Godwin’s law alert

From Yahoo!:

A teenager is suing her school district for barring her from the prom last spring because she was wearing a dress styled as a large Confederate battle flag.

It’s a pity that the Hong Kong boutique Izzue (no link; I don’t link to morons who have Flash-only sites unless I’m making fun of them) stopped selling their Nazi-themed clothes. If they hadn’t, just think of how many Ohio schoolchildren of German descent could have worn Izzue’s clothes with the argument that the aforementioned Kentucky teen made:

“Everyone has their own opinion. But that’s not mine,” she told reporters outside the courthouse. “I’m proud of where I came from and my background.”

17:28 EST | permalink | /issues/free-speech

Originals from the 1st-amendment cases

Via Volokh: original documents from famous free-speech cases. My only regret is that they don’t have the complete text of the speech in Bethel vs. Fraser, although it is exerpted in the decision:

Respondent gave the following speech at a high school assembly in support of a candidate for student government office:

“‘I know a man who is firm – he’s firm in his pants, he’s firm in his shirt, his character is firm – but most . . . of all, his belief in you, the students of Bethel, is firm.

“‘Jeff Kuhlman is a man who takes his point and pounds it in. If necessary, he’ll take an issue and nail it to the wall. He doesn’t attack things in spurts – he drives hard, pushing and pushing until finally – he succeeds.

“‘Jeff is a man who will go to the very end – even the climax, for each and every one of you.

“‘So vote for Jeff for A. S. B. vice-president – he’ll never come between you and the best our high school can be.’”

15:32 EST | permalink | /issues/free-speech

I wonder if this is the joke issue

2004 President Resigns In Plagiarism Scandal

By Emily M. Craparo

Two months after their election to class of 2004 president and vice president, Alvin M. Lin and Nikhil S. Gidwani resigned in the wake of revelations that their campaign platform was largely plagiarized. The positions remain vacant.

Gah. You should at least be creative with your empty promises and cloying platitudes. (It’s not as though anyone’s going to call you on them!) But here’s the best part:

Lin’s apology letter to the class of 2004, drafted to announce his resignation, itself contained a sentence from President Clinton’s 1998 speech to the nation admitting an affair with Monica Lewinsky.

I wonder if Clinton wrote that sentence himself, or if an uncredited speechwriter did.

(N.B.: 90% of this article is lifted from The Tech. Ha! —Ed.)

00:04 EST | permalink | /academics/mit

Egregious Abuses of the Internet, #25913

So, there I am, innocently reading a Wikipedia article on a man of leading cultural significance. Then I follow the link to the Amazon.com page for his biography. For some reason, Amazon treats ELinks users to a “Sponsored Links” section that Firefox users don’t get to see. And one of the sponsored links, for reasons I cannot fathom was…

Lonely Wives Club: A dating site for married people.

From their “Testimonials” section:

charact55 Maryland-Baltimore
Lately, it seems like when dealing with females, all there is is emotional problems. But on LonleyWives, most of the women just want to have fun, and that is music to my ears.

Nope, nosiree, I can’t imagine the crew on this site would have any emotional problems. Seeking clandestine romantic fulfillment elsewhere is the hallmark of a healthy relationship and stable emotional status.

I am sorely tempted to submit this as an ALOD. Or maybe I’ll just start my own section for these: I’ll call it OMG Egregious Internet Abuse – or OMGEAI. Hmmmm… In fact, I will do that. Watch this category.

04:40 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/omgeai

Lose your virginity, win a prepaid cellphone!

Below is an unedited advertisement which appeared on a MBTA Red Line train:

My, how far we’ve come in the past fifty years.

(I should also note that some people disapprove of the racial stereotypes potrayed in this ad.)

14:59 EST | permalink | /issues/sex-ed

Inspector Proctor

Alex Kazazis placed the collected Inspector Proctor strips online for your enjoyment. I suggest reading them all (there are only twelve), but if you’re pressed for time, this is one of my favorites.

23:16 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Some people need to go back to school

From the Crimson, an unfortunate choice of metaphor:

City Debates Israeli Holdings

Somerville lawmakers consider proposals to pull funds from Israel

One supporter was quoted as saying:

“The failure to confront racism and apartheid is demoralizing a little bit,” said Kareem Talhouni, a Cambridge resident sporting a “Free Palestine” pin on his shirt. “But South Africa was freed from apartheid. David did beat Goliath in the end.”

I really, really, really wish I’d been there to ask “Kareem, David slew Goliath in defense of what ancient country?”

Update!

Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 16:00:25 -0800 (PST)
From: Kareem Talhouni 
Subject: Barillari's Blog - Dec 8, 04
To: joseph@barillari.org

Hiya Joe,

I really, really, really wish you had been at the
Somerville Divestment hearing too, so I could have
explained the concept of irony to you...

Toodles,
Kareem

Let no-one say that I didn’t grant equal time.

22:36 EST | permalink | /world/israel

Pah. Poseurs.

As Seen on Drudge: A NM T-shirt shop sells a “Going Canadian” kit including a shirt, backpack patch, and pin to help Americans pose as citizens of the Arctic paradise while abroad.

According to the article, the State Department has encouraged Americans going abroad not to wear anything that might identify them as such.

May I suggest this go-incognito kit? I doubt that many foreigners will catch on, but it will be instantly recognizable to any American abroad. Identify yourself to your countrymen! Of course, they’ll think you’re a nutcase, but you can’t have everything.

14:11 EST | permalink | /world/canada

JP topic on spatial annotation

Using the campus map and floorplan info at http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg , write a program that outputs a TADS or Inform source code file that contains a spatially correct MIT campus. Bonus points for handling corridors correctly (easy method: split them when you run out of reasonable exit directions to use), more bonus points for building a reasonable model of the outside map. Extra super bonus points for descriptive text of the public areas.

I’m tempted to try this myself.

22:42 EST | permalink | /academics/mit

Oversloganated

The heck with “bench to bedside.” I’d like to see some “bench to bedroom” technology transfer.

(I’m adding the former to the “overused slogans in biomedical research” list.)

20:04 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

Quite possibly the best name for a blog, ever

This post at attracted my attention because it was linked from Instapundit. I subscribed to the blog’s RSS feed on the spot, just so I could have the “Protocols of the Yuppies of Zion” in my subscription list.

21:42 EST | permalink | /world/iraq

Election wrapups from other blogs

Volokh links to a Newsweek story about the Bush and Kerry campaigns:

In the summer of 2002, his aides had been relieved that no cameras had captured the would-be Democratic nominee, in full cry at a gay fund-raiser on New York’s Fire Island, shouting out, “If Bill Clinton could be the first black president, I can be the first gay president!”

