entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

One man's quest to earn the Most Human Human award at the Turing Test.

The author calls it an essay, but i believe that it's more apposite to label his article a manifesto regarding the ownership of data.

Why has this man been donating well-made art forgeries to museums for the past three decades?

"Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin have something in common: they are both cowgirl politicians.  In this, they are symptomatic of the too-narrow ways in which the United States is willing to accept women as leaders."

There is a 14-year-old girl who lives in poverty in Uganda who said to her chess coach, "Coach, I will be a grandmaster someday."

A woman who has no amygdala and no fear.

If i told you that 80% of the antibiotics sold in the US were sold for farm animals, you might be skeptical of my claim; but would you believe the FDA?

The Best Magazine Articles Ever

If Ken Thompson calls himself a programmer, not a developer, or an engineer, then anyone who shares that profession should follow suit.  I don't care that this article is over 20 years old, damn it.  Now get off my lawn.

Scientists from Tübingen, Germany, show that people really walk in circles when lost.

You might remember that i quite enjoyed I ♥ Huckabees; this long essay about the movie is what i would have written if i were in any way qualified to write about philosophy.

• Emily Bazelon interviews Ruth Bader Ginsburg about Sonia Sotomayor, women on the Supreme Court and in law, and feminism.
• The concept of software engineering is dead, only 10 years too late.  Now its shambling animated corpse will play out the string.
• Tim Kreider writes about outrage and separating it from more productive urges.
• Laura Blumenfend writes about the training that prospective Secret Service agents undergo.

Pandora has given me more music to enjoy, which is great, but it's also given me a lot of the reviews from the All Music Guide, which ranges from the interesting to the banal, from all of which the most salient fact emerged: Stephen Thomas Erlewine is an enormous wanker.

I look forward to a time when the Porny Presentation Bingo card goes unused at a technical conference. (via infotropism)

divisadero embedded a preview to possibly the greatest videogame-based movie of all time.

Remember Liquid Television?  sanspoof linked to something that reminds me heavily of the best parts from that show.  As far as LTV goes, one short that always stuck with me was "The Running Man" (part 1/part 2); the haunting music in the final minute remained imperfectly in my memory, so that when i first heard Michael Hedges's "Spare Change", i thought it was the music they used in the cartoon (it isn't).  Although there isn't a performance of "Spare Change" on YouTube, there is a huge amount of Michael Hedges content there, and, well, thank god for YouTube, because now i've seen Michael Hedges play.  Unless you know tronpublic, you've probably never seen anyone play guitar the way Hedges plays "Silent Anticipations".

Theo Jansen is a kinetic sculptor.  He does amazing stuff.

Via warrenelliscom, a levitating, powered lightbulb.  Thank you, Nikola Tesla, wherever you are.

"It took my 8-year-old son just a few seconds to shake loose some hidden history from within the official transcript of the [Coalition Provisional Authority]."  Thank you, Microsoft Word.

"Just think about your options.  You know Coach isn't going to give you back your scholarship just like that.  If she finds out [that you're pregnant] and if you decide to keep it, that's gone."

Let's start from the top: over the last month, Kathy Sierra has been issued death threats, both on her Weblog and on others.  As a result, she's been terrified to leave the house, and canceled her appearances at a technical conference.

However, my first reaction wasn't particularly compassionate.  Misogynist fuckheads on the Internet?  Not a big shocker.  I was perplexed by her reaction; this wasn't some idiot coming to her door and threatening her with a knife, but some pusbag who said something gross and hateful.  It ranks rather low on my crime scale.  But there's a lot of cultural baggage (i lack a better phrase at the moment) for men and women regarding how they react to threats.  Women don't react like men do to threats, and there's no reason for me to assume that they do, or expect that they should.

Another thing about her post that bothered me was the way she seemed to be trying to pin some blame on the events on Christopher Locke.  There's simply no evidence that Locke had anything to do with the threats, so it's irresponsible of her to keep throwing his name in with others who clearly did have something to do with them.  However, when i look at what Locke did in helping set up meankids.org and the subsequent unclebobism, i think of earlier days in talk.bizarre when many of us would pile on to berate willful idiots like Lloyd H. Wood, or the insistently kooky Andrew Beckwith.  I think upon that, and especially my own participation, as a bad thing and a classic example of the bullied bullying.  I can always try to plead my young age as an excuse, but Locke can't.

One assumption i was making regarding Kathy's post was that she should either be too terrified to post, or she should be over it.  This was a very poor assumption.  As i reread it, i realized that she's clearly coming out of her state of terror and she's trying to put her thoughts together.

It boils down to this: i would have reacted differently to the threats because i have years of experience on Usenet making a complete ass of myself and others, and a few years unmaking that ass.  My reaction to Kathy's post was along the lines of saying, "Oh, snap out of it!" to someone with chronic depression (and, yes, i've done that).  While i dispute dawn_guy's assertion that my response is indistinguishable from that of someone with a total lack of empathy, i do admit that her assertion that my reaction points to something unpleasant in my character is near or on the mark.  I think it's something that i've fought against for quite some time, and there's obviously still more work to do.

Lastly, i'd like to thank Kim for talking about this with me and setting me straight on a few points.