‘Up-skirt’ photography ‘reprehensible’ but legal

Well, here’s something handy just in case I decide to take my photography in a new direction — in public areas, peeking up skirts is completely legal.

The state’s voyeurism law protects people who are in a place where they “would have a reasonable expectation of privacy” — meaning the person could expect to be able to undress in seclusion or “be safe from hostile intrusion or surveillance.”

But the court found the law doesn’t apply to filming people in a public place, even if it’s underneath their clothes.

“It is the physical location of the person that is ultimately at issue, not the part of the person’s body,” Judge Bobbe Bridge wrote.

Laws are funny things, sometimes, both with what they cover and what they don’t.

Reviewed!

Last week I stumbled across Bloggy Opinions a blog review website. It seemed fairly entertaining, and the reviewers seemed to do a good even job of reviewing the sites they visited, so I went ahead and submitted ‘The Long Letter’ to them.

Bloggy OpinionsI got my review back today — and whaddaya know, not only was it good, it was really good! The review is posted on their site, but as there currently seems to be a slight HTML glitch that’s rendering my review invisible, I’m taking the liberty of copying it here.

DJWUDI — The Long Letter

Now here’s a blog I loved. It was excellent! It’s filled with multiple daily entries to keep you entertained, as well as a plethora of archived entries, features, and links that kept this reviewer busy for many hours. It generally amusing too, and though I’m sure a lot of work goes into the site, it appears effortless.

It’s the little things that make this site a gem in the drudge that can be the Internet. In the top right of your screen is an embedded applet that displays the mp3 that the author is currently listening too. It gets updated in real time and is the coolest thing I’ve even seen on a personal website! Unfortunately the version he uses is for the Macintosh operating system, so I won’t get to test it out on my blog. Another interesting feature is that he has implemented a help box on some of the more technical terms. Move your mouse over ‘Mbps’ and up pops a box displaying the full name ‘Megabytes per second’.

The layout is minimalistically beautiful. You’re not bombarded with a messy design; he takes a more newspaper, monochrome type layout. The text is the right size to read, and the font is easy on the eyes.

I can’t say enough about this blog. The author definitely deserves kudos. The only complaint I have is that he doesn’t seem to get that many readers, so the comment section is mostly empty.

Many thanks for such a glowing review!

Read more

Yikes

I think I just heard gunshots. Eight, very quick, all together, no pauses. Creepy.

[2:30] Called the police, they’re going to check out the immediate area.

[2:33] Nice response time — there’s two police cars looking around now.

[2:55] Haven’t heard anything else, nor have the police felt the need to get back in touch with me for any reason. I’m going to assume that all’s well — or at least well enough that I don’t need to actively keep an ear cocked.

Hooray for living downtown! ;)

The Turing Test is in no danger

Just some fun wordplay, from this MeFi thread dealing with AI, language, and other such goodies.
Some English sentences likely to trip up any AI program attempting to understand them:

  • We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were hungry.
    We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were ripe.

    How do you determine what object ‘they’ refers to in each sentence?

  • It’s hard to recognize speech.
    It’s hard to wreck a nice beach.

    Say these two aloud.

  • Visiting relatives can be boring.

    One sentence, two ways to understand it.

  • We saw her duck.

    Three meanings (the least obvious involves a serrated blade).

  • Time flies like an arrow.
    Fruit flies like a banana.

    With thanks to Groucho Marx, I believe.

Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers

Interesting timing on this one. My friend Prairie is working on getting her teachers degree, and teaches English classes at her college. She stopped by for a few hours last weekend on her way through Seattle, and we ended up chatting for a bit on just how often students seem to have, at best, a very questionable grasp of the English language.