And to a wonderful Telegraph column about American voters:

…you can’t be a redneck in Spain or Italy: when the birthrates are 1.1 and 1.2 children per couple, there are no sisters to shag.

15:29 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

Special Jurisprudential Corps

Has there been an occupying force in human history that sent in a battalion of lawyers to handle complaints after pacifying a city?

[On the pending incursion into Fallujah.] Marine lawyers will be ready to handle compensation claims for battle damage and to help verify any violations of the laws of warfare. —The New York Times

This really is a new kind of war.

20:27 EST | permalink | /world/iraq

The tragedy of the mirror image

Members of the National Socialist party of China demonstrate near Harvard Yard. Film at eleven.

Or maybe it’s just Falun Gong. Either way, I’m nervous.

15:39 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

3 a.m. in Maxwell Dworkin

Remember, kids, you can’t spell ‘algorithms’ without ‘orgsam’!

(Apologies to /usr/bin/fortune.)

02:38 EST | permalink | /computers/compsci

Canterbridgian pugnaciousness

I spotted a Brit on my hallway wearing a Bush/Cheney ‘04 sweatshirt. When I observed that I didn’t often see that sort of thing around here, he explained that it was purely ironic – he was 23 years old, and had never been in a fight. This, he suspected, would be a good way to provoke one. I suggested a Yankees shirt. He explained that he’d been trying to get one, but before he could, they lost the playoffs.

19:30 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

Makes you want to donate to the Porc, doesn’t it?

Shut Down Final Clubs

[snip]

Final clubs are only the most direct representation of the patriarchy structurally inherent at Harvard. The power dynamics between men and women on a Friday night at the Spee are mirrored in the rest of life on campus—men speak more than women in class, students will have more male professors, sexual assault happens and goes unreported and men are likely to be much more financially successful after college, in part because of the networks that final clubs enable.

[snip]

Men have space and resources at Harvard. Women don’t. Where can female students go to feel safe? Often, people propose getting a student center, or even buildings for women’s clubs, as the best solution. Yet though Harvard needs new social spaces, they cannot coexist with final clubs. Women’s clubs not only have several centuries of power and resources to catch up with, but they also reinforce heterosexist gender binary and economic exclusiveness. While elite male clubs exist, women cannot be equal anywhere on Harvard’s campus.

[snip]

Julia M. Lewandowski ‘06, is a history and literature concentrator in Dudley House. She is co-founder of SASSI-WOOFCLUBS, Students Against Super Sexist Institutions - We Oppose Oppressive Final Clubs. For more information about SASSI-WOOFCLUBS , e-mail lewand@fas.harvard.edu.

Sassy Woofclubs?

19:26 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

Metroliner and the decline of morality

Client thought ad was “…too risque, and implies that Amtrak promotes casual sex.”

Ad here. Complete series starts here. Via boingboing, which is great when it avoids George-W-Bush-related-conspiracy theories.

22:47 EST | permalink | /media

How NOT to run a campaign website

The race for Stark County prosecutor is between

John D. Ferrero, Jr. ( http://keepferrero.com/ )

and

Jeffrey Jakmides ( http://www.geocities.com/jakmides4prosecutor/ )

Geocities? Geocities!? This must be a gag campaign.

I’m tempted to submit this as an Awful Link of the Day.

Update: just did:

Jeffrey Jakmides is running to be prosecutor of Stark County, Ohio against John D. Ferrero, Jr. ( http://keepferrero.com/ ). It’s a Geocities website. It looks like it was designed in 1992. This guy will be responsible for prosecuting murderers, theives, and rapists.
Need I say more? (I ended up voting for the guy with the better website.)

Update 2: The wankers at SA won’t accept Geocities ALODs because of bandwidth issues. Bah.

15:03 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

OMG!!! B3st Da5id Br00k5 column EVAR!

Here.

16:32 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

Did he buy a matching helmet?

Via LGF: for a biased wire service (depending on whom you believe), Reuters’s photographers haven’t been going to much effort to make Sen. Kerry look good:

17:17 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

Protectionism

“We shut the loophole which has American workers actually subsidizing the loss of their own job. They just passed an expansion of that loophole in the last few days: $43 billion of giveaways, including favors to the … people importing … fans from China.” — Sen. John Kerry, October 8

Hmm. Fans like these?

Both of you – I’m sorry. Couldn’t resist.

14:13 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

The talking points guy must have been out to lunch

• “Civilians get onto aircraft, and their luggage is X-rayed, but the cargo hold is not X- rayed.” —Sen. Kerry, Sept. 29.

• “When you get on an airplane, your bag is X- rayed, but the cargo hold isn’t X-rayed. Do you feel safer?” —Sen. Kerry, Oct. 8.

• “People who fly on airplanes today, the cargo hold is not X-rayed, but the baggage is.” —Sen. Kerry, Oct. 13.

There it is – in EVERY PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE, Sen. Kerry managed to mention that airplane baggage is X-rayed, but airplane cargo holds aren’t.

First, the obvious: if a terrorist can get a bomb onto a plane without slipping it onto his person or into his baggage (for instance, because he’s a mechanic, baggage handler, or flight crew member), chances are good that he can slip it onboard after any cargo-hold X-ray screening.

Second, how on earth do you X-ray a cargo hold? Do you put the ENTIRE PLANE in a hanger-sized X-ray machine? Do you paste X-ray film all over the outer hull and have a guy walk through the inside with a portable X-ray source, sweeping the walls and hoping that he doesn’t get cancer? Has anyone, anywhere, ever, X-rayed the entire cargo hold of a large commercial airliner, much less in the 30-to-60 minutes of cleaning/prep time typically allocated between flights?

Why does Sen. Kerry keep mentioning this?

Incidentally, Sen. Edwards flubbed it on Oct. 5 : “We’re screening our passengers going onto airplanes, but we don’t screen the cargo.” Maybe he’s referring to cargo planes (FedEx, etc.) I doubt it.

02:32 EST | permalink | /issues/terrorism

Words that should never be used together. Ever.

“Prayer breakfast.”

20:44 EST | permalink | /issues/political-excess

Filking columns

I just came across this blog entry, which I’ve had sitting around for some time and never bothered to post. I realize that Mr. Derbyshire is himself involved in an interracial marriage, but nevertheless, I couldn’t resist posting it. The original column (which should be skimmed first) is here.

