Note: not an actual quote from anyoneA couple of days ago, the New York Times posted an article describing
the method by which they prevented British citizens from reading an article about the alleged terrorist plot that was recently foiled.
The short version is that they modified software used to localize advertising to localize their content, preventing the story from appearing to anyone with a British IP address. Their reasoning was that British law prevents the media from revealing details about cases prior to trial.
Now, the purpose of this law is clear, and rather admirable: they don't want people tried by the public before they can be properly tried with all the evidence. Just think of how many publications had been shouting recently that they'd found Jon Benet Ramsey's killer, only to discover that — oops! — the DNA didn't match.
But something like this just gives me an uncomfortable feeling in my gut. I react with guarded displeasure to censorship of any kind, although I can admit that there are circumstances where it can be justified.
Keith Olberman bitch-slapping Donald Rumsfeld, although not about censorship, is a very eloquent reminder of why governments shouldn't be allowed to restrict speech. Tony Long, the copy chief for Wired News,
makes several additional points on the same topic.
Editor Jill Abramson's assertion that "this was preferable to not having it on the Web at all" smacks of Google's justification for censoring search results in China, a position which Google co-creator Sergey Brin later suggested may not have been wise (no link handy for that, sorry).
Preventing the Brits from seeing a story about terror plots is certainly a far cry from kangaroo courts and people disappearing in the middle of the night. But you can see it on a map from here — especially in our current political climate — and that scares me.
They do get one point, though.
At least the Times posted the article explaining what they'd done (again, much like Google openly admitting they were censoring results, especially to those receiving the results). I can certainly give them some credit for that.
I've always been a bit disappointed that the world isn't stranger than it is.
There are weird things in the world; don't get me wrong. But day-to-day living contains few, if any, real surprises. When you go to work, you pretty much know what to expect. When you get together with your friends, you pretty much know what to expect. When you walk into a store, you pretty much know what to expect.
And pretty soon it all starts to blend together, because it's largely the same every time. How many really memorable store visits have you had in your life?
I ask this because a bunch of people apparently decided about a week ago that the world needed to be a bit stranger. So they
invaded a Home Depot in slow motion.
It was a
flash mob: a large group of strangers organized over the Internet to meet at a specific place and time, where they'll receive instructions to do something weird. In this case, that involved going to the local Home Depot and spending five minutes in slow motion, and five minutes frozen.
Reactions from the employees varied from the curmudgeony to the edge of hysterics, with most of them simply finding it very funny.
I think this happened in New York, but I find it encouraging. The world isn't very strange, but that doesn't mean we can't make it stranger. More people need to do things like this.
Think we could get a flash mob going in Erie?
I had a very uncomfortable moment some months ago when I realized that my sister does not believe in evolution.
Now, I'm certainly aware that there are people in the world who hold this view, and — to an extent — I can understand why they would. I just think they're being a bit dense about it. Of course, my perspective is somewhat colored by having actually held some of the physical evidence in my hands.
My sister's objection, at least, is based on her religion, and I can see that. The ones I really don't get are the people who simply refuse to believe it because it doesn't seem to make sense. "I just don't see how you get a cow from a whale," they observe.
Well, no. That's because you haven't had some three billion years to observe the progression. What we
can observe are the tiny changes that occur within our limited span of time, so-called microevolution. In a lot of instances, these are changes that we've caused through selective breeding. We've even created new species.
All of which is a far cry from turning a water creature into a cud-chewing methane factory, I'll admit. But again, it's a question of time. We can make a new species in a matter of years; imagine what we could accomplish in even 100,000 years — an eyeblink on the evolutionary time scale.
Hell, it probably didn't take us more than 10,000 years to make the housecat, the domesticated dog, and the cow. And that was before we even knew what we were doing.
One objection my sister has voiced, however, is that evolution is "just a theory." She's not the first to make the argument, and far from the last. This always seemed to be a really silly argument to me, because the person making it obviously doesn't understand what a scientific theory really means. I've never been terribly great at explaining it, however.
So imagine my delight when I stumbled across
this today. It's easily the clearest and best explanation I've ever seen about how evolution being a theory, rather than a law, is thoroughly immaterial as an argument against it.
Read it, if you doubt me. I'll take your questions later.
Looks like the great Pluto debate will
soon be decided. If you're not aware, the astronomical community has been arguing for years now over whether or not Pluto is, in fact, a planet.
The problem stems from the fact that, if Pluto's a planet, so are a number of other objects. There is no formal definition of the word "planet" that leaves us with exactly nine in our solar system. The two front-runner theories put us either at eight by excluding Pluto from the mix, or twelve by adding Pluto's moon Charon, an asteroid named Ceres — which was considered a planet when it was first discovered — and another celestial body nicknamed Xena (yes, after the warrior princess).
Apparently, this all gets decided tomorrow. Grade school book publishers, I imagine, are in a frenzy.
What's really interesting about this, aside from the altering of one of the fundamental facts of our early education, is the personal stake people assume in this issue (something first brought to my attention by my friend J.R.). Look at some of the quotes from this article:
'Opponents "smell blood, and I think they're going to get it," Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., said on the eve of a vote by members of the International Astronomical Union.'
'Suddenly, the future looks dim for much-maligned Pluto, which is smaller than Earth's moon.'
