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01:34:43 AM, Tuesday 7 September 2004
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I said damn,
it’s hot in here,
there must be some caloric in the atmosphere.
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12:51:57 AM, Monday 6 September 2004
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“J. was released after 49 hours in custody – charged with disorderly conduct. She had been walking down the sidewalk when the police closed in on everyone in that general vicinity, pressing them against walls and parking meters and screaming at them.” (This Modern World – note from parent of a protester)
“I have never done anything illegal in my life. No illegal drugs, no underage drinking, I don’t even smoke cigarettes. I had complete faith in the legal system of this country. I never thought that I would be arrested, much less arrested without any explanation. I had no idea what my rights were as a citizen under arrest.” (This Modern World – account from a protester)
“[P]rotesters are being taken to the hospital for skin reactions and asthma attacks from the chemicals and diesel soaked into the concrete floor at the Pier 57 detention center, a former bus depot, where reports are that as many as 40 protesters at a time had been crammed into the 10’ by 20’ pens covered in wire mesh.” (The Village Voice)
“They just took us all away. They trapped us and put us all into buses. We’ve been in jail for over 13 hours right now. In our first nine hours, the only food we received was an apple. In our first four hours here we weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom or get water. So none of us were read our rights; we haven’t been able to talk to any lawyers. A lot of people here that were arrested without even protesting, they were—just happened to be on the sidewalk where everyone was on that block—was arrested. And there are chemical warning signs all over this place that we’re being held. A lot of people are forming rashes on their skin from the floor—from whatever it is that is on it.” (Democracy Now – interview with detained protestors)
“At some point the police would just start picking people out of the crowd and arresting them. From what I saw, there was often no rhyme or reason behind who they picked to arrest. While the arrests often seemed arbitrary and done in an overly aggressive fashion, I saw no overt acts of police brutality. While Tuesday night was chaotic, it wasn’t Chicago 1968.” (Christian Science Monitor)
“They’re calling it ‘Guantanamo on the Hudson.’ The protesters are part of largest group ever to demonstrate and get arrested during the history of the nation’s more than 80 political conventions.” (Christian Science Monitor)
“Let me tell you about some of the people I was proud to call ‘cellmate’: A family of tourists with some really, really bad luck. Right in the middle of the sweep their cab pulled up on 42nd Street and they started to get out—Mom, Dad, and a boy around sixteen. A cop grabbed them, pulled them out of the cab, cuffed them, and threw them into the paddy wagon. ...” (CaptainNormal.org)
“Cops fear some protesters might hang around after the convention to disrupt other events, like the U.S. Open, so the pen will remain open indefinitely, [a police source] said.” (New York Post)
“I asked Durant what he thought about the police response to the marches thus far. ‘Quite honestly, a mixed review,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen a lot of restraint.‘” (Slate
“One of those cops, seven-year veteran Sgt. Joseph Diaz, cut open his leg when he fell through a skylight on the roof, and required 38 stitches when he was treated at Bellevue Hospital, according to police.
Thies … said one of the activists had warned the sergeant not to remain on the skylight because it was cracked, but claimed Diaz ignored the warning. ‘The last thing we wanted to have happen is anyone to get hurt,’ said Thies.
Because of Diaz’s injury, the four activists who hung the sign were charged with first-degree assault – which carries a maximum prison sentence of 25 years – as well as reckless endangerment, criminal trespass, conducting an unlawful street show, unlawful posting of an advertisement, and failing to obtain a license to hang a sign larger than 75 feet.” (officer.com)
“We command you, that you have and produce the petitioners who it is alleged in supporting affidavit have been imprisoned and detained by you upon warantless arrest for an unreasonably long period of time; arrested without probable cause; denied access to counsel during their unlawful detention; and detained under unsafe conditions at a hazardous site, including the possibility of asbestos contamination, denied medical care, without being produced before a local criminal court where bail can be set or issued a Desk Appearance Ticket (‘DAT‘) and released from custody…” (Indymedia.org – online PDF of writ of habeus corpus)
“A judge ordered city officials on Thursday to immediately release nearly 500 anti-GOP protesters, then held the city in contempt for not complying and imposed a fine that could total almost a half-million dollars.” (boston.com)
“Or, as one of the cops said, ‘My commanding officer says “Arrest her“, I have to arrest you. But somebody’s told him that that’s got to be the order. “Arrest them all“—that’s the line from the top.’ The top, for this particular national security event, as the RNC has been labeled, is the Secret Service. ‘They’re in charge of this whole thing,’ a bicycle cop told me on the street the next day, but Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly made sure to take his full portion of credit.” (Mother Jones)
“‘I think this is the first time a major municipality has actually been held in contempt and possibly fined for violating the rights of demonstrators before their cases went to court,’ says Daniel Alterman, one of the heavyweight lawyers … who went to bat for the demonstrators.” (The Village Voice)
Google News: arrests at NYC
Wikipedia: 2004 Republican National Convention protest activity: Police tactics and Pier 57
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12:12:50 AM, Monday 6 September 2004
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Beautiful Ladies
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(2)
05:06:30 PM,
Thursday 2 September 2004
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Young liberal idealist looking for conservative or Republican person to discuss hopes and plans for the future of our society
That’s beautiful.
