The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Kristi Wachter:

I was sure there was going to be something about swing dancing in here.

Seconding albatross's recommendation for The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. I read it a couple of months ago (I'm reading through the entire McPhee oeuvre) (although I had to put off The Curve of Binding Energy until later - it looks like a good book, but I wasn't up for reading about nuclear weapons at the moment).

Deltoid is great - full of fascinating tech nerds spending all their time (and money) trying to make a hand-crafted airship fly. Interesting motivations, great back stories, gripping suspense, seasoned with at least a handful of really wonderful classic John McPhee sentences.

Today is the birthday of Tommy Shaw, born in 1953.

Tommy has been a member of Styx since the mid-1970s. He wrote or co-wrote, sang, and played lead guitar on a number of their hits, from "Crystal Ball" to "Too Much Time on My Hands."

These days, I don't spend all day, every day, listening to the latest Styx album over and over and over, but when I was in school, Styx was the world to me, and Tommy was one of those imagined friendships that make everything okay.

Geri @43:

If I vote for Obama, I'm a sexist. If I vote for McCain, I'm a racist.

How in the world does that make you a sexist? Obama's the candidate. If you're a Democrat and you support his platform, you vote for him. Senator Clinton didn't win the nomination. You, as a Democrat, no longer have a woman you can vote for.

... And ... voting for a woman BECAUSE she's a woman - that's sexist.

I would have been perfectly happy to vote for Senator Clinton for president if she had won the nomination and if there hadn't been a candidate I liked more. I think her lifetime of experience as a woman informs many of the positions I appreciate. But I would not vote for her because of her gender, or because she shares it with me, even though I think a greater balance of gender and race and experience in elected office would be a good thing.

Francis @ 18:

not only are the maps no easier to draw, they are actually illegal to draw in Britain under current law.

Seriously? Why are they illegal?

"Help spread the word about John McCain on news and blog sites. Your efforts to help get the message out about John McCain’s policies and plan for the future is one of the most valuable things you can do for this campaign."

You know, I think this is true. I really should be posting comments on more blogs, spreading the word about McCain, his policies, and his plans for the future:

"Great post about McCain. Did you know about his plan for a wall at the border? I can't even imagine how much that will cost. I wonder if he remembers Reagan's 'tear down this wall' speech?"

"Hm. McCain and foreign policy, eh? I'm afraid he lost me when he started supporting torture after roundly opposing it. I think it's a terrible policy, and sends troubling and dangerous messages to our allies and our enemies."

I get the impression that a lot of people think McCain isn't a great candidate but are unaware of how appalling he is.

When I picketed Scientology, I often used the phrase "Scientology - it's worse than you think" to tempt people to take my fliers. Seems like I need to do my bit for McCain's campaign by spreading the word about his policies and plans - making sure people know he's worse than they think.

Seconding Wesley (#35)'s recommendation on Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. I've recently seen several of the Powell-Pressburger films, and they give a fascinating perspective on England and the war. Blimp was shot during the war, which is pretty amazing in itself. Churchill tried to stop the film - some historians think he thought the Blimp character was a little to close to himself.

Makossa:

My favorite radio show, KFOG's "Ten at Ten" (which is a magnificent
little history lesson every day - his sound bytes of the start of the
AIDS crisis in early 80's years are heartbreaking), often plays "Soul
Makossa" by Manu Dibango when 1973 comes up.

Skwid, let me recommend LinkedIn. I know a number of tech folks who have gotten interviews through LinkedIn - since you know someone who can vouch for you, you tend to get past the slush process and at least to the phone interview stage a lot faster.

For getting the resume down to one page, I suggest using the heading "Relevant Experience," which indicates that you have plenty of other experience, too, but you've been thoughtful enough to highlight just the bits your reader will care about.

To put just one face (okay, three faces, but only one of them got the death penalty) on the wrongly-convicted issue, it's worth noting that the West Memphis 3 are still in jail despite the new DNA evidence, and Damian Echols is still on death row.

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I'm strongly against the death penalty, but I confess I wasn't displeased that Romania abolished it just after the death of CeauÅŸescu.

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Oh yeah - w00t! Go NJ!

When they decommissioned the card catalog at the San Francisco Public Library, they took 50,000 cards and had people write quotes from the corresponding books (or related books) on the cards, then they papered the walls of the new library with them.

It's pretty cool.

Carol @ 276:

Spodiodi turned up in the song "Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee" by Stick McGhee, later covered by Jerry Lee Lewis.

Bridget @ 6 and 28:

I perpetually don't know what the word for things is. Is there a word for that? When you know what something's called but can't think of the word?

Dysnomia? Various sites define that as "inability to remember names of objects" or "marked difficulty in remembering names or recalling words".

It's also a moon of Eris, named for the daughter of the Greek Goddess Eris: Lawlessness, the daughter of Discord.

There are a few things up at the Internet Archive - I just did a quick search on WWI; the list includes a number of WWII entries, but also has footage of the San Francisco celebration of VE Day and an interview with the maker of a documentary about the WWI vets who marched on Washington.

My thinking about hate crime laws has undergone a lot of change.

I used to support them pretty automatically.

