Pledge ruling upheld

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Back in June, when the Pledge of Allegiance was ruled unconstitutional because the words “under God” encroached on the division between church and state, I didn’t think that the ruling would stand. In a nation where if you don’t support the President’s holy crusade you’re just another one of those damn dirty traitors, I expected the public outcry would end up pushing the courts into overturning the ruling.

I was quite pleasantly surprised to read yesterday that the appeals court has rejected the request to reconsider the ruling, letting it stand as-is.

From the New York Times:

A federal appeals court stood by its ruling that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional because of the words “under God,” perhaps setting the stage for a U.S. Supreme Court fight over a decision that prompted a nationwide outcry.

Bush administration officials strongly condemned Friday’s ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, though they stopped short of saying they would appeal to the Supreme Court.

[Judge Steven] Reinhardt lashed out at the “disturbingly wrong-headed” dissent that public outcry over the pledge ruling should have persuaded the circuit to reconsider.

“The Bill of Rights is, of course, intended to protect the rights of those in the minority against the temporary passions of a majority which might wish to limit their freedoms or liberties,” Reinhardt wrote.

And from Reuters:

In defending the ruling, defiant 9th Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt said that the court would not be swayed by public outrage over one of its decisions and did not consider the “importance of an issue” good enough reason to rehear a legal ruling that it considered correct.

“We may not — we must not — allow public sentiment or outcry to guide our decisions,” Reinhardt wrote.

“It is particularly important that we understand the nature of our obligations and the strength of our constitutional principles in times of national crisis,” he wrote. “It is then that our freedoms and our liberties are in the greatest peril.”

Not terribly surprisingly, Attorney General John Ashcroft has sworn to appeal to the Supreme Court.

“THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT will spare no effort to preserve the rights of all our citizens to pledge allegiance to the American flag,” Ashcroft said in a statement issued in Washington shortly after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco declined to reconsider its ruling. “We will defend the ability of Americans to declare their patriotism through the time-honored tradition of voluntarily reciting the pledge.”

John, John, John. I’m no legal expert, but I haven’t gotten the impression that the Pledge of Allegiance has been banned outright — only that it is not to be a school-sponsored activity. All Americans still have the right and the ability to voluntarily declare their patriotism any way they want to whenever they want. They just shouldn’t be forced to do so in ways that may conflict with their personal beliefs. I have to admit, the mental picture of a man like Ashcroft — who’s likely to equate Wiccanism with ‘Satanism’ — trying to cope with the concept of a “patriotic Witch” makes me laugh. A lot.Atheists and Agnostics can be patriotic, as can Muslims, Hindus, Baha’i, Buddhists, and so on. Heck, I’d bet that even Jehovah’s Witnesses and Wiccans can be patrotic! But they don’t believe in ‘God’, and shouldn’t be required to profess a belief that they do not hold.

Anyway, the original ruling was made. That ruling has now been confirmed. Now it appears that it may fall to the Supreme Court to finish this off. We’ll see how things end up if this does end up heading their way, but in the meantime, congratulations to Judge Reinheart and the rest of the Court of Appeals.

(Via MeFi and BoingBoing)

Yawn!

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It’s 8:30 in the morning, and I’m at work. Ugh.

On the bright side, there aren’t too many other people here, so I’ve been able to snag the stereo, drag it over to my area, and attach my iPod to it, so I’ve got good tunes without having to have my headphones on all day.

Gotta take life’s pleasures where you can, right?

Especially at 8:30am.

Search improvements

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I spent some time last night working with the search software I have installed on djwudi.com, tweaking and improving it so that it gives much more useable results.

While MovableType does include its own search function, I’ve chosen not to use it for djwudi.com because I have a number of pages that live outside of my weblog, which MT would not be able to search. However, I’d run into a bit of a problem with the search engine I am using, and I think I’ve finally got it solved.

The issue that came up was simply that because the search software had indexed the text of every page on the site, there were certain words that were essentially useless to try to search for, because they’re repeated on so many pages. For instance, I was trying to find a page where I’d written up a short description of the MT TrackBack functionality — unfortunately, a search for ‘TrackBack’ returned hits for every single page on my weblog, because they all had the word ‘TrackBack’ on the page.

