Blog Archives

Consent, real and imagined, in the technology industry

Posted on 2014-04-29 by

Everyone must read this article from ModelViewCulture: Betsy Haibel (2014-04-28), “The Fantasy and Abuse of the Manipulable User” A few representative quotations: Another mechanism behind rape culture is the belief that sexual consent and non-consent exist on a different plane … Continue reading →

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That’s how it’s SUPPOSED to work (quote)

Posted on 2014-03-01 by

From Diane St. Clair’s The Animal Farm Buttermilk Cookbook: Recipes and Reflections from a Small Vermont Dairy (Andrews McMeel, 2013): We also eat meat, and we raise all of the meat that we eat on the farm. There is no … Continue reading →

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Quote of the day

Posted on 2014-02-27 by

From Greg Shill, guest-blogging at The Conglomerate, of all places. He’s talking about a recent Kansas decision that found a sperm donor to be the legal father of a lesbian (ex-)couple’s child, despite all the parties having signed a contract … Continue reading →

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Some surprising words of wisdom from Ron Unz

Posted on 2014-02-15 by

Conservative activist Ron Unz would not exactly be my go-to person for economic analysis, but Mike Konczal draws attention to a 2012 article of Unz’s making the conservative case for increasing the minimum wage. Some choice quotations (footnotes omitted): On … Continue reading →

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Quote: M.J. Dominus on programming languages

Posted on 2014-02-02 by

From a Saturday-evening blog post which was primarily about job applicants at his company failing a really trivial programming quiz by doing it in Java: You will not produce anything really brilliant, but you will probably not produce anything too … Continue reading →

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This week’s Diane Duane quote

Posted on 2014-01-22 by

Maybe this one is really intended for me more than whatever readers I may have here: It is perhaps one of life’s more interesting ironies that, of the many who beseech the Goddess to send them love, so few will … Continue reading →

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Quote of the day

Posted on 2014-01-18 by

From Christian Weisgerber: All that the recent pardon of Alan Turing triggered was self-righteousness about what good people we are now and how wicked British society was sixty years ago. The real message should have been: Which of todays punishments … Continue reading →

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Cosma Shalizi on programming as expression

Posted on 2014-01-03 by

I don’t agree with everything he says in his advice for students in his Intro to Statistical Computing class, but I like this a lot: Programming is expression: take a personal, private, intuitive, irreproducible series of acts of thought, and … Continue reading →

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While I’m quoting Diane Duane…

Posted on 2014-01-01 by

This made me tear up (not least because it’s never happened to me, of which more later if I can manage to get it written): But normally the concept of the date suggests something besides just going out to have … Continue reading →

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A lovely short meditation by Diane Duane

Posted on 2013-12-31 by

I’m not one for meditation, but I thought this was lovely: I’ll meet cruel people today, cowards and liars, people eaten up with envy and people drugged out or wasted on booze. They’ll be like that because they’re not clear … Continue reading →

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