I was somewhat swayed by the "a crime is a crime" argument. If a friend of mine is killed, he's just as dead whether the killer hated him for being gay or just wanted his wallet. (I do see the point about the intent to terrorize a community and society's desire to squash acts intended to terrorize.)

I think I'd be much less ambivalent about hate crime laws if they didn't specify protected groups. If we said "If your motivation for the crime was driven by the victim's membership in a group" rather than specifying religious affiliation, sexual orientation, and race, that would seem to me a better approach than enumerating protected classes.

I've been a critic of Scientology for years. I've been stalked by Scientology agents, been in a car following a picket that was pinned into a parking space by a Scientology PI, "outed" (I started picketing Scientology under a pseudonym, aware of their reputation for harassing critics), and libelled. Scientology teaches and encourages mistreatment - sometimes illegal mistreatment - of perceived enemies, including "suppressive persons" (like me) and psychiatrists (yes, all psychiatrists). However, suppressive persons and psychiatrists aren't protected classes. On the other hand, Scientologists are. I certainly think Scientologists, like members of any other religion (and members of no religion) should be free from harassment. However, hate crime laws make it far easier for Scientologists to claim harassment based on behavior that would not be illegal - and is not illegal - when others do it.

A friend of mine, Keith Henson, just served four months in prison for "interfering with a religion" as a result of his peaceful protests of Scientology. At his trial, members (whom he'd never seen, even during his pickets) complained about him doing things like writing down license plate numbers (which is not illegal) and protesting at members' residences - it happened to be their residence because they both live and work at the massive, razor-wired compound he was picketing (in other words, he wasn't picketing individual homes), and more to the point, Scientologists have picketed both his home in Palo Alto (where residential pickets are illegal) and my apartment building in San Francisco (where they're legal).

My experience with Scientology has made me wary of making an act illegal (or more strongly punished) simply because it's aimed at an organization that identifies itself as religious (and of course, in our cases, we're protesting the organization, not individuals, but that didn't result in a happier outcome for Keith). I certainly have enormous sympathy for those who are physically attacked (including the physical act of vandalism) based on their beliefs. But codifying protected groups means that people who don't happen to fall into those groups receive less protection under the law.

(Click Preview.) Geez, that was long. Sorry.

John @ 103:

There appears to be room to chastise Burt/SFWA for delivering a procedurally faulty DMCA notice. But it seems to me that if one buys this line of logic, one must also chastise Scribd for accepting and acting on the faulty notice as if it were legitimate.

There is more clearly room to chastise Burt/SFWA for generating an inappropriately broad list of improperly posted works. Again, though: one must also blink at Scribd's blithe acceptance of that list -- especially in the context of the procedural DMCA objections raised above -- and its failure to vet the challenged works before actually taking them down.

Having been on the receiving end of this law, I must agree and disagree. Completely agree that if the "notice" did not conform with the DMCA law (including, for example, the sworn statement on penalty of perjury), all Scribd had to do was say, "Golly! Send us a proper DMCA notice, and we'll sure take stuff down! ... But not until then."

But, once they've received a proper notice, I disagree that Scribd should have vetted the material themselves. That's part of the whole point of the safe harbor provisions: to keep the service provider from having to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether a particular work is infringing - a determination that is properly made by a court, once an actual suit for infringement has been brought. It increases workload and liability for the service provider if they have to try to judge whether each individual work infringes.

The DMCA specifies that, if a suit alleging infringement hasn't been filed within two weeks of the takedown notice, all the files can go back up. That's what happened in my case, and I'm sure it was much easier for my ISP to temporarily disable 600+ files, wait two weeks, and then re-enable them when no suit was brought, than it would have been for them to eyeball each one of those pages. That alone probably would have taken more than two weeks.

When Scientology served a bogus DMCA complaint against hundreds of pages at my site, I considered it an act of perjury, since what I had posted (raw data taken from their publications) does not have copyright protection in the US. However, perjury is very rarely prosecuted in the US.

The DMCA (if not abolished) should provide direct, automatic penalties for abusers of the law, as well as compensation for those subjected to a bogus takedown. As it stands, ISPs and site owners can sue for damages, such as loss of income, but as my site generates no income, the law offers nothing to me, nor to my site visitors who were deprived of that information until the two week safe harbor period expired.

True, Sonny Bono bears some blame for the DMCA, but Texas Republican Lamar Smith is still alive, and he's been a huge proponent of harsh and anti-consumer content law for years.

"They laughed at [Galileo|Einstein], too."

Well, I was unsurprised to discover that the Fluorosphere already knew about Wendy Cope, but I've just discovered her - reading this poem last night filled me with joy.

The Orange, by Wendy Cope

Here's hoping she'll be a new delight to someone else here as well.

Jim, I have the same problem as Pat - shoulderbelt rides up to nestle in my neck. That never stops me from wearing it, but I do tend to move it down to the very top of my upper arm every twenty minutes, until it creeps up again. I know a woman who has a cheap plastic clip that does something similar - changes the location of the top of the shoulder strap so it's closer to the shoulder.

My hunch is that, in an accident, the few inches of positioning won't make much difference, but I've always wondered whether that's correct. Do you know anything about shoulder straps and the very short? (I'm under 5 feet.)

Thanks for this post. I've always been a seatbelt user, but will pay closer attention to my passengers now.

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