19:40 EST | permalink | /issues/homosexuality

Only at MIT, part 3

“Did you know that just under half of the men at MIT pledge (i.e. join) a fraternity?” (rush.mit.edu)

• “Each semester Theta Chi’s GPA is consistently among the highest of all living groups.” — Theta Chi

• “…our house GPA is typically one of the highest among all fraternities,” — Nu Delta

• “We have one of the highest GPAs of all fraternities at MIT…” — Chi Phi

• “Our house GPA is consistently one of the top 5 on or off campus.” — Alpha Epsilon Pi

• “For the past couple of years, we have maintained a grade point average that is well above the all-men’s average, and one of the highest on campus - a 4.47 on a 5 point scale.” — Phi Sigma Kappa

• “With one of the largest varsity athlete populations on campus, along with the 3rd best GPA on campus (4.4/5.0),…” — Phi Delta Theta

• “Yes, our GPA is significantly higher than the campus average, but to us academics go beyond numbers.” — Zeta Beta Tau

• “Additionally, our house GPA is one of the best on campus.” — Theta Xi

• “…we’ve consistently had one of the highest GPAs on campus…” — Sigma Chi

• “SigEp brothers consistently maintain a high house GPA…” — Sigma Phi Epsilon

21:47 EST | permalink | /academics/mit

kerryse.cx

Thanks to Carlos for the link and Yahoo!/AFP for the photo.

01:51 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

No comment

15:45 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

Best PAW letter ever

I am a member of the Old Guard who was back for my 70th reunion and rode in a cart in the P-rade. I watched the younger classes march and was struck by the length and slowness thereof. It was longer and slower than the Death March on Bataan, thanks to the babies and dogs, which, in my estimation, do not have a legitimate place in the P-rade.

I recognize that the younger classes are larger than they used to be and that Princeton is now co-ed, but in the interest of a shorter and quicker P-rade, I suggest that participation be limited to persons 18 or older.

N. Conover English ‘34
Liberty Corner, N.J.

(Original here).

09:06 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

It doesn’t take long to become a curmudgeonly alum

In fact, I think I was one before I even registered as a freshman. (Note that the Princeton alumni association grants alum-status to anyone who matriculates at Princeton, so all I needed was the “curmudgeonly” part.)

But I’m not the only one. The Daily Princetonian’s new “Street” section features a sex columnist, Rachel Axelbank, who ruffled the feathers of a pair of recent alums with such tasteless gems as “cobwebs in her panties,” and “porking the circling buzzard.”

Rachel’s pants-happy prose also tripped my vulgarity threshold, but what irritated me the most was not the vulgarity, but the tendency — endemic to sex columnists — to dance around the issues with cute-yet-disgusting euphemisms. By contrast, I’m a firm believer in straight talk. As such, if I were still a Prince columnist (and had the necessary cojonoes*), I’d submit this, which I’ve had sitting around for several months, which I suspect would get me hauled before at least one of the University’s disciplinary committees, and which no-one would accuse of skirting the issues.

* Cute vulgarism.

13:06 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

License Raj

Under my proposals, any given person might be granted a license to raise children, or a license to write newspaper editorials. Never, ever, would anyone be granted both – the reasons why are obvious.

23:33 EST | permalink | /media

Work-avoidance mode

This site always gets more attention when I should be doing real work – as such, revamped the photos section’s layout, uploaded a whole mess of new photos, and even started organizing them by keyword.

If you should be doing something useful right now, by all means, have a look.

01:16 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/blog

Aftermath of the latest outage

The barillari.org server’s motherboard (a GA-7VRXP 2.0) bought it several weeks ago, and barillari.org has been offline ever since. My apologies. I’ve recently resurrected it. There may be further downtime in the future, until the server moves to Boston with me at the beginning of September.

22:16 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/outages

Heh.

“Telemarketers are annoying. But lumping them into the same chapter as torturers and terrorists is going a bit too far!”

21:45 EST | permalink | /issues/terrorism

Notes from California

The setting: the California State Secretary of Education, confronted with a very precious child, puts her in her place:

The conversation, videotaped by KEYT-TV, took place July 1. The girl, 6-year-old Isis D’Luciano, asked Riordan if he knew her name meant “Egyptian goddess.”

Riordan replied, “It means stupid dirty girl.”

After nervous laughter in the room, the girl again told Riordan the meaning of her name.

I can scarcely think of a better way to respond. But that’s not the best part. Busybodies all over Cali have called for his resignation – this isn’t the first time he’s managed to offend people:

As mayor, he once greeted hunger strikers outside his office eating a hamburger.

I’m ready to nominate this guy for President. But that still isn’t the best part of the story:

Democratic state Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, who had scheduled a protest by civil rights organizations, canceled the demonstration after an apparent mix-up over the girl’s racial background.

Dymally was quoted in the San Jose Mercury News Thursday saying the child was “a little African-American girl. Would he (Riordan) have done that to a white girl?”

The girl is white, with blonde hair.

It’s times like these that I almost want to go into politics.

21:52 EST | permalink | /world/california

And it keeps the flammable-flag industry in business, to boot

Interesting observation in an Atlantic Monthly interview with British historian Niall Ferguson:

Not too long ago I was living in southern Thailand, the Muslim part of the country, and we could buy colorful Osama bin Laden t-shirts and magazines with images of George Bush with horns coming out of his head. It seems like the U.S. is losing more credibility every day, especially in the Muslim world. Aren’t you worried that the bald-faced wielding of American power will risk delegitimizing the American Empire?

In a way, if you are the imperial power you have to accept that people are going to hate you however you go about spreading your influence. One of the problems Americans have is this desire to be loved. Legitimacy isn’t necessarily based on affection. It’s based on credibility. And I think what we’re seeing in Iraq is just the latest in a series of tests of American resolve and credibility. It’s not the hatred one should worry about, it’s the contempt. The legitimacy that the United States will achieve if it makes a success of Iraq will outweigh the inevitable resentment. You need to be respected. And the United States has a long way to go before it attains that respect, most obviously in the Middle East.

23:14 EST | permalink | /history/usa

Incidentally, for the purposes of school lunches, it’s a vegetable

Some people read Playboy for the articles. I read the National Review for the ads.

12:25 EST | permalink | /issues/w

Low Priced! Huge Selection!

No comment.

20:45 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

barillari.org reestablished

barillari.org is now at its summer home. The pipe here is much narrower (cable modem vs. massive massive campus bandwidth), so go easy on the spidering.

23:31 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/outages

Outage beginning

Barillari.org will be shutting down today. It will be back up in a few days, operating from its summer location.

09:52 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/outages

Potential outages

This site may be offline periodically in the coming weeks, starting June 2. Any outages should be temporary.

23:43 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/outages

Update on photos

Photos are being updated in near-real-time. Check the photos page for details. If one of the links just gives you a directory listing, rather than a contact sheet, it’s still being updated – just check back in ten minutes or so.

