The Library of Dresan – Page 85 – Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis

No Joy of Xi

Published May 14, 2008 by centaur

So I had this great article planned on my new work setup, which involved a combination of GNU Screen, XEmacs, gnuclient, and a few shell scripts, including my new favorite, xi.

The idea, you see, was to start a GNU Screen session on your workstation. Screen is a terminal based program which lets you "attach" to a running command line prompt, so you can start Screen at work, go home and pick up right where you left off. I used to run the editor XEmacs inside Screen, so I could go to a talk and resume my editing session on my laptop. However, this means running XEmacs in no-window mode, where it loses many features.

The first brainflash was to use XEmacs' gnuclient utility, which also lets you "attach" to another program from the command line, this time to a running (x)Emacs. Normally this pops up a new window, but I found a version of gnuclient for XEmacs which lets me run in no-window mode. So I now start XEmacs, start Screen, run gnuclient, and now I can connect to the same editor anywhere.

The next step was to set up scripts that run these with the configurations I want - myscreen, myxemacs, mygnuclient; not strictly necessary but I can wrap the programs with a little sugar so they always run the right way, do the right thing, and fail with graceful error messages. I'd done this first with myx11vnc, which has odd and weird options I can never remember.

But I digress ... and I'm still short of my real goal. You see, other than losing features in XEmacs in command mode, one thing that was really bugging me was that I continually switch back and forth between vi and Emacs at the command line. I prefer Emacs, but vi is faster to load and type, so I use it for quick jobs ... but it has an almost entirely different set of control keys, which can get confusing. The problem has gotten worse since I've temporarily retired the use of Eclipse at work until some bugs are worked out in a new loader system ... so now I just use XEmacs and vi, without the palate cleaner of a CUA-compatible editor ... and thus end up really confusing myself.

What I really want is an Emacs as easy and convenient as vi, so I can run it anywhere. Gnuclient is about that fast since you don't need to open an Emacs, but typing mygnuclient is painful and can't even be done with tab completion with half a dozen my* programs sitting around in my bin directory.

But wait ... why not call mygnuclient ... 'xi'?

Well, I can, and do. And the result is now I have a fullfeatured Emacs-compatible editor at the command line, fast to type and fast to load as vi, with the added bonus of all my Emacs macros, all my open files, and the history of whatever I was working on. Calloo, callay, he chortled in his joy.

But a lot of the particular details of this depend on my work setup. And I don't blog about the details of my work. (Note no code samples.) So I started to replicate this behavior on my new Mac OS X laptop with Aquamacs so I could show you how this is done without giving away any proprietary trade-secrety things.

But Mac OS X is not Ubuntu, and Aquamacs is not XEmacs. Aquamacs is a version of Emacs, as it turns out; and Steve Yegge's delusions aside, Emacs is perennially just a bit behind of Emacs in all the features that matter to me. No, Steve, I don't care what your experience is; all I know is that in my experience Emacs keeps on leaving me twisting in the wind so I've learned NOT to rely on it, not when I've got XEmacs - but Aquamacs' slick Mac OS X changed that equation.

I really like Aquamacs; it uses the Mac-only command key for all the typical Mac keyboard shortcuts, and the remaining option keys for Emacs. It really is the best of both worlds, and I wouldn't want to give that up ... but Aquamacs isn't compatible with gnuserv. It's version, emacsclient, does not have a no-window mode because Emacs's multiple TTY support is less well developed than XEmacs. There's a patch, but it isn't here yet, and I'm pretty sure it's only compatible with vanilla Emacs, not the Aquamacsy goodness I want. So no 'xi,' not on my laptop yet.

None of this is unsolvable. I'm convinced I could make it work. But not the easy hour or so of hacking it took to make this work on the Ubuntu version, and not in the time available to me to make my "every day in May" blog posts. So you'll have to wait a while to hear the Joy of Xi told properly, in all its grody, replicable detail.

-the Centaur

the consequence…

Published May 14, 2008 by centaur

... of making things easier on Qumana was to make things harder on Blogger. Apparently the setting I turned off on Blogger to prevent the extra carriage returns in Qumana means that Blogger posts will come out all mooshed together. Sigh.

Pleasure and Pain, Fiction and Science

Published May 14, 2008 by centaur

I really enjoy writing fiction, but I find writing science painful. And I just realized one reason why: stories are narratives, and since I write stories in chunks of scenes, the incomplete narrative can still be absorbingly interesting - like surfing past a few seconds of a movie on TV.

