Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman’s breasts; it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy.

—Lazarus Long


Archive for the 'General' Category

Hiding the Decline: Prologue

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

According to the summaries I’ve seen, the 61 megabytes of email and documents net-jacked from the Climate Research Unit a few days ago do not — quite — reify conservatives’ darkest fantasies about “the team” (as the network of professional anthropogenic-global-warming alarmists communicating through CRU likes to style itself). To do that, they’d have to [...]

Barbecue kings!

Monday, November 16th, 2009

John Birmingham writes from Australia:

Even, and this is gonna hurt, the Americans have it all over us when it comes to cooking with fire, iron and tongs. In fact it’s arguable the American barbecue, or rather its plethora of regional variations on barbecue, set the gold standard worldwide for applying heat to meat while out [...]

The pragmatics of webscraping

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

Here’s an amplification of my previous post, Structure Is Not Meaning. It’s an except from the ForgePlucker HOWTO on writing code to web-scrape project data out of forge systems.

Your handler class’s job is to extract project data. If you are lucky, your target forge already has an export feature that will dump everything [...]

Ego is for little people

Monday, November 9th, 2009

When I got really famous and started to hang out with people at the top of the game in computer science and other fields, one of the first things I noticed is that the real A-list types almost never have a major territorial/ego thing going on in their behavior. The B-list people, the bright [...]

Maybe if moral cowardice cost money, it would be less common?

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Heh. State representative Fred Maslack of Vermont has proposed a bill under which non-gun-owners would have to register and pay a fee. Entertainingly enough, there is actual justification for this in a careful reading of the Vermont state constitution.
The Hon. Rep. Maslack is joking. I think. And I’m against requiring people who [...]

Structure Is Not Meaning

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

So, I announce ForgePlucker, and within a day I’ve got some guy from Y Combinator sneering at me for using regular expressions to parse HTML. Says it’s “crappy code”. The poor fool…he has fallen victim to a conceptual trap which I, fortunately, learned to avoid decades ago. I could spout a freshet [...]

Announcing ForgePlucker

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

I’ve been strongly hinting in recent blog entries that I planned to do something concrete about the data-jail problems of present open-source hosting sites. Because I believe in underpromising and overperforming, I decided at the outset not to announce a project until I could not only show working code, but code with wide enough [...]

The future of software forges

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

I’m still not going to talk about my attack on the forge infrastructure problems quite yet; the software is coming along nicely, but I intend to announce only after it handles its fourth forge type (yes, that was a tease). But I will say this: I now think I know what the future of [...]

Hacker superstitions about software licensing

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Hackers have a lot of odd superstitions about software licensing. I was reminded of this recently when a project maintainer asked me whether he needed to get a sign-off from each and every one of his contributors before switching from Apache v1 to Apache v2. Here’s what I told him:
My opinion is [...]

Fearing what might be true

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

I am not generally unhappy with my model of how the universe works. Yes, it would be pleasant if there really were a beneficient creator-god and an afterlife; it would be nice if “good government” were actually a sustainable possibility rather than a fond but deluded hope in the minds of statists; it [...]

Public Space in Cyberspace

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Following my post Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves, a great many people took me for task for trying to make a principled distinction between public space and private space, and tangled that up with a lot of confusion about the distinction between “public” and “state-owned” space. Here I’ll attempt to shed some light on [...]

Condemning Censorship, Even of Werewolves

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Thomas Paine once wrote: “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Paine’s truth is not idealistic handwaving, it is brutal pragmatism. Justifications for censorship, even the best-intentioned kind, have [...]

Looking Deeper into Forges, And Not Liking What I See

Friday, October 9th, 2009

In my previous post, Three Systemic Problems With Open-Source Hosting Sites I identified some missing features that create serious brittleness in or project-hosting infrastructure. The question naturally arises, why don’t existing hosting systems already have these facilities? I have looked into this question, actually examining the codebases of Savane and GForge/FusionForge, and the [...]

Raymond & Polanski vs. “Mr. Society”

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

In my previous post, Why Artists Defend Roman Polanki, I analyzed the flap over the Roman Polanski arrest as a case of artists arguing for a privilege to behave like shitheels without being held to account for it. I advanced this as an explanation because I think it covers the facts better than some [...]

Why artists defend Roman Polanski

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

In 1977, Roman Polanski drugged, raped, and sodomized a 13-year-old girl. When he believed a sort-of-plea-bargain was about to come unstuck, he took it on the lam. He lived the high life in this self-imposed exile for thirty years, until busted in Switzerland recently. Now various of the usual suspects on the [...]

Mighty aches from little ACORN’s fall

Monday, September 28th, 2009

In all the foofaraw surrounding the ACORN scandals, there is a huge important consequence of them understood – but not spoken – by everyone who follows politics as a blood sport. This story describing conditions in Michigan and tallying up some recent ACORN convictions for electoral fraud is an indicator. And, on top of Obama’s [...]

Uncivil society and the collapse of the nomenklatura

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

A few moments ago, I read a review of a new book, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, and the following sentences jumped out at me:

This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed from [...]

Not long before the end

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

In California Dreamin’ I wrote:

The U.S. as a whole will almost certainly face [California's structural deficit] problem before the end of Barack Obama’s administration in 2012. Social Security obligations were due to exceed collections in 2013; even before Obama quadrupled the federal deficit this meant a giant blazing meteorite was already hurtling straight at the [...]

Let these two asses be set to grind corn!

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

In The Book of Lies, the diabolically brilliant occultist Alesteir Crowley once wrote:

“Explain this happening!”
“It must have a natural cause!”
“It must have a supernatural cause!”
Let these two asses be set to grind corn!

In the original, there is a sort of grouping bracket connecting the second and third lines lines and pointing at the fourth. [...]

From radical evil to farce in two generations

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

There just isn’t any better marker for the fundamental narcissism of today’s left-wing politics that this:

That’s Che Guevara’s granddaughter, Lydia, We are told that she posed semi-nude to promote vegetarianism and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
There are so many levels of wrongness and unintended irony here that it’s hard to know where to [...]