Update: The photo count is nearly 1500.

22:00 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble/reunions

1954/2004

Larger version

18:02 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble/reunions

On a related comic note

Publishers encumbered with unsold magazines sell them to paper recycling plants where they are turned into toilet roll. One popular adult manga satire of the manga world, published in 1991, suggested that the toilet paper manufactured from pulped manga magazines is used by male manga readers to masturbate neatly while reading subsequent issues of manga (Akihara and Takekuma 1991).

—Adult Manga: Culture & Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Sharon Kinsella, 2000.

One hopes that EU manga below was not used for either of these purposes. Especially the latter.

23:59 EST | permalink | /world/japan

Euromanga

Who says the Europeans aren’t doing anything to combat racism? (If you don’t like PDFs and are on the campus, Firestone has a copy – I stumbled across this there.)

Here’s a great snippet:

An artificial world where no-one is ugly, no-one is fat, where there are no blacks or asians! All sunshine and happiness! […] Under the guise of humor, we are bombarded with clichés and I’m sure it becomes even more difficult to deal with reality. In real life there’s rain, asians, fat people, and plenty of nastiness.

23:55 EST | permalink | /world/eu

Bloomberg at work

According to the NY Times, a pack of “brand-name” cigarattes now costs at least $7 in NYC.

According to one of those sketchy discount pharmacy sites I found with Google, a 20-pack of nicotine gum (when purchased in a box of 63 packs) is $4.85.

In New York, it’s now cheaper to chew nicotine gum than it is to smoke.

What happens when a New Yorker who took up gum to save money wants to quit?

Will they have to start smoking?

13:26 EST | permalink | /issues/public_health

It’s an I’m-glad-I-had-a-camera moment.

I wonder if this guy noticed that he drives an SUV?

20:13 EST | permalink | /issues/petrochemicals

Bowling for Castro

Carlos dragged me along to see Commandante, the Oliver Stone puff-piece on Fidel Castro. I must admit that I fell asleep at least twice during the 90-minute film (which wasn’t helped by the excruciatingly hot screening room), but my impression of the parts for which I was awake was pretty much the same one that this gave me.

23:32 EST | permalink | /world/cuba

Columnar conclusion

My most-likely concluding column as a columnist for the Prince is online.

18:50 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Necroterrorism

Third hit on Google for “necroterrorists” (I guess they’re funded by smuggling corpses instead of drugs, like their narco- cousins) is an index of “death metal” bands. I’ll file this in the “people who take themselves way too seriously” category:

INTERPRET	TITEL	KATEGORIE	MEMBER
Gardens of Gehenna	Dead body music	sonstiges	meden
Genital Grinder	Genital Grinder	death metal	meden
Gholgoth	Somnus Mortis Imago	Black Metal	meden
Ghoulunatics	King of the undead	death metal	meden
Gnosis	Another selfmade luminary	speed thrash	meden
Gnostic	Evoking the demon	Black Metal	meden
God Dethroned	Ravenous	death metal	meden
Godless	Let there be darkness	Black Metal	meden
Godless North	Summon the age of supremacy	Black Metal	meden
Godz at war	Postmortem	death metal	meden
Gold Fuer Eisen	Heimat	heavy metal	cyberbloodgoat
Golden Pyre	Necroterrorists	death metal	meden
Golem	Death never dies	death metal	meden
Gomorrha	Sexual perversity by autopsy	death metal	meden
Gorath	Haunting the december chords	Black Metal	meden
Gore Blister	Art bleeds	death metal	meden
Gorelord	Zombie Suicicde Part 666	death metal	meden
Goretrade	Ritual of flesh	death metal	meden

22:25 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web/weirdness

Redlining the postmodernism meter

Militants in Fallujah burn their own flag. I guess they ran out of American flags:

(I’m aware that the new Iraqi flag looks entirely too much like the Israeli flag to satisfy the hardline types, but it’s still ridiculous.)

Image swiped from Yahoo! News/Reuters.

20:12 EST | permalink | /world/iraq

At last

Top Bush administration officials said Wednesday that restrictions on the entry of foreigners have prompted many to shun travel to the United States since 2001. They recommended that the constraints be reviewed.

“This hurts us,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said, citing a 30 percent decline in overseas visits to the United States over 2 1/2 years. “It’s is not serving our interests. And so we really do have to work on it.”

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said the security benefits derived from the post-Sept. 11 restrictions have had unwanted economic side effects.

If they actually move to fix the problem, we just might cut down on incidents like this.

02:17 EST | permalink | /issues/immigration

Up, up, and ever up

The latest Prince column is up. Click for discussion of overindulgent course ratings.

21:49 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Only on Teh Interweb

Schicklgruber and Dzhugashvili could have made a deal, but Hitler and Stalin cannot!

A superhero comic featuring Adolf Hitler and Joe Stalin. Succinct. (Scoll down for the English translation.)

00:46 EST | permalink | /history/germany

Details, details

Signing up for every mailing list in sight back in September 2000 was one of the best decisions I ever made at Princeton. It keeps me abreast of developments like this:

From: Debra Bazarsky <bazarsky@PRINCETON.EDU>
Subject: Additional LGBT-Related Events of Interest
To: LGBTSS@PRINCETON.EDU
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 16:36:11 -0400
Reply-To: bazarsky@PRINCETON.EDU

These are additional Princeton events that are of interest to the LGBT
community:
 
[...]
 
1. Protest Against DETAILS Magazine!
Asianmediawatchdog.com will be holding a protest against Details on
Friday, April 16 from 11:30am to 1:30pm (*Note the time change*). In
front of Fairchild Building, 7W34th Street in Manhattan. It's between
5th Avenue and 6th Avenue, closer to 5th Avenue. It's right in front
of Empire State Building.  Details magazine published a feature in its
April 2004 issue titled, “Gay or Asian” that described Asian American
men using offensive terms like “bonsai ass” and “sashimi-smooth
chest.” To view the page, visit www.asianmediawatchdog.com and click
on “Details Magazine.” If you have questions, please contact Julius
Chen (zjchen@Princeton.EDU) of AASA.

If you click on over to asianmediawatchdog.com, they have a list of perfectly reasonable “demands” for the editors of Details magazine:

We demand that Details

1. Admitts responsability and gives a real apology, a full page ad from the Editors and Whitney McNally.
2. Positive and diverse representations of all APAs and LGBT APAs in details.
3. Diversity sensitivity training for all editors and writers (possibly by AAJA).

But that’s not the best part. The best part is that they reproduced the entire damned page on their website! (I would never have heard of this magazine if not for this tiff. It sounds wonderfully tasteless.)

