March for Choice on April 25!

One more week until L. and I are headed to Washington DC, to join what is likely to be the largest pro-choice march in the nation’s history. The hotel reservations have been placed; breakfast will come from Food Not Bombs; all that we need now is an oil change for the car and some posterboard for the signs. I’m getting really excited about the march: Washington is a great place to visit, the march will be an awesome experience, and I hope that this will be an important step towards lighting a fire under John Kerry and the Democrats to start pushing abortion rights, hard, to defeat George W. Bush. (And yes, I said abortion rights–not some mealy-mouthed incantation of the word choice that actually means nothing. We don’t need more of that after 8 years of Clintonian apologies for being pro-choice. We need a movement, and pro-choice politicians, who will be unapologetic about supporting women’s rights to control their own uterus. Morality is on our side, not the side of male power and coercion.) The fact is that if the Democrats made the upcoming election a referendum on abortion rights, they would win easily; and with this election season march we have a chance to catapault the issue into the center of the debate. Let’s hope that our putative allies have the sense to pick up the ball and run with it.

I want a sign just like this one.

Above all else, let’s make this March everything that the pro-choice movement should be: radical, agitating, unapologetic, aware and proud of the radical feminist movement that fought and won the first battles only thirty years ago. These are women’s lives, people, not something that we should have to bandy crooked words with a bunch of dickheads in government office over, or quibble with men in black robes over compelling State interests to justify. Let’s move the movement back to the passion, conviction, energy, creativity, and justice of its radical feminist roots. L. and I are making up our own signs (I’m sure there will be more than enough people to carry NOW and FMF banners without our help…); we haven’t made a final decision on the slogans yet, but here’s some ideas we’ve been mulling over:

What do you think? And who else is coming to the March next weekend? Let me know and maybe we can grab some dinner together in DC. Hope to see you there!

Those of you who pay attention to such things may have noticed that this weblog is syndicated in three different formats: RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 0.3. Those of you who don’t pay attention to such things may very well have no idea what I am talking about; if you want to know more about what syndication is, and why you might find it useful, you can find a gentle introduction to Atom syndication–and links to tools and services that use it–at AtomEnabled.org, and a gentle introduction to RSS syndication–and links to tools and services that use it–at What Is RSS?. Mark Pilgrim sums it up like this: Smart bookmarks that tell you when your favorite sites change. There’s actually a lot more to it than that–as Mark knows, and points out–but that’s far and away the most popular end-user application for syndication at the moment.)

The reason, in any case, that I am bringing this up at all is in order to let you know that I’m deprecating the RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds for Geekery Today. Why? Well, there are a variety of reasons. Some of them are purely selfish, having to do with slow performance from MovableType due to the number of indexes it has to update whenever I add or update an entry. But there are good reasons to deprecate RSS quite apart from my own provincial concerns. One of the main ones is that RSS is a big, fat mess, and tools that are based on it face a huge interoperability nightmare in trying to deal with its maddening array of quirks. Atom is also better designed and better suited for use in weblogs. Thus, the RSS feeds are deprecated; if you use them, you’d be much better off switching to the Atom 0.3 feed at your earliest convenience.

Since I am deprecating the RSS feeds rather than discontinuing them, you’ll still be able to use same old URIs that you have in the past. However, I will be dropping the visible links to RSS feeds from the website, and–somewhat more importantly–RSS feeds will no longer be instantaneously updated to reflect new posts. They will be updated eventually; I’ve set up an automated script to rebuild the RSS 1.0 feed once a day, and the RSS 2.0 feed once every other day. I settled on this solution because I didn’t want to tax the server too much, and I figure that RSS 2.0 is about twice as much of a mess as RSS 1.0. The Atom 0.3 feed is still updated instantaneously, so if you want the up-to-the-minute news (and if you want to support open standards and non-lame technology) that will be the best one for you to use.

Another matter of little importance concerns the format in which Geekery Today is written and revised. XHTML is a great output language for documents on the web, but I hate writing in it. Fortunately, there are lots of humane text markup formats for the web; one of the best is John Gruber’s Markdown. I’m now using Markdown, which through a brilliant bit of Web voodoo can plug directly into MovableType, to write more or less all the content on Rad Geek People’s Daily. That doesn’t mean very much to you, since the Markdown is translated into XHTML before you ever see it. But it does have an interesting side effect: you can now use Markdown syntax to comments you post in the Talk Back section, which provides simple, intuitive ways to create *emphasis* (= emphasis), **strong emphasis** (= strong emphasis), [inline links](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link) (= inline links), block quotes, ordered lists, unordered lists, and more. (If you know how to write an e-mail, you already know most of what you need to know about Markdown.)

Like all things in this fallen world, the system is not altogether flawless: Markdown is technically designed to be used along with inline XHTML, but you can’t use XHTML in the comments section. (If you try it, I’ve set MovableType to strip the tags out.) Still, nearly anything you could conceivably need to format a comment is available. Also, a couple of unfortunate side effects have fallen out of the way that MovableType formats comment text: (1) if you insert a URI in the text of a comment, it is no longer automatically linked–I had to disable this to keep MovableType from screwing up Markdown link formatting; (2) you can’t use the convenient angle-bracket Markdown <http://www.uri.com> syntax for linking to a URI either, because MovableType mistakes that for an XHTML tag and strips it out. That doesn’t mean that you can’t link anything from your comments; it just means that to do it you’ll have to use one of the explicit link syntaxes to do it.

(If you have a weird urge to experiment with Markdown syntax right now, you can try out the Markdown Dingus.)

