Blog: 2004-02

The U.S. Census Bureau isn't the first party to advise me not to spawn. Helping You Make Informed Decisions

Theologians and ethicists unsettled by new Emacs DNA-editing:

;;; dna-mode.el --- a major mode for editing dna sequences

A suspect Craigslist ad:

last modified: Tue, 24 Feb 15:49 EST

Two Future Doctors - ww4m - 23
Date: 2004-02-24, 2:52PM EST

My roomate and I are both 23 year old single, attractive girls who attend Harvard Medical School by day and love to party at night! We both grew up in a very conservative, rural environment (catholic school, strict parents, etc.) and now that we're in the big city we're ready to cut loose. Growing up in small towns we weren't sure how to initiate this sort of thing, but we're looking for a fun loving straight male, ages 18-40, who likes to drink, dance, stay out late and then get wild and freaky with us. Looks aren't that important to us, just a good personality and no inhibitions. If this sounds like you contact us and tell us a little about yourself.

"Buffalo Soldiers" (2001) is a passable way to kill 98 minutes, and casting seemed good, but the perspective behind the attempt at satire was unclear.

"Spellbound" was good, and cleverly done, if still a bit slow in parts. Watched while working.

You really have to see it in action to believe the degree. Perhaps it works so well because it is so unbelieveable — students trust the institution will do the right thing in the end, and so attempt to work with it, while the institution silently works against the student. This happens in situations more harmful than I imagine Naomi Wolf's. I second the advice to get a good lawyer.

I am ashamed of what I tell them: that they should indeed worry about making an accusation because what they fear is likely to come true. Not one of the women I have heard from had an outcome that was not worse for her than silence. One, I recall, was drummed out of the school by peer pressure. Many faced bureaucratic stonewalling. Some women said they lost their academic status as golden girls overnight; grants dried up, letters of recommendation were no longer forthcoming. No one was met with a coherent process that was not weighted against them. Usually, the key decision-makers in the college or university — especially if it was a private university — joined forces to, in effect, collude with the faculty member accused; to protect not him necessarily but the reputation of the university, and to keep information from surfacing in a way that could protect other women. The goal seemed to be not to provide a balanced forum, but damage control. [...] The saddest part? If a Yale undergraduate came to me today with a bad secret to tell, I still could not urge her to speak up confidently to those tasked with educating, supporting, and mentoring her. I would not direct her to her faculty adviser, the grievance committee, or her dean. Wishing that Bart Giamatti's beautiful welcoming speech to my class about Yale's meritocracy were really true, I would, with a heavy heart, advise that young woman, for her own protection, to get a good lawyer.

—Naomi Wolf, "The Silent Treatment," New York Magazine, 1-March-2004 edition

Glancing at an OnJava.com article on the Java logging API, you can tell they have a sense of humor. (No, I'm not switching from Scheme back to Java just yet. Wrote some simple Syslog bindings for MzScheme, and wanted more ideas on higher-level abstractions.)

Finally saw "Roger & Me," the other night. Funny, and a nice little PR torpedo for a certain automaker CEO, but I wish Michael Moore had spent less time harassing the peasants and building the Michael Moore myth.

The Jayson Blair scandal at the NYT made me temporarily forget about the Judith Miller one. William E. Jackson Jr., "'NY Times' Fails to Acknowledge Its Role in WMD Hype," Editor & Publisher, 18-Feb-2004

"Henry Fool"

"The Luzhin Defence"

Dilbert tackles disruptive innovations labs.

Anyone in Cambridge/Boston who is not sleeping late with their valentine(s), bring him/her/them to Chomsky at 1pm in MIT Kresge.

Oh! I thought you said "sex degrees of separation"!

Family values:

The parishioners — many of them children, some as young as 7 — held signs that read, "Remember Sodom and Gomorrah." A gay man argued with the group. "God does love you," an adult parishioner told the man. Another urged him to repent. Then the name-calling began. A black teenager in the church group yelled an antigay slur at the man. The man returned fire with a racial slur. "How do you like it?" the man said, as the boy retreated to the back of the group, shocked. "Let him burn in hell!" yelled a girl of about 10 from the church group.

—Yvonne Abraham, "Dueling chants of passion, venom marked scene outside," Boston Globe, 12-Feb-2004

Let's start with the absurd quibble over the word "imminent." The word was, in fact, used by three administration spokesmen to describe the Iraqi threat, while Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld variously described it as "immediate," "urgent," "serious and growing," "terrible," "real and dangerous," "significant," "grave," "serious and mounting," "the unique and urgent threat," "no question of the threat," "most dangerous threat of our time," "a threat of unique urgency," "much graver than anybody could possibly have imagined," and so forth and so on. So, could we can that issue?

—Molly Ivins, "Setting the record straight," WorkingForChange, 10-Feb-2004

Very telling: "sacrament" is of course a religious concept, and totally outside the purview of the state...

Bush signaled the direction of his thinking in last month's State of the Union address, where he stopped just short of endorsing an amendment but said the nation "must defend the sacrament of marriage."

—Mike Allen and Alan Cooperman, "Bush Plans To Back Marriage Amendment," Washington Post, 11-Feb-2004

Boston-area people who oppose the attempt to ban gay marriage through a constitutional ammendment: Rally at the State House, Nurses Hall, at 2pm.

My laptop doesn't use a VPN, and I've been wary of accessing, over wireless, non-SSL'd sensitive sites such as eBay and Web-based email services. So I set up Privoxy on my laptop to relay accesses to such sites through an SSH tunnel to the Privoxy on one of my DSL-connected home systems. The following command, run on the laptop, securely forwards local port 8119 over SSH to host homehost, and on to port 8118 at homehost's loopback address:

ssh -a -N -T -v -x -C -L 8119:127.0.0.1:8118 homehost

Lines like the following in the laptop's Privoxy config file then cause accesses to certain Web sites to go through the encrypted tunnel:

forward .ebay.com  127.0.0.1:8119
forward .yahoo.com 127.0.0.1:8119