20:13 EST | permalink | /issues/homosexuality

OMG!!!!!111!!1!!! Redux

Second in a series.

Another instance of trolling at Princeton! The Prince reports that a controversy has marred the contest for the ‘06 presidential race:

It all started 1:39 p.m. Sunday, when Matt Mims ‘06 sent an email to Quadrangle Club’s email forum, requesting recipients to look at one of Thompson’s recent campaign emails.

Mims specifically pointed out one sentence in Thompson’s email — “Let’s get chris lloyd Out of office” — and argued that the capital ‘O’ in “Out” was a deliberate jab at Lloyd’s open homosexuality, “telling us that this is a reason we should vote against him.”

Within a few hours, a dozen emails were sent to the forum on the topic, including one from Thompson and several from his friends, who vigorously defended him and questioned Mims’ logic. Eventually, the flurry of emails died down, but feelings are still raw on both sides.

Alex reminded me that this is a reprise of the alleged “fniger” controversy on Slashdot, as recorded by Trollaxor.

Lastly we must not forget another thing that’ll cause all-around general trolling mayhem on Slashdot: [Slashdot chief editor Rob] Malda’s detestable spelling habits. The one time he was commenting on a story about disabling the finger server on UNIX systems, he misspelled finger as fniger. WHOA. The whole Slashdot community was up in arms over what was percieved as a barely hidden racial slur. To “stop the fniger server” was taken to mean that blacks shouldn’t be using Linux!!! What an idiot Rob Malda is, whether or not the “fniger fiasco” was intentional. 5/5 of all story submissions that day were trolls, and the signal to noise ratio mutated to 4:1 (troll:legit) for 3 days straight after.

It’s also the second time in the space of a few weeks that the Prince has covered trolling. Is a trend emerging?

18:02 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Absolute links

After the n-th person mentioned it to me, I finally changed the relative links in the RSS feed to absolute ones. If you still can’t see the images or click the links, drop me a line.

12:03 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/blog

Perennial-ism

6 April 2004: My biweekly column: “…perennial Prospect apologist Zachary Goldstein…”

7 April 2004: Zachary Goldstein’s letter to the editor: “…Prospect’s perennial gadfly, Joseph Barillari…”

It boggles the mind to think that some people have the gall to call the Nass “narcissistically self-indulgent.”

15:20 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Filmed entertainment

I recently discovered this short film on the Internet. It’s attributed to Leni Riefenstahl, although I can find no record on the canonical websites of it being part of her oeuvre. There are no markings within film as to its title, date or author, although the filename called it Apell der Jugend, filmed (apparently) at the Luitpoldarena.

I would not be at all surprised if it were indeed a Riefenstahl film, but I have not seen enough non-Riefenstahl films from the period to make that judgment with any authority. (Note, however, the opening shot of the trumpet; it is reminiscent of the close-up shots of the coxswains’ mouth-megaphones in the second half of Olympia.)

There is also a version with subtitles, although its quality is much lower.

I’m assuming that whatever copyright was attached to these films expired along with the Third Reich, although I will be happy to remove them if informed otherwise. Also, if anyone has any clues as to the film’s genuine title and origin, please do drop me a line.

Update: I just noticed that this is actually a low-quality transfer of ten minutes of footage from the middle of Triumph des Willens. Oops.

17:51 EST | permalink | /history/germany

Bestiality at Princeton

The latest column is up.

A former eating club officer (who asked that I identify him only as such) came up with a rather subtle critique:

The “beasts”, who you advance as the unsafe drinkers at Princeton, seem to be to be a fairly unconvincing straw man to someonef who has held an officer’s post at one of the clubs. They seem, from your description, to be unequivocally male, and aggressive males at that (and even, with a little reading between the lines, it seems they are probably members of fraternities or sports teams). They also seem to be approaching their “animalistic” drinking with at least some knowledge of the consequences, and doing so on a regular basis. I must admit that in my experience, I have dealt with such “beasts” to some extent. But I would argue (purely based on personal anecdotal evidence, but I’m not sure that’s avoidable) that these “beasts” are NOT the people likely to force this debate to a crisis by dying of alcohol poisoning. These people generally have a fairly large support-network of more-or-less similarly minded beasts who have been through this before and have some knowledge of what to do. They also, by repetition alone, are fairly likely to realize at least an approximation of their own limits (perhaps through being McCoshed or PMC‘ed) and are less likely to repeat the stunt (If for no other reason to avoid serious disciplinary measures). Of course these beasts are problematic and possibly at least low grade threats to themselves and others, but I don’t think they should be the focus of a dialogue with the goal of preventing a death due to alcohol poisoning (nor, in my experience, are they only athletes or frat-boys, but that’s another matter). This is not to say that they shouldn’t be the focus of dialogue (they should).

I must admit that I didn’t consider the distinction between people who are likely to drink themselves to death and people who vandalize and befoul the campus. Intuitively, they are disjoint sets. However, even if I tarred two different groups with the same brush, it does not follow that only one group should be the focus of attention: both ought to be.

(I should also note that I wasn’t thinking specifically of men, or even of fratboys and athletes when I wrote the article – I can think of many anecdotes of non-men, non-fratboys, and non-athletes getting drunk to the point where excreting in the wrong place seems like a good idea.)

If you’re at all interested, I can go into detail about the demographic which I feel is most likely to die of alcohol poisoning, but I’ve spent enough time on this for now. I’ll just leave you with a parting note that I really wish someone would inject into this debate: When I was first a club officer, I felt that I could call the proctors to take care of a dangerously intoxicated student with impunity, and this was borne out by experience. By the end of my term, the precedent had been set that calling the proctors for a dangerously intoxicated student could result in charges being brought against the club officers. This creates a serious dilemma for club officers who are attempting to deal with a borderline student. Especially because in most cases said borderline student has a group of friends who are arguing that they will take him/her home and take care of him/her. And also because Princeton students don’t react well to the idea of having these charges on their record. If someone dies of alcohol poisoning in an eating club, this entirely new dilemma will most likely be a strong contributing factor.

This is regrettable. I’ve heard that the University’s policy was not to charge students if they called the proctors for a fellow student whose life was in danger from overindulgence. But that certainly doesn’t stop the Borough Police from hounding the intoxicated party for details when he or she gets to PMC. I‘m also hesitant to say that they shouldn’t press the student for details — although professionalism dictates that they ought to, at the very least, wait until the student has sobered up a bit before interrogating them.

11:01 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

From the mailing room floor

I just came across a piece of writing from sometime last year. It was deemed “highly inappropriate” for Tiger Magazine when I sent it to the mailing list. Fortunately, this website has no such standards.

