b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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The Trouble is the West
The list of things that offends muslims
Blueprint CSS Framework
Robert Plant Apparently Did License Cadillac
Can We Please Just Do The Obvious?
"If there's a bustle in your hedgerow ...
An Inconvenient Truth
The list of things that offends muslims
Blueprint CSS Framework
Robert Plant Apparently Did License Cadillac
Can We Please Just Do The Obvious?
"If there's a bustle in your hedgerow ...
An Inconvenient Truth
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Thursday, November 8, 2007
The Trouble is the West
An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the November issue of Reason magazine. My favorite quote is her closing statement:But I don’t even think that the trouble is Islam. The trouble is the West, because in the West there’s this notion that we are invincible and that everyone will modernize anyway, and that what we are seeing now in Muslim countries is a craving for respect. Or it’s poverty, or it’s caused by colonization.
The Western mind-set—that if we respect them, they’re going to respect us, that if we indulge and appease and condone and so on, the problem will go away—is delusional. The problem is not going to go away. Confront it, or it’s only going to get bigger.
The list of things that offends muslims
Yet another growing list of evidence that there is little actual difference in what we westerners call "moderate" islam and "radical" islam - there are merely varying degrees of apathy that determine the level of action.Saturday, November 3, 2007
Blueprint CSS Framework
My friend Matt Mower recently pointed me to the Blueprint CSS Framework, a very nifty set of modular CSS stylesheets and accompanying sample files that help a neophyte web builder create nice looking sites with multi-column layouts while still using CSS.I can't point you to my results yet, but I can say that it's helped me immensely and allowed me to actually structure a multi-column web page without the use of tables.
About once a year I foolishly take on the task of designing a new website. As you can see from the HTML on this very page (assuming you're looking at my web page and not the RSS feed) this effort has never actually resulted in a new design for b.cognosco. But never mind that.
What normally happens is that I spend days and days with high blood pressure, evolving a blue-streak vocabulary, throwing temper tantrums, and being cruel to small animals while I try to get HTML to do what I want with my limited understanding of the all too cryptic CSS.
Once I have good and well failed at that I try to hire someone to help me. I am a cheap bastard and have no interest in going out to *real* designers who will charge me $3,000 - $10,000 for a website that is basically for some hobby interest of mine or some freebie for a friend. But I am also a contrarian - so I do not wish to click over to TypePad or Wordpress and grab up a template that is in use by a few hundred other people. I like to do a lot of stuff that simple templates don't cover.
So I do various mockups of the page in something I can understand (like Adobe InDesign) until I have something I am happy with, create a PDF, and send it to some HTML slice-and-dice service or con one of the many web people I know into doing a little work for me on the side.
Sometimes this last approach works out ok except that no one creates CSS stylesheets I can really understand. So even if the site looks good I have to spend days of frustration trying to understand the nesting and tagging and inheritance and hacks and browser-specific workarounds that everyone uses.
But Blueprint has made it a lot easier, and more understandable, to use CSS by providing a discrete grid for layout and a well-documented set of stylesheets that explain what things do. I'm told the grid is even quite useful for experienced web designers to speed their basic development. I'll put some links to the new site(s) here when they're ready. In the meantime, try out Blueprint. It's nice.
Robert Plant Apparently Did License Cadillac
This is old news by now and my source is not impeccable, but I asked the question a few days ago, "Who sold the rights for commercial use of Led Zeppelin's music to Cadillac?"Apparently, Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin did. Scroll down this Led Zep tribute site and you'll see news photos of Plant at Cadillac's 100th Anniversary celebration.
I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.
Guess all that money from the '70s ran out. But it says something interesting that they still control their music, unlike the Beatles and lots of other musicians. Good for them.
Posted by: 
Terry Frazier at 10:37 AM
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Categories: Copyright, Music
Terry Frazier at 10:37 AM
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Monday, October 29, 2007
Can We Please Just Do The Obvious?
For anyone who's managed to miss the news for the past 6 months, the southeast US is in a 100-year drought. As we are wont to do in such cases, we have ignored this for the past several years until now all our lakes and reservoirs are nearly empty. Suddenly, we have a crisis.Imagine that.
So what do our vaunted civil servants do in this precarious situation? They implement outdoor watering bans. They argue with other states. They complain to the Army Corps of Engineers. They shutdown car washes and landscape companies. They go on TV and tell us how dreadful it is, and how sorry they are that people must lose jobs, and that they just can't help this awful, awful situation.
All the while they completely ignore the blindingly obvious, brain-dead simple, straightforward, and guaranteed 100% foolproof solution to the problem. Any 3rd-grader could suggest this.
Raise the price of water!!!
Oh, I know we can't raise the price. After all, it's completely unfair to the poor.
Bullshit.
The average person can live comfortably on 1,000 gallons/month. They don't even need to be particularly conservative to do that. We could probably survive well on 750, but let's say 1,000 to be compassionate. So for a family of four you need 4,000 gallons.
Let's be really, really compassionate for the poor. Set the price for the first 5,000 gallons at $10. Set the price for the next 1,000 at $10. That's $20 for up to 6,000 gallons - enough to serve a family of 7.
Set the price for the next 1,000 at $20. The next 1,000 at $30 and so on. At 10,000 gallons you're paying $150. By the time you get to 15,000 gallons (a typical amount of water used in one month watering a yard) the cost is now $550. Nobody gets a pass. Everybody pays.
You think people won't stop using excess water once they get a $550 bill? I sure will. If they won't (or don't), raise the incremental price to $20 per thousand. I don't know anyone who would spend $1,100/mo on water. If you have that kind of money more power to you - there aren't going to be enough of you to significantly raise total usage and we can all get on with our lives without these self-serving, jackass politicians grandstanding on TV with all their new emergency regulations.
Car wash owners would have to run out and change their coin-ops from $2 to $10. Or $20. That will hurt business, but people who want to spend $10 or $20 can still wash their car now and then. And maybe the owners will figure out they need to recycle. Ditto for industrial users and the power company. Office building managers will have to figure out how to actually operate their sprinkler systems, or turn them off. And landscapers will have to stop guaranteeing their plants. But we'll get over it.
It's absurd to try and reduce the use of limited resources in every way imaginable except the one way that is best designed for managing limited resources - economics.
But this is the government. I wish I could be surprised.
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 11:12 PM
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Categories: Economics, Policy & Regulation
Terry Frazier at 11:12 PM
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"If there's a bustle in your hedgerow ...
Don't be alarmed now.It's just a spring clean for the May Queen."
Just what the hell does that mean? I've wondered for more than 30 years.
But my real questions is, if Zep really still owns the rights to their music who sold Cadillac the rights to use it in their commercials?
From Rock Gods to Ringtones
Posted by Alan Wexelblat
As you've no doubt seen by now, the remaining members of Led Zeppelin have finally agreed to release their complete collection on iTunes, along with a special purchase item that bundles all 141 tunes. Verizon Wireless will also be offering Zep ringtones.
The band has famously refused most prior commercial uses of their music, with one amusing exception: Jack Black begged them for the rights to use "Immigrant Song".
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 10:19 AM
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Categories: Copyright, Music
Terry Frazier at 10:19 AM
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An Inconvenient Truth
If a truth is ugly and inconvenient, is it still a truth?If a truth is offensive to you or might hurt someone's feelings is it still a truth?
If you just don't like a truth, does pretending it's false make it untrue?
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This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
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