I was doing some recreational programming recently, all related to spam filtering.
Tino requested that I take in a number of texts (meaning text files of actual books, 12 of them) and figure out which letter pairs never occur in natural language. I did that, and while checking my work, I found "yx" from the word "sardonyx" (meaning it does occur). I figured this must be a user name from one of the Neal Stephenson books since it sounds like a superhero who's special power is being derisive. I grepped all the books, and the source surprised me. It was the King James bible, from Revelations:
21:19 The foundations of the city's wall were adorned with all kinds of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, chalcedony; the fourth, emerald;
21:20 the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, chrysoprasus; the eleventh, jacinth; and the twelfth, amethyst.
21:21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls. Each one of the gates was made of one pearl. The street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass.
Apparently, it's some sort of gemstone. You learn something new everyday, I suppose.
Late this afternoon, I got two emails from CBS Marketwatch. While this is a normal event in my mailbox, their subjects were quite irregular.
At 4:15pm, this appeared: "EBay tops Q2 goals, raises outlook, sets 2-for-1 split." Then, 45 minutes later, I got this: "After The Bell Report: EBay tumbles on second-quarter growth, outlook."
The market must have had a nearly impossible outlook for eBay if this didn't please it. I just checked now, and eBay is at $110. That's 110X earnings vs 115X earnings this morning. It's hardly a significant change in it's valuation.
I can't help but think that irrational exhuberance is in charge, if in fact it ever left.
Just wait until the initial 2nd Quarter GDP number comes out next Thursday. If it's bad, everyone will point out how it's in the past and therefore isn't important. If it's good, it will be declared the Wave of the Future.
Posted by nicole at 06:44 PM
...something about the bugs, but Tino beat me to it. I encourage you to have a look at this picture. It's really something.
I haven't seen any swarming on the windows tonight, trying valiantly to get to the precious, precous light, but I've also heard a lot of thunder.
Posted by nicole at 09:07 PMPer the Washington Post, Dick Gephardt is having trouble raising money.
The disappointing performance, which Gephardt campaign officials did not try to dispute and which came after a mediocre first quarter, prompted a major shift in fundraising strategy that will now focus more on small donations rather than on big checks.
I would have *sworn* Gephardt kicked off his campaign with a speech that included a "single payer health plan", ie socialized medicine. This is not a path to the "big checks." The little people might support something like that, but you can kiss the support of insurance companies, doctors, big pharma and HMOs goodbye. There's a lot of big money tied up in those categories. It's not hard to figure out.
And, of course, there was that little gaffe wherein he said "When I'm president, we'll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day." Hello? Separation of Powers? Checks and Balances? There won't be any of those.
I think his campaign is dead in the water myself. Howard Dean is too far ahead of himself, peaking too soon. I'm predicting that, based on what is known now, it will be Edwards who gets the nod.
There has recently been a spate of media blathering about how AOL "stole" Time Warner. They want the public to believe that Steve Case is a geek from Virginia who managed to sell them magic beans? This should embarrass them, yet they are so anxious to be victims and to be right about everything.
They never expected to operate AOL seriously. They planned to retire on their stock profits, profits for which they didn't expect to work. They didn't want convergence, they wanted the money.
Unfortunately, the stock market did not cooperate with their scheme. Their timing couldn't have been worse, really.
Now they seem to be wasting opportunities to do anything useful, and are concentrating on blaming Steve Case instead. Providing some of their media properties to it's fancy new distribution channel, AOL, would be a good start. They do this now to a small degree, but they need to do it like they did with the ubiquitous AOL disk. Time Warner people clearly don't have the fortitude for this.
But if they don't have the energy and thus aren't getting the pretzel monies, they want a license to complain about how they were wronged.
What crybabies.
Posted by nicole at 08:53 PMWe here at Astrogirl are a big fan of Splenda, which is probably it's death knell right there, but I'm glad to see it showing up in new products[1]. I limit myself to one serving a day because this stuff is, IMHO, not especially well tested. It is the best artificial sweetner that I've ever tasted (I think Aspartame tastes like ass, so that puts me in the super-picky category). Sucralose is so good that I'm suspicious of it, and I'm sure the wonderful folks at CSPI will find some damn problem with the stuff. If they don't, they'll make one up.
Yes, I'm getting to the point now.
Walmart is using their purchasing power to demand new formulations of products. In this case, they are selling an exclusive lower sugar version of Hawaiian Punch. The fruit juice in the punch remains, and it has sugars in it of an unprocessed nature, and Splenda is added instead of the usual, vile, high-fructose corn syrup. I think it's a contest as to which is has the simpler molecular structure, but I'm betting on the Splenda being shorter.
Now if someone would just carry this stuff, I'd be quite happy about it.
[1] Don't blame me for Olestra -- I never even tried that stuff
Posted by nicole at 10:33 PM