Category: Explanation

Recent Changes to This Blog

You may or may not have noticed, but I’ve been making quite a few changes recently here.

You may or may not have noticed, but I’ve been making quite a few changes recently here. I changed the layout using a WordPress Theme called Limau Orange. This layout uses space more efficiently than my old theme and has a sidebar on each side of the content, which I really like. I’ve tried to put the more relevant “widgets” near the top where they are more likely to be seen. Recent additions are three randomly selected pictures from our photo gallery and ten recent links that I’ve saved to del.icio.us. You may have also noticed that I’ve added a few “Pages”, which are always available at the top of the left sidebar. “About This Blog” and the three articles beneath it offer a short history of how this blog came to be as well as describing what I write and what’s available in the sidebars. There are a few other useful pages and I expect to be adding more eventually.

What do you think?

What is “The Surge”?

John McCain wants “the surge” to mean two different things in order to cover his ass for his poor grasp of the history while simultaneously using it to criticize his opponent for opposing it. Unfortunately, McCain has failed at both and, in the process, revealed that the new John McCain will resort to the kind of tactics patented by Karl Rove and the Bush administration.

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain has been criticizing Barack Obama this week for not supporting “the surge.” In a controversially edited interview on CBS News on Tuesday, McCain took Obama to task for saying that the so-called Anbar Awakening should be credited for helping to decrease violence in Iraq over the last 18 months. According to McCain “the surge” was responsible for the Anbar Awakening:

I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane (phonetic) was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.

Unfortunately, as critics would later point out, McCain chose exactly the wrong time to invoke the word “history.” The awakening began in late 2006, at least three months before President Bush went to Congress and the American people in January of 2007 to announce a new strategy in Iraq. This strategy had a working title of “A New Way Forward” but became generally known in the press and with the American people as “The Surge.” Given that it wasn’t announced, much yet implemented when the awakening began, McCain is horrendously wrong, right?

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Fun with Wordle

I used it to analyze the recent editorials that the Presidential candidates submitted to the New York Times about future Iraq policy.

According to their description, “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.” Also called a “tag cloud“, a word cloud summarizes the frequency with which certain words in a blob of text appear. Words that appear more often, are displayed larger while words that appear less often are smaller. Unlike the tag cloud for this blog (which appears in left sidebar), Wordle’s clouds are adorable. Their cloud editor is very easy to use and lets you change many aspects of the cloud. I used it to analyze the recent editorials that the Presidential candidates submitted to the New York Times about future Iraq policy.

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Social bookmarking

For all those reasons, del.icio.us has become a mainstay in my suite of web applications.

For me, the power of the internet is in its ability to facilitate communication with other people. Thus, I have lately found myself attracted to various “social networking” websites. Most recently I’ve been experimenting with several social bookmarking sites, all of which offer free memberships.

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Misheard Lyrics

I recently discovered a new phenomena (at least new to me) on YouTube called “misheard lyrics.” The idea is to take a song where the lyrics are indistinguishable and caption it with incorrect (and presumably humorous) lyrics. Because it’s a video format, it is also necessary to add visual elements which also help convey the incorrect lyrics. Here’s a classic example:

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