But papers are hybrid beasts: they report data and argue about what we can conclude from it. Since I write papers by core dumping my data then refining the argument, what I'm subjecting myself to when I edit my paper is a poorly argued jumble based on a quasi-random collection of facts. It's not all bad - I do work from an outline and plan - but an outline is not an argument.

This hit home to me recently when I was working on a paper on some until-now unreported work on robot pets I did about ten years ago. Early drafts of the paper had a solid abstract and extensive outline from our paper proposal, and into this outline I poured a number of technical reports and partially finished papers. The result? Virtual migraine!

But after I got about 90% of the paper done, I had a brainflash about a better abstract, which in turn suggested a new outline. My colleagues agreed, so I replaced the abstract and reorganized the paper. Now the paper was organized around our core argument, rather than around the subject areas we were reporting on, which involved lots of reshuffling but little rewriting.

The result? Full of win. The paper's not done, not by a long shot, but the first half reads much more smoothly, and, more importantly, I can clearly look at all the later sections and decide what parts of the paper need to stay, what parts need to go, and what parts need to be moved and/or merged with other sections. There are a few weak spots, but I'm betting if I take the time to sit down and think about our argument and let that drive the paper that I will be able to clean it up right quick.

Hopefully this will help, going forward. Here goes...

-the Centaur

Why I’m not donating to the Myanmar relief effort…

Published May 12, 2008 by centaur

... even though I really, really want to:

In Myanmar, food aid only at the junta's behest
Wealthy Burmese who want to donate rice or other assistance have in several cases been told that everything must be channeled through the military. This angers local government officials like Tin Win who are trying to rebuild the lives of villagers. He twitched with rage as he described the rice the military gave him. "They gave us four bags," Tin Win said. "The rice is rotten - even the pigs and dogs wouldn't eat it."
The UN high commissioner for refugees delivered good rice to the local military leaders last week, but they kept it for themselves, Tin Win said, and distributed the water-logged, musty rice. "I'm very angry," he said, adding an expletive to describe the military.
For the ruling generals, who have been in power for over four decades in Myanmar, the driving motivation of handing out assistance is to show that they are in control and the benevolent providers for the nation, analysts say.

Everyone, do what you think you have to to help these people. Here's a link to the Red Cross's efforts. But I'm afraid it's not helping. I haven't found out how to help out the victims of the China Earthquake, but obviously that's a lot less people who need help.

Sigh.

-the Centaur

A Nice Problem To Have

Published May 11, 2008 by centaur

So my friends are reading Frost Moon and giving me feedback, which I'm letting pile up while I get other work done (and so my committment to what I just wrote can evaporate to the point I can read it objectively). But I've already started the sequel, Blood Rock. I wrote a lot of Frost Moon in the Barnes and Noble Writing Group at Steven's Creek, but I've avoided reading Blood Rock there because I thought it might be a spoiler for my alpha readers who were still reading Frost Moon.

Now I know holding the new chapters back was a good idea.

My mother-in-law just finished Frost Moon and said "I can't wait for more!". So I sent her the first chapter of Blood Rock, which she immediately printed out intending to read it. But Sandi's dad got to it first. He's read part of Frost Moon, but had stopped and was waiting for his wife to record it on tape so he can listen to it on his long over-the-road trips. But he sees Blood Rock lying around, picks it up, and BAM! page one, gets a huge spoiler for the ending of Frost Moon.

There are obvious spoilers in the first chapter of Blood Rock: the central character of the series is still alive, as are other people whose fate was in doubt. I was worried that people would find that out, but in all truth you could guess that from the fact that it's a book in a 'genre' series and not a 'literary' one-shot novel. It's going to be a story about someone's continuing adventures, not about the unfortunate events leading up to someone's untimely death.

But there are also NON-obvious spoilers: who the main villain was, what he was doing, and what happened to him. I won't go into any more details, but suffice it to say these are MUCHO spoilers if you haven't finished the first book. I hadn't been worried about that, but in hindsight this is blindingly obvious. So I am very glad I didn't read this at the writing group!

As my mother-in-law and father-in-law both pointed out, it's rare for a book in a series to give away the ending of another book in the series. And so I need to be careful about how I refer to the past. While I can't hide the end of Frost Moon - it's integral to the plot of Blood Rock - I can instead hold these revelations back to the last possible minute. And now that I think of doing that, it seems like it will make the point when I refer to it even more of a shock. Nice.

