This from Andrew Sullivan:
All evidence indicates that the Reagan administration has abandoned both containment and détente for a very different objective: destroying the Soviet Union as a world power and possibly even its Communist system. [This is a] potentially fatal form of Sovietphobia … a pathological rather than a healthy response to the Soviet Union.
Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen, 1983
This is where I’ve been in Europe:
And this is where I’ve been in the States:
Think I need to get out more
Riemann was one of the first mathematicians to explore non-Euclidian geometry, along with Gauss (of course Gauss, he did everything), Bolyai and Lobachevsky.
Back to my Maths degree for this bit of news. Slashdot’s reporting the claim that the Riemann hypothesis has been proven by Louis de Branges de Bourcia at Purdue University.
The Riemann hypothesis is all about solutions to a function called the zeta function. Riemann, back in the 19th Century, noticed that solutions to the function seemed to be related to the distribution of prime numbers — and prime number distribution has been a puzzle for ages. As Wikipedia says,
TheyWorkForYou is the new website from the MySociety / DowningStreetSays crowd. It’s currently being beta-tested and is, essentially, Hansard brought to life on the web.
I have an RSS feed of recent appearences from my MP, Simon Thomas (Plaid, Ceredigion) and I see from the website that he:
A new web standards body, GAWDS: The Guild of Accessible Web Designers has been launched to promote accessibility and standards in web design. Founder Jim Byrne says:
Accessibility is now shorthand for the adoption of core standards that benefit every user of the Internet and impact the bottom line of every business. GAWDS intends to promote these standards to instill in Web designers the high level of competence and professionalism required to unlock the full potential of the Internet
Mirabilis reminds me of another post I could really do with restoring. So here we are (again). The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’s classification of animals:
Tim Bray reports that Sun Microsystems has opened up blogs.sun.com . He says,
there’s an internal email going out to the whole company Monday officially reinforcing that blogging policy, encouraging everyone to write, and pointing them at blogs.sun.com
Tim describes the policy meeting where this all started:
Wired has published an atlas of intellectual property. The downloadable PDFs show that copyright enforcers map onto the developed West and copyright infringers map onto the developing world and the old Eastern Block (with the odd exception - see Norway). Now there’s an interesting use of geocoding.