The Mouthpiece answers your questions about Princeton, part I.

Q: I mobilized hundreds of undergraduates to put up thousands of
posters around the campus advertising our lecture, "The Joys and Toys
of Gay Sex." But some thoughtless reactionary Limbaugh-listening Nazi
Neanderthals tore them all down! Who was it, so we can send the
Rainbow Squad to their door?
        Sincerely, Debra B.
                                                                                
A: Debra, The unposterings you witnessed were not random acts of
homophobia. Nor they motivated by the self-denying same-sex urges of
the members of the campus Greek system, or even by Tory writers.
                                                                                
No, the truth is far more sinister. These teardowns all point to one
sinister organization. There is one group at Princeton who cannot,
absolutely cannot, abide homosexuality. They rue the day when
Princetonians elect not to be fruitful and multiply. They curse when a
Princeton man refers to his "boyfriend" in a non-ironic fashion. When
they see a Princeton woman wearing a pink triangle, they grind their
teeth. And _nothing_ irks them more than watching students flounce
along the campus walkways.
 
This isn't the Robert P. George Society, though they're a close
second.
 
The individuals responsible for tearing down your posters are the men
and women of Annual Giving. Every Princetonian who gives up breeding
for butt-loving deprives Princeton of their most effective alumni
chokehold, namely the question implicit in every AG letter: "If I send
in the cash, will that improve Junior's chances?" If "Junior" is
really a washed-up 22-year-old performance actor from upstate New York
who Dave Princeton '98 met at a circuit party, where do you think the
AG letter's going? Straight into the wastebasket, where it can
languish beside an empty tube of K-Y.

23:19 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Tax tip

One would think that Capone’s notoriety would obviate the need for the IRS to print such an obvious tax tip.

15:32 EST | permalink | /issues/taxation

OMG!!!1!!!!!!111!!!

According to the Prince, someone sent a troll post to the Class of 1994:

“At first the letter looked very official,” a ‘94 alumnus said, “but as you read [the letter], it devolves, using nonprofessional syntax and wording and making bizarre accusations. My first impression was just ‘what the hell?’”

This false letter included accusations targeted at specific members of the Class of 1994, assigning blame for the mailing of the first letter and accusing others of having homosexual affairs.

This is a classic trolling technique: write an reasonable-looking post that degrades into something completely insane. This is a great example. So is this. (Both are really gross, so don’t read them if you’re easily disgusted.)

15:53 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Columnar edifice

Two columns. One from early in the month that I forgot to mention before. Another that just came out.

22:41 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Subtitled protests

• Location of protest: Taiwan

• Written language of Taiwan: 正 體 字 (Traditional Chinese)

• Written language of poster: English

And people say that globalization is a bad thing.

23:13 EST | permalink | /world/taiwan

Outage! Outage!

Sometime on or before 11 March 2004, Verio’s DNS servers decided to stop pointing barillari.org to this computer. Instead, they redirected all hits to barillari.org to a “Welcome to the Future Website of Barillari.org” domain-parking page.

I fixed the DNS records, but it will take days for them to propegate. Needless to say, I will not be continuing with Verio as my registrar. I’m in the process of transferring the domain to another. More to follow.

08:15 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/outages

Just when I thought it could get no worse…

…the Nass redeemed itself!

Another satisfied customer.

01:09 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Still have doubts about the war?

Then read this excellent encapsulation of Tony Blair’s rationale. (via Andrew Sullivan)

02:11 EST | permalink | /world/iraq

Pot, meet kettle

One of the front-page news stories on Yahoo! Singapore was an AFP thinly disguised HRW rant report about supposed abuses by US troops in Afghanistan. Notwithstanding the obvious irony of the story’s placement (Singapore isn’t exactly a beacon for human rights — the tiny island leads the world in executions per capita; possessing more than half an ounce of heroin carries a mandatory death sentence, a fact about which HRW’s main Singapore page is strangely silent), the article is a wonderful example of modern journalism. Take the lead:

US military forces in Afghanistan have mistreated detainees, arbitrarily detained civilians and used excessive force in arrests of non-combatants, Human Rights Watch said in a new report.

And then take the second to last sentence:

“But the United States has refused to allow any independent observers access to detention facilities in Afghanistan, except for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which does not report publicly on its findings,” the rights group said.

One would think the fact that (a) HRW hasn’t visited detention facilities, and (b) another major NGO has visited them, might be salient enough to land at the beginning, no? (And, if the ICRC doesn’t report on its findings, then what is this?)

21:27 EST | permalink | /world/singapore

Uncanny PageRanking

Blast it. Google’s on to me — I’m up to #20. (But only with Moderate SafeSearch on, which is the default.)

01:24 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

Tycho Brahe, we feel your pain

Jacob Holdt, a Danish self-described vagabond, gave an interminable intriguing slides-and-narrative presentation in McCosh 50 this evening. Drawing from his photography during years as a drifter in the U.S., he aimed to stir up the humanist passions of the audience by calling attention to the racial injustice and oppression in modern America.

Such is the official line. The actual presentation was first and foremost one thing: overlong. Very overlong. Excessively overlong. Overlong to the extent that after sitting through the first half and twenty or thirty minutes into the beginning of the second, I walked to the Dinky station with Alex, chatted with him until his train left, walked to Frist, had a slice of pizza, chatted in the computer cluster, walked back to McCosh, and discovered that it was still going on. The presentation started at 7 p.m.; it was 11:30 p.m. when it finally finished.

The content was a series of slides (shown in pairs, often with captions overlaid), with a prerecorded voice-over, intercut with excerpts from taped interviews and with music.

The music was the worst part of all. At far too many points in the presentation, Holdt would run out of words but not of pictures. Keeping his frame rate constant (about one image every ten seconds, with two images displayed at once), he would spend three, five, perhaps even seven minutes playing a washed-up folk song (my personal favorite was Whitey on the Moon). Everything in me was screaming Filler! Filler! And it continued in that vein — commentary interspersed with interminable musical interludes — until Alex and I left. (I came back just before the end.)

The commentary was decent — no better or worse than I would have expected from the presentation, considering the group that sponsored it. The sections on race relations, as far as I could tell with my limited knowledge, were reasonably accurate for their time. Of course, much of their time was still in the 1970s.

This underscored a crucial flaw of the presentation: the most recently datable material in the slides was from 1990 — based on billboard advertisements in Harlem. Between 1990 and 2004, New York had the good fortune to be cleaned up by one Rudy Giuliani. I can’t speak to much of the poverty-related or race-relations-related material, but I tend to doubt that.

