Summary page 21 of 36

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02 Nov 2005 — A song that could have been written for Judge Alito

Carol Rose Livingstone	Judge Samuel Alito
I am no friend of the fathers and mothers I am no friend of the sisters and brothers I am no friend to the weak and distressed I am no friend to the poor and oppressed.	Denied a habeas petition for a convict sentenced to death. The convict argued that during the sentencing phase, his lawyers had not looked up his school, medical, court, and prison records, and therefore did not obtain evidence that might have mitigated his sentence. (Rompilla v. Horn, reversed by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote)
But I am a friend of the fetus, A friend of incomparable worth I am a friend of the fetus, Right up to the moment of birth.	“Justice O’Connor has also suggested on more than one occasion that no undue burden was created by the statute upheld in H.L. v. Matheson, which required parental notice prior to any abortion on an unemancipated minor. Instead, she has stated that this statute merely inhibited abortions to ‘some degree.’ In dissent in Matheson, Justice Marshall argued that the statute would result in substantial interference with abortions sought by minors. He wrote that ‘the minor may confront physical or emotional abuse, withdrawal of financial support or actual obstruction of the abortion decision.’ These harms are almost identical to those that the majority in this case attributes to Section 3209 [the Pennsylvania law requiring a married woman seeking an abortion to notify her husband].” (Alito’s 3rd Circuit dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey [citations omitted, emphasis added])
Once it’s a baby I will not go near it, I will not feed it and I will not rear it. When it is crying I won’t even hear it For I have no room in my heart for a human.	Argued that police officers could strip-search a ten-year-old girl and her mother during a drug bust, even though the officers’ search warrant, in the space for “[s]pecific description of premises and/or persons to be searched”, only mentioned the girl’s father and their residence. (Doe v. Groody [dissenting])
But I am a friend of the fetus, A friend of incomparable worth I am a friend of the fetus, Right up to the moment of birth.	“Section 3209 contains four significant exceptions. These exceptions apply if a woman certifies that she has not notified her husband because she believes that (1) he is not the father of the child, (2) he cannot be found after diligent effort, (3) the pregnancy is the result of a spousal sexual assault that has been reported to the authorities, or (4) she has reason to believe that notification is likely to result in the infliction of bodily injury upon her…. Of the potentially affected women who could not invoke an exception, it seems safe to assume that some percentage, despite an initial inclination not to tell their husbands, would notify their husbands without suffering substantial ill effects.” (Planned Parenthood v. Casey, op. cit.)
I will not weep for it, I won’t lose sleep for it, I will not care for it, I won’t be there for it, I’ll walk away from it, I won’t go grey for it I will not pray for it and I won’t pay for it.	Ruled that state governments were not bound by the Family and Medical Leave act because Congress did not show “any finding concerning the existence, much less the prevalence, in public employment of personal sick leave practices that amounted to intentional gender discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. For example, Congress did not find that public employers refused to permit as much sick leave as the FMLA mandates with the intent of disadvantaging employees of one gender…. Moreover, even if there were relevant findings or evidence, the FMLA provisions at issue here would not be congruent or proportional. Unlike the Equal Protection Clause, which the FMLA is said to enforce, the FMLA does much more than require nondiscriminatory sick leave practices; it creates a substantive entitlement to sick leave.” (Chittister v. Department of Community and Economic Development, effectively reversed by Nevada v. Hibbs)
But I am a friend of the fetus, A friend of incomparable worth I am a friend of the fetus, Right up to the moment of birth. (Let it get a job!) Right up to the mo—ment of birth!	“[T]he plaintiffs offered testimony that the exceptions in Section 3209 would not cover a case in which a woman did not want to notify her husband for fear that he would retaliate in some way other than the infliction of bodily injury upon her, such as by subjecting her to psychological abuse or abusing their children. The plaintiffs, however, do not appear to have offered any evidence showing how many (or indeed that any actual women) would be affected by this asserted imperfection in the statute…. The plaintiffs offered evidence that ‘mere notification of pregnancy is frequently a flashpoint for battering’. This proof indicates when violence is likely to occur in an abusive marriage but provides no basis for determining how many women would be adversely affected by Section 3209.” (Planned Parenthood v. Casey, op. cit.)

