Blue Sky On Mars

What to Expect When You’re Expecting - a book that everyone tells you to get, and with good reason. Covers many of the things that come up during pregnancy. This is a great guide to read before pregnancy so that you know what you’re getting yourself into.

Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way - This book was good for teaching us the Bradley method. Surekha and I both think that natural childbirth is great, but we also know that science can offer a lot to ensure the safety, well-being and comfort of a laboring woman and unborn child. Even though we chose to go ahead with medical interventions, I still recommend this book for anyone who would ideally have a natural childbirth.

What to Expect the First Year - Everything that’s good about the other What To Expect… book applies here.

Parenting

Arnold has taken a step that will surely help build a credible campaign:

Seeking to add muscle to his team, Arnold Schwarzenegger named financial heavyweight Warren Buffett (news - web sites) his senior economic adviser on Wednesday as the actor prepared a high-profile run for California governor.

Politics

Two universities win battle against RIAA subpoenas:

Both MIT and Boston College won their requests to reject subpoenas issued by the Recording Industry Association of America Inc. (RIAA) over jurisdictional issues, according the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Jurisdictional issues are not that exciting, but it will be far more inconvenient for the RIAA to wage this particular brand of war against their customers.

Music

In another expansion of its massive brainpower, Google will now add 2+2 for you:

To use Google’s built-in calculator function, simply enter the expression you’d like evaluated in the search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button. The calculator can evaluate mathematical expressions involving basic arithmetic (5 2*2 or 2^20), more complicated math (sine(30 degrees) or e^(i pi) 1), units of measure and conversions (100 miles in kilometers or 160 pounds * 4000 feet in Calories), and physical constants (1 a.u./c or G*mass of earth/radius of earth^2). You can also experiment with other numbering systems, including hexadecimal and binary.

Technology

See a streaming show that you’d like to be able to “tape”? Use WM Recorder!

Technology

The BBC has an intriguing article about a man who is selling Ultima Online virtual goods for a living. Near the end, they talk about his ethical dilemma in dealing in stolen UO goods:

Mr Dibbell greatest fear is that he falls prey to real cyber criminals who pillage his Ultima items or steals the cash from his PayPal account.

I’m pretty sure PayPal has reasonable protections, but in UO someone could just come along and bump off his character. Eventually, you might see people band together to police areas to prevent crime. There is, after all, a reason (or many reasons) why society is what it is today.

Technology

California Determines Recall Ballot Order

Under the lottery-style system, the reordered 26-letter alphabet — beginning R, W, Q, O, J, M, V, A and eventually ending with L — is applied throughout candidates’ names.

That means that David Laughing Horse Robinson, chairman of the Kawaiisu Indian tribe, goes first, not Rainforth, because O comes before A in the state’s newfangled alphabet.

But wait — it gets more complicated. And that’s exactly when Robinson’s advantage would seem to run out.

To avoid giving any one candidate a lasting edge, their names will be rotated one position for each Assembly district, of which there are 80. Robinson’s name will be first on the ballot only in California 1st district, which stretches from the northernmost border to Sonoma County.

And we thought butterfly ballots were bad! There are currently 115 certified candidates, so people will really have to scan to find the candidate they want.

Politics

I’ve really got to hand it to the folks at Graco. Their products are really well engineered and great to use! We just bought a Graco stroller to go with the infant car seat. It’s very solidly built and has many conveniences. Granted, that comes at a price: $70 at Target. But, this stroller will work great for us now (with the infant seat) and all the way up until Crysania is 40 pounds!

Parenting

I had been wondering how much caffeine was okay for my wife to have (she hasn’t been having any caffeine for a long time). Parentstages has answered my question. According to them, having less than 400mg of caffeine is probably fine, and that’s like 10 cans of Coke.

Parenting

A couple of bookmarks of Python naive Bayes implementations for myself: Divmod Reverend is licensed under LGPL and the ever popular SpamBayes is licensed under the Python license.

Software Development