(no subject)

I woke up relatively early and spent the day studying for Automatic Control. Somehow, however, I feel like I spent the whole day fighting with Matlab.

Started writing an article on Bose-Einstein Condensate. Perhaps I'll submit it to the Daily Cal or to Lunds Naturvetarkårs Medlemstidning. I suspect that publication in the latter is more probable, & it might be fun to try writing in Swedish.

For breakfast I had Frukt Museli with milk and coffee. For dinner I had some stir-fry made from pre-cut frozen ``wok'' vegetables and chicken pieces, with jasmine rice.

Leningrad Nuclear Power Station underwent an emergency shutdown today after engineers ``lost control of the reactor.'' The plant uses the same RBMK reactors that earned notoriety in Chernobyl and thus directly threatens the entire Baltic region.

'Talk'ed with Kristen. St. Petersburg sounds like quite an experience, complete with poisonous tap water, primitive (=smelly) plumbing, steel doors, armed guards, a 2:1 student:teacher ratio (how'd that happen?), and lots of Japanese classmates (why?).

livejournal feature request: different "categories" of entries.

To-do:

* study for reglerteknik
* pay the rent
* get a Russian visa
* submit Weizmann application
* do laundary

Journals and history

Web journals of all kinds are becoming increasingly popular, to the same level of ubiquity as the humble hit counters and guestbooks that came before. Not only are there quasi-traditional journals like Livejournal (and its clones which pop up daily), but also the various "forums," "bulletin boards," and things like Slashdot. These sites provide ample forum to discuss or post what one wishes to discuss or post, but I fear that the number of these sites and the resulting dilution of the market may prove harmful. For example, it used to be that Usenet was THE forum for discussions, but now, as so many arguably better (=less spam) alternatives exist, Usenet has fallen by the way-side. One cool thing about Usenet is that since it is effectively mirrored by hundreds of sites globally, it provides a semi-permanent record. Granted, some people see that as a disadvantage, but Usenet archives from the last 20 years have become a valuable part of the historial record. With conversation now tucked away in a multitude of nooks and crannies on the web and adorned with all sorts of HTML markup, the conversations from this new era of the web will not be as easily archived and subsequently searched. Here's another hazard: if web logs take the place of paper diaries, then there's a greater risk that those diaries will be lost, for instance when sites go down. Perhaps diaries aren't as important or pervasive as they once were, but I still think it's a matter worth considering. The centralized nature of the web presents a threat of data loss.

It would be neat if database-backed sites could expose their raw content in a universally understood, object-based format, so that the web could be crawled, indexed, and archived kind of like a heterogeneous usenet. This, of course, is part of the dream of XML, but one of whose realization I am skeptical, if only because exposed raw content can earn no revenue.

If I could get straight ASCII Reuters and AP feeds in a nice text interface like I had with Compuserve Information Manager a decade ago, I'd be happy too.