A life in words

  • Pandemonium

    You know, it’s kind of easy to get freaked out about a possibly approaching tidal wave of global fatalities when every day brings so much news about the “swine flu pandemic”. While that does seem to be frighteningly real possibility, I liked this: While the infected need access to medical care and anti-viral drugs, the…

  • Powers of Two

    Okay, I know I just had a post called “Two Ideas”. I guess I’m feeling binary lately. Here goes…. The two books I bought today Algorithms—this is for Computer Science 312. I think it will go a long way towards being able to understand what the people in the NLP lab are always talking about.…

  • Two Ideas

    These ideas have rather caught my attention: About the Semantic Web, see this TED talk by Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data A blog post about Internet-fueled government transparency: What the post-bureaucratic era will mean for the public service

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech … Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the right of another: and this is the only check it ought to suffer, and the only bounds it ought to know. … A free People will be shewing that they are so, by their freedom of speech. … Freedom of speech is ever the symptom, as well as the effect of a good government. … Guilt only dreads liberty of speech, which drags it out of its lurking holes, and exposes its deformity and horror to daylight.Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood no. 8, 1722 (orthography and spelling modernized)