The New York Times reported with a straight face that Pfizer has given up testing Viagra on women, having discovered after eight years that, quote:

1. men and women have a fundamentally different relationship between arousal and desire
2. arousal and desire are often disconnected in women
3. with women, things depend on a myriad of factors
4. the brain is the crucial sexual organ in women

Umm, gee, duh, wonder what gender of people they had running those labs.

I put up on my web page what I am listening to at the moment. This article tells how I do that.

I listen to music through the Squeezebox, a fabulous device made by SlimDevices that plays MP3s you have on your computer through your stereo system. “SlimServer” is the server that runs on whatever computer you have handy, that you talk to through a web interface, and feeds the music wirelessly to the Squeezebox. SlimServer can also report its current status, including the current song being played, in XML format, which turns out to be useful, via the URL:

http://slimserver:9000/xml/status.html

Using wget or lwp-request, I grab this data and then process it through XSLT to get a simple string of the form SONG by ARTIST from ALBUM:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- slim-putsong.xsl:
transform slimserver XML status output into SONG by ARTIST from ALBUM -->

<xsl:transform
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:sl="http://www.slimdevices.com/slimserver/xml"
version="1.0"
>

<xsl:output method="html" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>

<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:for-each select="sl:status/sl:player_status/sl:current_song/sl:song">
<b><xsl:value-of select="sl:title"/></b> by
<b><xsl:value-of select="sl:artist"/></b> from
<b><xsl:value-of select="sl:album"/></b>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:transform>

With Slimserver 6.x, the XML format was changed. 🙁 The “sl:song” portion of the for-each statement above needs to be removed.

You can apply this XSLT through a tool such as xsltproc.

I wrote a little shell script which grabs the URL, transforms it, and FTPs it to my server:

#!/bin/sh

# shell script to create HTML of current song playing on Squeezebox,
# and ftp'ing a file containing that information to bob's blog.

wget --quiet --output-document=-  http://localhost:9000/xml/status.xml | \
xsltproc --novalid slim-putsong.xsl - > slim-putsong.html

ftp -i -n my.host.name <<EOF
user user password
cd /some/directory/
put slim-putsong.html
bye
EOF

To prevent FTP’ing an unchanged file, precede the ftp line with

diff slim-putsong.html prev-slim-putsong.html > /dev/null ||

Run this script from cron however often you want.

All that remains is to include the HTML file into the web page you want the info to appear on, with something like

<? include 'slim-putsong.html'; ?>

Contemplating one’s navel as an aid to meditation. Also “omphalopsychitism”, mystical contemplation of the navel as a way of inducing hypnotic reverie.

I just learned about a Christian practice called lectio divina, and immediately sensed that there is much in common here with Zen koans. Lectio Divina is a practice of slow scripture reading, followed by meditation and prayer. I was especially struck by the comment on one web page on the topic that “our own lives are also fit matter for lectio divina.”

Drs. Hwang and Moon, the Korean researchers who recently succeeded in cloning human stemcells, said that their success was due partly to the “Zen-like” ability Easterners have to sit perfectly still for 10 hours in one spot while manipulating the eggs, almost like a meditation.

Of course, Dr. Hwang also attributed part of their success to the fact that Korean fingers are so dextrous due to use of slippery metal chopsticks since childhood.

Cory Doctorow gave a speech at an O’Reilly conference on Emerging Technologies called Ebooks: Neither E, nor Books.

But I don’t think he’s got it figured out quite yet. He says, “The distinctive value of ebooks…revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text.” But that’s not the disinctive value. The distinctive value is that the experience of reading them on the computer can be richer, more engaging, more educational, more impactful, and more fun. Assuming you have the right technology to do so, such as Infowalker.

In “Uji”, Dogen is trying to tell us something about time. The problem is that the only means he has to communicate with us are words like “time”, that we think we already understand. It’s like trying to understand how a telescope works by looking at a distant telescope though your own telescope with its thoroughly smudged lens.

Faced with this problem, the approach Dogen takes is to resort to his patented trick, which basically amounts to hitting us over the head with the telescope. He keeps using the word “time” in weird, disconcerting, unaccustomed ways, forcing us to see it outside of our usual framework.

Which is all fine and good but now I am faced with the problem of trying to translate this into English. Suddenly we are confronted with a layered series of issues, including what Dogen’s theory of time is, what typical preconceptions of time people of his time listening to or reading “Uji” had that he was taking for granted and trying to break through; but also the preconceptions of the typical reader of the 21st century in the West about “time” and the word “time”.

In particular, it seems to me that the word “toki” as it existed in medieval Japanese may not even correspond that closely to the word “time” in modern-day English, even though all translators mechanically translate “toki” as “time”. I have the suspicion that 700 years ago people in Japan had a more quantum view of time, where now people in the West have a more wave view. They viewed time as a series of moments, coming one at a time, whereas we view time as a flow, as an unmeasurable quantity, like a river. Given this gap, translating “toki” as “time” in “Uji” is misleading—or even just wrong.

That’s why I think “toki” should be translated as “moments”, and why I am translating the title of the fascicle as “Some-Moments”—explicitly trying to capture the ambiguity that Dogen was constructing with his neologism “Uji”, able to be parsed as either “Ji which U” (moments which are something), or “Ji for U-ing” (moments for something).

Besides, translating “toki” as “moments” makes the whole fascicle read much better in English translation—which is at least one valid test of the quality of a translator’s terminology decisions, and one which one wishes were applied by more translators.

Trevor F. Smith has put up a speed reader version of Cory Doctorow’s new on-line novel Eastern Standard Tribe. This is an ultra-cool technology based on some Xerox PARC research, which flashes the book, one word at a time, in large type, up on the screen. I just wish there was a pause button…

After my most recent posting on gayriage, plus some recent developments like the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, I tried getting this posted on Kuro5hin, but this time my article was dumped quickly. Here’s what I had written:

George Bush is threatening a unique application of the “constitutional process”—to define a word, in this case “marriage”. Or more accurately, to specify a definition which the word can’t have: the legal union of a gay couple. The Massachusetts Supreme Court, on the other hand, is of the opinion that the mere use of a different word (“civil unions”) would keep something that’s otherwise exactly the same as marriage from being constitutional in that state. John Kerry’s in the middle, saying he’s against gay marriage, but for rights for gay couples.

Clearly, this is a problem of semantics. To which let’s bring a semantic solution, in the form of an easy-to-use new term for gay marriage that’s the same, yet different: Gayriage.

This gives everybody what they need. Bush can say that marriage is a sacred institution binding a man and a woman, and if gays want to get married so badly, they’re just going to have to get gayried instead. The Massachusetts court certainly can’t hold that the difference of one consonant at the beginning of a word makes anything unconstitutional. And for Kerry a line like “In my first hundred days I will protect marriage and stand up for diversity with an executive order creating the insitution of gayriage” fits right into his Lincolnesque shtick.

Our neologism inherits the entire linguistic context of the word “marriage”, providing ready-made expressions like “gayriage counseling” and “a gayried couple” to name just two.

Last weekend I attended an intensive class in Tibetan. The main goal was to learn the basics of Tibetan in a dilettantish-type way. The course was given by David Curtis of the Tibetan Language Institute, a great organization devoted to making Tibetan more accessible.

My article on Tibetan orthography got posted at the fine community discussion site called Kuro5hin.