At 1805 CDT this evening the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed into the river. While it’s too early to know the cause, what’s visible on television newscasts paints a remarkable picture of at least one, if not many, catastrophic failures in the forty-year old structure.
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Machine translation has come a long way, but it’s still far from perfect. (Very far from perfect!) It might surprise you, though, to know that one of the better - arguably, in some cases, the best - sources of machine translation is - wait for it…
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Late last month, the intelligence community met in Washington for the 2007 “DNI Open Source Conference”. While the conference has come and gone, a number of presentations from the conference can be downloaded from the event website. There are close to two-dozen powerpoint presentations available; all are at least a little bit interesting. Two good ones are this one (573KB) on “exploitation of the Chinese internet”, and this one (642KB), which covers, principally, “blogosphere analysis” for intelligence purposes.

You might be a redneck… if you have more kids than you can count. Even if you can count past, say, nine, eventually you’re going to start running out of names - especially if you’ve decided to stick with ones that all begin with the same letter.

Mark Morford writes, in an article for the San Francisco Chronicle on a woman in Arkansas - Michelle Duggar - who has so far had sixteen children, and is aiming for more. A highly entertaining article, I might add, and one which I wish I had written… so go read it, already; what are you waiting for?