One of the things that drove this home for me within the past few years was corresponding with a friend of mine who I know is quite intelligent, knows how to express herself quite well, and generally is quite handy at doing so. However, all these strengths are almost entirely verbal — when it comes to the written word, reading e-mail from her was like corresponding with a different person. Little use of capitalization or punctuation (and what there was was often used incorrectly), poorly constructed sentences…the works. Eventually I had to break down and ask her about it, and she attributed it in large part to how she was taught in school. Apparently, teaching basic things like grammar, punctuation, spelling, and all the building blocks of the English language had fallen by the wayside, usually being replaced with an admonition from the teacher to be sure to use the grammar check and spell check on the computer.

Quite frankly, I was pretty floored by this. Admittedly, much of my command of the language (which, though it may be somewhat egotistical, I like to think is fairly decent [though I do tend to over-use parenthetical remarks {like this} too much]) was greatly influenced by having two parents with a love of the language, but even without their assistance, I know that proper writing was still being taught when I was in school. Is this just not deemed worth paying attention to anymore? Or are teachers just getting lazy? Either way, it’s a fairly disturbing development.

What started all this rambling, though was an article in the New York Times about how today’s teachers are coping with students using online abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons in their writing.

Even terms that cannot be expressed verbally are making their way into papers. Melanie Weaver was stunned by some of the term papers she received from a 10th-grade class she recently taught as part of an internship. “They would be trying to make a point in a paper, they would put a smiley face in the end,” said Ms. Weaver, who teaches at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa. “If they were presenting an argument and they needed to present an opposite view, they would put a frown.”

As Trisha Fogarty, a sixth-grade teacher at Houlton Southside School in Houlton, Maine, puts it, today’s students are “Generation Text.”

On the one hand, suddenly typing — and writing in general — is ‘in vogue’ again among kids, due to the explosion of the ‘net and its associate technologies, such as IM programs like Yahoo! Messenger, chatrooms, and weblogs. However, if teachers aren’t able to help train these kids in the differences between the online slang and the correct usage, today’s students may very well be in for a world of hurt later in life, when they’re asked to write something more formal than a quick IM note to set up a date or pass gossip along. The teachers in this story sound like they’re all at least making some effort to make sure they’re actually instructing their students well — it’s the other teachers, those who ‘teach’ their classes to rely on all-too-inaccurate grammar- and spell-check software, that really worry me.

“Kids should know the difference,” said Ms. Harding, who decided to address this issue head-on this year. “They should know where to draw the line between formal writing and conversational writing.”

Found via MeFi

Violence in the media

I was browsing through /. tonight when someone mentioned an interview with Joss Whedon over at The Onion from last year (oh, except I’m not supposed to link directly to articles inside The Onion…I guess I better just link to the /. post that has the entire interview copied into it — so, which is the greater copyright breach? Anyway…). It’s a good interview on its own, but this quote is as a followup /. post said, “I think that’s just about the most intelligent and responsible thing I’ve ever read about the influence of culture on behaviour.”

People say, “After Columbine, do you feel a responsibility about the way you portray violence?” And I’m like, “No, I felt a responsibility about the way I portrayed violence the first time I picked up a pen.”

Breakin’ the law! Breakin’ the law!

Okay. More stupidity. Or maybe ‘stoopidity’.

It’s just come to my attention that in my post “Kudos to the Onion“, and in Kirsten’s comments to “Stoopid. With two ‘O’s.“, my site is in violation of The Onion’s (don’t-)link policy.

Can I use a headline to link to The Onion on my site?

The Onion does not support the use of its headlines without the express written consent of the publisher. You can put a link to The Onion on your site but may not use the headlines or content. More information on how to link to The Onion is available at our Link Page.

Oh, come on. Looks like whatever ‘powers that be’ that exist at The Onion have decided to join the many other sites with stupid anti-linking policies. That’s a shame, too.

Oh, well. I’ll keep everything linked as it is, until such time as I get a cease-and-desist letter from the Onion (not likely to happen — this isn’t exactly a highly-trafficked site — but ya never know, do ya?). If that happens…well, I’ll probaby end up taking all links to The Onion off my site. Would be a bummer, but hey (shrugs). I won’t be the first.