We're heading home now, but we'll be back.
Akin Illustrates What is Wrong With the GOP
Sorry. More politics.
You want a summation of what's wrong with the GOP, and its terrorist wing, the Tea Party?
In an effort to explain his stance on abortion, Representative Todd Akin, the Republican Senate nominee from Missouri, provoked ire across the political spectrum on Sunday by saying that in instances of what he called ‘legitimate rape,’ women’s bodies somehow blocked an unwanted pregnancy.
Ok. Reprehensible statement. Idiotic. But not unexpected from a pro-lifer.
Mr. Akin, a six-term member of Congress who is backed by Tea Party conservatives, made it clear that his opposition to the practice was nearly absolute, even in instances of rape.
Yeah. So, he's a Tea Partier. That makes a bit more sense. In their world, everything is black and white.
“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Mr. Akin said of pregnancies from rape. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.
Err. Ok. In context, that's way worse. Not only is it just morally reprehensible, and politically suicidal, that shows a complete lack of understanding of basic elementary science. Oh well, just another politician who has no regard for science. I suppose it could be worse.
Mr. Akin, who has a background in engineering and is a member of the House science committee
WHAT?! He's on the House science committee? How the hell does someone who doesn't understand how babies are made get onto the House science committee? Double-you. Tee. Eff.
(Via the New York Times.)
Some Links and Info
I'm not in a place particularly conducive to writing anything of a meaningful length, so here are a few things that might be worth reading.
- Joe Posnanski on the late Johnny Pesky - As always, Joe Posnanski pretty much nails it.
- Going between planes, wifi, 3G, no service, etc, I noticed my iPhone's battery dying rapidly. Turns out, I had a stuck iMessage. If you see iMessage always saying "sending" on a particular contact, start deleting your messages until you find the "stuck" message. Saved my battery.
- Getting your vim config under git - As a web dork, keeping my config synced across machines has been painful. I'd tried keeping them under git before, but never had gotten it quite right. This is the right way. So easy, and makes my life much nicer.
- TextMate 2 goes open source - I've never quite gotten into TextMate, but this is an interesting move. Will it keep being developed and supported commercially? (Maybe, given he GPLv3 license.) Regardless, building it to play around is pretty simple and probably worth it.
- WordPress 3.1 for iOS - For the first time, the WordPress iOS app is meaningfully usable, i.e. I typed this in the app.
Warning: Waffle Fries and Politics
Political talk follows. If you think your politics are different than mine, and you don't want to start hating me, you should stop reading. You should also probably be smarter.
This has been on my mind for a while. I think I have a draft post going back almost a year. I'm probably going to alienate people on both sides. That's not my intent. I just want to point out that there really aren't two sides to this argument.
I "get" (where "get" means "I understand how someone could think that way") a lot of the things that people do that are bad/abusive/douchey. I don't agree with these things, but I can wrap my brain around how people can feel that way. For instance, I "get" how someone could think racist things, how someone could live in a world or be brought up in a world where they're taught to believe that. I don't agree with racism; I find it repugnant and inarguably wrong. But I can see how someone, when brought up in a certain situation, could end up holding racist views. And I feel bad for those people. I don't excuse their behavior; being raised that way in no way excuses their ignorance when they've reached the point that they can make their own judgments. Time and history will show them the error of their ways. Society has moved on, and they are being justifiably, left behind.
I "get" how someone could be homophobic. The particularly religious, the juvenile, the sheltered. I can see how you could, as an adult, arrive at the point of view that being gay is not ok/against nature/whatever that person wants to tell themselves to make them feel like they're ok in being discriminatory against homosexuals. Again, I can see how someone could arrive at that opinion. I don't agree with it, I think it's a ridiculous point of view (and won't even dive into the ridiculous things you would have to believe if you took the Bible literally), but I can see how you'd feel that way.
Those were two of the hardest paragraphs I've probably written here, mostly because I'm fairly certain at least someone people will take away from it that I think being a racist or homophobe is ok. I don't. I think it's reprehensible. I think it's ridiculously outdated thinking. Expressing those views makes me immediately assume the person's views on everything are moronic. That clear enough?
That being said, even if I can rationalize being against homosexuality, I don't "get" being against gay marriage. I just can't wrap my head around it. If I put myself in the shoes of a "traditional marriagist" (and let's be honest, these days, traditional marriage seems to mean having two or three marriages and an affair [rimshot]), I can't get from point A (gay marriage) to point B (gay marriage is bad).
For instance, let's say there's a gay couple. Today (in the US, let's not address the world as a whole), they can be monogomous, live together, share a bank account, pay their taxes (separately), own common goods, eat waffle fries from Chic-Fil-A. The only thing they really can't do in most states is get married and take advantage of the legal things that bestows on them (shared health insurance, visitation rights in the hospital, combined taxes, etc.)
How does any of that impact anyone but the couple?
