| Due Process (18 October 2002) |
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Certainly, I find pedophilia and anyone who enables it reprehensible. The Vatican, however, was wholly right in its criticism of the new policy of the US bishops. Due process is necessary for justice. To remove due process is to render justice impossible. Furthermore, defrocking pedophile priests is not the way to protect children. The way to protect children is to:
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| TV Shooter Analysis (17 October 2002) |
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I'm getting so sick of hearing people on TV analysing the D.C. area shootings. e.g. You don't know that the shootings are completely random. You cannot, therefore, draw any conclusions from the non-fact that they are completely random. Don't try to tell me these people you bring in to spout conclusions based on incomplete facts are experts. I'm sure the real experts told you they wouldn't speculate without knowing the facts. Just report the few facts you do know and move on. |
| TxDOTs anti-DWI campaign (17 October 2002) |
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The Texas Department of Transportation is running a "hard-hitting anti-DWI" campaign. There is, however, a flaw in the logic of this campaign. If no one ever drove drunk, there would still be auto accidents. As long as there are auto accidents, there is the chance that what happened to Jaqueline Saburido will happen. Logically, it would be better to illustrate that more people get into accidents when drunk than when sober. Or that when drunk, people have worse accidents than when sober. On the other hand, if the campaign acheives its goals, it matters little whether it is logical or not. |
| Reporting about Serial Killers (11 October 2002) |
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On NPR's Morning Edition today ("Police Criticize Media Coverage of Sniper"), Dr. Michael Welner of NYU made what I think was a very good point. The subject was the fact that serial killers often draw satisfaction from reports of their exploits in the media. On the other hand, the media cannot ignore such an important story. Dr. Welner said that the media should change how they cover serial killers. Instead of words like "cunning" and "sniper", they should use words like "coward" and "shooter". Just because the media must report the story doesn't mean they need to stroke the killer's ego or make his actions out to be anything but the crazed and brutal things they are. Too bad Morning Edition specifically, and NPR in general, didn't take the Doctor's suggestion. |
| Not just Perl... (11 October 2002) |
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OK, time to test some text with some formatting... Well, the first version of my blog script seems to be working. There's still a couple of must have features that will need to be added soon, and the templates could certainly use some additional work, but it is working. I say it is a Perl script, but it isn't (to take a page from the Java world) pure Perl. I use these commands, which were already available on my Linux machine:
I could've written Perl code to do the things I use those programs for. Indeed, except for copydir, they'd all be pretty easy to replace with Perl code. On the other hand, the commands were there, did what I needed, were well tested, and (at this point) I have no need for this script to be portable to any other machine. |
| First Entry (10 October 2002) |
| I'm creating a simple Perl script to manage a blog. This is my first entry. |
| My Home Page |
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What was I reading?
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| my booklist |
| Some Links |
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<free culture>
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