Our household has taken on a new resident: A genius cricket. While crickets are very good at naturally taking up positions that are hard for humans to reach, this cricket has located quite possibly the best possible position in the entire household: Deep inside our furnace, as near as I can tell. I haven't made visual contact yet so I'm not sure, but he's definitely in the furnace room. Crickets are known for their chirp (which only male crickets can do; male wings have ridges or "

Honey, this one's for you: Not a morning person? Take solace — new research suggests that "night owls" are more likely to be creative thinkers.Scientists can't yet fully explain why evening types appear to be more creative, but they suggest it could be an adaptation to living outside of the norm.... Scientists scored each [group of Morning, Intermediate, and Evening people as they] completed activit[ies based] on originality, elaboration, fluidity and flexibility factors.

I've been watching my weblogs (by which I mean the actual web server logs) scroll by to make sure everything's kosher and fixing up little things here and there. It's an interesting view of your website; I'm not sure I've ever really watched a weblog for hours at a time before. One interesting point: While I'm sure my experience isn't necessarily representative, the online feed readers have really taken off.

An "unbeatable" Clinton-Obama ticket? You know, just on general principles I don't really want our President sequence to go "Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton". And even more strongly on the same principles, I don't want to see "Bush, (Clinton,) Bush, Bush", so Jeb, unless you are a political genious please don't run. 300 million people in this country and only one family and one marriage is Presidential material? If we're really lucky, 2008 will be Clinton vs.

I just saw a Konqueror user flash by in my logs (which I've been watching for errors), and decided to check my Javascript to see if it worked in Konqueror. I'm not surprised to find out it doesn't. Unfortunately, I don't see any way to debug the Javascript with Konqueror. A few web pages reference starting konqueror in a console to get javascript errors output on STDOUT, but that's not working on my copy.

I've released NonMockObjects 0.2.0. This release adds easy support for obtaining many variants of an object, which allows you to easily test that all combinations of some parameters have a certain invariant. For instance, my Entry objects for this weblog can optionally contain a title, a link for the title, and a summary. The only constraint on that set is that a link affects a title, so you really need a title for the link to make sense, although it is permissible to have a link without a title in the database.

I was having a problem with one of the code paths through my RSS caching routines. This is a post to test that Google and a couple of other readers are working now.

Via Instapundit via Dr. Helen, a fascinating paper on anti-psychotic drugs and the difference between their perceived and real effects on cognitive functioning.

Also interesting is an unexamined assumption in the paper about what constitutes the "real you".

If you're reading this, I've deployed my new weblog system.

I apologize for the fact that this will probably cause your aggregator to barf and think all my old posts are new, although it shouldn't be too many.

Note there's a "below the fold" now; post continues at the "Read the rest..." link.

Back in 2002, Jeremy Bowers wrote an article asserting that statistical filters for spam were our last line of defense, that they are doomed to eventually fail, and that once they did we would all be buried under an avalanche of unwanted mail. I responded with this post and he responded to me and others with this post. Four years later, statistical filtering nevertheless remains a valuable weapon in the war on spam.