Paul Graham writes "So Far, So Good"...#

``This battle has only just started. I've only been seeing spams that seem intended specifically to spoof Bayesian filters for a couple months. But we'll be seeing a lot more now that AOL has released Bayesian filters.

How will the battle play out?

As I said in the Plan for Spam, I think it may all come down to links. The Web is the main cause of spam, not email. Nearly all spams include some kind of contact mechanism, and this is nearly always a link. This is the part of the spam that filter writers should focus on, because this is the hardest for the spammer to change.''

Leslie writes about how she talks and gets stuff done...#

``Though I am an accomplished writer, in spoken conversations I tend to be a bit... waffle-y. However, I didn't realize that I was a waffler until yesterday, when I poured my heart out in a letter to Friend A, then asked Jenn to proofread. Her sage words of advice? "Why don't you just tell her what you want?"

I'm chalking it up to the fact that in my first family, being upfront and direct just isn't something we did. It was a skill that came in handy as a preacher's family- being able to say "bless your heart" when what you really mean is "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" saved us all from many a heartache.

Trying to be diplomatic and tactful to that degree in the real world was just eating my lunch. ''

Joh3n is very obstinate...#

``When I was in high school, on the first day of chemistry class as a sophomore, the teacher played a little song for the class on a boom box. It was the elements of the periodic table (in no particular order), sung By Tom Lehrer.

The teacher jokingly offered that anyone who could sing the song the next day would get an A. The teacher did not realize that a) I'm an ass, and b) I'm a rather determined ass. I promptly found the lyrics (and the album), and subjected my family to the horror of myself learning the elements as sung to the tune of 'A modern major general'. I sang the song, but got no instant A. That bastard made me learn basic chemistry instead.''

Holy Crap#

From Just a Gwai Lo is Andrew Coyne on gay marriage...#

``Let me see if I have this straight. Marriage is as old as civilization itself, and as universal. Rooted in the natural order and ordained by God, it has survived through centuries of war, famine and no-fault divorce. Yet let a few hundred gay couples in and the whole thing will collapse.

This cannot be permitted. Marriage is of such primal importance to society -- the very survival of the species depends upon it -- that any and all means must be deployed in its defense. If marriage can no longer be defined in such a way as to exclude homosexuals, then the only answer is to abolish marriage altogether, at least as a legal concept.''

JAGL quotes and comments...

'' "The proper course, for those who are truly convinced it [gay marriage] heralds the end of civilization, is to amend the constitution to forbid it: 'Notwithstanding the equality rights guaranteed in Section 15, marriage shall be defined as the union of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others.' Something like that. Get Parliament and the legislatures of seven provinces with 50% of the population to agree, and you're home."

I've always liked the way Coyne thinks. His argument is that a ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional (at least in Canada), and that to "remedy" this, one must amend the constitution, which is staggeringly difficult. And, he argues, it's a good thing it is staggeringly difficult. Conservatives in the United States are asking for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, as if it required a majority in both Houses to pass. (Hint: it requires quite a bit more than this.) My opinion on the matter, while still in development, is that I wish gay marriage well, in that I wish it no particular harm. ''

From MemePool is The Science of Zombies - Awesome.#

Via Matrix Essays is an article about Where Reloaded Failed -#

``In his book, Signposts in a Strange Land, Walker Percy writes, "*Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition, so that one never recognizes oneself, the deepest part of oneself, in a bad book.*" But are books the only medium to which this premise can be applied? In the article "Good Books, Bad Books: Windows into the Human Heart," Steve Garber builds on this premise and applies it not only to books, but to films, songs and poems as well. He writes, "Stories—good stories—have a way of finding their way into the deepest places."

[...]

The problem with this picture of Zion lies in the expectation that has been built from the previous film. What view of these free people do the Wachowski brothers, the writers and directors of this trilogy, offer us? A picture of complete hedonism: Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. The creators have cheapened the people and hope of Zion and have consequently depreciated the "evil" of the Matrix. They have shown that with freedom, humans will resort to animalistic tendencies—not of survival, but of gratification. For a people looking to topple the reign of slavery and find the freedom to choose and live out real purpose to their lives, this depiction is a prostitution of their humanity. ''

Alexander Payne has a nice set of humour...#

``A friend says everyone should be a connoisseur of something. I agree, and have decided to be a connoisseur of mineral water. I think it's a good choice, personally. I love the stuff, it's relatively cheap, good for you, and attainable. * Mineral water is pretentious (it is gourmet water, after all)*, but it doesn't have the evil robber baron vibe of cigars, scotch, or other commonly connoisseured luxuries. And while everyone fancies themselves a connoisseur of wine, another friend points out that few actually have the breadth of knowledge to truly be vino-heads. Mineral water seems an attainable thing to be a connoisseur of.

