OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software.

OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo 4, DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.

OpenLaszlo is "write once, run everywhere." An OpenLaszlo application developed on one machine will run on all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems.

OpenLaszlo | the premier open-source platform for rich internet applications

It's the hottest sensation to sweep the nation: Pink Noise! Also known as a signal with even power distribution on a logarithmic frequency scale, pink noise masks background noise to help you concentrate. Now with source code and white noise, for those less colorful. Drown out annoying roommates and co-workers today!

Blackhole Media - Noise

Executive Summary

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Executive Executive Summary

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

Offered FYI in response to a recent post.

Freeman admitted he was a skeptic on global warming. His problem was not change in the climate. “In the long view we ARE changing the climate.” He felt that climate was hugely complex, that we understand very little of it and many people are reducing this unknown complexity into one data point — the average temperature somewhere. Until we understand what kind of changes we are making in our “solutions” he says he believes the best action on global climate change right now is inaction.

But I have studied their climate models and know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.

The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That's why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Besides the general prevalence of fudge-factors, the latest and biggest climate models have other defects that make them unreliable. With one exception, they do not predict the existence of El Niño. Since El Niño is a major feature of the observed climate, any model that fails to predict it is clearly deficient. The bad news does not mean that climate models are worthless. They are, as Manabe said thirty years ago, essential tools for understanding climate. They are not yet adequate tools for predicting climate. If we persevere patiently with observing the real world and improving the models, the time will come when we are able both to understand and to predict. Until then, we must continue to warn the politicians and the public: don't believe the numbers just because they come out of a supercomputer.

Freeman Dyson: I am always happy to be in the minority. Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details to be sure that they are ... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

People seem to use this phrase in a lot of different ways ... the most common seem to be: step out/back, dream up, bring to mind/recall, promote.

"What it's not going to be is a publication with a whole bunch of reports in it," Burgess said, explaining that it would use a narrative style to appeal to a wide audience. Citing the Iraq Study Group report and the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission as models, she said the SIR project would "drill up" to capture the full picture of reconstruction.

But I do believe that what will define the increased revenue growth as we drill up our assets will be that that we will provide a better customer experience for which customers will pay us.

I just had him drill up a Radical Inferno and he did my Fury ...

My existing flag holder was too small for the "modern" flag poles so we had to drill up a new one.

In a year in which certain people have tried their hardest to drill up hate against Muslims, what could be more appropriate ...?

Election posters and logos are being plastered all over the country to drill up enthusiasm for the elections ...

I bet I couldn't even pick that drill up now!

But what about Google’s drilling, "down, up and around" everyone else’s data!

Este soporta navegación basada en menú, drill up & down, ordenación, entre otras. Es 100% basado en Web, sin instalación en el cliente, sólo un navegador.

Drill up, drill down, drill by, and drill through?

I must confess to not be particularly interested in the topic. Its a tough and very real problem but one for which is easy to drill up sensationalist threat scenarios.

Information is presented through Axeda(R) Report and the new Axeda(R) Dashboard application, which provide rich displays and reports that highlight key performance indicators with drill-up, drill-down, and ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

A gothic fairy tale set against the postwar repression of Franco's Spain.

This film was previously recommended here at MemeStreams [script] during its theatrical release. MemeStreams was hardly alone in giving the film, now available on DVD, effusive praise:

a haunting mixture of horror, history and fantasy that works simultaneously on every level ... a brilliant work of the imagination ... utterly unforgettable ... visually stunning ... intense, searing, beautiful, terrifying ... marvelous, rich, daring ... transcendent ... a tour de force of cautionary zeal, humanism and magic ... [it goes on and on.]

Anthony Lane concluded:

It is, I suspect, a film to return to, like a country waiting to be explored: a maze of dead ends and new life.

Have you returned yet?

Pan's Labyrinth

This paper is from 2005. I have only skimmed it. I'm posting in response to the recent thread Political Preference Is Half Genetic.

We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors. Employing standard methodological approaches in behavioral genetics —– specifically, comparisons of the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins —– we analyze data drawn from a large sample of twins in the United States, supplemented with findings from twins in Australia.

The results indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes.

We conclude by urging political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation.

Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?

"We are working very hard to go after the rogue elements or extremists of any flavor."

"Basically, it's turn-based, but we put some real-time flavor to it."

The organization [SCIRI] also intends to drop the word "revolution" from its name and hopes to ascribe to a name with a "bigger Iraqi flavor" to it.

The showdown in Finland today will have an Eastern European flavor after former communist bloc countries scored a near clean-sweep in the semifinal that ended in the early hours Friday.

"This training gives paratroopers a flavor of the task before they deploy so they don't lose the flavor if they have to do it later on," added Sgt. 1st Class V.K. Graf, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Brigade Combat Team.