Put another way, if every state in the US passed a law tomorrow allowing gay marriage, what would happen? How would your life change? More specifically, how would your life change if you were against gay marriage?
Your church can still choose to not perform gay marriage.
You can still choose to think homosexuality and gay marriage are an abomination.
Your can still teach your children to hate gay people.
In other words, you can continue to be an enormous asshole.
Everything is exactly the same. The sun is in the sky, birds are chirping, and you can still be a giant douchebag. Except now we've bestowed common human rights on gay couples. And I can get waffle fries without feeling that I'm losing a small piece of my soul.
I imagine their are two arguments that folks cling to. First, that gay marriage is against the Bible. Second, that gay marriage is a slippery slope to something even more untowards.
The Bible argument is illegitimate. The Bible being against gay marriage simply means you can continue to be against gay marriage. Your church doesn't have to allow gay marriage. Hell (I wrote that without immediately understanding the small amount of irony in word choice), your church can disallow gay members entirely. That's fine. It's a private institution. Be as douchey as you want.
The slippery slope argument is even more asinine. "If we allow gay marriage, what's next, a man marrying a dog?"
No. Stop being an asshole. That's the Godwin's Law of gay marriage arguments. Seriously, stop being an asshole.
So, here we are. I can get why someone wouldn't want homosexuality to exist, but since it does, I can't wrap my head around any legitimate reason to be against gay marriage. Hell (there it is again), wouldn't it be better to wrap some Godliness around a gay couple by putting them into a monogamous relationship? Wouldn't that help to stop the spread of the "gay"?
Again, I'm editorializing my own work here. Obviously, the stereotypes that homosexuals are promiscuous or that homosexuality can be spread like a sickness are ridiculous. And for me to state them is offensive. But, isn't capitalizing on those stereotypes to show why the "traditional marriagists" should be in favor of gay marriage worth it? If not, I apologize to the offended. Unless you're a homophobe. I'm glad you're offended.
Anyway, I would like to get past this human rights hurdle early in my life so that we can move onto surmounting bigger issues. Cancer. The environment. The economy. Getting Dan Harmon back onto Community. We're wasting so much time, mindshare, and hurt feelings fighting a battle that will be over in the next 10 years. Like it or not, gay marriage will be legal in almost every state within the next 10 years. I will state that here confidently. Let's stop pissing into the wind and move on.
It's (well past) time to grant homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexual couples. It's the right thing to do. It's certainly the moral thing to do. (And, arguably, the Christian thing to do.)
When we do, I'll be able to eat some waffle fries again. And they will taste awesome.
Awesomer than ever.
A Pictoral Guide to the US Women's Gymnastics Victory →
Even knowing the results of the Olympic Women's Gymnastics team finals, I was still spellbound by the athleticism and ridiculous poise under pressure.
The Atlantic Wire captured it all in an awesome pictoral display, showing how the US won, Russia folded, and letting you relive pretty much all the greatness of Tuesday night. And they partially explain how the hell gymnastics scoring works.
To keep it simple, if you want to win, you need a score above 15 on beam and floor. You want at least a mid-15 on bars. And you want as close to 16 as possible on vault.
The greatest part of the article is the images. You need to check it out. So. Much. Greatness.
Image from The Atlantic Wire
Nearly 10 Things About Mountain Lion … roarrr
Lame title aside, I've not had much time to write in the past few weeks. So, while I've got a few minutes of downtime, I figured I'd brain dump a few of the things I've learned about Mountain Lion, as I've been using it since it came out last week.
- I regained about 15GB of disk space after installing Mountain Lion. I'm not sure this will happen to everyone, but I'm guessing between clearing out old caches, probably clearing out some of the 32 bit components (since it's a full 64 bit os), and just going through a full reboot, I got back a whole boat load of disk space.
- Notification Center is cool, but reasonably useless. Until more apps support it (which means updating and releasing in the Mac App Store, it tends to be a no man's land for me. I use Growl a ton, and in a few weeks (hopefully), Growl 2.0 will be out, which will pipe all of those fun Growl notifications right into the Notification Center. That will be nifty.
- Brett Terpstra hooked up a nice script that lets you pipe stuff into the Notification Center. If you do anything in the Terminal, or script anything at all, it's pretty awesome.
- iTunes continues its slide towards suckitude. For whatever reason, iTunes performance seems to be worse. The podcast interface, intermittently, throws crazy beachballs when just clicking on a podcast. Could just be me, but I'm guessing it's something in the newest build.
- Safari is good again. Safari gets really good for a build, then falls behind Chrome for a while, then gets really good again. iCloud tabs are great, the speed is great, as is finally merging the search and URL bar. A few months from now, I'm guessing it'll have drifted behind Chrome again.
- iCloud is getting better. Slowly but surely, iCloud is getting really useful. The aforementioned iCloud tabs are great, and for some apps, iCloud for documents is really good. There are a few things missing (can't share docs between apps; not enough apps using iCloud), some bugs (Contacts still seems to flake out sometimes), and some performance issues. But by and large, iCloud is useful. It's just not as useful as Dropbox, yet (for files).