01 Nov 2005 — Teshuvah

If you’ve been wondering where this blog has been for the past two months, the answer is simple: I spent Elul and Tishrei atoning for the sin of not backing up my server. Fortunately, I still had files on the machine that had been hosting this blog up until September 2004, and a large number of the blog postings from the following year could be reconstructed from Bloglines and from search-engine caches.

A friend of mine has introduced me to Unison, and my new server, God willing, is backed up daily and the backups are copied to an undisclosed location. There are some mistakes I really don’t want to make twice.

23 Aug 2005 — Hackers

Excerpt from a NYT article on today’s CS students:

To help reverse three years of steep decline in the major at M.I.T., professors there met with freshmen last fall to extol the virtues of computer science. In one such gathering, John V. Guttag, a professor, brought pizza and soft drinks to a freshman dormitory. Professor Guttag spoke and so did a heart surgeon from Massachusetts General Hospital, who had majored in computer science as an undergraduate at M.I.T.

The bad jokes just write themselves…

17 Aug 2005 — Why Java is the wrong language for “enterprise” applications

Two and a half years ago, after I was laid off, I had the search engines send me a daily list of every job posting in the Boston area containing the words “Perl” or “Java”. Virtually nobody wanted to hire a Perl programmer, and virtually every Java position required not only Java, but J2EE; not only J2EE, but experience with a particular brand of J2EE application server. I had worked with Java in my previous position, but not J2EE, so I stayed unemployed for ten months.

While I was pounding the electronic pavement, I decided to submit to the discipline of the free market, so I signed up for a free online course taught by someone at Sun and downloaded the Linux version of Sun’s J2EE reference platform. After a few sessions of learning the arcana of the EJB, I told my wife: “Now I understand why they have all these positions for J2EE programmers. Something a Perl hacker can do in an hour, a team of J2EE programmers have to spend a week on.”

Developers’ backlash against the complexity of J2EE is now in full swing, and it seems to be taking two forms. Some people are pushing for expanded use of lighter-weight Java frameworks, such as Hibernate. Others are arguing that the proper solution is to abandon Java altogether, and work with more dynamic languages—a proposal that has sparked much debate, and inspired a Java framework that’s even simpler than Hibernate. I can’t boast years of experience implementing the high-traffic database-intensive Web applications, but I have reason to believe that the dynamic-language folks are on the right track.

Suppose you’re writing a Java component to extract information from a relational database and construct objects appropriate for some other application. The classical way to do the job is to write the procedure, in Java code, to extract fields from the result set and construct your objects. J2EE and its competing frameworks give you an alternative: you can write a description of how database fields map onto your objects, and let the framework generate code that does the translation for you.

The authors of your framework have no way of knowing in advance what classes you would be using in your business logic or what schema your database tables would have. The only way they can connect one to the other is by exploiting loopholes in the Java static typing system: for example, J2EE CMP systems generate code, while Hibernate uses reflection at run-time. The more your object-relational mapping diverges from “one database row equals one object”, the greater the flux through those loopholes.

So you need to look at how your architecture is split up between the business logic, the persistence layer, and the mapping, and ask yourself: given that the mapping layer has to work around one of the fundamental traits of Java, its type system, do you really benefit from having a mapping layer that’s implemented in Java?

You might answer, “because we’re a Java shop.” But when you’re sweating over the proper contents of XML configuration files, or writing annotations for a tool that “generates 85% of the code for you”, you’re not writing Java. So if you expect to be stuck writing a lot of not-Java, you might as well survey all your options, and see which not-Java is best for your needs. Even if your business logic is thousands of lines of Java code, you can still use a more dynamic language for the mapping layer and use JNI, wrappers like Perl’s Inline::Java module, or JSR 223, when it becomes available, to talk to your business objects’ factories.

