists I've posted to over my life, I'm responsible for... 2004-02-17T14:11:45Z http://tom.idealog.info/blog/20040122-1074817500.shtml I'm somewhat annoyed with sites like Slashdot and the Drudge Report declaring the Spirit rover dead, just because it hasn't been sending data back to earth for a day or so. While it may be dramatic to proclaim the mission a failure, it just isn't accurate. A better site for mars rover news is spaceflight now. There mission... 2004-01-22T19:25:00Z http://tom.idealog.info/blog/20040120-1074655691.shtml Just got done watching the state of the union. Bush was remarkably combative. He mentioned his controversial carrier visit, gave a listing of the nations involved in the war against Iraq, and demanded that the PATRIOT act and the tax cuts be renewed. During the speech, the Democrats were remarkably uncivil. I thought I... 2004-01-20T22:28:11Z http://tom.idealog.info/blog/20040114-1074103305.shtml Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, writes about how he dislikes "stealth corrections", but at the same time thinks "there's something perhaps a bit too self-important about posting an audit-trail note every time you make a minor stylistic edit to a post."... 2004-01-14T13:01:45Z http://tom.idealog.info/blog/20040111-1073800638.shtml A screenshot from Last Exile. I was having a conversation with my friend Tony today about a new anime called Last Exile , which features teenage pilots rescuing a young... 2004-01-11T00:57:18Z http://tom.idealog.info/blog/20040109-1073662347.shtml Well, if you read this site through a RSS reader, you may have aggregated a few empty blog posts. This is because I posted a broken version of the RSS script, and didn't adequately test it before I put it online. That'll teach me to upgrade the blog at 1 in the morning. Rather than fix the old code, I rewrote it in python. The RSS code... 2004-01-09T10:32:27Z