There were a few (rare) items that were absolutely incorrect — for instance, the assertion that the U.S. was alone among developed countries in retaining a death penalty (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, to name a few, are apparently below his development standards.) And there were many more that were quite suspect:

One, repeated several times, was that there were more black people in prison than in college. Well, let’s see: according to the Sketchbook of Criminal Justice Statistics (on jails and prisons and juvie), there were 255,100 blacks in jails, 42,963 in “juvenile residential facilities,” and 587,300 in prisons in 1999 – for a total of 885,363. The Census Bureau indicates that in 1999, 1,998,000 blacks were enrolled in college.

Well, he was only off by a factor of 2.

That wasn’t the only outlandish claim. Others included:

• Our violence against the third world kills more people each year than did World War 2.
• 10% of the population of Washington, DC is addicted to drugs

…and so on.

But keep in mind that I was scribbling notes in a darkened auditorium. Maybe I mis-scribed him. Fortunately, he put some of the most egregious examples on his web page:

Students in black universities often laugh at the Klan speech in my show, for they know all too well that their pain and exclusion is not caused by a few hooded nuts out in the woods, but by us - the great majority of “good” law-abiding citizens - who are today silently forcing millions of blacks into ghettoes, isolation, despair - and finally prisons and death.

In our white guilt from not living up to our own lofty democratic ideals and Christian values we escape into Bill Cosby shows to cover up for our ultimate crushing of the black family.

Today more than 70% of black children grow up without a father and one in ten without either parent - twice as many as when I first came to America - and three times as many as under slavery.

Let’s see. When I got up today, I checked my cotton futures and noticed that I was going to take quite a hit. As I showered, I called my trusty overseer, Cyrus, on the speakerphone and told him that if he didn’t start putting his back into the whippings, he’d soon find himself on the receiving end. As I dressed, I fired off an email to the principal of my former high school, advising him to start quietly discouraging black students from enrolling. They’d just bring down the test scores, I told him. Later that morning, I replied to a voicemail from a friend who’s in the crack-cocaine business. He was curious if I could suggest any new customer bases for his product, which was rapidly reaching market saturation. I suggested selling it in majority-Black elementary schools, an idea he’d never considered, and for which he thanked me profusely. Sometime that afternoon, I answered a pharmacist friend’s voicemail, advising him to stop offering the morning-after pill to black women, because their illegitimate children formed the basis of my sharecropping holdings in Mississippi. It was then that I went to lunch at my favorite whites-only lunch counter—

—or not. I would like to know how what I actually did “today silently forc[es] millions of blacks into ghettoes, isolation, despair - and finally prisons and death.” Or, for that matter, what my role is in the “ultimate crushing of the black family.”

His thesis — as best I can describe it — was that the racism of American whites was due to nasty childhood experiences (e.g., racist, abusive parents) and the degradation of American blacks was the consequence of an internalized racism that sprung up after the death of Jim Crow laws. While I am sure that both of these are true to some extent, I fail to see how they explain everything — or, for that matter, what solutions we might devise for them.

But the aim of the talk didn’t seem to be about solutions — Holdt presented himself as a modern-day Jacob Riis, providing “shock therapy” for the limousine-liberal set without any practical suggestions. As I understand, there’s a “workshop” tomorrow that will provide some insight into that matter. The last slides encouraged us to attend it, otherwise, the slide indicated (I kid you not) the material we saw might make us into more sophisticated racists.

If that’s what it costs me to avoid spending more time on this presentation, so be it.

09:15 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

That’s why we should send Saddam to the ICC!

Alan Dershowitz famously remarked that had Adolf Hitler been alive today, he would have defended him — and won.

If Adolf Hitler were alive today, I doubt Dershowitz would need to bother:

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - When U.N. prosecutors opened their case against Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites) two years ago, they set out to get him convicted of genocide. The consensus today is, they failed.

16:21 EST | permalink | /world/serbia

I knew I’d have to hold my nose on Nov. 2…

…but stories like this are making it easier and easier for me to contemplate voting for President Bush.

I’m much less convinced of the President’s will when it comes to vandalizing the Constitution by reaching out to the Christian ultra-right with gay-bashing than I am of Sen. Kerry or Sen. Edwards’s willingness to torpedo the economy by poorly-conceived, sound-bite-motivated trade policy.

Even if the President had the political will to push for the FMA (which I doubt, considering that it took years for him to endorse it without waffling), I’d peg its chances of of passing well below those of Sen. Kerry or Sen. Edwards’s chances of strangling the nascent economic recovery with protectionist trade policy. I’m no fan of the Bush administration’s near-paranoid secrecy, unwillingness to admit mistakes, or (fortunately limited) pandering to the ultraconservative Christian far-Right, but those flaws pale in comparsion to the trade policy and foreign policy of an Edwards or a Kerry.

P.S.: Be sure to tell all of your Edwards-leaning friends to vote Nader!

12:23 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

Herbert Harangues

I liked Bob Herbert’s coverage of the judicial outrages in Tulia, TX. But I’m getting the impression that, having since run out of ideas, he’s now reprinting John Edwards’s campaign statements

Take his latest:

The knee-jerk advocates of unrestrained trade always insist that it will result in new, more sophisticated and ever more highly paid employment in the U.S. We can ship all these nasty jobs (like computer programming) overseas so Americans can concentrate on the more important, more creative tasks. That great day is always just over the horizon. And those great jobs are never described in detail.
We’ve allowed the multinationals to run wild and never cared enough to step in when the people losing their jobs, or getting their wages and benefits squeezed, were of the lower-paid variety. Now the middle class is being targeted, and the panic is setting in.

This evening, instapundit linked to two counterpoints: the first indicates that Herbert’s numbers are way off, the second points to a number of explosively-growing professions that labor surveyors often overlook.

I’m a good deal more optimistic about the U.S.’s economic future. The biggest threat to growth (and job growth) is not outsourcing, but people who don’t understand comparative advantage. Followed closely by people whose task it is to come up with 21st-century science curricula, but are instead spending their time bickering over whether to teach a fairy-tale interpretation of human origins in science class.

16:49 EST | permalink | /issues/economy

They get points for trying, at least

Bryan from GlenOak pointed out that I’d missed covering the latest salvo in what I will term “diversity pranks,” or political stunts intended to take potshots at affirmative action.

A cadre of College Republicans at Roger Williams University have collected funds to present a scholarship, competition for which is open only to white students.

This is far less original than the affirmative-action bake sale idea, but I can’t say I’ve seen anyone actually do it before, so the RWU CRs get points for being the first. (The bake sale, on the other hand, has been repeated to the point where it isn’t shocking any more.)

I’d still like to see a kissing booth modeled on the bake sale idea. It’s derivitive, but it’s the kind of thing that the people who write headlines for a living dream about.