In the above paragraphs, I keep using the word “database”, but the same logic applies to LDAP directories, MQSeries messages, HTTP requests, and XML documents—all of which have some kind of structure whose variations (a) depend on the application they are used for and (b) are not constrained by the type system of whatever code ends up processing them. Yet, if you read the J2EE documentation to glean some non-cynical definition of what the “Enterprise” is all about, you would conclude that the stunning complexity of J2EE, and the five-figure price for its application servers, is what you need to integrate your Java code with XML files, Web servers, databases, and messaging systems. It’s ironic that Sun devotes so much marketing hype to this use of Java in the “enterprise”, and yet this kind of integration goes against the grain of the language.

17 Aug 2005 — Burning the storehouses

According to the Talmud (Gittin 55b), when the Romans beseiged Jerusalem, the zealots ruling the city burned down its grain storehouses, so the Jews would have no choice but to fight the Romans.

Two thousand years later: “As the police tried to enforce the law allowing moving vans to enter to pack up the belongings of residents who want to leave voluntarily and legally, the protesters—many of them young, devout and living in other settlements on the West Bank—feared that the evacuation of Neve Dekalim was about to begin. They confronted the officers, and while there was some scuffling, the most serious incidents occurred when one young man threw a caustic liquid, probably ammonia, into the eyes of a police cameraman, and another tossed urine on a female police officer and paint on a senior commander.” [Emphasis added.]

Apparently, for these folks, Jews who want to obey laws passed by a democratically elected government of Jews are part of the problem. Perhaps if the law-abiding citizens can’t move out past their neighbors, they’ll realize that they have no choice but to stand and fight the Israeli army.

[Updated to add: Alternatively, some people were spoiling for a fight so badly that when they saw the police come through in large numbers, they didn’t stop to think, hey, the “walk out of Gaza or we drag you out” deadline hasn’t passed yet, so these officers aren’t yet doing anything that we have to oppose. Not as bad as the first-century zealots, but still pretty bad.]

There’s a lot of whinging from the settler movement about how “Jews don’t expel Jews”, as if eviction from one part of Israel to another constitutes “explusion”. I fear that some day, chas v’shalom, God will get fed up with how certain Jews have turned real estate into an idol (again), and remind them what real expulsion is like.

11 Aug 2005 — I just love how you wave your hands

Today’s New York Times gives us the lowdown on girl crushes. A girl crush, if you’re too lazy to read the article, is what happens when a straight woman has feelings of infatuation, completely nonsexual feelings, mind you, for another woman, and you shouldn’t think that she’s a lesbian for having these feelings. One of the women quoted in the article used the word “sexy” twice to describe her admiration for a colleague, but she must be regarding her co-worker as sexy in a strictly Platonic sense.

What struck me about the article—aside from the author’s apparent hangups—was this line: “Social scientists suspect such emotions are part of women’s nature, feelings that evolution may have favored because they helped women bond with one another and work cooperatively.”

Scene: Somewhere in Africa, 100,000 years ago. Two women are digging for yams.

Uggah: Hey, umm, Squeak, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while.

Squeak: What?

Uggah: I just want you to know how much I really like you. When you were picking berries a few days ago, I was really impressed by how confident you were about which ones were ready to pick and which ones weren’t ripe, and I looked at how your fingers were holding the berries and—you know—like—I think you’re a really cool person and I want to be your friend.

Pause.

Squeak: Uggah, that’s really sweet of you.

Uggah: I mean I want to be your friend in a totally non-sexual kind of way. I don’t want you to think I’m a dyke or anything.

Squeak: No, I don’t think that at all. I want to be your friend, too.

Uggah smiles shyly and returns to her digging. Squeak looks out to the horizon and sees a band of mightily thewed single male hunters, dragging a carcass behind them.

Squeak: Hey, Ug? Can you do me a favor?

Uggah: Sure. What?

Squeak: It’s starting to get cold here. Can you run back to my hut and get a couple of blankets?

Uggah: I’d be glad to.

