Yet another word I can’t stand to hear or read
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Wed, 31 Aug 2005
Tue, 23 Aug 2005
You can’t make this stuff up
Mass backwards introduced me to the newest dead horse in the blog-world: 65 students at Timken High School (over 13% of the women in the class) are pregnant.
I have nothing to add, except to make note of Timken High School’s mascot:
See this page and this page, from which I pulled the logos.
Yes, that’s right. The Timken TROJANS.
May I suggest a different design for the mascot, reflecting the school’s hope for change?
Mon, 22 Aug 2005
Oh, great.
The U.S. Attorney’s office issued a warning regarding terrorists who disguise themselves as homeless people:
Homeless people easily blend into urban landscapes, the message said.“This is particularly true of our mass transit systems, where homeless people tend to loiter unnoticed,” the e-mail said.
It referred to a recent incident in Somerville, Mass., in which a police officer became suspicious about someone dressed as a street person. The officer questioned the man, discovered he had a passport from a “country of interest” — typically a Middle Eastern or South Asian nation — and a checkbook with a questionable address, the e-mail said. The investigation is continuing, it said.
“Mass transit” in Somerville presumably means Porter or Davis on the Red Line.
Cute.
Addendum: I thought I’d see if someone in the Yahoo forums for the article had a link to the “State Department report that was issued last week” that the letter referenced. Big mistake:
Sun, 21 Aug 2005
The State Department is teeming with Finns!
While writing one of those you-know-it’ll-never-get-read-but-you-feel-obligated-anyway letters to the State Department (attached below), I noticed something funny in the address bar:
A Linux penguin! Finnish interests have penetrated the State Department!
A simple check confirms:
$ telnet contact-us.state.gov 80 Trying 131.193.154.145... Connected to contact-us.state.gov. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 02:19:39 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Linux/SuSE) <--- !!!! Connection: close Content-Type: text/html Connection closed by foreign host.
Letter, for those still tuning in. (See also this related post )
Subject: Constitutional negotiations in Iraq
21 August 2005 Dear Madam Secretary, As a U.S. citizen, I would like to register my concern with recent news regarding constitutional negotiations in Iraq. An A.P. wire story yesterday indicated that U.S. diplomats had "conceded ground to Islamists on the role of religion in Iraq." I hope that the United States continues to push for a constitution enshrining democratic values, with legislation subject to the will of the people, not to "a religious test," as the A.P. indicated. Cordially, Joseph Barillari Boston, MA
Wed, 17 Aug 2005
Tafted
I have not been following the fiasco-in-progress in Ohio (it has something to do with Gov. Taft and a coin dealer, I believe), but today, it made the front page of Yahoo!.
A few months ago, Gov. Taft opined on the importance of avoiding impropriety before a group at Xavier University:
“Public employees can enjoy entertainment, such as golf or dining out, with persons working for a regulated company, or one doing business with the state, ONLY if they fully pay their own way.”
But just today:
Gov. Bob Taft was charged with four ethics violations Wednesday for failing to report dozens of gifts that included dinners, golf games and professional hockey tickets, deepening a scandal that has rocked Ohio’s Republican Party.
Naturally, I have no idea as to the veracity of these charges, which may well be politically motivated. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they were reasonable, either.
Several years ago, Gov. Taft came to my high school. The event was telecast to a few other high schools (I think the event had something to do with showing off the fancy videoconferencing equipment). I remember very little about the speech except for one item: I was seated at a table perpendicular to the governor’s seat. While speaking, the governor pulled his feet under his chair and pawed at the carpet with the tips of his shoes. This struck me as very odd.
“Did you get the memo?”
I’m still floored that people who lament the lack of majors/women/minorities/non-nerds/funding in academic computer science continue to use the terms “computer science” and “information technology” interchangably.
As I mentioned a few weeks back, corporate “information technology” embodies everything that’s repelling people from the field. Computer science is what people do in research labs and academic departments. Corporate “information technology” is what people do in Douglas Copeland’s Microserfs, for instance:
“…reworking old code for something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8.”
Men in computing
The Geomblog carried a link to a commentary on the Bill Gates-Maria Klawe talk held in Redmond a few weeks back.
Professor Klawe worries aloud about the CS funding crunch and the dearth of women in computing. Again, I can’t say much about the former, but the most elequent answer to the latter came ten years ago (a veritable eternity in this field) from Philip Greenspun:
Intelligent people with PhDs are working as C programmers; The average engineering career lasts seven years, pays average, and doesn’t justify an MIT education that costs $120,000; anyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD; there has been so little progress in programming environments, systems, and computer languages in the last three decades that programmers in India and other Third World countries are perfectly capable of taking over the majority of American computer science jobs.
Your January issue [of Communications of the ACM] asks “Why are there so few women in computing?” Maybe you should do another issue asking “Why are there so many men?”
Tue, 09 Aug 2005
Holy crap! We’re all screwed!
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 22:51:11 -0500 From: Adoh Fadduq Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Subject: Possible security issue with Emacs? Insha Allah, I am now trying to choose an editor for my software development and typesetting work. I have closely considered Emacs, which fits my needs in some respects. I do, however, feel that there is a big security issue with it for me and my brethren: Emacs was largely developed by Jews and for Jews. Considering how cunning the Jews are, I would not be surprised to find that they have hidden special bugs and booby traps inside emacs, in order to spy on and disrupt work of my Allah believing brethren. Are my concerns justified?