13:28 EST | permalink | /issues/preferential_treatment

The Israeli Bus Lines World Tour

When the Hague showing is finished, they ought to send it to Berkeley.

21:16 EST | permalink | /world/israel

jigl wins the gallery generation wars

I’ve investigated a number of different web image-gallery generators for my site. My primary requirements are that the system generate static HTML and images (i.e., no CGI, no PHP, no MySQL, no SSI, none of that dynamic crap), that it scale large images and provide links to the unscaled versions, and that it not look like crap.

For a while, I used fgg, which, when hacked a bit, produced reasonable results. But it had some irritations: namely, it scaled images by a size ratio, rather than to a particular size. And, while I liked its minimalism, I was looking for something a bit less spartan.

igal is a nice tool, but it didn’t do scaling the way I liked, either. And none of the preset layouts really cried out to me. (I do use it when assembling sets of graphs for my independent work, however.)

Today, I stumbled on jigl, which is amazing. It’s a single perl script, the site supplies a wonderfully subtle background theme (the default isn’t as attractive), and it does image scaling almost the way I like it (it accepts a target Y value, rather than a target X value, for reasons I can’t quite fathom.)

I plan to use it for future collections—especially subsets of the photos in the photos section, like this one.

15:14 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

The very latest Prince column…

…is here. I’m very sorry.

08:34 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

The Depsotism of the Check-Box

I recently came across a form that looked like this:

Regrettably, they neglected to include a checkbox titled “anything nuclear.”

02:17 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

La Posterite de l’Affaire Kerry

Instapundit points to a blog post that scoops Drudge on the Kerry Affair. I’m not so much interested in the affair itself as the post’s speculation that Karl Rove is behind it:

Pointing an indignant finger at the machinations of Karl Rove, the Bush administration’s strategist who has a penchant for dispersing rumors, many on the Democrat side will claim that Rove is up to his old shenanigans and that the rumors have no basis. What caused McCain to lose in 2000 could inspire Democrats to rally behind Kerry, and lead to a major rift between the parties and brings the race to a closer finish. Theoretical, but plausible.

It appears thoroughly implausible to me. The only reason to bring the race to a closer finish is to tarnish Kerry a bit; to soften him up before the general elections. The strategy runs the grave risk of backfiring and destroying the Kerry candidacy, meaning that John Edwards could face W. in the general election. Edwards is the only candidate who really threatens the Bush base. I can’t imagine that Rove would be willing to risk bringing him into the general election by his rumor-machinations.

19:24 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

Cut to: Kerry, in love beads, smoking a jay

The blogosphere will doubtlessly be all over this Crimson article detailing an interview with the fresh-from-Vietnam John Kerry, just linked from the Drudge Report:

“I’m an internationalist,” Kerry told The Crimson in 1970. “I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.”

12:18 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

Digicams in court

Carlos pointed me to an article on digital photographs as evidence in the Boston Globe. Near the end, note the paragraphs:

Erik Berg, a forensic supervisor in Tacoma, Wash., and the developer of More Hits, said digital photos can allow for even more security than traditional means of stowing film negatives in a drawer.

“I have the ability to lock down one or more digital files to a point where I can ensure not only who can or cannot look at it, but for how long, whether or not they can print it or distribute it,” he said. “I can also prove whether or not it has been tampered with since it was created.”

The last bit may be true, as Canon sells a system to make tamper-resistant digital images by appending a digital signature to them. (See this Slashdot article.) It’s an interesting idea, but the research sector has not been kind to such systems — e.g., devices in which a secret is concealed from the device’s owner. The camera must contain a secret key used to sign the images; it is unlikely that the technique needed to extract the key will remain undiscovered for long unless the cameras languish in obscurity. If I were a defense attorney, I would definitely mention this.

The rest of what he describes is a pipe-dream that the music and film industries have unsuccessfully pursued for years. No one has yet discovered a way to make a standard-issue PC disobey its owner, especially if that owner is technically sophisticated. What he describes can only be true on a closed system that he controls – if not, he’s lying through his teeth.

Bottom line: despite my enthusiasm for digital cameras, if I were a detective, I’d shoot film. It’s not as though one can’t tamper with film, but it’s easier to explain its flaws to a jury.

00:41 EST | permalink | /issues/trials

The Decline and Fall of the Princeton Empire, Vol. 1

I finally got around to checking the PUG email account. Besides a few dozen spams, there were a few pieces of mail from Shelly Jannos, one of the officials in charge of student activities. It was addressed to all of the clubs at Princeton. And, lo and behold, I did discover a club of which I had heard only rumors, and that heretofore I had thought was just an informal gathering of the deranged:

Princeton has an officially sanctioned anime club.

Old Nassau is shuddering beneath our feet. She crumbles from the inside.

These are the End Times.

Ia! Ia!

23:17 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/administrivia

New! Improved! Prince Column!

In which I discuss WWS admissions. (Although, as you will notice, the column isn’t actually about WWS admissions.)

01:08 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton/bubble

Grautitious Invocation of Godwin’s Law

This is highly unfair, but I couldn’t help but post it:

“Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or SA – ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as their having guns doesn’t serve the State.” —Heinrich Himmler

“These weapons are dangerous and designed for one purpose: military assault. We don’t need them on the streets of our cities. We use assault weapons in the army; folks who want to use them should enlist.” —Wesley Clark

23:20 EST | permalink | /issues/elections/2004

It’s cultural insensitivity week here at barillari.org

If you should ever find yourself in Mèrida, be sure to pay your respects to the statue of Faphuatl, the Mayan god of masturbation, pictured at right. It’s in a traffic circle on the Paseo de Montajo.

03:12 EST | permalink | /world/mexico

Oh, no!

The Bush=Hitler crowd was right! Just look at the similarities!

Update: This column is the best I’ve yet seen:

In 1933, the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, was burned to the ground. Nobody knows for sure who set the fire. The Nazis blamed communists. “This incident prompted Hitler[,then Germany’s chancellor,] to convince [German President Paul von] Hindenburg to issue a Decree for the Protection of People and State that granted Nazis sweeping power to deal with the so-called emergency.”

The Reichstag fire parallels the Sept. 11 attacks here, and Hindenburg’s decree parallels our USA Patriot Act.

22:54 EST | permalink | /issues/w

Next thing you know, Red Hat manuals will come in .doc format

Google has a mailing list for media types – you can subscribe using the link in the lower-right corner of this page. Given that they’re girding up for war, I’m surprised they picked this mailing list hosting service:

19:15 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

And now – the Kerry Kool-Aid!

After browsing his camp