- Twitter integration is sort of cool. It's nice to be able to quickly tweet from Notification Center, or to sync up a contact's Twitter user with their address book entry.
- AirPlay Mirroring is badass. Too bad it only works with newer Macs. I'm sure someone will hack it to work with others.
- It's $20 bucks. Just buy it.
I haven't really played with dictation, but I'm guessing that'll turn out to be pretty cool. For instance, I just dictated this line right here. Works well enough, though the lack of response while you're speaking is disconcerting (because it is sending everything out to Apple's servers, rather than doing it locally. so it can't keep up with your speaking).
Anyway, seriously, it's $20. Go buy it.
And yeah, I probably should have just come up with a tenth fact.
Yahoo Making Lemonade Out of Sewage →
I'll keep this short, since my punditry is not strong.
Jesus. Yahoo! just made lemonade out of a massive pile of horseshit.
— Ryan Toohil (@ryant) July 16, 2012
Yahoo hiring Marissa Mayer as CEO was probably one of the only moves Yahoo could make to keep the company relevant in the short term. This is a major shot in the arm for Yahoo, putting a real technology person in the head spot, someone who (at least from the east coast) has some major star power and real dork creds.
She's smart, she lead Google Search during its heyday, and she's a pick that makes perfect sense. Which makes the fact that the pick is shocking enough to keep Yahoo in the news for a few more days (and enough to make everyone wonder why she wasn't on the shortlist of speculated options all along).
But, more than that, Mayer should at least keep some smart people from abandoning the Yahoo ship, giving her time to plot a new course. It'll be interesting to see where Yahoo goes, as the places they are really strong (Sports/Fantasy Sports, News/Finance, arguably Flickr, I suppose Yahoo Mail is still big) are places that are strong, but not really growing. Do they double-down and try to take ownership of those areas? Or do they carve a new path?
Two days ago, Yahoo had a short list of uninspiring candidates, with all of the interesting ones saying publically they had no desire to lead Yahoo.
Today, Yahoo has a new CEO with legit technology credentials; it makes a huge leap forward by having a young, female CEO; and Yahoo now has more of the world's attention (and probably not just the tech world) than they've had since the shareholder revolt, which is not what you want attention for.
See, interesting. Really interesting. Way more interesting than if Yahoo had just hired another media person. Now I'll pay attention to Yahoo for more than checking my 15 year old email address and managing my fantasy football teams.
Nifty Dorky Stuff of the Week
A quick update this Sunday, as I've just spent an hour or so dorking around with a couple of scripts/tips/techniques that crossed my radar this week.
Archiving tweets
Dr. Drang at leancrew.com pieces together an IFTTT recipe plus some python to give you a nice archive of your Tweets. If you're a big dork, it's worth the 20 minutes to get it all pieced together, so you can have a text file with all of your tweets. If you need some help pulling an archive of your tweets, there are some nice apps / tools / scripts to help you do that (or drop me an email).
But now I've got every stupid thought I put into Twitter sitting in a text file so I can go back and relive my inanity.
Quick fuzzy string-matching for file editing
Internet-dork-hero Brett Terpstra puts together a nice little ruby script to quickly let you find and edit text files (in the editor of your choice), based on a partial file name. It'll come in handy for those folks who don't do a good job remembering either the location or the name of that script they were working on.
Now, if someone could just help me figure out a way to get Coda 2 to let me do the Quick Search on sshfs mounted volumes, I'd be a happy nerd. (I'm guessing I need to get Spotlight to index the volumes, which I haven't been able to do yet).
NFL Stands "Not For Long" (will we cut away to the 4:15 game) →
"In researching the kickoff time shift, the NFL analyzed games from the 2009-11 seasons and found that 44 games required part of the audience to be switched to a mandatory doubleheader game kickoff," a release from the league reads. "With a 4:25 p.m. ET kickoff time, that number that would have been reduced by 66 percent to only 15 games"
Butchered, awesome Jerry Glanville quote aside, the NFL is probably the most fan-friendly, forward thinking professional sports league (at least when it comes to non-concussion-related topics). Sunday Ticket, NFL RedZone, and NFL.com give you almost anything you could possibly want to see on Sunday, if you're willing to pay a bit. If you don't want to pay, you still usually get at least three games on Sunday, and now, if the early game is close, you won't get yanked away before seeing the final plays of the game.
If the NFL would follow MLB and the NBA's lead and put out an app (at say $10-20 a season) that let you listen to the radio broadcasts of any game, it would probably make a gajillion dollars.
MLB, with its At Bat app and web service, Apple TV/Xbox Live integration, and really well done MLB.com and MiLB.com sites, would be a shoo-in for fan friendly behavior, but their continue adherence to their absurd YouTube and blackout policies mean that, no matter what they do, they're always going to be second place.
(From Awful Announcing.)
I hate fantasy baseball
