First Pair of Jeans Purchased On the Web

It has proven impossible to find jeans that actually fit me in stores.

So, after may years of looking, I finally did need a new pair badly enough that I ordered my first pair of jeans on the web.

Baggy Fit from Gap --

Ordering was easy and the survey even easier to fill.

Now, I can throw away the old, torn pair.

Five More Days to World Cup 2006

Yes, only five more days are left to the World Cup 2006.

The Guardian plans a World Cup 2006 podcast, available also as a free subscription on iTunes.

Meaning of Treaties

Article IV of the NPT says the following:

Article IV

1. Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

2. All the Parties to the Treaty undertake to facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Parties to the Treaty in a position to do so shall also co-operate in contributing alone or together with other States or international organizations to the further development of the applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, especially in the territories of non-nuclear-weapon States Party to the Treaty, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.

However, some people think that we should use judicious double standards when applying such treaties.

Of course, that this logic suffers does not prevent it from getting a broad forum for professionally produced prose that uses it to advance dubious arguments.

International law, like any other law is there to reduce transaction costs (including wars) in the dealings among nations.

To belittle these laws brings us to very dangerous borders.

Python for Education

I was pleasantly surprised to see Python is popular within the education community.

For example, take a look at the programming languages resources at Kirby Urner's Mathematical Canvas.

MPlayer for Mac OS X

If you're a Mac user and are trying to play an AVI file of a German TV program from the recent Germany - Japan soccer game, downloaded through bit Torrent using Azureus, with XviD compression, you may want to try MPlayer for Mac OS X.

First interaction with Python

Having not read any manuals, here's my first interaction with Python on our family iMac at home:

masood-mortazavis-imac-g5:~ masood$ python
Python 2.3.5 (#1, Mar 20 2005, 20:38:20)
[GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1809)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 1+1
2
>>> 1./3.
0.33333333333333331
>>> 2./6.
0.33333333333333331
>>> 2./3./1.
0.66666666666666663
>>> 0.9999**99
0.99014835352672459
>>> .99999**10000
0.90483696561475935
>>> .5**99
1.5777218104420236e-30
>>> exit
'Use Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit.'
>>> ^D
masood-mortazavis-imac-g5:~ masood$


Sounds like a pretty handy calculator to me but I'm sure it can do much more!

Japan vs. Germany

Youtube video highlights of the game can be found here.

Angola vs. Argentina

Youtube video of the highlights of the game can be found here.

Government documents in the digital age.

Government Printing Office is moving to the digital age, reports Zachary A. Goldfarb of the Wasthington Post.

"Americans wanted to search for information on the Web and did not want to pay for printed versions of government documents. Seventeen thousand people, for example, paid to receive the Congressional Record in 1995, a number that was quickly shrinking by 2002 and now stands at less than 2,000. A quarter of a million pages are retrieved from it online in a month.
....
"The Future Digital System will respond to that trend by making available online all 2.2 million government documents -- a total of 60 million pages -- by the end of the 2007, tagged by keywords so they can be easily searched. It is a nearly $30 million endeavor and will include documents all the way back to the nation's founding."

Tracking Data on the Traveller

Aoife White of Associated Press reports how U.S. plans to keep collecting data on European passengers coming into the U.S. (See Washington Post for the reprint.)

"U.S. authorities will be able to keep trawling through personal data on passengers flying from Europe, even though the European Union's highest court found problems Tuesday with the accord that made airlines share the information.
...
"During negotiations leading up to the 2004 accord, the EU won some concessions from the U.S., such as shortening the time the information is stored, to a maximum 3 1/2 years, and deleting sensitive data such as meal preference, which could indicate a passenger's religion or ethnicity."

However, this is World Cup season.

There are probably more people heading in the opposite direction.

The View

Here is the view from WashingtonPost.Com newsroom.

Online Media Presence

Washington Post has one of the best online presence of any print media I know. It combines advertising, interactive social content networking technologies (e.g. blogs, technoratic, etc.), video, audio and blogs by its writers on various beats.

Reuters.com which also has a fairly sophisticated online presence for a news media comes close to the Post but Post is unique in the sense that it traditionally was and continues to be a significant print medium with a distinguished past.

Blogs posted by Reuters seem to be focused on what counts as less than the news.

Many of the entries are in the "oddly enough" category, which are farcical pieces.

The other mentionable category at blogs.reuters.com is the tech-media-telecoms, including this bit about MADtv.

Finally, in the emerging technology category, we see entries like the one on a Yellow Submarine.