'"Some say, 'No, Pluto is a nice planet'" and should remain one, Watanabe said.'
"Smell blood"? "Much-maligned"? "Nice planet"? It's a tiny, cold rock spinning erratically through space, farther out than any of us can hope to travel in our lifetime.
What's even crazier, though, is that I sort of get it. Pluto's small, and cold, and alone, and
weird. Well, okay, having a moon sort of kills the "alone" part, but you catch my drift: it's the cosmic underdog. The Little Planet that Could (even though a planet doesn't really do anything, other than spin). And, if you're given to personification, it's the planet that's the most like any particular person who's geeky enough to care about the issue.
Sis, add "I am Pluto" to the list of t-shirts I will one day make for my own amusement. Perhaps with a graphic of tiny little Pluto, dwarfed by his bigger brothers, giving them all the finger.
Of course, having said all of this, I now have to admit that I actually favor dropping it as a planet. I don't know why, but it makes more sense to me to have eight planets than it does to have twelve. It seems tidier. Or maybe it seems like, once we start calling moons and asteroids planets, the door's open to start planetmaking all willy-nilly, and eventually it won't be anything special to be a planet anymore.
And again: why this emotional investment in the solar system?
I don't really have an answer. But tomorrow — for good, ill, or indifference — our universe changes.
It probably says nothing good about me that
this is the funniest damned thing I've seen in a long time.
I nearly stopped breathing at this:
And then Sir Neville made hym redy, wyth one spere he smote hem downe al thre over ther horses croups. This kynde of thynge was ful yn his style, for hys verye wallet hath ‘bad motherswyvere’ on it ywrit.
Of course, what do you expect from a dork who's proud of the fact that he owns the complete works of Chaucer in the original Middle English?
Okay, no more composing posts in Word for me. It's nice that Blogger's composing window picks up on the HTML embedded in the document, so that things like links are carried over easily, but it also picks up all the crap HTML for which Word is infamous.
I
still have no idea what an
<o:p> tag is supposed to be.
Might be time to give Open Office another go.
The head of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry wants to
fill the sky with sulfur.
The intention, I guess, is to form a kind of second ozone layer; the sulfur particles will reflect the sun’s heat back out into space, preventing a good bit of it from reaching the Earth and accelerating the global temperature. The article linked above cites evidence (volcanic eruptions) that suggests this would actually work.
It’s a temporary solution, since the sulfur particles would only last a few years. Presumably, they could be replenished, although I imagine the cost would make it impractical in any great frequency.
I have nowhere near enough scientific acumen to argue with someone who’s been in the field for over fifty years. Hell, I don’t have the legs to argue with someone who’s got a hard science bachelor’s degree. But this just seems like a bad idea.
As one commenter on the article points out, volcanic eruptions — and the proposed measure here is, essentially, an artificial volcanic eruption without the flaming chunks of rock and lava falling from the sky — carry a variety of unpleasant after-effects, like acid rain.
But the Earth has survived massive eruptions before, some with climatic effects severe enough to drop snow on Hawaii in July (I’d pull up a reference for that one, but my sister stole the Childcraft books for her daughter). The fact that this is a very temporary move, then, could actually work in its favor.
Crutzen’s not proposing it as the solution, merely something to stave off
bad Kevin Costner movies for a few more years. If nothing else, maybe it’d give Florida and Louisiana a year or two to catch their breath.
I hesitate to say that it’s worth a shot, but… well… maybe it is.
Well, after talking about this silly thing for months, I've finally decided to sit down and do it.
And, as is my nature, I overthought it nearly to death. I already had a title and a purpose, so those weren't sticking points. No, the real question was this: where to host it?
The obvious choice would be LiveJournal. Several friends and at least one sibling have LiveJournal accounts, and posting it there would enable me to make use of the social features they have (I could finally be on somebody's friends list, and wouldn't that be a thrill?).
But I'm not particularly fond of LiveJournal (despite having claimed to be in a cover letter I once sent them; I am nothing if not mercenary). Their pages are -- and my apologies to those friends who have them -- rather ugly most of the time. For reasons I still don't understand, comment threading doesn't work in Firefox. And the code... it's just hideous.
I'm something of a code nazi, you see. Ask my coworkers. Few things make me happier than being able to fit the code for an entire web page on a single screen because it's that clean and concise. Every time I look at a new site, I hit "view source." It's a compulsion; I can't help it. Half the time, I haven't even consciously decided to do it.
So therein lay my criteria: I have to like the look, and I have to like the code.
It would suite the rigorous logician in me to state that I investigated many options, compared features, and maybe even went so far as to interview satisfied and dissatisfied users. I am, however, supremely lazy and did none of these things. Fortunately, I had encountered a number of Blogger pages before, and always liked the look of them.
So I checked out the code. The pages have an XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype (which I'll likely explain in a later post somewhere), which is good. They're technically not valid XHTML -- meaning they're not correctly written -- but only because the JavaScript included in the pages hasn't been correctly marked as character data (again, something I'll attempt to expain at a later point). So I figured I'd give it a go.
When I got to the part where you select your blog's template, I noticed that they listed the designers for each template. Jeffrey Zeldman. Dave Shea. Douglas Bowman. The very people whose articles I read when I'm trying to figure out how to make my own code better.
And that's all I needed.