I've never had this problem before. It's a nice problem to have... :-)

-Anthony

The great bit bucket in the sky…

Published May 11, 2008 by centaur

So after my essay on intellect and will, Jim posted an interesting comment, to which I replied ... a long-ranging reply which could have been a blog post in its own right. SO I finished the reply, hit preview to check it out, and then hit view blog. Note that none of those steps involved "publish" ... so the whole essay disappeared.

AAARGH!

These browser based apps still leave something to be desired. Anyway, it was really witty and acknowledged all of Jim's good points while carefully highlighting my areas of difference in a subtle yet engaging way. You should have been there ... *sigh*. Will rewrite it (in Qumana so I don't lose it) and will post it as a new article shortly.

-the Centaur

A Blogging Bookmarklet

Published May 10, 2008 by centaur

As part of making my "Blog a day through May" and "Distract Myself From Writing This Paper" tasks easier, I hunted down this Blogger bookmarklet which which enables you to select some text on a page and then with a single click get a micro-Blogger window so you can edit and send a post (like this one):

What is BlogThis! ?: "BlogThis! is an easy way to make a blog post without visiting blogger.com ... Clicking BlogThis! creates a mini-interface to Blogger prepopulated with a link to the web page you are visiting, as well as any text you have highlighted on that page. Add additional text if you wish and then publish or post from within BlogThis! ... just drag the link below to your browser's Link bar. Then, whenever the mood strikes, click BlogThis! to post to your blog:

This isn't the only bookmarklet out there. There's also one for Google Bookmarks, Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion has his own list of key bookmarklets, and Irregular Shed shows us how to make your own. I know these work in Firefox but I suspect you can get this to work in other browsers as well.

So check out these links, and if you find yourself doing any of these common tasks in less than a click and the associated commenting/typing time, add yourself a bookmarklet and save a few minutes of your life.

-the Centaur

Worthy of human treatment …

Published May 10, 2008 by centaur

Once as a child I asked a Jesuit whether dolphins should be treated like people if they turned out to be intelligent. I think I phrased it in terms of the question "whether they had souls", but regardless the Jesuit's answer was immediate and clear: yes, they have souls (and, by implication, should be treated like people) if they had two things - intellect and will. Years later I read enough Aquinas to understand what he meant. But when I tried to regurgitate my understanding of these concepts for this essay, as partially digested by my thinking on artificial intelligence, I found that what came up were new concepts, and that I no longer cared what Aquinas thought, other than to give him due credit for inspiring my ideas.

So, in my view, the two properties that a sentient being needs to be treated with respect due to other sentients are:

Intellect: the ability to understand the world in terms of a universal system of conceptual structures

Will: the ability to select a conceptual description of a desired behavior and to regulate one's behavior to match it

In this view, part of the reason that we treat animals like animals is that their intellects are weak and as a consequence their wills almost nonexistent. While animals can learn basic concepts and do basic reasoning tasks, it's extraordinarily difficult for them to put what they can learn into larger structures that describe their world - for example, it takes years of intensive training for chimps to learn the basic language competencies a human child gets in eighteen to twenty four months. Without the ability to put together "universal" structures that describe behavior, your cat can't describe behaviors much more sophisticated than "I'm not allowed in the art studio" and hence is vulnerable to all sorts of hazards and prone to all sorts of misbehavior because they simply can't understand that, for example, it's not a good idea to go out after 2am since their owners won't be awake to let them in.

Similarly, children are wards of their parents because they haven't yet learned the conceptual structures of what they should do, and lack the self-regulation to guide themselves to follow what they have learned. Violent criminals become wards of the state for the same reason - either they didn't realize that it was a bad idea to hurt their fellow man, or more likely didn't bother to regulate themselves to achieve it. A similar problem occurs for a variety of neurodiverse people who, for one reason or other, are not able to regulate their behaviors well enough to manage their lives without the assistance of a caregiver (though having various kinds of self-regulatory dysfunctions is not necessarily a sign that someone does not have a sophisticated intellect, and there are a number of autistic people who would argue that we are too quick to discriminate; but I digress).

Regardless, so intellect and will are ideas that bump around in my head a lot. Can something understand the world it's in in abstract terms, and figure out its relationship to it? And given that understanding, can it decide what kind of life it should lead, and can it then actually follow that life? Anything that can do that gets a free pass towards being treated with respect - if you have those fundamental capabilities I'm inclined to treat you like a fellow sentient until and unless you prove me wrong.

