As found in a Chinese fortune cookie that I had the pleasure of eating last night: “It is sometimes better to travel hopefully than to arrive.”

I was poking around some gardening websites today, and I found this truly delightful site: www.savedbythebud.com. Enjoy!

Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Apparently, the Supreme Court has already decided. (See Wikipedia for a more readable summary of the case.)

Allow me to relate the following story to you.

I was working tonight at the store where I work, and some Middle Eastern guy came in to get directions to Roanoke. I was showing him the way on a map-which wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, since he only half-spoke English and I never got around to taking Arabic in college, but that’s only ( Read more... )

The cover story of Prospect Magazine’s Aug. 2007 issue, “Off the Record” (http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9735), describes the changes that the music industry has been undergoing. We all know that CD sales have been dropping precipitously, but the article makes a perhaps surprising observation: concert attendance is on the ( Read more... )

According to the New York Times, Japan will begin to implement a jury-style system in their courts in 2009. From what I can tell from the article itself, apparently Japanese courts are currently composed of three judges, with no jury. The article notes that the proposed system will provide for a six-person jury; the six jurors and three judges will ( Read more... )

In my previous post, I noted some of the various ways that one can experience multilingual computing for free. In this post, I will continue that discussion while focusing on two slightly different aspects of the issue: (1) ways to upgrade a computer's operating system (OS) for free so that it has multilingual capabilities and (2) ways to upgrade a ( Read more... )

Sometime during the Fall 2003 semester, I had the idea that I could improve my language proficiency by setting my computer to Spanish. After some initial research, I discovered that Windows was wholly unlike the Mac OS (which can switch to different languages with minimal effort): I would have to buy a completely different copy of Windows XP in ( Read more... )

I just read an interesting article in the New York Times earlier today. It's called "Not Buying It," and it's an article about the "freegan" movement. As the article explains, freegans are persons who try to avoiding buying products if at all possible; this usually involves dumpster diving or otherwise rummaging through trash in order to find ( Read more... )