Squeak: I’d do it myself, but we’re so far from camp, and I have such a sore back from all this—

Uggah: It’s no problem. Really.

Squeak watches Uggah until the other woman is a few hundred yards away. Then Squeak brushes back her hair, faces the approaching hunters, and watches them as she digs, leaning forward to show them her cleavage.

Pop quiz for aspiring evolutionary psychologists: which character in this drama is going to leave more copies of her genome behind?

via rm

07 Aug 2005 — ...and every Sunday, the residents have Soylent Green for lunch

Seen on a sign outside an assisted-living facility:

Ask Us About Short-Term Stays

05 Aug 2005 — Every sperm is sacred, but some things are even more sacred

The archdiocese of Portland, responding to a child-support lawsuit by a woman who got pregnant by a seminarian, argued that the mother had engaged “in unprotected intercourse…when [she] should have known that could result in pregnancy.” William Levada, who was archbishop of Portland when the lawsuit was filed, is now prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the branch of the Vatican formerly known as the Inquisition).

The lawyer who wrote that response says he doesn’t think Father Levada ever read it. Levada himself was unavailable for comment, so we have no idea if he is prepared to disavow his lawyer’s argument, or if he’s preparing to add a footnote to that whole “thou shalt not use birth control” doctrine.

via Bitch Ph.D.

02 Aug 2005 — TMI 911

When I am dictator of the world, I will make it illegal to broadcast images of minors on television, even if their parents consent.

Dr. Deborah A. Borchers, a pediatrician in private practice in Cincinnati and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on early childhood adoption and dependent care [said, regarding Supernanny and Nanny 911:] “As the children get older, they’ll watch the videotape of the shows of them being portrayed as brats, and they’ll be embarrassed.”

You shouldn’t have to belong to the American Academy of Pediatrics to figure that out. So why would anyone sign up for these shows? Perhaps it’s because many people believe that the only mental-health treatment they can realistically afford is the kind that you pay for by prostituting yourself to Hollywood: not just the nanny shows, but Oprah, Dr. Phil, etc.

And they might be right.

28 Jul 2005 — They stole my idea! And probably transported it backwards in time, too!

For a while, I’ve had this idea kicking around my head for a different kind of online dating service, but I haven’t had the Copious Free Time to implement it. Now I don’t have to, because the people behind OkCupid had a similar idea, only they had more Copious Free Time (if I had sold two Web sites to Barnes and Noble, I’d have more Copious Free Time, too), and two of them are Real Mathematicians, which means they are using statistical matching techniques that I wouldn’t have even tried to implement.

If you’ve used this service, I’d be interested in hearing your evaluation of it, so I can find out how good my idea was.

28 Jul 2005 — Is there a right to speak on double super-secret background?

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on whether or not to pass a Federal law giving journalists the right to keep their sources confidential. The people who spoke in favor of this law were right to say that freedom of the press is one of the fundamental principles of our democracy, and laws that promote this freedom are Good Things. However, a system of checks and balances is another fundamental principle of our democracy, and judging from the remarks made at the hearing, the sponsors of the Federal shield bill are not giving that principle its due.

Consider the privileges granted to a lawyer. The Sixth Amendment grants a criminal defendant the right “to have the assistance of counsel for his defense”; the ability to speak with a lawyer in confidence is obviously an important aspect of this right. But you can’t just put “lawyer” on your business card and enjoy all the legal immunities of an attorney. The license to practice law is granted by the state, and someone who violates the professional standards of the bar can lose that license. There is no comparable licensing scheme for journalists.

Furthermore, not every conversation between a lawyer and client is privileged. If I tell my attorney that I cheated on my taxes, she can’t be compelled to reveal what I said to a court. But if I ask her to help me cheat on my taxes, and she complies, then our conversation is unprivileged. Witnesses at last week’s hearing expressed sympathy and support for Judith Miller, who chose to go to prison rather than snitch on her source. But if her source was sharing classified information with her, then Miller was abetting a crime, like a lawyer advising a client how to cheat the IRS.

