More Davidson Blogs

These are by alumni or students:

Ben Towle: Cartoonist, Educator, Hobo - www.benzilla.com/
All of God's Money (Rob Leacock) - ourloveis.blogspot.com
the quick and dirty (Travis Lloyd) - travislloyd.blogspot.com/
The Barnacle's Barnyard (Bronson Tennis) - litroman.blogspot.com/
Lemonade anyone? - albanium.blogspot.com/

And here's an interesting post by a former resident of Davidson.

Thank you, Google blog search.

Katrina
I realize that many of you have already donated money to Katrina relief by now. If you haven't though, the Houston Food Bank Virtual Drive is on and it will provide 196 meals for every $5 contributed. (Charity Navigator gives the Houston Food Bank three out of four stars overall and four out of four stars for efficiency, so it's not a fraudulent charity.)

The Birth of Outrage
Thanks to Kevin Drum for providing a concise timeline that outlines the fate of both FEMA and flood control projects in New Orleans. As you can tell, the Republican promise of smaller government has changed into the promise of an incompetent government, which through its incompetence gives the average taxpayer less value for their money. A point that may help the Dems, if they are bold enough to call someone incompetent. Thankfully there are still a few reliable government programs.

Keeps Getting Better

Thanks to Mind Hacks for a link to New Algorithm for Learning Languages. It's about the Automatic Distillation of Structure (ADIOS) algorithm, which can discern the rules of grammar after it reads a book in any language. But here's the coolest part:

In addition to child-directed language, the algorithm has been tested on the full text of the Bible in several languages, on artificial context-free languages with thousands of rules and on musical notation. It also has been applied to biological data, such as nucleotide base pairs and amino acid sequences. In analyzing proteins, for example, the algorithm was able to extract from amino acid sequences patterns that were highly correlated with the functional properties of the proteins. [italics mine]