Digging through the documentation for the search software yesterday (yes, I know, actually reading the instructions is so uncool, but it really does help sometimes…), I discovered that there is a very simple way to tell the search software to ignore certain areas of a webpage. So, some tweaks to my templates to ensure that the software only pays attention to the actual content of each page, and ignores all the navigational or presentational mumbo-jumbo, and I’ve got a far more useable search feature than I did previously. Woohoo!

Dive! Dive! Dive!

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Interesting editorial over at Wired today: Go Deep! The US needs a NASA for exploring the oceans.

NASA has had its day. It’s given us technological marvels from cell phones to SETI screensavers. But we’re not mining the moon. We’re not terraforming Mars. And we’re certainly not finding any aliens. We’ve gotten completely off track: choosing to look for long-dead microbes 390 million miles away on Europa, while neglecting undiscovered life just miles off the coast of North America.

About 94 percent of life on Earth resides in the oceans. We’ve seen only about 2 percent of this vast ecosystem – the uppermost layer (home to fish, whales, scuba divers, and most known marine life). Beneath this warm lens lies a cold, dark, and life-rich realm of grand proportions. It’s home to creatures as far removed from the sun and human biology as any alien imagined by science fiction.

This is something that’s been bouncing around my brain for quite a few years now. While I certainly don’t want to see space exploration stop (and I am excited about some of the new ideas being proposed), it’s amazed me that we’re basically ignoring such a huge expanse of unexplored territory, right here on the very planet we live on. Surely some of the advances made in our exploration of space could be adapted to serve in an underwater environment, since some of the same concepts apply (such as keeping a standard pressure environment stable in an environment with a vastly different pressure — much more, rather than much less).

What new technologies could be created as we explore the new problems? Or what current technologies could be adapted and improved? We’re already seeing more and more work in hydrogen-powered automobiles — why not incorporate some miniaturized desalinization plant with a hydrogen-powered engine, and then any submersible could have a nearly infinite supply of fuel (think of a Bussard Ramscoop for a sub)? The linked Wired article mentions some of the odd chemical processes that are ocurring naturally by undewater thermal vents — who knows what kind of chemical tricks we could learn by studying these?

I just think there’s a lot to be explored in a frontier very close to home, and it’s a real shame that so little has been done in this direction as yet. Yes, I still think we need to go up — but there’s no reason we shouldn’t be going down, either.

By the infinite dick of God

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I first found this on the ‘net ages ago, and used to have a copy somewhere on my hard drive. I’d forgotten about it for a long time, then the phrase “by the infinite dick of God” popped into my head tonight, and I decided to search this out and preserve it for posterity. Enjoy.

I am forever astonished by how many mistakes could be avoided if people would just think about what they are saying. This is especially the case in religion. An example of this is the assumption that God is male. Obviously God is a woman, because God doesn’t have a penis. The proof of this is by omission: nowhere in the Bible is there a reference to the “Divine Penis,” and I am sure that if God were a man He would talk about it somewhere. No real man could go on for hundreds of pages about himself without mentioning that thing once or twice.

Upon remarking on the above observation, I was notified by someone that he heard the oath “by the infinite dick of God” around Caltech, though “semi-infinite” would be more precise. Unfortunately, this further muddles the issue. I am thankful that the ancient theologians did not realize this point, otherwise they would have wasted much time in debating this actually nonexistent part of God. I can see it all now…

During the fall of Rome, St. Augustine referred to “God’s mighty male member, wider than the Coliseum, more powerful than Zeus’s tool, able to take Athena in a single bound.” Then in the middle ages, Thomas Aquinas, in an attempt to reconcile St. Augustine’s remark with the rediscovered writings of Zeno, declared that the length of God’s immense organ must be semi-infinite. But then Rene Descartes, after spending a lifetime in philosophical thought, stated that since God is greater than that which can be conceived, God’s measureless masculinity must be truly infinite, because an infinite length is much longer (in fact, infinitely longer) than a semi-infinite length.