We may seem to have gotten pretty far from souls here. But for the Christians in the audience, think about intellect and will for a moment. Something that had intellect could learn who Jesus was, and something with will could decide whether or not to follow him. And it wouldn't matter whether that was a neurotypical person, an autistic person, a talking dolphin or an intelligent machine. For the atheists in the audience, this may be an easier sell, but the point actually is still the same: something with a truly universal intellect could evaluate a system of beliefs that it was presented, and with a selfregulatory will decide whether or not it was going to agree and/or follow that system of beliefs.

Thinking out loud here...

-the Centaur

How hard it is…

Published May 10, 2008 by centaur

... to keep up the pace of daily blogging when you have Real Life to do! I'm working on a scientific paper (and several novels and stories and a comic) and already this month have come up with three blog posts - Delusionaries, Biblical Spam and the Joy of Xi - which are too complex to just dash off, so they've been languishing. If I get a chance I'll tackle one of them tomorrow after the next draft of the paper is done. Until then ... post! And let the chips fall where they may.

-the Centaur

Forces of Evil on the March

Published May 9, 2008 by centaur

Yet another wacko has popped up with a scheme to control on other people's lives to make himself feel happy:

Chef Wants To Outlaw Out of Season Vegetables

Celebrity British chef Gordon Ramsay said restaurants should be fined if they serve out-of-season fruit and vegetables. "I don't want to see asparagus in the middle of December. I don't want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home-grown," he said after raising his concerns with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

"Fruit and veg should be seasonal. Chefs should be fined if they don't have ingredients in season on their menu," he told the BBC on Friday. ... "There should be stringent laws, licensing laws, to make sure produce is only used in season and season only," he added.

I'm not going to bother going on about how this would have killed my hardworking father's business shipping produce had such a law been passed in America. I'm going to even devil's advocate for a second. The outcome he wants ... eating foods in season prepared locally ... is actually a good thing. Eating foods that are in season creates variety. The "local foods" movement takes this further, reducing the cost to ship vegetables. For example, the excellent Hopland Inn serves food from only a hundred or so miles away, and Google's Cafe 150 is named after the maximum radius of its ingredients.

But many other things we like to eat are NOT local, are NOT in season, and are NOT Gordon Ramsay's business. Everything he is complaining about is phrased in terms of what he wants to see, and he wants us to pass a law, enforced by people with guns who will come to take your money, to enforce his whims in the presence of no concrete harm?

Ah-ah-ah. I don't think so.

Tongue in cheek, what is it about Britain that breeds this kind of totalitarian control mindset? They don't have a recent history of dictatorship, but everyone from Alan Moore to George Orwell to P.D. James keeps writing stories where England goes to hell in a totalitarian basket. But I guess if I had the experience of these English writers, with springloaded Gordon Ramsays popping up everywhere calling for stringent regulation of everything from seasonal fruits to the proper time for tea, I could see myself popping out a dystopia.

-Anthony

(ObDisclaimer: I have no evidence that Gordon Ramsay is not a nice, decent, humane person, nor do I know that England is populated by an army of springloaded Gordon Ramsay clones popping up everywhere with random totalitarian proposals. Those were jokes, in case you were wondering; almost all the people I've met from the British isles have been nice).

Interestingly…

Published May 9, 2008 by centaur

... if you have a blog draft hanging around for a long time in Blogger and finally publish it, it gets published at the date that you initially started it and not the date it was actually published. Interesting...

-Anthony

I’ve heard memory is unreliable but this takes the cake…

Published May 7, 2008 by centaur

Researching another story I came across this tidbit:

Eyewitness Memory is Unreliable
Australian eyewitness expert Donald Thomson appeared on a live TV discussion about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. He was later arrested, placed in a lineup and identified by a victim as the man who had raped her. The police charged Thomson although the rape had occurred at the time he was on TV. They dismissed his alibi that he was in plain view of a TV audience and in the company of the other discussants, including an assistant commissioner of police. The policeman taking his statement sneered, "Yes, I suppose you've got Jesus Christ, and the Queen of England, too." Eventually, the investigators discovered that the rapist had attacked the woman as she was watching TV - the very program on which Thompson had appeared. Authorities eventually cleared Thomson. The woman had confused her rapist's face with the face the she had seen on TV. (quote taken from Baddeley's Your Memory: A User's Guide).

