Month: May 2004

Standard Goods

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology does things like help define measurements and standards. Things like the exact volume of a gallon, or the official number of calories in the average tomato. Useful, very dry, stuff. Except they have the NIST Store, where you can buy things like, say, the government’s official standard peanut butter for your adhesion, peanut-butter-removal, and calorimeter tests. Or, say, a bag of official standard household dirt to test your vacuum cleaners with. Awesome.

Told You So

The Star Tribune (reg. required), apparently from Minneapolis/St. Paul, has coverage of the economic benefits of gay marriage. I know a trend when I see it: big parties are expensive, and expensive parties are good for the party business. Protest signs are mostly home-made, though, so that won’t get much. Lobbyists are having a field day, as are fax and printer toner salesmen.

Also, your complaint is off-topic

Michael Meeks has a blog. He’s affiliated with SUSE in one way or another. So his RSS feed is picked up by Planet SUSE. All well and good, but what if his content isn’t really on-topic for the aggregation, which is mostly software-oriented? Or, for example, me. I have a blog and it’s picked up by an internal Novell employees aggregation, but my posts have NOTHING to do with work. The whole point, for me, of getting a non-work blog was posting non-work-related stuff on it.

I don’t think Michael signed up for Planet SUSE– I think they just added him, as he invites anyone to do by posting an RSS feed. I certainly didn’t request to be on Planet Novell (not that I mind, but I didn’t agree to any terms or anything). Unless someone signs up promises a particular sort of content, there’s no good reason to demand that they produce it. If my RSS feed is off-topic for your aggregator, then don’t carry my RSS feed, or ask politely for me to split out the topics into two feeds, one for tech and one for everything else, like John Fleck has done, after getting too many complaints about his content from Planet GNOME.

Honestly though, nbody promised you a perfect walled garden of on-topic content. Don’t like it? Don’t read it. Also, your discussion of topicality should be taken elsewhere, since it’s not on-topic for this site.

Gay Marriage Legalized; Gay Divorce to Follow

Voters of Somerville! State Representative Ciampa, who voted to outlaw gay marriage, now has a challenger, Carl Sciortino. Sciortino seems to have the right ideas about housing too. I guess, at least, Ciampa is sticking to his guns… because despite what the right says about “anti-democratic judicial activism,” voting against gay marriage is voting yourself out of office in Davis Square.

Speaking of which, the Globe had a good article which I can’t seem to find online (they have a terrible website…) about the phrase “the traditional meaning of marriage” and how it’s a good example of the etymylogical fallacy. That particular error is made when one argues that the historical definition of a word necessarily has some sort of bearing on its current or future definition. That is, in my grandmother’s day, “cool” meant chilly, but that’s got no bearing on arguments about hipness or jazz. The article also notes that “wedlock,” the most common pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon word for marriage, actually means “contract proceedings” and could well be applied to any particular contract, such as land, feudal tribute, or car leasing.

On the editoral page, of course, Jeff Jacoby commits all the logical mistakes outlined above. My favorite part, however, is where Jacoby complains that the arguments of the anti-marriage right have been portrayed as bigoted.

I know it hurts to be insulted that way, Jeff, but that’s called “accurate reporting.” Nobody wants to hear it, especially not in a headline, but you really are a bigoted and ignorant bastard. I’m sure that the former Rev. Shanley could appreciate the pain of being vilified by the right-thinking world at large, but that doesn’t make it any less fair or just to portray you as a bigot than it was to portray Shanley as a sexual predator.

I wonder if Jacoby has been assigned to make flawed arguments so the Globe can claim it makes some token effort to appease its presumably crucial rich-bigot audience (the poor bigot, of course, reads the Herald), or if he actually believes what he says. Either way, I pity him. He and Nick Petreley make me think I could succeed as a journalist if only I slept with the right people– although I shudder to think of the people I’d have to sleep with. I mean, Jacoby. Ewww.

As Seen On…

Everybody Loves Zoidberg WOULD be a really good show. I love Zoidberg anyway.

I’ve seen a few episodes of MTV’s MADE recently, and I think that, of the makeover reality shows, it’s really the best. It’s a simple concept: high school kid has some dream of personal accomplishment, and MTV shows up and helps them achieve it in 10 weeks. It’s always something difficult, and out of character, and good. A very femme young woman who wants to learn to skateboard because she’s tired of being so deliberately useless. A chorus nerd who wants to join the hip-hop dance team. An out-of-shape whiner who wants to run a triathalon.

These kids are not passively being “made over” by MTV. Instead, they’re becoming self-made, re-creating themselves in a quintessentially American narrative of self-invention, performative identity, and achievement.

Did I already say this? I can’t remember. I saw an episode in Germany and that’s when I began thinking of how the music videos on EuroMTV are local, but the shows are all bratty US kids, and how Made was especially US-centric. On the other hand, every child dreams of achievement and change. That’s what it is to grow to adulthood, really. The self-invention thing may be a very American twist, but everybody dreams of becoming somebody else.

The fight is so bitter because the stakes are so small

Every time I have to read a Nick Petreley article, I approach it with a sense of trepidation: will it have a reasoned opinion, or will it be full of bile? Well, this week it’s bile.

I wasn’t able to come up with a response, mostly because half of the article is an extended ad hominem attack on the GNOME developers, particularly Havoc and the UI team. Michael Hall, however, has a much more reasoned review in the most recent Server Watch: Enterprise Unix Roundup article. In the past, he’s provided a similarly nuanced, logical approach to the interminable desktop wars and other flammable software subjects.

I’m afraid I don’t have much else to say on the subject, aside from, well… illogical ad-hominem attacks on people who’ve never done anything bad to me and whom I have never met, and whose software is in fact a perfectly lovely alternative to what I happen to prefer. As they say in academia, the fight is so bitter because the stakes are so small.