ewiethoff

> Just search for the headline on google, and click through that way. No registration.

No, that's not guaranteed to work. It's a cookie issue.

I have have never registered at nytimes and have seldom been able to read its articles, no matter how I approach the site. Until a few experiments today, that is.

I reject all cookies by default. NYTimes confronts me with the registration page when I have cookies disabled. I discovered today that if I go ahead and allow cookies from www.nytimes.com, I can read the article without registering. Allowing for session does the trick; don't store the cookie indefinitely. And accepting cookies from wt.o.nytimes.com and up.nytimes.com is not necessary to read the article.

Upmod for RuPaul link farther down that page. Now, that's Change!

Aside: Whether or not your site shows a phone number, make sure your contact information and the FAQ/Help areas are usable without Javascript or Flash. Google is sure to find it. So are customers and potential customers with peculiar disabilities. (Asus, I'm looking at you.)

> Rest assured, however, that we will give more money to corn farmers for ethanol, despite the fact that it is neither environmentally or economically sound as an energy source. Obama comes from a corn state.

Cue the Corn Cartel. Did you know you can use corn syrup to melt snow and ice on roads? No need for salt. No more salt-induced auto body rust. All praise for corn.

But seriously, now. I do hope corn ethanol does not get promoted.

Addendum (since I can no longer edit): I reread the story. Never mind the above reference to illegality.

The other day, I saw a photo of the President of France and his wife walking on a beach in their bathing suits. (!) It occurred to me that here in the U.S., we don't show the President with bare arms and legs.

Bill Clinton was big on outdoor jogging, and started out his presidency jogging in gym shorts and a tee-shirt or sweat jacket. But pretty soon, pressure from the press or a staff person made sure he always wore a spiffy jogging suit, i.e., no bare arms or legs.

The "Australia Project" presented to the desperate protagonists in the Manna story sounds like a come-on. I can't help picturing the recruitment of indentured servants (i.e., slaves) for the colonies or the present-day recruitment strategies of prostitution rings.

No, their debts will spiral and their ability to get any sort of loan for "retraining" will plummet, if they're in the U.S., that is. American households average something like $10,000 credit card debt these days. Unemployment compensation pays 2/3 or 3/4 what they had been earning. Hence their bills pile up and, with bad credit, they can't get "retraining." They're hosed.

"Experts aren't really experts. They suck at what they do. They just suck a little bit less than everybody else around them at the time."

Disagree. There are "experts" and there are Experts. Some Ruby on Rails blogger guy is an "expert"; Plácido Domingo is an Expert.

I solve problems by asking yes/no questions. And, by golly, you'd better give me a yes/no answer. No blah blah blah, no roundabout story. Just say "Yes" or "No," dammit!

"[T]here may simply be not enough important things to do to keep everyone busy."

More and more these past few years I think of a favorite old science fiction story by Frederik Pohl called "The Midas Plague."

All production is done by robots. Production has become so, uh, productive that humans spend all their effort just wearing out everything made by the robots. "Poor" people must live in giant mansions with several robots and wear out more stuff than "well-to-do" people, who live in small cottages with few to no robots and enjoy leisurely, intellectual and social pursuits. Comically (or tragically), it's illegal to get a robot to wear something out for you.

I think I'll reread it today.

But the ubiquity of HFCS in bottled, jarred, canned, tubbed, and boxed foods in the US cannot be explained by the sugar policy, for so many varieties of groceries didn't contain sugar in the first place. (I'm pushing 50 and have been reading food labels since childhood.)

Yet another reason why I'm glad I'm allergic to corn. Yet another reason to be fed up with the Corn Cartel's push to have everything under the sun made from corn.

Article subtitle is "A long-lost text by the ancient Greek mathematician shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus." This has been known for several decades, ever since Heiberg transcribed some of the text (I don't know how much), per the article.

I refer you to The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development, a 1949 book by Carl B. Boyer, reprinted by Dover Publications [ISBN 0486605094]. Boyer writes several pages about Archimedes' method of exhaustion, notions of the infinitesimal, and so on. The main footnote reads:

For the works of Archimedes in general, see Heiberg, Archimedes opera omnia and T. L. Heath, The Works of Archimedes. For Archimedes' Method, see T. L. Heath, The Method of Archimedes, Recently Discovered by Heiberg; Heiberg and Zeuthen, "Eine neue Schrift des Archimedes"; and Smith, "A Newly Discovered Treatise of Archimedes."

Boyer is clearly using Heiberg's work on the Archimedes Palimpsest.