Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
--Phil Agre
The New York Daily News reports that the
MTA is planning to create
two
new subway lines, to be called the V and the W.
There isn't much new track involved here--a few hundred feet. Mostly
the plan would reshuffle existing service. Extra trains
from Queens would be nice, but people who take the D or B train in
from Brooklyn or the Bronx aren't going to enjoy having to
change trains at 34th Street every time their trip takes them
north, or south, of that point.
The MTA hasn't confirmed any of this--if enough people object, they may change parts of it. Or not--they don't have much control over repairs on the Manhattan Bridge.
Maybe this guy
has too much time on his hands, but it's hard not to admire a
Lego
stegosaurus.
[via /usr/bin/girl]
A team of Kenyan and French scientists has found
human-looking
fossils in a layer of sediment dated to six million years ago.
About the size of a modern chimpanzee, "Millennium Man," not yet
formally described or named, seems to have walked upright and had
teeth much like ours:
It has small canines and full molars -- similar dentition to modern man and suggesting a diet of mainly fruit and vegetables with occasional opportunistic meat-eating.
If the dating holds up--and maybe even if it doesn't--it's time to redraw the family genealogy again.
A couple of notes on the US constitution and the presidential
election:
Amendment 14, Section 2 says (in its entirety):
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.
There's nothing that requires a state to choose its presidential electors by a popular vote. Once it has done so, however, for the state legislature to ignore that vote and pick the candidate it prefers might be a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The short list of reasons for denying people the vote for electors does not include "we're having trouble counting the ballots quickly," let alone "we can't get the results we want." Almost all male Floridians over the age of 21 would be disenfranchised if the Florida legislature put its choice in place of their own. Is there a constitutional lawyer with a calculator in the (Florida) House? How many electoral votes do you get if only 100 Floridians get to vote for electors?
If you can look away from Florida for a moment, there's everyone's current favorite, the Twelfth Amendment. Among other things, it specifies that
The electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.
I can't find any law stating what happens if a state's electors ignore that requirement, and there doesn't seem to be any case law regarding either of these issues--we are living in new and interesting times. It's not clear what the Senate can, or should, do if presented with, hypothetically, electoral votes from Hawaii that name the state's governor and senior senator as president and vice president. Or, not so hypothetically, votes from Texas for two Texans.
If you're one of the three people who reads both YAWL and my homepage regularly, sorry about the duplication.
A nice long-term
botanical
experiment: in 1879, William Beal buried bottles of seeds,
to be dug up and planted every five years. The interval
has been extended to ten and
then 20 years: this year's planting produced a fine crop of
Verbascum blattaria, or moth mullein, the only plant
to germinate in recent cycles.
[via Honeyguide]
The first
life
on land was there a billion years earlier than we'd
realized: photosynthetic bacteria were living in a seasonal
pond in South Africa 2.6 billion years ago.
Is that a cell phone in your pocket, or are you
about to
shoot me?
Teresa Nielsen Hayden on
Laws, ballots, and
getting drunk on anger.
I'll tell you a secret. It's a basic rule of politics. It doesn't get taught much in school, and if you think about it a minute you'll probably see why. Goes like this:The fact that you're on their side
doesn't mean that they're on your side.
Organizing a mob to terrorize a vote-counting center into stopping the count is not heroic. It isn't brave. It isn't a blow struck in defense of truth and justice. It's a crude attempt to circumvent the system, and it shows a profound disrespect for law and democracy. It's even more disturbing that they did this so openly, and that their own party hasn't disavowed their actions and done what it could to rein them in.
What's going on now isn't even about who gets to be President of the US next January 20. It's about how we choose a president: it's about whether the choice is made by people voting, wisely or otherwise, or by mobs in the pay of a faction...
"whether this nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
Tired of watching paint dry? Right now, in what is supposedly the
crossroads of the world, center of an exciting metropolis, large numbers
of people are staring at
a
block of ice.
There's a perfectly good library
a few blocks away.
It's not just the Palm Beach butterfly ballot that became an
inadvertent literacy test--
everyday
life is effectively a literacy test, now that everything
from government forms to bank cash machines have interfaces
created by people who know as much about designing a page as they do about drawing a horse. Nowadays anybody is free to explore the uncharted frontiers of typographic design, and that's pretty much what anybody has been doing.
Canadians: you have an election next week. In the meantime,
you can add your name to the
petition demanding that
Stockwell Day change his first name to Doris.
More on the flaws of filtering software:
the sites SmartFilter blocks under the most categories are
privacy
and anonymity services, and translation software.
Seth Finkelstein's
analysis points out that this is inherent to the design: anonymizers
are a way of escaping the filtering software.
The blocking of
sites
belonging to political candidates is harder to explain,
except as an example of how badly such programs
work. It has, however,
convinced at least one politician that he was wrong to
support filtering software.
The Yale Daily News interviewed several
Yale undergraduates who have
spent
a night in jail after being arrested for relatively minor offenses.
Some learned from the experience, but at least one doesn't seem to
have gotten past resentment:
here I am a white, yuppie Yale student... I felt put upon because of my class and color. How could I, as an educated person, be put to this inconvenience? This doesn't happen to people like me
Nobody seems to have noticed
FindSame, a search
engine that will find similar text. It's handy if you can't
remember more than two lines of a song, and more than handy
if you want original source code, or are afraid someone may
have plagiarized your writing. Given an URL, it will pull in
the document and then look for pieces of the text elsewhere;
it's also set up to take input of a line or two. Unfortunately,
the company providing this service is
considering pulling it off the Web because it's
not used much.
Paleontologists can learn a lot about mammals from their
teeth. A new analysis shows that an extinct species of
North American
rhinoceros
was semi-aquatic.
Copyright 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.