BBG

Yesterday we visited the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in the hope of persuading ourselves that it is actually spring, depite the chilly grayness around here. And it must be! Look at these great weeping cherry trees, tulips.





The best spectacle though, is my spouse and his allergies. Here he is, blissfully unaware that he's in the midst of a Toxic Airborne Event.



Approaching the moment of reckoning...



At his request, I'll not publish documentation of his current suffering. He's doing a crash course in the science of antihistamines/decongestants/morphine. Dad, any advice to share? I've heard tell of the interesting practice of administering a daily dose of locally produced honey throughout the year in order to build an immunity to local pollen allergens. I wonder if there are any rooftop, or perhaps fire-escape apiaries in New York?

The situation in Rome

"The silver-haired Bavarian is the first German to ascend the papal thrown since Hadrian VI in 1522. " From The Week in Germany.

On Benedict XVI

While looking for something else today, I came across three short pieces by Michael Novak about the new Pope. They seem very well-informed and substantive. Here's a link to the AEI site where they are available. If it doesn't work directly, go to aei, then to scholars, then to Novak, and scroll down. An abbreviated version of one of the papers was published in the NYT today.

http://www.aei.org/scholars/scholarID.44,filter.all/scholar.asp

What's up in Washington?

I sure wish there were news from Washington. Is it true that the Senate and the graduate schools have been closed for the last month in honor of the resumption of baseball in the District?

Academic News

MIT Pranksters Fob Computer Gibberish on Tech Conference

Pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology successfully submitted a research paper written entirely by computer to scientific conference, according to the Reuters news agency. Jeremy Stribling told Reuters last week that he and two fellow MIT graduate students, in questioning the standards of some academic conferences, wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.
The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Fla. To their surprise, one of the papers--

"Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy"--was accepted for presentation. The Rooter paper contains such verbiage as, "the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning," and, "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions."

It seems to me that I've been seeing a lot of "context-free" grammar, and grammar-free prose lately, in sources that shall here remain unnamed.

What Type of American Are Y'all?

I found this linguistic regionalism assessement bouncing around the blog world this morning. Please get profiled and post your results so we can tease each other! It's quick, don't worry.

American English Test

Here are my results:

45% General American English

30% Yankee (yeah right! That's just because I can order a cruller in a pinch.)

20% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

April 11th, Part II

We didn't manage to photodocument Grandma's party as comprehensively as one might wish, but here are a couple more to fill in the background. As you can see in this first picture, the blokes at the party tended to stick together in a corner of Jessica's tea room, perhaps to ward off the the clouds of estrogen generated by all the bridal and baby showers taking place at the venue that day.

The Guest of Honor and her Attendants

Last weekend we celebrated the 85 years of this queenly citizen:



with a great day of parties. We had a wonderful luncheon at Jessica's Tea Room,





followed by cake & ice cream (and margaritas, lemonade, & vast glasses of red wine) at Liza and Charles's in Hellertown.







Coming soon (tomorrow if we're lucky), the MEN who celebrated Grandma's birthday...

ISR part II

FYI, the picture of the entire group of SAISers was taken on the top of Point 593, which was a very difficult point to for the Allies to capture. Only on the fourth offensive, did the Allies finally dislodge the Germans from the top of this hill in May of 1944.

Since we are posting our favorite links, I should give you some more on the Battle of Montecassino. If you are more interested in reading about the battle, please look here. Naturally, I have much more information about the battle if you wish.

International Staff Ride 2005

Sorry it has taken me so long to get these on the web for you, but I tried last week, but the website seemed down. Anyway, as most of you know from conversations, it was a wonderful trip.