Wolfowitz instead maneuvered and wheedled and stormed and generally distracted everyone from, you know, giving loans to poor countries. He negotiated a sweetheart deal for his sweetheart. When caught, he resorted to legal arguments that had a definite "that depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" flavor to them. What a maroon.

For Halliburton and other oilfield-services providers, it’s imperative to have more than just a local flavor, said Dan Pickering, an analyst at Pickering Energy Partners in Houston.

All of what's mentioned here, and there's a thick book of examples one could use with this Administration, seems to have a strong "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" flavor to it.

Brown's best hope is to build a very good and loyal team. But that means he must cut down the "ego" flavor in his words and begin talking more about "we" rather than "I."

The Turkish people filled the streets in protest when it appeared the religious fundamentalists were about to gain control. They understand something that the majority in America does not understand: that religious fundamentalist -- of all and any flavor -- are anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-democratic morons.

While the daily senseless killings have not yet equated the carnage in some war-torn countries like Iraq and even Nigeria, where ethnic flavor often lead to thousands of death during th... [ Read More (1.0k in body) ]

Gold Star for "Away From Her" [2], the debut film from Canada's Sarah Polley ("Go"). See it in your local theater today. (In ATL it's playing at Tara.) At the New Yorker, watch a clip (not the trailer).

Here's David Denby from earlier this month:

The fading of memory, the anguish of losing the contours and the colors of the physical world, the mixture of loyalty and selfishness in the elderly—these are not subjects you would expect a young filmmaker to understand or even to take much interest in. Yet “Away from Her,” based on the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (first published in this magazine in 1999), was written and directed by Sarah Polley, a Canadian actress who is still in her twenties. The movie, Polley’s feature début, is a small-scale triumph that could herald a great career.

The week before, Anthony Lane wrote briefly, but memorably:

If Penélope Cruz or Jennifer Lopez sees this movie, she may just give up and become a librarian.

A.O. Scott liked it, too:

I can’t remember the last time the movies yielded up a love story so painful, so tender and so true.

The Chicago Tribune hails:

Bergmanesque and beautiful, set in a wintry landscape fitfully lit by one woman's flickering awareness and one man's long-term, stubborn love, "Away from Her" is one of the most remarkable and moving love stories the movies have recently given us.

In a press interview, Polley laments:

"It's sad to think there was a time when people lined up around the block to see Bergman movies… and how unimaginable that is now."

Perhaps, but here's to hoping that a few people will line up for her movie.

Away from Her, by Alice Munro (and Sarah Polley)

Zizek's most recent film, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, was presented at the Independent Film Festival of Boston in 2007. (I mentioned it in the 15 April NYT Sampler.)

Publishers Weekly Starred Review. A Lacanian-Hegelian philosopher and pop culture critic who divides his time between America and Slovenia, Zizek is one of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor with compulsive readability, and his new volume provides perhaps the clearest elaboration of his theoretical framework thus far. Expatiating on such subjects as ,Heidegger, neuroscience, the war on terror and The Matrix, he seeks to rehabilitate dialectical materialism by replacing the popular "yin-yang" interpretation (the struggle between opposites that ultimately form a whole) with a theory of the "gap which separates the One from itself." One example is a tribe whose two subgroups draw mutually exclusive plans of their village: their deadlock "implies a hidden reference to a constant... an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole." Discussing Abu Ghraib and pedophilia in the Catholic Church, Zizek explores how an ideological edifice is sustained by underground transgressions: "Law can be sustained only by a sovereign power which reserves for itself the right... to suspend the rule of law(s) on behalf of the Law itself." Based on his interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he envisions a society in which public law would no longer sustain itself through its own obscene breach. This challenging book takes us on a roller-coaster ride whose every loop is a Mobius strip.

About the film, IFF Boston said:

World-renowned philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek examines the work of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Charlie Chaplin and others, concluding that "Cinema is the ultimate pervert art...It doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire."

You can read the book's introduction:

A Spanish art historian uncovered the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture: Kandinsky and Klee, as well Bunuel and Dali, were the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centers built in Barcelona in 1938, the work of a French anarchist,Alphonse Laurencic (a Slovene family name!), who invented a form of "psychotechnic" torture: he created his so-called "colored cells" as a contribution to the fight against Francofs forces. The cells were as inspired by ideas of geometric abstraction and surrealism as they were by avant-garde art theories on the psychological properties of colors. Beds were placed at a 20-degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6-foot-by-3-foot cells were strewn with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent the prisoners from walking backward and forward.The only option left to them was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines, and spirals which utilized tricks of color, perspective, and scale to cause mental confusion and distress. Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving. Laurencic preferred to use the color green because, according to his theory of the psychological effects of various colors, it produced melancholy and sadness.

The Parallax View, by Slavoj Zizek