[via Keith, as was the last post, for that matter]
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02:39:57 AM, Thursday 2 September 2004
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The Open Government Information Awareness suite of software tools acts as a framework for US citizens to construct and analyze a comprehensive database on our government. Modeled on recent government programs designed to consolidate information on individuals into massive databases, our system does the opposite, allowing you to scrutinize those in government. Citizens are able to explore data, track events, find patterns, and build risk profiles, all in an effort to encourage and motivate action. We like to think of it as a Citizen’s Intelligence Agency, giving people similar tools and technologies to those held by their government.
Definitely something I’m going to have to read up on.
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02:18:28 AM, Thursday 2 September 2004
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11:32:52 PM, Wednesday 1 September 2004
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This MetaTalk thread is a spoiler for pretty much everything, ever. Though some of them are lies. It is beautiful. (Don't click if you don't want to know how it ends.)
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07:46:48 PM,
Wednesday 1 September 2004
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Nature's toy, U.S. Patent No. 6,360,693.
[via me from the past]
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(6)
04:09:56 PM,
Wednesday 1 September 2004
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Two posts particularly worth reading over at Tom Tomorrow's blog.
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01:22:19 PM,
Wednesday 1 September 2004
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C Cod, or C Compile on Demand, lets you write C like you would a scripting language: you edit and run the source files, and it compiles the sources at runtime if they've changed since last time you ran them. Including CSP: C Server Pages. That's right, C embedded in HTML. It's insane, but potentially pretty cool.
[via Keith Devens]
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02:04:59 PM,
Tuesday 31 August 2004
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Wow, things have changed while I was working in other languages. Much less of the Java hate now that it's possible to split a String on a regular expression.
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03:14:26 PM,
Monday 30 August 2004
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So it seems today's the day we offer all our excess Gmail invites to anyone who's been left behind. I have enough for six of you. Anyone interested?
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(1)
02:27:09 AM,
Sunday 29 August 2004
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mic in track
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09:26:37 PM,
Friday 27 August 2004
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Paul Graham's quotes page has my favorite variation yet on the old palindrome: "A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal-- Panama!"
Also, describing languages in terms of what problem they fix:
Algol: Assembly language is too low-level.
Cobol: Fortran is scary.
Ada: Every existing language is missing something.
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(1)
07:46:12 PM,
Friday 27 August 2004
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In general:
1) It doesn't have to be perfect.
2) It just has to be better than what you already have.
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(3)
06:08:42 PM,
Friday 27 August 2004
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Looking over the logs reveals that comment spam was coming at a rate of several per second, which is fast enough that putting a throttle on link-bearing posts would make spamming decidedly more costly.
The spammers report their user-agent as Internet Explorer, but at that rate I figure it has to be some kind of robot, so some kind of anti-robot measure might also help.
Still thinking.
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(6)
05:27:49 PM,
Monday 23 August 2004
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So on the way to work this morning I'm thinking about the similarity between Ken Layne's "The God of War, Death, and Madness" and one of Mark Ames's articles in the eXile, and then just now I'm reading blogs and there's a post on Pedantry comparing them. So anyway, I'm not the only one that sees it.
