A friend and I keep having different permutations of the same conversation, which revolves around this question: what is the essential explanation for Islamic terrorism? My friend’s answer is that it’s primarily religious; in other words, that something intrinsic to Islam spurs on suicide bombers and the like. I disagree for a number of reasons: […]
Author Archives: filosofo
OpenID Servers: Allow Redundant Means of Access
May 8, 2008 – 10:43 am
That’s the lesson I take from Kyle Neath’s critique of OpenID (HT: Ma.tt), from his first point, the one that I think has the most traction. OpenID servers should allow users to associate their account with several OpenID providers, if they want, and/or an email address.
sed and Multi-Line Search and Replace
April 26, 2008 – 1:21 pm
I’ve been experimenting with getting regular expression patterns to match over multiple lines using sed. For example, one might want to change <p>previous text</p> <h2> <a href="http://some-link.com">A title here</a> </h2> <p>following text</p> to <p>previous text</p> No title here <p>following text</p> sed cycles through each line of input one line at a time, so the most […]
C.S. Lewis on His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, and The Da Vinci Code
April 15, 2008 – 11:48 am
Or whatever certain circles think is the controversial-book-we-need-to-protect-people-from du jour. There are earnest people who recommend realistic reading for everyone because, they say, it prepares us for real life, and who would, if they could, forbid fairy-tales for children and romances for adults because they ‘give a false picture of life’—in other words, deceive their […]
A Good Enough addEvent
April 14, 2008 – 11:48 pm
Several years ago, PPK of Quirksmode sponsored a contest to come up with a new version of the trusty JavaScript addEvent function. The original addEvent was created by Scott Andrew LePera in 2001 as a way to merge Internet Explorer’s attachEvent with the W3C’s addEventListener. Both addEventListener and attachEvent allow you to attach a JavaScript […]
Plato and Unreasonable Mathematicians
April 12, 2008 – 10:06 pm
A friend today sent me this picture from the Boston Museum of Science. It’s especially funny to me, because I have formal education in both mathematics and philosophy. And anyone who’s read Plato’s Republic is bound to think it odd. It’s odd because Plato’s good society, the republic, requires its citizens to study mathematics for […]