It simply staggers my imagination that someone testifying about unreliable eyewitnesses would then get accused of something by an unreliable witness ... who herself had been watching him talk about unreliable witnesses and got confused!

-Anthony

Extra Spaces

Published May 7, 2008 by centaur

Qumana is a great blog post editor, but it has an interesting property that makes its posts appear weird on my web site.

If you hit return, it wraps the whole paragraph in a HTML "p" tag

like so

Which is nice, in theory it's how you're supposed to use the "p" tag, but ...

It puts huge spaces between paragraphs in my blog.

I'm not sure why this is happening. Some CSS error in my stylesheet? Some translation ... WHOA!

I just did "view source" on the published blog, and found extra
tags after each paragraph in the published blog! So THAT's what is happening... now, of course, the question is WHY, since they don't show up on Qumana's Source View.
Here's seeing if switching from "Enter Starts A New Paragraph" to "Enter Starts A New Line" does the trick.
9:56pm hit return.
-the Centaur

Artificial Intelligence, Briefly

Published May 7, 2008 by centaur

Who am I? What do I do? Why?

I am an artificial intelligence researcher.

I study human and other minds to aid in the design of intelligent machines and emotional robots.

I believe emotions are particularly important for robots because, unlike intelligent machines which normally run as computational processes on a general computer maintained by some other agent, robots have physical bodies with physical needs that they themselves are in part responsible for - and an emotional system's functions are to evaluate how our current situation meets our needs, to trigger quick reactions to get us out of harm, and to motivate us to pursue long-term actions to improve our lot.

I pursue artificial intelligence because right here, right now its techniques help me construct better software artifacts and deepen my understanding of the human condition, and because I hope that creating human level intelligence and beyond will improve the lot of human kind and further the progress of sentient life.

I think these things often, but I never say them. Time to change that.

-Anthony

Regurgitating Slashdot…

Published May 5, 2008 by centaur

... does not constitute true "blogging," unless you really have something new to say about the topic. Same goes for the tip you just found on Lifehacker. Perhaps, the curmudgeon in me says, keep the "me too"s and "+1"s to yourselves?

But, I'm a hypocrite; half the tricks I learn and shiny sparklies I find, I only get because some other blogger has read it (out of the dozens of other blogs I don't subscribe to), decided it was good, and regurgitated it into my waiting Google Reader. So keep it coming ... I guess. But I still need something more than "check out what I saw on Slashdot."

-the Centaur

Don’t Get Overly Ambitious

Published May 5, 2008 by centaur

If you're going to blog once a day for a month, it's important not to get overly ambitious about the articles you're going to write each day. I started off with the idea I'd finish all the waiting blog posts I had sitting around, write down my definitive thoughts on several key topics, et cetera.

The outcome of this bright idea? Well, sitting "right next" to this article in Qumana is a blog entry on "delusionaries" which proved too big to chew in a couple of small bites. So I'm going to spit this one out, cut it up into smaller bits, and try again. Stay tuned.

-Anthony

How Easy It Is To Fall Off the Wagon!

Published May 4, 2008 by centaur

Not even the first week and I skipped a blog entry. Shame on me - and I was even online yesterday.

It's very easy to "fall off the wagon" - to decide to change how we want to live our lives, but then let our day-to-day habits, plans, and interactions carry us through a course of actions that contradicts that. A Christian theologian would make some noise about the fallibility of man; a cognitive scientist would natter on about automatized behaviors, capture errors and the illusion of conscious will. But the long and the short of it is that we're really bad at this.

I can point to a number of wagons I've fallen off repeatedly: regular exercise, martial arts training, doing the physical therapy exercises for my knee, calling all my friends at the beginning of the month, taking the laundry out of the dryer as soon as it beeps. But other wagons I hang on to tenaciously: feeding the cats twice daily, watering the lawn, attending the weekly and monthly writing groups.

At first blush this is the diference between things that have immediate feedback (mewing cats, wilted plants, written stories) and those that don't (it can take months to notice changes in your waistline). But I find that this even applies to things that don't have immediate feedback - like writing my "weekly snippets" at the Search Engine That Starts With a G, a performance tool that I regularly use even though I'm the only one that apparently reads them. True, if you don't send snippets you get reminders about it; but most people ignore them, just like I ignore many, many other automated reminders I get. So that's not it either.