Or so I thought. A look through Mineral Waters of the World broadened, expanded, and ultimately blew my mind, at least as far as a mind can be blown by mineral water. There is an astounding selection and detail in the mineral water world, hardly rivaling wine or cigars but still quite impressive. But I see that breadth as a enjoyable challenge, not an imposing deterrent, and thus I know I have picked the right luxury for which to cultivate an expert palate.''

John on Lord of The Rings...#

``The real irony is that I'm not all that big a fan of the books, which I understand is utter heresy. But honestly. All those lame songs and Tom Bombadil. Really, three cheers for Peter Jackson for giving him the boot. I'm rather more interested in the world of LoTR, which is why of all of Tolkien's books, my favorite is the Simarillion. I'm a geek for the mythology rather than Tolkien's manner of writing.

The movies flood you with the feeling of the Tolkien mythology while necessarily slicing and dicing the text to get it to a manageable length (if you call what is effectively a nine-hour movie managable), which is why they work so well for me. That's the one thing I don't think people really appreciate about these movies -- so far, they represent probably the best editing to film of any literary work out there. It's an underrated but critical point.''

Peter Lindberg writes about meeting Bilingual Children in the park...#

What I wanted to know was whether his daughter—18 months old—could distinguish between the languages, so that she would respond in the same language she was addressed in.

He said that children in a bilingual environment develop their speech slower, so that he couldn't really tell yet. But his feeling was that she can't tell the difference between the languages yet, although she understands both Spanish and Swedish.''

Razib from Gene Expression got an article published in Frontpage Magazine called, I am Woman, Here Me Squeak ....#

`` "Yes, I have a body, a physical manifestation upon this earth. But it is the vessel of an intelligent mind and a strong spirit. It is not for the beholder to leer at or to use in advertisements to sell everything from beer to cars. Because of the superficiality of the world in which we live, external appearances are so stressed that the value of the individual counts for almost nothing."

So states Sultana Yusuf Ali, a seventeen-year-old high school student, in an article for the Toronto Star. The piece, titled "Why Do I Wear a Hijab," defends a practice that many Westerners view as a medieval throwback. How does Sultana Yusuf Ali rebut this charge? She couches her decision to don the hijab in terms of "female empowerment" and anti-capitalist individualism. She evokes the image of the sexual harasser when she states that no one will "leer" at her. She rejects the capitalist marketing of sex peddled by corporations. She denies the cult of beauty enforced by a patriarchal society. Finally, she exults in her own individual worth.

[...]

Raised within the Islamic community, I have been privy to many opinions and statements not manufactured for mainstream consumption, and American Muslims do not generally express views informed by the rights of women. Rather, rationalizations of their customs are rooted in non-Western premises. American Muslim women may assert in public that the hijab liberates them, but the practice comes from societies where women are viewed as property by male relatives. ''

Russell Beattie is very clever in disallowing comments JUST from people who come from Google, so that they don't comment on old, old posts.#

Werner Vogels wrote an article about common misconceptions with Web Services...#

``I wrote an article for IEEE Internet Computing about how there are still many misconceptions about the fundamentals of web services, titled 'Web Services are NOT Distributed Objects: Common Misconceptions about Service Oriented Architectures'. It deals with the confusion about web services and distributed objects, with web-services & RPC, that there are more than just HTTP bindings, the relation between web services and web servers, (un)reliable web services and about why debugging web services is hard but not impossible ''

Someone "in the industry" that I sent this article too wrote that "people like to learn stuff by comparison to what they know" and that lots of people want to similarities to distributed computing technologies and web services and this is why they are let down. He also wrote, "A lot of people don't like Web services because they don't include things they're not supposed to include. I guess others don't like them because they think they do include those things..." - He's a pretty interesting guy who knows where people's desires are at.

