For many years, one of my rules for dating me has been: I do not date anyone crazier than I am. Note that I am known for singing in public and juggling fruit in the grocery store, so by "crazy" I do not mean "weird"; I mean "mentally unstable in ways that make it difficult for you to conduct your day-to-day life". Broken is okay. Demolished is not ( Read more... )

So here's a sort of goofy thing.

A week or two after Len died, I forget exactly, all of a sudden one day emails addressed to him started showing up in my inbox, most of them listservs and announcements and things like that. It was a bit jarring and quite surreal; then again, basically everything about that time had a "you are living in a Jeunet ( Read more... )

By now you've all probably heard about the court order that the U.S. Department of Justice served on Twitter last December, and which Twitter successfully fought to have unsealed so that it could notify the affected subscribers - among whom are Dutch entrepreneur and privacy activist Rop Gonggrijp, Icelandic parliament member Birgitta Jonsdottir, ( Read more... )

I basically skipped out on the Internet for most of last week. This was mainly because last year's router decided it was no longer interested in putting out a consistent enough signal for my WLAN interface to stay stapled to it long enough to do things like, oh, open a webpage. I am happy when things consistently work, I can troubleshoot them when ( Read more... )

Tonight I'm reading Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, and less than a chapter in, I already recommend it wholeheartedly. (You can download a PDF for free at that link.) Altemeyer is a psychology prof at the University of Manitoba, and he is a social scientist of the first water, emphasis on the scientist part: he is a stickler for the scientific ( Read more... )