I was watching Bill Moyers Journal the other night and was intrigued by the final thought of the show. Moyers was discussing additional 200 billion dollars that the president now says he needs for Iraq. He had an interesting story to tell about this:

All of which reminds me of the famous French naturalist, Henri Fabre, who was intrigued by a species of worms, known as processional caterpillars, because they march single file in long unbroken lines. One day he came upon a line of them in the forest. He gathered them up, put them around the rim of a flower pot, and then started them walking. Round and round they went, like a tiny merry-go-round, hour after hour. They kept going for days and even though food was near at hand, they never strayed from their well-worn path. In the end, every one of them starved to death on end endless march to nowhere. See transcript of episode

On a side note, I’m not sure what the appropriate literary comparison of this is. Is it an analogy, metaphor, allegory or fable?

Anyone who knows me well will know that I have a twisted fascination with everything Mormon. Sarah Hepola has posted two interviews with Mormon teens about their views on Mormonism in general. The teens go by Lucy Latter-Day Saint and Olive Oxymoron for the purpose of the interview. As an aside, based on the responses from both teens, I’m not so sure I’d call them Mormons as much as teens that were raised as Mormons.

It’s nice to see that both of these girls are very thoughtful about their religion and articulate as well. When asked who would play Joseph Smith in a movie, Lucy Latter-Day Saint responsed:

Joseph Smith would best be played by Alec Baldwin, who is a little old, but Hollywood does wonders with makeup. Alec Baldwin always seems so egomaniacal regardless of what role he plays; this trait would serve him well in portraying Joseph Smith.

Interesting. She also thinks the craziest thing about Mormonism are the holy undergarments, but admits they ‘work’.

They are butt-ugly, but they serve a purpose. For one thing, they are unsexy. Mormons already have too many kids. If they didn’t wear such ugly underwear, there would almost surely be a lot more Mormon kids. Secondly, the ugly underwear keeps Mormons couples faithful to one another, because they would never let anyone other than their spouses see them in the ugly rags, and the Lord has commanded them not to take them off…

My personal favorite is her response to the question “Why are Mormons so nice?”:

Mormons are so nice because they are trying to entice you into being one of them. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Well said.

Via Kottke.

Fishing for humans is prohibited at this site:

Via Say What?!.

I’ve heard a lot of rumors about Spotlight now actually ‘working’ in Leopard. That’s good news, because it was a total bust in Tiger. I liked the idea of it, but it was just too damn slow to actually be useful and I ended up using Quicksilver instead.

In More Goodies in Apple’s New Operating System, David Pouge mentions two new features in Spotlight (other than fixing the molasses problem) I wasn’t aware of.

Menu bar calculator:

[Spotlight] is also a tiny pocket calculator now. Hit Command-Space, type or paste 38*48.2-7+55, and marvel at the first result in the Spotlight menu: 1879.6. You don’t even have to fire up the Calculator.

This is a neat idea, and if I could train myself to actually use it, it would be useful.

Dictionary lookups

The Spotlight menu also searches the Leopard dictionary now. If you type, for example, “schadenfreude” into the Spotlight box, the beginning of the actual definition appears right there in the menu. Click it to open Dictionary and read the full-blown entry.

Um, interesting example word. Anyway, one of my favorite features in OS X is the ability to move your mouse cursor over any word (in a Cocoa app) and press Ctrl + Cmd + D and get a little pop up that defines the word.

I’ve been steadily beefing up my vocabulary by using this feature. Sometimes this little trick isn’t enough though and I have to go to the real dictionary. I usually use Dashboard for this, but in general I’m really not a fan of it. This new Spotlight trick is great.

Mozilla’s Alex Faaborg announced a week or so ago that Firefox 3 would focus on visually integrating with the operating system:

Visual integration with Windows and OS X is our primary objective for the Firefox 3 refresh.

This is great news for Firefox, because as I have mentioned before, its user interface has really been the achilles’ heel of the browser, especially on the Mac.

Mozilla’s user experience team literally wants to do a better job of visually integrating with Windows than IE, and a better job of visually integrating with OS X than Safari. I don’t know if we will be able to pull that off, but that’s the goal.

I’m glad that they’ve recognized this as an issue and I can’t wait to see what they come up with. If Firefox actually did look as good or better than Safari on a Mac, I might use it as my primary browser.

Via Beauty And The Geek: Firefox 3’s Visual Makeover.