http://www.matrixinfoservice.com/

There's no content to speak of yet. However I'd appreciate your feedback about the overall look and feel.

Also, does anyone feel like designing a logo? :)

Consider the difference in meaning and usage between "a little" and "not much."

I've more than once run across discussions (on LJ and elsewhere) about "heresy" among Thelemites. To some extent, these discussions follow the standard pattern of all accusations of heresy: inevitably the accuser defines orthodoxy to include himself and his beliefs, and the accused heretics are doing, saying, or thinking something that he doesn't like. All very traditional.

The part that escapes me is how the concept of "heresy" even applies in a religious system where "thou hast no right but to do thy will," and the meaning of that phrase is explicitly left for the believers to decide "each for himself."

Can someone explain this to me in short words?

I've started my spring planting: Fava beans, early beets, turnips, spinach, and bok choi. In a couple of weeks I'll plant another crop of each.

My mother-in-law is in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease. Recently we received an update from her husband (my stepfather-in-law, technically), who is a very decent man in an indecent situation. The news isn't good (it seldom is, these days), and it reminded me of a peculiarity in my response to Alzheimer's.

This disease offends me.

I don't consider it "evil;" I can't bring myself to assign moral weight to an impersonal degeneration of the brain. But even if I could, simply saying that it's morally wrong wouldn't convey the true sense of my response.

Alzheimer's disease is repugnant. It is aesthetically offensive to reduce a brilliant mind to a tattered wreck. It destroys something that leaves the whole world reduced by its loss. It is wrong in the sense that defacing a book is wrong, not in the sense that telling a lie is wrong. It is...ugly, to a degree that four letters are too small to contain.

I wonder how much this says about the disease, and how much it says about me.

I bought my first digital camera about 10 years ago. At that time I had just moved to the Bay area, and gramina was still back in Southern California. I bought the camera so I could take photos of various houses I toured and email them back to her so she could help decide where we'd live up here. At the time I thought a camera without film was just remarkable. I could take pictures all day and not have to pay to have them developed!

That camera had about the same size and weight as a standard SLR camera, minus the SLR's lens. It had a grand 2.3 megapixels, and could hold about 100 photos at that resolution. It cost me about $700.

Today, my cellphone has 2.3 Mpx, and it's a toy compared to modern smartphones, which often have 5 Mpx. For Christmas I got a Nikon Coolpix camera, which has 10 Mpx and holds 750 photos at that resolution (750!), or 25 minutes of video with sound. The Coolpix is small enough that I sometimes lose track of it. It would rattle around significantly in the box for a standard pack of playing cards. Yet it has every feature that my old Ricoh digital had and more. It even has a tripod mount, though the image of that tiny thing perched atop a tripod is a bit comical.

I can only imagine what cameras are going to be like in another 10 years. At the moment I think the limiting factor on miniaturization is the user interface. You have to be able to hold and aim the thing, and you need to be able to view the little LCD screen.

I'm envisioning a "camera" about the size and thickness of a credit card. Resolution is 20 Mpx, and the camera has effectively unlimited memory, since it automatically uploads every photo to a server. Fancier models might have a lens and CCD that clips to the frame of an ordinary pair of glasses, and the screen is a heads-up display projected onto those glasses.

The Japanese word for "fruit" is kudamono. XYZ-mono is a common construction that means "A thing that does XYZ, or to which XYZ is done." For example taberu means "to eat," and tabemono means "food."

I got curious about the etymology of kudamono in light of a very common Japanese word: kudasai. It means "would you please do..." and is the root form of the verb kudasaru, meaning "to give with kindness." Leave it to the Japanese to have a specific word for that.

I wondered for a while if kudamono might be derived from kudasaru. In that case it would literally mean "something that is kindly given [by the plant]." That tickled my romantic fancy. However after digging a little deeper I think it's actually derived from kudaru, meaning "to descend." So the origin of kudamono is more probably "something that comes down." Which just goes to show once again that caterpillars are not related to cats, no matter how it sounds.

Now, the correction...

( Cut to spare the innocent from grammar wonkery )

A common Japanese term for a large company or similar financial entity is zaibatsu. Taking that word apart reveals some interesting things about the way the Japanese think.

Zai is a prefix that connotes wealth or the accumulation of material goods. A non-profit organization such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would be a zaidan. Batsu describes an important sort of social grouping in Japanese society. It might be used (with different prefixes) to refer to a political party, a network of alumni, a group of people from the same village, or any sort of faction. But batsu doesn't refer to the people per se in those contexts. Rather it describes a sort of group identity that the people merely embody, and to which they owe allegiance.

A more evocative, connotational translation of zaibatsu might be "money clan," or even "financial tribe."

This is an amazing piece of work.

"Beneath a suburban house in northern Italy lies a massive underground temple built entirely in secret by a group of non-architects, working around the clock for 15 years. Dug out of the rock without building or excavation plans, it was all overseen by a middle-aged former insurance broker....The structure contains a number of spaces, some with ceilings over 25 feet high. One room is a four-sided pyramid covered in mirrors and topped with a glass dome. The ceiling of the "hall of spheres" is covered entirely in gold leaf."

Is a kite store a convectioner's shop?