June, 12, 2003 archives

the boards of sag and aftra have voted to merge, but there is infighting on the sag side that could squelch the deal. (via l.a. observed, fun stuff.)

with the general decline of unions in the american workplace, it is interesting that the entertainment industry is still largely union-dominated.

this piece by martin e. hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at standford university (and the hellman in the diffie-hellman key agreement method), explains why moore's law hasn't resulted in dirt-cheap telecommunications. that's some pretty powerful deflationary pressure built up. (via dan gillmor.)

continuing my stroll through the films of kurosawa on dvd, i watched hidden fortress. i wouldn't put it at the top of the list, but it is enjoyable. (and yes, the peasants served as inspiration for part of the narrative structure of star wars.)

los angeles magazine has a piece by d.j. wade on riding the bus in los angeles (the url looks fragile, so it will likely be a different article next month). tony pierce responds on his busblog.

the mta should sell the map of the system online. i'd get at least two. (and the online trip planner totally failed me for a recent early-morning trip.)

i've actually done the red-blue-green-shuttle route to lax a few times, and have to say i never feared for my safety at any of the transfer points. you could easily spot the people headed to the airport via the green line. (and i'll admit confusion as to whether a single ticket+transfer is good enough to take that trip. i've always played it safe by using two tickets and one transfer.)

oh, one big exception to take to the article. the author writes: I'm lucky those drivers have been so willing to tax themselves to benefit a transit system few of them will ever use. this ignores the rather large subsidization of automobile travel, particuarly in southern california.

here's the reverend bayesian classifier, which looks like a very useful bit of code. if you happen to program in python. hooking something like this up to a weblog system to do auto-categorization would be very cool.