Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Monday, 8 April 2002

# 11:30 PM

a heartening announcement

I can't say it any better than the judges did:

The Supreme Court [of the State of Colorado] recognizes that both the United States and Colorado Constitutions protect the rights of the general public to purchase books anonymously, without government interference.

... and therefore that the government may not demand purchasing records from a bookstore. Well, it's not as absolute as that.

...the law enforcement need for the book purchase record in this case was not sufficiently compelling to outweigh the harm that would likely follow from execution of the search warrant, in part because law enforcement officials sought the purchase record for reasons related to the contents of the books that the suspect may have purchased. (emphasis added)

As reported on Slashdot.

# 3:15 PM

Apropos of Avram Grumer's speculations about theories of what makes a "liberal", or a "conservative", and Gary Farber's observation that people self-identifying as either simply do not understand how the other group's arguments can be rational, let alone right: I'm told that it is instructive to get one's hands on a copy of George Lakoff's Moral Politics, which taps the Gordian knot at an angle you may not have thought even existed and sees it neatly fall into two pieces.

I say this not having read the book, so cum grano salis as Teresa says.

Joel Rosenberg, who knows far more about these things than me (being a person who actually owns and shoots guns) confirms my suspicion that it would be trivial to get a gun through airport security, if one were determined enough.

# 2:45 PM

Bizarre dreams, involving plastic bags full of human blood, trying to find a microscope in a derelict physics laboratory, and trying to sew together a gift T-shirt for someone on very short notice. Also there was something about extremely expensive Magic Markers.

As I said long ago, my dreams don't tend to make any sense.

feelings of loneliness

The Flash Girls' Banshee is playing on the music shuffler just now, and I'm reminded of the trouble I had falling asleep last night. Not because I expect the Cwn Annwn to howl for me anytime soon... see, Banshee is a love song (sort of). And I have come to despair of finding love, or even lust, again; it's been years now since there was anything but missed connections. I don't let it bother me in the daytime, but in the dark it's harder.

(The music shuffler put Mysterious Ways immediately after Banshee. I see it's decided to be unhelpful this morning.)

feelings of inadequacy

Blogs like Electrolite and Pigs and Fishes make me wonder why I'm in this game at all. They give you political commentary, humor, and interesting newsbits. I whine about my life. What's the point? Is anyone actually reading?

# 3:30 AM

I'm rereading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin. I should have done this years ago; I last read it when I was about twelve years old, and missed about two-thirds of the story, never mind the point (it's definitely a book with a point, or several).

Also recommended: Making Book, a collection of essays by Teresa Nielsen Hayden. You would perhaps not expect a set of guidelines for copy editors to be amusing, nor to illustrate so many useful principles for writing as well; yet that is exactly what the On Copyediting essay does. And The Pastafazool Cycle ought to be required reading for eighth graders learning how to do library research.

# 12:10 AM

Wonders never cease—the landlord sent someone around to vacuum the carpet in the common hallway. It is a great improvement. (Alas, they didn't do the stairs.) And the laundry room no longer has slime on the floor, although in other respects it is still rather grungy.

Slashdot has a link to a paper called Single Points of 0wnership which discusses how the distributed computing client bundled with KaZaa has created a serious security risk: if the distributed-computing servers were compromised, they could distribute trojan horses to all the KaZaa clients out there, potentially rendering millions of computers into zombies (sense 2).

This seems an opportune moment to do the airport security rant I promised last week, but it turns out that Bruce Schneier has beaten me to it by several months. All I can add is that to anyone with half a brain it's bloody obvious that the security checks are appearance without substance. Who do they think they're fooling?

Oh, also, you know which security regulation was being most carefully enforced? The photo-ID requirement, of course. Which, as Bruce points out, adds no security at all (fake IDs are trivial to obtain, and even if you can reliably detect them (which you can't) you still don't know whether or not the person you have reliably identified, is a hijacker). Its real purpose? Read his rant.