recursion

<Ash> look: I like python pretty well, but the syntax is kind of annoying.

<AaronSw> this from a lisp programmer?!

<Ash> AaronSw: One type of brace is much simpler than a bazillion!

<AaronSw> to write perhaps, but not to rfead

<Ash> Lisp's syntax is simple and efficient.

<Ash> With a proper editor, lisp is incredibly easy to read.

<look> OK, let's pretend we got past the syntax argument

<look> It's now 45 minutes in the future

<look> and we've agreed to disagree

<look> Hurray!

<AaronSw> I bet look's time machine is programmed in Python. <duck />

PS: Grrr...I need a preformatted style badly!

Star Tribune: Rip Rapson: Changes in communities don't just 'happen': "An area the size of the Mall of America is developed every day. Over the past decades, while our population growth has been about 25 percent, we've urbanized 60 percent more land. What does that ratio imply for the major new growth spurt we're facing -- nearly a million new residents by 2030? What will happen to the land that's left?"

Rapson is the president of the McKnight Foundation.

Embrace Open Space

Minnesota Land Trust

Trust for Public Land (see the Minnesota Program Highlights)

I'm going to research these orgainizations and find out which one is the most effective and join it. After my vacation up north, I've realized the great importance of preserving open land from development.

You can read more about the importance of land trusts in Home From Nowhere. (I think, it's been a while since I read it).

Looks like Eikon has some competition in the free, content-based image search arena. GIFT, the GNU Image-Finding Tool (formerly Viper), is a query-by-example content based image query tool (like Eikon).

I tried their demo but I couldn't figure out how to get the system to work. I also couldn't figure out what language the core is written in. OK, after fiddling with the PHP version of their demo, I figured out how to use it (the Java applet remains a mystery). It works very well. You basically have to select a random image and say it's "relevant", then tune the query from there. Not particularly useful as compared to query by sketch or even Eikon's explictly query image.

The Viper team also has a very nice list of other content-based image query systems.