Good News and Bad News

Thompson Reuters Open Calais is an online service that reads text and extracts information from it. It picks up things like names, numbers and dates, and probably does some more complex analysis as well. The good news is that it is free.
    When you feed it some text, it returns an RDF file which contains all of the extracted information in some special RDF format. I imagine this RDF file is good for something, but I haven't figured that part out yet. It is part of the Resource Description Framework.
    They also offer a paid subscription service for lawyers and stock brokers. This is where it gets interesting.

Open Calais Features 
I cut off the financial features checklist so the chart would fit on this page. 
We didn't lose any information: all the features are checked green for the premium package.

The financial package gets you green check marks on all of the features. Most of the features are self explanatory, but there were a couple of bits of jargon in there I didn't recognize.

• IPTC Categories - These are metadata codes used by news organizations.
• RCS Categories - I suspect these are metadata codes used by the RCS Media Group, who are based in Milan Italy.
• TRBC Industry Mapping - Thomson Reuters Business Classification

Okay, so Open Calais picks information out of your story and generates all the metadata codes in the world, but look at the next couple of items:

• Pharmaceutical Drugs
• Financial Deals

Think news of FDA approval of a new drug might be of interest to Wall Street types? Well, yeah, but I didn't think it would so important that it would rate it's own line in the features list.

All of which make me think that the recent extraordinary price hikes on some drugs (Epi-pen springs to mind) might be related to the way Obama-care is being administered. In other words, I think someone is gaming the system.

Via Detroit Steve

Quotes

"Dropping the capitalization, usually reserved for holy things, is another way that we aim to put the internet (the Internet?) into the background, in spite of our gnawing intuition that it is unspeakably important — that, in some sense, it represents an entirely new civilization and phase in human development." - from Manifesto: The Internet as Art

His big break came with the role of Cooter, a mechanic who helped the mischievous Duke boys and their leggy cousin, Daisy, outwit and outrace Hazzard county bigwig Boss Hogg and his corrupt henchman, Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane. - Tim Wright and Bradley Hope writing in The Wall Street Journal. Included here because it does a good job of summing up the entire show in one sentence. It does have one short coming in that it doesn't include a shot of the General Lee flying through the air.

"Real truth lies, if anywhere, not in facts, but in nuance." - John Le Carre, quoted in a book review in The Wall Street Journal

Job Dream

Inhabit

Much to my surprise, a much younger me has landed a job at some kind of custom engineering firm. My first project is to generate a bid to make about 30 bicycle Z-brackets. On a normal bicycle these would be called headstock bearings, but there must be something special about these bearings, otherwise why would the client be asking us to make them? Normally you would go to someone who has experience making these things, like a bicycle manufacturer or one of their suppliers. But the client has asked my employer, and my employer has dumped it in my lap.
     My immediate reaction is to figure out how to get it done as cheaply as possible, but after talking to my boss, and a very brief conversation with his boss (hi, how's things, bye), I come to realize that price is probably not the issue here. The immediate goal is to put together a bid that will cover our costs of getting the part designed and built, and don't worry too much about the price. They are only asking for 30 units, so there are not going to be any economies of scale. And we don't want to spend a great deal of time putting this bid together as I have no idea what the client is expecting. If they balk at the price, well, then we can negotiate.

Fictional Knowledge

Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford in Blade Runner

Literary Review has an excellent overview of Philip K. Dick's life and work, disguised as a book review. I've read some of his stuff, but what I remember are the movies Total Recall and Blade Runner. I'm reading through this review and I come across this passage:

In the immediate aftermath of 2-3-74, Dick felt reborn. It had been not a breakdown but a breakthrough: for the first time he had stepped behind the scenery and witnessed the truth. Deep peace flooded him as certainty finally conquered doubt and paranoia was replaced with a sense of divine protection.

Sounds very similar to something I read about Avicenna who came to believe that the world is an illusion and the reality only appears to you during an ecstatic religious experience.

Via Detroit Steve

List of movies made from Philip K Dick stories.

Der Inseider has a few things to say about Philip K Dick

Jelena Goes to the Range

"Ammunition" - Kiev part 1
Nothing special about this other than that Jelena showed up in this blog once before singing "Nikola".

Colonia

Colonia Dignidad Entrance

Hermione Granger breaks out of the Harry Potter frame. Actually, she broke out five years ago, but I'm still in love with Hermione. But that's just celebrity fluff.

The movie The Colony (aka Colonia) is a fictional thriller set in a real, horrifc, place. It's 1973 and the USA backed, right wing Augusto Pinochet stages a coup that overthrows the Soviet backed left wing Salvador Allende. Our characters get caught up in events and end up in Colonia Dignidad, a place no one ever leaves. Thousands were tortured there and hundreds were killed.

What's interesting is the way this closed society continued to operate. Cut off from the outside world, the inmates had no idea what 'normal' life might be like. The guy who ran it, Paul Schafer, was a real psychopath.

Range Hood

AKDY 30-Inch 3-Speed Under Cabinet Range Hood AZ-W0175WHT

I replaced our old range hood with a new one yesterday. Someone got a little over enthusiastic about cleaning the old one and scrubbed off some of the paint so it no longer looked pristine. I suspect that a film of some kind of nasty had accumulated over the last 20 years and it reacted with the paint, so wiping it down with a soft cloth was all it took to wipe off the paint. Or the person doing the cleaning attacked it one of those Scotch Brite scrubbers. Those things will cut through anything. Cause remains unknown, and really, at this point we don't care.
    The old range hood never worked very well. Turn it on and it sucks air very well for about three seconds and then the tone changes, the air velocity drops and you realize that the only way to get rid of the smoke is to open all the windows. Problem is that when the house was being built, the duct that leads to the outside got an extra kink. The old hood probably would have worked fine if it had a straight shot to the outside, but this extra kink made pushing the air out more than it could handle.
    We have a party coming up and some people want the kitchen to look 'nice' and the range hood was the one big eyesore, so something had to be done. I could have painted it, but that would have meant sanding and masking and making a mess and agonizing over whether the sanded surface was smooth enough and then spray painting and hoping that there wasn't any overspray and then cleaning the entire kitchen to get rid of the overspray. So no, I'm not going to paint it.
    Taking the old range hood out was not a big problem until I touched something inside the hood. OMG. Didn't anyone ever clean this thing? It was nasty. Light bulb goes in the trash, I'm not even going to try and clean it. Metal parts in the recycling bin. Feed that shit to the smelter.
     Installing the new hood was a real pain. Even though the screw holes are all laid out on a standard pattern and even though the hood fits perfectly in the space under the counter (less than 1/32" of slop anywhere), the screw holes don't line up. Electric screwdriver solves that problem. Connecting the duct is not a problem either. The exhaust port from the hood is the same size as the old one and fits in the duct just fine, but it's a loose fit, it needs to be sealed. I can seal the two sides and the front with duck tape, but the the back is right up against the cabinet wall. How the devil are you supposed to seal that? I finally gave up and went to Lowe's and bought a can of Great Stuff spray sealer for $6. I think I used about ten cents worth.
    The absolute worst part was hooking up the electrical lines. I won't mention how the guys running the masonry saw out in the garage kept turning the power back on because their saw quit working. Never mind that the breaker controlling the circuit to the fan had nothing to do with the outlets in the garage that the saw was plugged into.
    No, the problem was having to make like a snake to be able to put the screws in the cover over the electrical connection. I ended up having to bend over backwards with the back of my head lying on the range, looking straight up. Then I was able to see and reach the screws. Lucky I didn't break something on the range.

Bought the hood from Amazon