First the fuckwit:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=fuckwit+&btnG=Search

A most excellent bit of googlejuice.

And, welcome Gnumby, our latest special correspondent here on SHCS. G. was good enough to send along a photo of himself:

See? I knew there'd be a "bloggish mode" in Drupal!

Let's see what it looks like. Don't try this at home kids?

Void where prohibited.

The Face of Iraqi Terrorism

A new study shows where the foreign fighters in Iraq are coming from.
Care to guess?

by Stephen Schwartz

03/04/2005 12:00:00 AM

FOR MONTHS, a behind-the-scenes, seldom-mentioned debate has raged in
the West, over the origins of the "foreign fighters" attacking the
U.S., coalition, and local anti-jihadist forces in Iraq. Some,
including Saudi dissidents like Ali al-Ahmed of the Saudi Institute and
myself, have suspected Iraq's dangerous southern neighbor, the kingdom
of Saudi Arabia, of being the main source.

Our evidence often seemed thin. We cited the repeated calls by hundreds
of Saudi clerics for volunteers to go north of the unpatrolled border
to kill themselves and others. We circulated translations and
photographs of Saudi "martyrs" whose biographies appeared in the
kingdom's print media and on websites.

The Wall Street Journal

March 4, 2005

COMMENTARY

Vova the Dread

By NINA L. KHRUSHCHEVA March 4, 2005; Page A14

Vladimir Putin's presidency proves that Stalinism will never end in
Russia. Emerging from the past, Russian dictatorship continues into
the future almost without pause, changing only in name: Ivan the
Terrible, Peter the Great, Koba the Dread. Fourteen years after the
fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's people discovered that their lives
fare better with dictators. Hence the readiness with which we came to
like "Vova" Putin's firm hand. We support his jailing the "dishonest"
oligarchs, his clamping down on the "irresponsible" press and
promoting a dictatorship of order over transparent laws. We are eager
to sing his praises -- a hit pop song goes, "I want one like Putin"
-- and make chocolate statues of this, oh, so pleasantly sweet modern
autocrat.

On the subject of document preparation, I was in need earlier today of a tool to format some html to print nicely. I had some success with html2ps, followed by ps2pdf.

For example, I wanted the tutorials a friend wrote on WWW basics and creating web pages printed nicely for my students at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institute. The pages are available from the class website under Lectures > WWW:
http://cs.bluecc.edu/parker/cs120/

I ran the following commands:
$ html2ps -tL2 -Cbh review.shtml basics.shtml text.shtml graphicsListsTables.shtml links.shtml > web_pub.ps

German discovers longest prime number

Luke Harding in Berlin
Wednesday March 2, 2005
The Guardian

A German eye specialist with a keen amateur interest in mathematics has discovered the world's largest prime number after a 50-day search using his personal computer.

Dr Martin Nowak, who has his own practice in the south German town of Michelfeld, stumbled upon the number last week, breaking the previous record for a prime number by half a million digits.

Prime numbers are divisible only by themselves and 1. While the first prime numbers 2, 3, 5, and 7, are easy to identify, Dr Nowak's monster prime number is more than 7.8m digits long and is written as 2 to the 25,964,951st power minus 1.

(2005-02-24) -- After the recent discovery of two ancient crocodile skulls which closely resemble modern crocodiles despite 40 million years of evolution, the National Science Foundation (NSF) today issued a grant of $56 million to fund the new 'No Croc Left Behind' (NCLB) program.

The program, administered by the American Institute of Biological Science (AIBS) is designed to end the "soft bigotry of low expectations which has kept crocodiles mired in the backwaters of evolutionary progress for tens of millions of years."

Genetic scientists at AIBS will attempt to "aggressively hyper-evolve" the modern crocodile to "bring it more in line with Darwinian expectations."

The Robber of Zork sent me a system using ltoh and latex with some special make files to produce a resume in ps, pdf, html, and txt formats. I had to reformat my original resume to take advantage of the res.sty style. Below I've listed the results and a few other verions of my resume, formatted with other tools.

What I need to do next is figure out how to incorporate other latex packages with the ltoh system, like hyperref and html, so that the pdf's are hyperlinked.

Yes, we're making a big splash with the launch of this site. But first things first:

Look, we don't really like people all that much around here. We don't invite or solicit participation or feedback. If you are really seized by a burning desire to do something around here, apply directly to the Robber of Zork.

I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. I'm adding this paragraph to the "page" I created yesterday, but I'm sure this isn't how it's supposed to be used. There must a bloggish mode for Drupal, yes?