Ted Leung links Chris Winter's post about how libraries should be easy to use not hard and adds...#

``More code == more opportunities for bugs. It would be instructive to see C#, Python, Ruby, Lisp/Scheme, and Smalltalk versions of this. It just goes to show that the design of the libraries is just as important as the design of the language. This is related to Kim's overuse of abstraction posting about abstraction and syntax. Designing libraries is about designing syntax. It's nice that the libraries provide a large number of abstractions. But it would be nice to have some additional "syntax" for the common case. ''

Ted Leung writes about Lisp adoption and Lisp assimilation...#

``In the early 90's when I argued with people about Lisp like languages, I was always getting pushback on the syntax, and on garbage collection. Today, I no longer have to argue with people about garbage collection. Java and C# have made it acceptable. But people misunderstand its importance in constructing modular systems. Most people like garbage collection because it eliminates memory smashes. This is true and definitely a big benefit. But the bigger benefit of having garbage collection in the language is that subsystem designers no longer have to worry about which subsystem owns the memory. This makes it much easier to break things apart and reuse them. When you have to manage memory by hand, your subsystem has two "protocols" jammed into a single mode of expression (the API). You have the application level protocol for the subsystem, and you have the memory management protocol for the system, so that subsystem users know how to interact with objects that came from the system. We don't have to deal with that any more and that decouples subsystems a lot. So we killed two birds with one stone, but we only saw the carcass of the smaller bird.''

Once people start learning that macros can be powerful and that libraries should add "syntax" then the other thing Ted's people didn't like about Lisp (syntax) will start looking like a good idea.

Dave Hyatt has a hellish time at work...#

``The span in question had clear:both on it, which meant it was supposed to be pushed underneath the floats. Now in Safari the floats were about 14 pixels tall, and the span cleared them, which meant it was offset 14 pixels from the top of the enclosing div. The assumption Safari made was that the block itself should grow to enclose the span. This meant that the div itself was 14 pixels tall.

Not so in Mozilla. In the latest Mozilla, if a block had no bottom border and the last item in the block was a zero-height block child that cleared the floats, then even though the child itself was offset 14 pixels, the enclosing block had zero height. *Make sense? Didn't think so. Welcome to my world.*

[...]

I now believe that Safari's rendering (gap and all) is correct, so until a spec tells me otherwise, I'm changing nothing. NOTHING.

It took me 10 hours just to decide that what I did in the first place was correct. Aren't layout engines fun? ;)''

Steven Frank writes about his Power 25 ballot...#

``I would say that [Steve Jobs'] not just the most powerful person in Macintosh computing, but one of the most powerful in computing, period. And I'm not just trying to kiss his ass here, think about it: the entire PC market rips off everything Apple comes up with. They don't have two original thoughts to rub together over there. If it weren't for Steve, I'd probably be writing this in WordStar on MS-DOS 12.0, blissfully unaware that life could be that much better.''

Ryan McGee must have a gigantic brain...#

``Many trade publications this year have been making the distinction between "celebrity" and "star". The two may at first seem really similar, and that's sort of the point these publications were making: the line between the two is increasingly thin and blurry. Sorta like Sarah Michelle Gellar over the last two seasons of "Buffy". "Star" implies a type of aura gained through a body of work in which one person's reputation can tip a pop culture consumer off to a basic level of quality one can expect from a work to which they are attached. A "star" may also imply someone whose body of work commands a certain amount of respect and historical maintenance. Thus, we remember Bob Hope at his death not for his current drawing power, but for the cumulative body of work he accomplished, both onscreen and off.

A "celebrity", on the other hand, is distinguished simply by their existence as a person living under public scrutiny. I initially typed "public eye", but really, lately, the two are synonymous anyways, so let's call a spade a spade. "Celebrities" are the "OK, why exactly are these people famous exactly" type of people. They are either famous by the sake of their looks (name any of a few dozen teen stars here) or have managed to insert themselves into the public arena long after anyone remembers why they were ever there in the first place (I'm looking at you, Charo). In a bizarre cycle, these people are famous because they are…famous. There's no qualitative measurement here; they look pretty, therefore they are. (That's Decartes' lesser known theory of existence.) ''