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03:06:42 PM,
Monday 23 August 2004
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As you may have noticed, I've gotten a couple of heavy bursts of comment spam lately. To keep it from happening again, I've resorted to a rather extreme measure that I hope will only be temporary: it is now impossible to include a link in a comment on m14m.net. I'm still looking around for another solution that will be less severe without being too much work to maintain, and still working on writing some code to clean up the spam that's already there. I'm very sorry I've had to do this--it sucks, and I really hope I can come up with something better. And I remind you all that one of the greatest pleasures in Weblogger Heaven will be the ability to look down upon the torments of the spammers in Weblogger Hell.
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(7)
02:49:40 AM,
Monday 23 August 2004
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There was a loud sustained comment spam attack going on, so I've turned off comments. Tonight I'll try turning them back on, but only after I've implemented some kind of anti-spam measure.
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09:43:04 PM,
Sunday 22 August 2004
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Ibuprofin'!
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(1)
09:19:36 PM,
Sunday 22 August 2004
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So, it seems the Olympics people have included on their website an absurd little creature known as a Hyperlink Policy. I would expect nothing less from them. Anyhow, the Internet (Bridgie reports) seems to have decided that the appropriate response is a Googlebombing campaign identifying the whole thing as the crass spectacle it really is, where exploited children are pushed to work ever harder for the benefit of corrupt politicians, and greedy corporations.
(I'm not actually as concerned as all that about the Olympics, but I figure if one is doing something like this one may as well go all out.)
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(8)
03:48:47 AM,
Sunday 22 August 2004
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Meep. Hit return too soon.
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(1)
03:35:48 AM,
Sunday 22 August 2004
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NLTK, the Natural Language Toolkit, is a suite of Python libraries and programs for symbolic and statistical natural language processing. NLTK includes graphical demonstrations and sample data. It is accompanied by extensive documentation, including tutorials that explain the underlying concepts behind the language processing tasks supported by the toolkit.
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(1)
02:36:08 AM,
Saturday 21 August 2004
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Remember the Really Big Button That Doesn't Do Anything?
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(3)
08:55:12 PM,
Friday 20 August 2004
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Dammit! There's an XML of the House membership for the 107th Congress, but not for the current (108th) Congress. Of course, the whole congressional XML thing is a work in progress. Also, a bit of Googling around just led me to web-services.gov, which sounds interesting.
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(2)
07:17:27 PM,
Friday 20 August 2004
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Text file (ostensibly ASCII, but I see some accent marks in there) of a list of members of the House. Effectively a comma-separated flatfile database with four fields (surname, first name, state, district), but it has some warts. Doesn't include party affiliation. The HTML version includes parties, but it looks like a devil to parse.
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(1)
06:57:58 PM,
Friday 20 August 2004
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Senators of the 108th Congress in HTML and (bing!) XML!
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(1)
06:32:36 PM,
Friday 20 August 2004
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Some might say a quarter after twelve is too late for breakfast.
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(8)
03:12:45 PM,
Friday 20 August 2004
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Brad DeLong asks the question "Just what are the fundamental (valid) insights of Marxism?"
He gets some interesting answers. Well worth a read, though you'll need to ignore one post by a persistent troll on his site. Also, in passing, someone links to a New York Times article that argues for something I've been saying for a while: the prevailing philosophy among radical leftists today is not Marxism but anarchism.
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(5)
02:21:03 PM,
Friday 20 August 2004
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Okay, I definitely have to start reading Fafblog.
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(3)
01:52:12 PM,
Friday 20 August 2004
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Just so I'll remember to expand on this tomorrow: a claim only becomes meaningful in light of the reasons one has for believing it.
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(4)
02:47:37 AM,
Friday 20 August 2004
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Avocado poll! How much do avocados cost where you live? How easy are they to find?
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(19)
12:15:00 AM,
Friday 20 August 2004
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Of the seven things I have identified as Coming Soon in the history of this bloglet, two actually came soon, one had actually been done a few hours earlier and I just forgot about it, and four never came at all. So yeah, I try to avoid promising to do anything on here.
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(8)
06:42:28 PM,
Wednesday 18 August 2004
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Matt Webb has the right idea about how weblogging software should work. (How it should work inside, that is. If a program worked this way, you probably wouldn't be able to tell based on the user interface.)
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03:14:26 PM,
Wednesday 18 August 2004
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Brad DeLong: I think that if we are to ever succeed in raising the level of the debate over economic policy, economists will have to wean themselves off of their bad habit of writing op-eds whose esoteric meanings are at sharp variance with their exoteric meanings.
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(2)
01:33:18 PM,
Wednesday 18 August 2004
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