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10 Jul 2009 — Peace between Jews and Arabs is the easy part

Many political figures itching for the elimination of the Jewish state are also fond of antisemitic pseudo-histories of the Jewish nation, e.g., Holocaust denial. If these leaders studied actual Jewish history, instead of tripe like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they would be rushing to the negotiating table—not out of sympathy for Jewish suffering or an appreciation of the historical Jewish claim to Palestine, but as a hard-headed political strategy. They would realize that their best hope to eliminate the State of Israel is to make peace with it.

03 Jul 2009 — Short reviews of long books

I read a couple of books recently that are so thick and comprehensive that a proper review of each would be, well, thick and comprehensive. In the interest of saying something about them before October, I will dare to review them improperly.

03 Jul 2009 — Cryptorebel without a cause

When Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother came out last year, various geeky and liberal bloggers I respect lauded it as A Very Important Book That Today’s Young People Ought To Read. I finally read it and my general reaction was: this is A Very Important Book? WTF?

01 Jul 2009 — U-S+Eh!

Happy Canada Day to my Canadian readers. (Do I have more than one?)

26 Jun 2009 — Warming up for “can Superman beat up the Hulk?”

The Seven-Year-Old asked me if an AT-TE walker is bigger than an Oliphaunt.

24 Jun 2009 — Irony as a second language

I’m sure that all of us, regardless of our political views on other matters, can come together and agree that it would be good if more American residents would learn to speak English.

22 Jun 2009 — The museum of institutional egotism

During my brief stay at yeshiva in Israel, we toured some of the archeological sites near Tiberias, and our guide pointed out a number of details about the Roman civil engineering from two thousand years ago. A tour guide who appreciates technology, I thought. Cool!

21 Jun 2009 — Unbound

A well-designed computer language, such as Lisp, strives to give its users “the illusion of infinite memory”: the programmer can allocate as many objects as he or she wants, and the language implementation is responsible for cleaning them up. As long as an object can be reached by the code that is running—as long as it is still useful, still capable of affecting the state of the world—then it remains “live”, and the garbage collector will pass it by.

21 Jun 2009 — Femme-inism

Narratives of transsexuality aimed at a general audience, both in print and online, are a genre unto themselves, and one of the conventions of the genre is the tone, directed at cissexual (i.e. non-trans) readers, of “please understand me, because if you understand me, then you couldn’t possibly condemn me”. The refreshing thing about Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl is that it breaks that frame, and tells us “please understand yourselves, because if you understand the prejudices that our culture has taught you, then you can learn to respect me”.

19 Jun 2009 — A debugging tip for weak-minded programmers (like me)

So if you have some script¹ that was created with the time-honored “copy, paste, edit” method of abstraction, and it’s not doing what you expect, and you’re just tearing your hair out because the part that you edited is perfectly clear and works just fine when you try it from the command line all by itself, and you’re not really sure what one of the parts that you copied and pasted is doing but since all these other scripts use the same code surely there’s nothing wrong with it… you may want to consider the possibility that there’s some relationship between the code that you don’t understand and the output that you don’t expect.

15 Jun 2009 — How do you say “Arrr!” in Ladino?

Edward Kritzler’s Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is a mediocre book about a fascinating topic.

08 Jun 2009 — Rediscovering Talmudic logic

[The following is based on a tikkun leil Shavuot talk that I gave at my synagogue last week.]

31 May 2009 — We have experienced technical difficulties

Over this weekend I had one of those Learning Experiences that I could have done without. It turns out that when you transfer your domain registry to a different registrar, the information about your domain does not automatically get copied over. So if you sent email over the past few days and it bounced, or if you tried to access this site over the last few days and got a 404 error or a mysterious domain-parking page, that’s why.

13 May 2009 — “Do as I say, not as I do”

Connecticut Post:

30 Apr 2009 — “The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down”

I would feel better about the Boston Globe’s journalistic integrity if the Massachusetts congressional delegation had told the Globe’s corporate masters “please, shut down that newspaper, it’s a blight on society”.

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