–The Management

Posting on Geekery Today may be held up for a while in the next several days, as I grudgingly prepare the paperwork for my annual surrender of tribute to the State.

In honor of the occasion, though, you can follow my argument on Slashdot with Shakrai, who castigates those who would dare to cheat the State of its booty. Since I argue that taxation is nothing more than robbery with more paperwork, I can’t muster much outrage at those who lie to the taxman in order to keep some of their own damn money (thank you very much!).

For what it’s worth, while I don’t see anything morally wrong in cheating on your taxes, that doesn’t mean that I do it; since I make most of my money through self-employment I no doubt look pretty suspicious to the IRS from the get-go, and I have no desire to encourage them to come along and help me get my finances in order by being less than scrupulous in my reporting. It just goes to show that while nothing immoral could count as expedient, lots of things that are morally permissible are still not particularly smart. Such is life in this possible world.

In international news, Donald Evil Lord Skeletor Rumsfeld has announced that the situation in Iraq is not out of control. Meanwhile, in Iraq, your tax dollars are hard at work:

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) U.S. Marines battled insurgents for control of this Sunni Muslim stronghold Wednesday, calling in airstrikes against a mosque compound where witnesses said dozens were killed in six hours of fighting. An anti-U.S. uprising led by a radical Shiite cleric raged for the fourth day in southern cities.

The Abdel-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque was hit by U.S. aircraft that launched a Hellfire missile at its minaret and dropped a 500-pound bomb on a wall surrounding the compound.

The U.S. military said insurgents were using the mosque for a military fire base. Iraqi witnesses estimated 40 people were killed as they gathered for afternoon prayers. U.S. officials said no civilians died.

An Associated Press reporter who went to the mosque said the minaret was standing, but damaged, apparently by shrapnel. The bomb blew away part of a wall, opening an entry for the Marine assault. The reporter saw at least three cars leaving, each with a number of dead and wounded.

Chaos spreads, people are murdered, and you and I are forced to foot the bill for a war that many of us wanted absolutely no part of. Sooner or later there will be a reckoning for the terrible destruction that is being wrought on Iraq; I can only hope against hope that terrorist logic will not win the day, and that we will not be forced to face the consequences yet again for things that other people decided to do–using stolen money and professing to act on our behalf.

I’m no great fan of Hillary Rodham Clinton. But she does have her moments. Among them is this:

It’s always sad when anyone dies.

… when asked for her thoughts when J. Strom Thurmond finally shuffled off this mortal coil.

(Thanks to One Good Thing for the pointer.)

A happy slightly-belated April Fools’ Day! (It’s after midnight on April 2, but, on the other hand, I don’t consider the day to have ended until I go to bed. So there.)

The web is full of silly posts today; this website, bold in its conformity, will be no different. Today’s selection is a bit of a re-run; Alina Stefanescu tipped me off to this April Fools’ 1995 article from the Economist:

THE new field of empirical mathematics (EM), a discipline pioneered in the early 1970s by P.G. Somerset and elaborated by V.M. Singh, has already scored some notable successes. Among these are a shortened procedure for the renormalisation of transintegers and refinement of Haberlein’s encryption algorithm. EM, as its name suggests, seeks advances in mathematical theory by means of counting things. As might be expected, the development of computer technology has allowed far more rapid and comprehensive counting of things than previously possible.

It is the belief of the present authors that our work in progress may constitute EM’s most important advance to date. In the course of conducting routine surveys of things counted so far, we discovered that the number of things tended generally to increase more than it decreased. Among the things that proliferated were (in alphabetical order) area of the universe, cable television channels, crime, Economist columns, four-minute milers, lawyers, persons with jobs, persons without jobs, population, potholes, tarts, torts, toxic wastes, video games and weevils. Some things did, of course, decrease. However, our statistical analysis demonstrates to a high degree of confidence that a strong element of hysteresis, or lag-induced upward stickiness, is present in the numbers of things. Put simply, on average everything is proliferating.

This would seem puzzling. Given the conservation laws of natural science, one would expect to see a rough balancing of things that became more numerous with things that became fewer. The persistent upward drift in the average number of things–or burgeoning, as the news media call it–suggests that what is changing is not things themselves but rather numbers. Numbers are losing their value over time; counting any given array of things requires slightly more numbers each year. We refer to this phenomenon as number inflation.

…

A great many previously puzzling phenomena are now explained–or, more accurately, seen to be illusory. For instance, many have wondered why ever-more athletic records are broken every year. The answer is that adjusted for number inflation, human athletic performance turns out to have been roughly constant over time. Similarly, astronomers devote much attention to the apparent fact that the universe is expanding. Since the universe cannot expand forever (eventually it will run out of space and bump into something), this hypothesis seems less than satisfactory; and, indeed, when proper integer-value adjustments are performed, the expansion of the universe proves to be an artifact of number inflation.

It is, however, in the realm of human affairs and social policy that the implications are richest and most consequential. For example, in America a widely noted phenomenon is the consistent tendency of budget deficits to increase despite all efforts to reduce them. Why should something grow even when cut? Because, of course, what needs to be deflated is not the deficit but the digits.

(The best part about this is that the satire is even better for those of us who are praxeologists. After all, are the findings of number inflation any more ridiculous than the idea that forcing banks to give money away for free is an effective way to encourage productive investments, or that taking billions and billions of dollars worth of human labor and blowing it up in another country is an effective way to increase overall wealth? Yet these are typical results produced by the practitioners of empirical economics…)