However, the followers of Aquinas immediatedly countered with a simple argument: “If God’s tree is infinite, then what holds it up? Certainly one end of God’s tremendous tree must be firmly rooted in his loins.” Also, a minor philosopher (whose name I forget, but who liked perfect islands) argued “If God’s monument to life were infinite then there must be a fig leaf whose extent is also infinite. But then there is something infinite that is not part of God, which contradicts the assumption that God is the greatest. The only solution is that God’s rod must be semi-infinite, so that He can hide it by turning His back to the world and looking over His shoulder.”

Since both sides had such valid points, for a while the discussion reached a stalemate.

Then the great German philosopher Hegel attempted to reconcile the issue with his sword-plowshare theory, where he proposed that the infinite and semi-infinite are actually two manifestations of the same thing. Though it seemed impossible, Hegel claimed that God does occasionally beat His infinite sword into a semi-infinite plowshare. This theory gained great popularity, but it didn’t really solve anything primarily because no one could understand it.

Some time afterwards, the rise of non-Euclidian geometry seemed to favor the Cartesians when it showed that God’s wondrous worm could be infinite in this dimension, yet be attached to Him in a higher dimension. However this solution was not totally satisfactory either, because then there isn’t a preferred direction to God’s protrusion in this dimension.

The answer to the debate had to wait till the beginning of the 20th century, when Georg Cantor, attempting to cope with his strict religious upbringing, proved that a semi-infinite member is just as long as an infinite member; therefore God’s member may be semi-infinite and yet be no shorter than an infinite member. Cantor’s colleagues ridiculed him by showing that his theorems also proved that a finite real dimension is commensurable with an infinite one, suggesting that anyone’s piddling plow is just as long as God’s prodigious pecker.

This paradox was solved only with the advent of quantum theory, which demonstrated that the real world corresponds to the set of integers rather than the set of reals. In that case Cantor’s theory showed that the finite phallus was infact infinitely shorter than the infinite one, though the theory still retained the property of the commensurability between the infinite and the semi-infinite. So today mathematicians agree that Cantor was correct, finally and conclusively demolishing the central argument of the Cartesian theory.

Thus we see that if St. Augustine had thought about the nature of God’s member, only after several centuries of the application of logic and mathematics and physics would a definite answer be reached. And even then the answer would be wrong, because the very basis of the argument is nonexistent. For the reason described at the beginning of this treatise, we the faithful know that by simply examining the Word of God it is obvious that any discussion in this area is meaningless, since God hath no member.

— Robert Mokry

New WTC plan chosen

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Final plan for new WTC building

Well, it looks like the winning plan for the replacement complex for the WTC has been revealed. While it’s not the one I favored, maybe it’ll translate better into the real world than the pictures of it I’ve seen so far.

It’s interesting to me that the new tower will include a spire that will bring the total height to 1,776 feet — four hundred feet taller than the original WTC towers, and three hundred feet taller than the current tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia. Ego? Hubris? Penis envy?

Anyway, all carping aside, it’s good to see that they’re moving forward on this, and that they did manage to choose something that was neither specatularly ugly nor spectacularly insipid. From what I remember, it’ll take about ten years to get the building erected and finished. Maybe round about the time I’m turning 40 I’ll swing by New York to see the building, and find out what they came up with for a memorial. I’ve got a decade to plan my trip, I should be able to make it by the time they finish, right?

(Via WebWord)

This isn't helping

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A few days ago, Robert Scoble asked what we think Microsoft should do in the future, both with technology and to improve their public persona. I haven’t done much for coming up with a list of what they should do, but here’s a hint to Micosoft: this is something you really shouldn’t do:

Anti-spam activists and a state attorney have argued against a proposal pushed by Microsoft that would weaken Washingtons tough law against unwanted e-mail.

In one way, Senate Bill 5734 would expand the states Commercial Electronic Mail Act by requiring that unsolicited commercial e-mail must include “ADV:” as the first four characters in the subject line, to make filtering out such messages easier.

But it would also carve out a broad exemption in the law for mail sent by companies the recipient has done business with, and completely exempt Internet service providers — including Microsoft.

Microsoft is one of the worlds largest providers of Internet service, and a company that has an existing business relationship with virtually every computer user.

“The way its written, it exempts them from the whole thing,” said Jim Kendall, president of Telebyte Northwest in Silverdale, a small Internet service provider.

