Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Today's song: "Freedom's just another word for nothin left to lose." 

Today's podcast includes lots of singing, one idea, not much more. A Windows reboot. A bunch of philosophy. Thirty minutes. Amazing. 

Yesterday I was invited to be the first podcaster to be broadcast on KYOU-AM. This raised some very interesting questions 

Gotta love O'Reilly, they always let everyone know about their open technology "summits," after they happen.  

Rogers: "At this point, he has enough Southern in him to order 'unsweet tea' by its proper name and is getting closer all the time to a convincing pronunciation of 'y'all."" 

Some more clues on Odeo in Fortune. "When Odeo goes live in early May, podcasters will log on and employ Odeo-crafted, simple-to-use tools to record anything from found sounds to near-professional shows." 

ResearchBuzz: "TimYang.com has a Google News scraper available called ScrappyGoo." 

Here's their feed for me, and one for podcasting. 

What is gather.com? 

Update: The people running the Syndicate conference say I am welcome to speak, but I can't have a sponsor. 

The fundamental theorem of calculus 

Yesterday on All Things Considered they had a segment on a famous professor and book author, Louis Leithold, who died on April 29. They explained how he taught high school calculus in his final years. On the big day, his favorite day of the course, when he unveiled the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus to his students, he'd wear two shirts, an outer shirt and a t-shirt that had the theorem printed on it. At the big moment, when he was ready to reveal the secret, he'd ask "Is it hot in here?" and then rip off the shirt, like a mathematical Superman, and the students would laugh, and there it was, a truth for all to see, discovered by Newton and Leibniz, but written by God Almighty, the most advanced mathematics produced by man in their time.

I was a math major, but I had forgotten that there was a Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, and once I remembered that there was one, I couldn't remember what it said (they didn't say on NPR). So I made a note to look it up when I got back to my computer, so here it is.

And here is the LA Times obituary for Dr Leithold.

More Nashville post-trip notes 

Sure, the Nashville blog conference had its share of Limbaugh-like dittoheads, but most of the people were very nice, and the part of Nashville the conference was held in, where the universities are, could be the college section of any city, but more stately and very pretty. I thought their university section was nicer than that of New Orleans, Madison or Cambridge. Maybe it looked so pretty because of the time of year, almost everywhere, early May is a nice time. I bet Mad-town looks pretty good this week too. And of course Palo Alto, where I lived for so long, is picture-post-card beautiful 365 days a year.

Three people stand out among my new Nashville aquaintances, two whose name I know; the other, I don't remember. The man without a name spoke with me after the Respectful Disagreement session to say he is politically a Christian conservative, but found my point of view interesting, and said that after the bashing I took in the session he felt he could spend two weeks talking with me and learn something through the whole time. I looked at him, a bit in disbelief, he was dressed very nicely, in the style of an artist. I told him if he were in San Francisco, I'd think he was a left-leaning Democrat. He told me he is an artist, but also is a conservative.

I said I felt the same way he does. Given the incongruence of his appearance and his politics, and the fact that he had the self and mutual respect to be generous with a stranger in his hometown, told me there's a grace to conservatives that you would never see if you let the louts speak for all of them. If I were in his shoes, I would have done the same. Make sure that the guest knows that the loudmouths don't speak for everyone. Maybe then that would appear in the stranger's blog a few days after the conference.

I also met Nick Bradbury, a Nashville native, and developer of the FeedDemon feed reader. He's a soft-spoken, gentle, thoughtful man. Can't tell what his politics are, and I didn't ask, possibly because we come from such a politically charged technologic place, the world of RSS. It's always good to have a face to put with a name.

My host for the trip was Rex Hammock, who is a very nice guy, and probably a Republican, something I teased him about endlessly (don't worry he found something to tease me with too). He's an interesting guy, one of the few people with a blog who I seem to always agree with. Even so, he's the blogger who met with President Bush a couple of years ago. How could it be that I always agree with someone who would be invited to such a meeting? (To be clear, I would have accepted the invite myself, had it been offered, but the Republicans don't even allow people like myself to cover their national convention.) I think friendships like this, that are in themselves conundrums, are more important in some ways that friendships between people whose politics are identical. Between Rex and myself there's a clue, some value, a fundamental theorum, that's more important than whether you vote Democratic or Republican.

Anyway, Rex was a fantastic, generous host. I hope someday to be able to return the favor. (But first I have to decide where I'm going to live!)