So some wagons are easy to fall off of and others are easy to hang on to. Why is that? I could go off and do a typical blogger speculation, but let's leave it at this for a moment: why are there some things that are so easy to decide to do (or not to do) regularly, while other habits are so hard to make or break that it seems nearly impossible?

'jes wonderin,
-the Centaur

Insignificance

Published May 2, 2008 by centaur

Created via Automotivator, which I found after seeing a Livejournal post (itself found via Planet Lisp) in which its creator, Zach Beane, created a motivational poster for all the smug lisp weenies:

I may not program in Lisp much anymore - probably less than once a month or so, compared to my Top Five (currently Javascript, Java, C++, Bash and Python) - but I do now have this poster hanging in my office at the Search Engine That Starts With a G. Already it's gotten quite a few questions ... :-)

So, on the note of doing things wrong and personal insignificance ... here's some random bits about some changes in the works. This is one of the first blog posts I've done on my new Macintosh, which replaces my beloved but fried Blue Slab of Coolness and my beloved but stolen old Powerbook. Having used it for a month or two now, I do so wuv my my Mac and it's crappy user interface, which does just enough right to almost make me ignore its massive gaffes (like switching between two windows and the screen suddenly reshuffling the z-buffer heights of all open applications).

But it's really flipping over into usability thanks to a trick I learned combining Spaces and VMWare, letting me switch back and forth between Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard with ease. (Apparently the new MacBook Pros are some of the best laptops to run Windows Vista. Who knew?) VMWare is slick because it lets you run Windows Vista on your Macintosh in a virtual machine - it's even smart enough to use the partition set up by Apple's Boot Camp dual-boot solution - but it really didn't get hyper useful until I learned the Spaces trick. Spaces (a warmed over version of the virtual desktops feature popularized by the X Window System) lets you create several "virtual desktops" you can switch between via control arrows - and once you do that, you can give one of them to Vista in full screen mode.

I can't remember the blogger who recommended this trick to me (Mossberg? Some Lifehacker article?), but using Space's control-arrows to switch desktops actually has proven easier in practice than using VMWare's (admittedly hyper-slick) Unity mode. Unity, like Parallels' Coherence mode, sounds great because it puts your Windows windows on your Macintosh desktop like any other Mac app. However, using Spaces to put Vista on its own desktop means the Mac apps and the Windows apps get their own OS desktop features like the taskbar, destktop icons, etc. Looking at the Lifehacker article on Parallels I linked to above, I suspect that I could make Unity work much better; but this is working well enough for me to get stuff done now.

Also this is a first post using Qumana, new blogging software which narcissistically inserts some adware which you can see here to the lower right. --->

Powered by Qumana

Qumana has been so nice to me so far (WYSIWIG mode, automatically snarfing URLs out of the keyboard when you insert links, etc., etc.) I'll leave the ad in just this one time.

SO click on some links above and give our "sponsors" some love. :-)

-Anthony

AnBloWriMo

Published May 1, 2008 by centaur

Recently I heard a friend say "2008 was the year the bloggers died" - because almost all of his friends who were bloggers stopped posting. Well, shame on us. SO, in the tradition of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) I announce Anthony's Blog Writing Month (AnBloWriMo) in which I will attempt to put up one post per day for the next month. Hopefully this won't amount to boring all of you to tears, but will instead serve as a useful reminder to me to get my backlog moving again. Of course, those two things aren't mutually exclusive...

Here goes - this counts as number one.
-the Centaur

Google News Quotes

Published April 16, 2008 by centaur

Google News has a new feature where searching for a politician's name will pull up recent quotes:

Consider this election season. All along the campaign trail we have heard candidates' thoughts on the future of health care, the war in Iraq, and even each other. These debates have generated untold pages of commentary, and it's only too easy to lose track of original quotations. Unlike much of the surrounding rhetoric, these quotations cited in news articles are not conjectures but facts - transcriptions of actual words and thoughts - be they campaign promises, arguments or opinions. Wouldn't it be great if they were easily searchable?

You can search for quotes right at the top of the Google News box; it apparently just shows news if it can't find quotes. At the time of this writing, searches on John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all turn up with news quotes:

Hillary Clinton: "I believe the potential for life begins at conception"

Barack Obama: "You go into those small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone for 25 years and nothing's replaced them"

John McCain: "We need to make a clean break from the worst excesses of both political parties"

I have a policy of not directly talking about my employer on my blog, so I deny all knowledge of the hard work of my cubemates in making this happen. Check it out...
-Anthony