(Via /.)

Caring for your Introvert

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Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. “Introverts…are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don’t outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness.” Just so.

The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books — written, no doubt, by extroverts — regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts’ Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say “I’m an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.”

— from a wonderful article in The Atlantic entitled Caring for your Introvert (via Jason Kottke) I’m almost tempted to keep copies of this article around to hand out to a few people I know.

Catching up, part four: political bits

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Yeah, well, I had to jump back into this side of things eventually. On the bright side, much as this stuff might worry and/or scare me, at least I’m paying attention to it now, which I wasn’t for far too many years.

  • With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the smartest man I’ve ever met. If you get into a dispute with him, he will take you on a devastatingly brief tour all the weak points in your argument. But he is a careful listener and not at all the ideologue he appears at this distance.
    >

    Here is the problem I think Dick Cheney is trying to address at the moment: How does one assure global stability in a world where there is only one strong power? This is a question that his opposition, myself included, has not asked out loud. It’s not an easy question to answer, but neither is it a question to ignore.

    …it’s possible Cheney and company are actually bluffing.This time, instead of trying to terrify the Soviets into collapse, the objective is even grander. If I’m right about this, they have two goals. Neither involves actual war, any more than the MX missile did.

    First, they seek to scare Saddam Hussein into voluntarily turning his country over to the U.S. and choosing safe exile or, failing that, they want to convince the Iraqi people that it’s safer to attempt his overthrow or assassination than to endure an invasion by American ground troops.

    Second, they are trying to convince every other nation on the planet that the United States is the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to use and spending, as they already are, more on death-making capacity than all the other countries on the planet combined. In other words, they want the rest of the world to think that we are the ultimate weaving driver. Not to be trusted, but certainly not to be messed with either.

    By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and the Great American Peace will begin. Unregulated Global Corporatism will be the only permissible ideology, every human will have access to McDonald’s and the Home Shopping Network, all ‘news’ will come through some variant of AOLTimeWarnerCNN, the Internet will be run by Microsoft, and so it will remain for a long time. Peace. On Prozac.

    John Perry Barlowe, Sympathy for the Devil, via Phil Ulrich

  • This nation is about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine applied in an extraordinary way at an unfortunate time. The doctrine of preemption — the idea that the United States or any other nation can legitimately attack a nation that is not imminently threatening but may be threatening in the future — is a radical new twist on the traditional idea of self defense. It appears to be in contravention of international law and the UN Charter. And it is being tested at a time of world-wide terrorism, making many countries around the globe wonder if they will soon be on our — or some other nation’s — hit list. High level Administration figures recently refused to take nuclear weapons off of the table when discussing a possible attack against Iraq. What could be more destabilizing and unwise than this type of uncertainty, particularly in a world where globalism has tied the vital economic and security interests of many nations so closely together? There are huge cracks emerging in our time-honored alliances, and U.S. intentions are suddenly subject to damaging worldwide speculation. Anti-Americanism based on mistrust, misinformation, suspicion, and alarming rhetoric from U.S. leaders is fracturing the once solid alliance against global terrorism which existed after September 11.
    >

    One can understand the anger and shock of any President after the savage attacks of September 11. One can appreciate the frustration of having only a shadow to chase and an amorphous, fleeting enemy on which it is nearly impossible to exact retribution.

    But to turn one’s frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet. Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word.

    Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq — a population, I might add, of which over 50% is under age 15 — this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare — this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.

    We are truly “sleepwalking through history.” In my heart of hearts I pray that this great nation and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings.

    Sen. Robert C. Byrd, We stand passively mute, via Allan Moult

  • And lastly for tonight, Dori Smith posts a number of articles worth reading, including the two I just quoted from.

I still find it amazing and more than a little concerning that the best commentary regarding the current and upcoming conflict comes primarily from columnists, webloggers, and “ordinary people” across the nation, and all-too-rarely from those on Capitol Hill (with speeches like Senator Byrd’s being a welcome exception). I’ve certainly not seen anything come out of the White House that’s nearly as well thought-out or well presented as many of the less “official” arguments are (both pro- and anti-war).