Why are members of the Senate Judiciary Committee so eager to give reporters a greater license to secrecy than their fellow lawyers have? Inquiring minds want to know. If some mole on the Senate staff has access to confidential documents that will answer my question…you know how to find me.

25 Jul 2005 — Acknowledgements

Emily G., meet Olin Shivers and Steve Heller.

You’re welcome.

via Sidelights

20 Jul 2005 — The new job description

Tim Bray looks forward to an era where blogging will create a “new public relations”, where senior managers teach employees their companies’ “goals and messages”, and regular employees, not just PR specialists, spread them to everyone else who cares to read about them.

Bray assures managers that this new system would not make them look bad, unless their organization is so dysfunctional that griping in blogs is the least of their problems. What I wonder is: will this make employees look bad? Will an employee with a widely-read blog get a better performance evaluation, on the grounds that the blog creates positive buzz for the company? Will insecure parents not only read their nannies’ blogs, but demand that charming anecdotes about their children be posted there?

How long until some poor soul discovers that he or she has been fired for not blogging enough?

18 Jul 2005 — The Goldstein Question

In a few months, God willing, a new rabbi will be installed at our humble synagogue, culminating a year-long search for someone to succeed our rabbi of thirty-nine years. When I served on the first rabbinic-search committee (more on that later), I contributed one question to our List of Things To Ask:

Suppose you had been a pulpit rabbi when Baruch Goldstein did that thing in Ma`arat ha-Makhpelah. On the following Shabbat, how would you have addressed the issue with your congregation?

There are many disputes of Jewish law where I’m happy to acknowledge that there are multiple points of view, let a rabbi that I trust answer my own questions, and not care that other people get different answers from the rabbis that they trust. May I eat food with a triangle-K hekhsher? At what minute does the fast on Tisha b’Av end? How do I handle going to a family event on Shabbat where my wife and I are the only observant Jews present? On the Goldstein question, however, my tolerance for pluralism runs out. According to a faction of dangerous zealots, he was preventing a mass murder; according to everyone with sense, he was committing one. (I trust I have made my bias sufficiently clear.) Nobody who belongs to the second group should call a member of the first group “my rabbi”.

Furthermore, in my experience, both support and disdain for Goldstein is spread out all over the spectrum of contemporary Orthodoxy; you can’t infer how a rabbi stands on the issue from the color of his hat or his attitude regarding women’s prayer groups. So you have to ask, and you have to ask without telegraphing the answer you’re looking for.

All I wanted, when I added this question to our list, was a litmus test to weed out people I absolutely didn’t want our shul to hire. I got something much better. The way that candidates answered the question—the way they connected the Goldstein massacre to their own personal history, or to issues in the general Jewish community—told us things about their personality and priorities that we didn’t get from the standard interview questions.

So, Gentle Reader, if you ever serve on a rabbinic-search committee for an Orthodox synagogue, I strongly encourage you to ask The Goldstein Question to everyone you interview.

(I also encourage you to endorse the candidate that is most likely to win approval from a large majority of the congregation he will serve, and not the candidate whom you personally believe would be the best person for the synagogue. That, you see, is why our shul had two rabbinic search committees, and why I was not a member of the second one. But that has nothing to do with Goldstein.)

07 Jul 2005 — Bleg: Windows 95 in Hebrew

For my job, I obtained a six-year-old Israeli telephone directory on CD-ROM. (Why six years old? Because now that Bezeq has its directory on the Web, there’s no market for Israeli phone books on CD-ROM. Why don’t I just use Bezeq’s Web page? Because I don’t really care about looking up phone numbers—I’m trying to dump all the names in the directory.)

The program was written for Windows 95, but all I have here is XP. If I try to run the program—even in compatibility mode—it gives the error message “Cannot find BIDI.DLL”. I assume that this DLL was distributed with Hebrew and Arabic versions of Windows 95.

So does anyone out there have a Hebrew version of Windows 95, with all the appropriate licensing paperwork, that they’re willing to give or sell to me?

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