Mark Jaquith ↓

Personal blog — Tempus Fugit

• Harold Camping isn’t a fringe Christian
• T-shirts for tall, thin men
• On Bing’s use of Google result clicks
• You Got Served, Fiddler on the Roof
• Why Political Talk Shows are Frustrating
• “Shop Vac” by Jonathan Coulton, Animated
• “Go back and show them the receipt, or you’re going to jail”
• This Thanksgiving brought to you by property rights

Mark on WordPress

• How to write a WordPress plugin that I’ll use
• Developing on WordPress using Git
• Just you and your thoughts
• Custom WordPress laptop skin
• Customize the WordPress Login Screen Logo
• 2010 in review
• Post Formats vs. Custom Post Types
• WordPress Q & A: Week of September 27

Under construction

I edit this page live. So it usually looks pretty bad. I don’t know what to put here right now.

Recent Photos

Links

• These marble machines (with interchangeable components) are blowing my mind.

• Florida Senator Stephen Wise introduced a bill intended to force schools to each “both theories” on evolution (welcome to the further re-branding of creationism). But due to the way the bill is worded, he may actually increase the detail with which evolution is taught to children.

  A thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution.

  Sounds good to me! No more letting teachers just avoid the subject.

• Freespace: They’re better than you.

  Timothy Sandefur peels back the faux-sophistication of those who lose their ideals and slide towards statism in later life:

  “Now that I’m a grownup, I want to use violence to compel people to do what I want them to do, instead of letting them make their own choices. I now believe that I am superior enough to others that I can force my preferences on them.” [...]

  Freespace: They’re better than you

• Something to think about, as the daily parade of TSA abuses continues:

  [The right to travel] is a right broadly assertable against private interference as well as governmental action.

  — Shapiro v. Thompson, 1969

• Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell reveals just how little she knows about the Constitution:

  Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that “religious doctrine doesn’t belong in our public schools.”

  “Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” O’Donnell asked him.

  When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O’Donnell asked: “You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?”

  Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience.

  “You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp,” Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O’Donnell’s grasp of the Constitution.

  She’s not a witch. She’s an ignoramus.

• The Vatican, on freedom of expression, condemning the infamous cartoons that dared to show the face of the Islamic prophet Muhammed (ignominy be upon him):

  The freedom of thought and expression, confirmed in the Declaration of Human Rights, can not include the right to offend religious feelings of the faithful.

  I suspect they’d still burn people at the stake for expressing such illicit ideas if they could get away with it.

• The Onion responds to Obama’s totalitarian claim that the U.S. government can target any American citizen for assassination: New ‘Do Not Kill’ Registry To Allow Americans To Opt Out Of Being Murdered.

  All citizens will have to do is supply us with their names and telephone numbers and we will make sure to block any further bothersome visits from killers smashing down their doors and ruthlessly murdering them in front of their screaming families.

• Publisher agrees to remove creationism material from science textbook, for use in Florida schools.

  The publishers of a marine-science textbook that critics say contains pro-creationism material has agreed to remove two offending pages from editions sold to Florida schools, state officials said.

  This has been a good week for the restoration of sanity to Florida!

• Here’s one less embarrassing fact about Florida to have to acknowledge.

  Florida court overturns state ban on gay adoptions.

  We conclude that there is no rational basis for the statute.

  Well no, bigotry isn’t rational, by definition.

• Ha! Great Right/Left skewering by The Onion.

  “Dad’s great, but listening to all that talk radio has put some weird ideas into his head,” said daughter Samantha, a freshman at Reed College in Portland, OR. “He believes the Constitution allows the government to torture people and ban gay marriage, yet he doesn’t even know that it guarantees universal health care.”

  via Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be | The Onion.

• Big surprise. The position Sonia Sotomayor espoused in her Senate confirmation hearing doesn’t jibe with the dissent she joined in McDonald v. Chicago.

  I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller.

  vs

  In sum, the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self defense.

  (via Hit & Run)

• We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they’re never going to be born. The number of people who could be here in my place outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here.

  Richard Dawkins

  I think about this almost every day. Consequently it irks me that the increasingly clichéd question “what is the meaning of life?” has been epitomized in popular ontology. We are each the winner of the universe’s ultimate lottery, and our response is “It must be a game. Who has some cheat codes?”

• Christopher Blizzard nails what is wrong with Apple’s “HTML5” demos which use browser sniffing and Safari- and Webkit-specific tech to exclude other browsers with good HTML5 support.

  The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability.

  via Christopher Blizzard · intellectual honesty and html5.

  Indeed. While the new stuff that HTML5 enables is exciting, the most amazing part is that the spec attempts to describe how a parser should implement these features in enough detail that two different browser vendors can follow the spec and end up with a parser that works the same (for the most part) as one created by another team who also followed the spec.