Uh-oh

I entered the date for my qualifying exam on my cell phone’s calendar.

I typed in “qual” (7825) using the T9Word (“guess what I’m typing”) option.

Its first guess was “suck”.

I hope that’s not a bad omen.

18:26 EST | permalink | /academics

Unsolicited parenting advice

The New York Times, today:

IT’S difficult when you have a kid,” the photographer Justine Kurland said. “If they’re in a good mood, you can get work done. But if they’re in a bad mood, you’re at their mercy.”

Ms. Kurland is known for photographing people in American wilderness landscapes, but the scene this day was the rent-stabilized apartment she shares with Casper, her 2-year-old son, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Casper, named for the 19th-century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, had just given a textbook example of one of his trickier moods. His father, the sculptor and multimedia artist Corey McCorkle, who lives 10 blocks away, arrived to take him out for breakfast, but he refused to budge. Instead he sat sobbing, rooted to the kitchen floor, a stunt Ms. Kurland said he increasingly liked to pull when she was scouting locations on the extended road trips she takes for her projects. [continued…]

AAAAAAGH! I can’t even COUNT how many times my parents pulled that stunt on me as a kid. I wanted to stay home; instead, I got a tour of the most boring parts of Massachusetts from the backseat of the car. Every. Single. Weekend. I’m surprised that I didn’t start huffing paint thinner.

For heaven’s sake, lady: Leave. The. Kid. At. Home. It’s not as though she’s living in North Dakota – this is NYC. She can find a nanny. And it’s not as though she has to pay through the nose to avoid the nanny problem — she’s an artist, not a politician. Hire an illegal; no-one’s going to check.

My parents wouldn’t have even needed a nanny — just park me in front of the Nintendo, thank you very much. It would have been good practice for the interminable hours of being parked in front of a computer in college.

13:54 EST | permalink | /arts/photography

Coincidence?

• September 2000: Enter Princeton University.
• September 2001: Shirley Tilghman is installed as the first female president of Princeton University.
• September 2004: Enter Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• December 2004: Susan Hockfield is installed as the first female president of MIT.
• February 2007: Drew Faust is selected as the first female president of Harvard University.

I sense a trend.

15:11 EST | permalink | /academics

Mario Meets Yahoo

TechCrunch has a gushing post about Yahoo! Pipes, which is some sort of graphical RSS-feed-editing service. You can drag little boxes around to combine news feeds, deleting posts that match certain criteria, keeping others, and publishing the result as a new RSS feed.

I can think of some uses for this, but I’m not quite as enthusiastic as Michael Arrington.It’s very slick, but I’m not sure who the intended audience is.

To Yahoo’s credit, the UI is so intuitive that in a few minutes, I’d whipped up a new feed for Guy Kawasaki’s blog that strips out his oh-so-cute minced oaths “bull-shitake” and “full of sushi.” Here’s what it looks like:

Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to replace the phrases—I could only delete the offending posts in their entirety. Call it collateral damage in the war on preciousness.

20:52 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

Three cheers for John McCain

For making it really, really easy for me to not vote for him:

A forthcoming bill in the U.S. Senate lays the groundwork for a national database of illegal images that Internet service providers would use to automatically flag and report suspicious content to police.

The proposal, which Sen. John McCain is planning to introduce on Wednesday, also would require ISPs and perhaps some Web sites to alert the government of any illegal images of real or “cartoon” minors. Failure to do would be punished by criminal penalties including fines of up to $300,000.

[…]

It also covers obscene images of minors including ones in a “drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting.” (The language warns that it is not necessary “that the minor depicted actually exist.”)

I suppose that means this image of a naked bearded man fondling a naked boy would be illegal. (Note, of course, that it’s a tondo painted 470 BC that today resides in the Ashmolean Museum.)

The real problems in the U.S. are obvious: social security is doomed. Congress can’t control its spending and doesn’t want to try. Iraq appears to be entering a civil war. Ten million illegal immigrants are living in the U.S.; a non-trivial minority of whom are involved in organized crime. Public education is a trainwreck in progress.

But no presidential candidate has the spine to tackle these problems. Instead, we get feel-good legicrap like the baseball steroid hearings, the Terry Schiavo travesty, the everyone-knew-it-was-doomed Federal Marriage Amendment, and this.

Are child molesters escaping justice because we lack a law that forces ISPs to face fines of $300,000 for failing to report ancient Greek paintings? I have my doubts.

But there’s a silver lining. I might have actually struggled over the campaign-finance issue, because I thought McCain’s views were, besides that, decent. But now that he’s cast his lot with the panderers, “pay no attention to the abortion that is the federal budget—Here! Over here! We’re saving your kids from perverts!” crowd, it will be very, very easy to vote for someone else.

That he managed to take a giant dump on the Internet industry in the process (since they’ll have to police their customers or face enormous fines) is icing on the cake. I have an idea: every time the Feds want to delegate the functions of government to private industry, they should be required to estimate how much it will cost American business. Ditto federal agency rulemaking. If corporations have to file environmental impact statements, I daresay that the government should be expected to file business impact statements. (We already have the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, so this isn’t entirely implausible.)

That’s the sort of pandering I could get behind.

21:00 EST | permalink | /issues/political-excess