Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Critters Weblogging

The white mouse

Coming back from dinner tonight, in the grass next to one of the dumpsters was a white mouse. Not a small white mouse, a larger one, almost as big as a small rat. And its fur was luminescent and shiny— softly glowing against the dark wet of the ground.

This is something you don’t see everyday, a white mouse. It’s not a rat because I know rats; I had to work with rats when I was getting my Psychology degree. In fact, I became fairly adept working with rats. For instance, I found that the trick to getting a rat that’ll make you look good in your research is to use a fat rat. Fat rats are fat because they learn quickly in order to get the most food.

This rat selection strategy backfired on me one day, though. I was working with a nicely plump rat, conditioning him to wait for a signal to press a lever; if he did, he would get some food. However, if he pressed the lever before or a second or two after the signal — no food.

He sat there passively until I pressed the signal for the first time, then jumped to his feet and raced to the lever: pushing on it with all of his might. My teacher saw this and insisted I use a new rat because I was the one who was supposed to be learning how to work with rats, and a too-smart rat was a bit of a cheat. Unfortunately, all that was left by this time were skinny creatures with vacant eyes who couldn’t find food if you shoved their noses into it.

Anyway, back to the white mouse. As far as I know, white mice aren’t naturally occurring, so I have no idea where this one came from. I imagine someone could have dumped a pet, but white mice are not supposed to be good pets. In fact, white mice are almost always bred for testing within chemical or biological research facilities.

I know that Monsanto is only a few miles away. Makes me wonder about that luminescent quality of the mouse.

As I was researching the white mouse, I stumbled on to an interestingly different, somewhat macabre story, White mice and Dead Cats. Written by a weblogger.

Mice and webloggers do proliferate, don’t they?

Categories
People Political

Is this what we’ve become?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Imagine my delight when I woke up this morning and found the following comment attached to one of my old postings, Blast them all and let God sort them out.:

I don’t expect Arabs to be humiliated. . .I expect them to be dead, deader than dead. God doesn’t need to sort them out, he already has. He had the evils all in one place at one point. Now he’s got them spread out all over the world. But I’m not going to sit around and wait for them to do something. . .if I see evils happening in my own backyard, the perps are going to die. If I’m marching into Hebron, and see a sand nigger with a gun, I’m going to kill them. Plain and simple, I’m not going to “bomb them and let God sort them out.” I’m going to shoot them and give God something to do.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust. The order has been given. Arabs are the 21st century’s Nazi’s. And they are going to die a painful death.

Staff Sgt Thomas Nichols
USMC

(Note that the IP address attached to comment belongs to the Marriott hotel chain, and the comment was most likely written by someone staying at a Marriott — not necessarily by a person with this name. The writer found my weblog posting by doing a Yahoo search with the words “ARABS MUST DIE”.)

Is this what we’ve become? Three thousand people were killed September 11th, so let’s kill millions of Arabs. Can someone please explain the humanity, the justice, and the morality of this?

The last time this world saw a determination to eliminate all people of a specific religion was in the middle of the last century, and was conducted by a man named Adolph Hitler. I found it somewhat ironic then that the use of ‘nazi’ is given the victims in this instance.

I will say this, though: at least this person was honest in their belief and in their expression of that belief. Too many people in my country, and in other countries, hide this same belief behind polite phrases such as “liberation of the native people” and “war on terror”.

And, at the least, this person wanted to kill all Arabs because he’s afraid, and because he’s pissed that someone would actually dare hurt Americans. Too many people in my country, and in other countries, want to kill Arabs because of oil. However, one difference between them and the writer, Staff Sargeant Nichols, is that these people don’t want to kill all the Arabs.

After all, we have to leave enough Arabs to run the pumps, staff the hotels, and clean the streets.

That I would live long enough to see this become the new “moral way”, the latest Christian Crusade, saddens me, and sickens me.

Categories
RDF

Selective Hearing

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Debate is not a game one plays when one is bored or has little else to do. Debate is a way of people trying to understand each other’s point of view. At the least, it is a way of discussing points of view for an audience in order to convince members of that audience to follow one course or another. Debate, when practiced at its best, is a celebration of differences.

In this previous post I responded, many times, to questions and concerns about RDF and RDF/XML raised by people such as Mark Pilgrim and Joe Gregorio. Was I patient? I hope I was. I tried to be. Was I accurate? As accurate as I could be. Did I convince anyone? Unknown. At the very least, though, I had hoped that I had argued well and that my rather extensive efforts were met with respect.

Imagine how disappointing then when I visit Joe’s weblog and find that he’s posted a new note about this discussion and quotes everyone in the debate but myself, though most of the quotes he uses were a result of my own discussion.

By ignoring me I have effectively been removed from the debate, my efforts dismissed. I have been reduced.

It is too easy in weblogging to reduce each other. Too easy to dismiss each other. To easy to ignore that which we just don’t want to hear, and manipulate that which we don’t want to ignore.

Categories
Writing

Article at Onlamp.com

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I wrote a little quip for O’Reilly Network’s ONLamp.com titled Today’s Unix: New all over again.

The article is related to the release of my newest effort for O’Reilly, Unix Power Tools, 3rd edition.

Categories
RDF

The White Shoes of Technology

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This week, the RDF Working Group released drafts of six working documents for the RDF specification. Six. That’s a whole lot of work. However, rather than getting a pat on the back with a quiet “Well done.”, the group has seen their effort catechized mercilessly.

Joe Gregorio chronicles Tim Bray’s half-hearted attempt to model RDDL using RDF/XML — a syntax that Bray has vocally opposed in the past. This leads into a chain of RDF bashing at the W3C Tag (Technical Architecture Group) mailing list. Bob DuCharme and John Cowan write an article for xml.com, Make your XML RDF-Friendly, and this led into a great deal of RDF bashing over at the xml.org mailing list.

I responded at the W3C RDF Comments mailing list and at the xml.org mailing list.

At xml.org, I wrote:

I’ve watched with interest the discussion about RDF within this list and over at the W3C Technical Architecture Group (seeded by this item from Tim Bray — link). What puzzles and confuses me is why there is so much animosity towards RDF.

If you don’t understand it, and don’t want to take the time to understand it, or don’t feel it will buy you anything, or hate the acronym, or you’re in a general bitchy mood that’s easily triggered if someone uses “Semantic” in the same sentence that contains “Web”, the solution is simple: don’t use it. Don’t use it. Don’t study it, look at it, listen about it, work with it, sleep with it, or generally go out and dance late at night with it.

I also wrote:

Is it fashionable to be _down_ on RDF? Sort of like the techie equivalent of
not wearing white after Labor Day unless you live in Australia?

I am particularly unhappy because of Tim Bray’s involvement in all of this. There’s an implication and an assumption made that because Tim Bray ‘invented’ XML, he’s qualified to be a definitive judge of RDF and RDF/XML. However, the two efforts are not the same: XML deals with meta-language, RDF with meta-data. Tim has a right to his opinion, and I don’t fault him for it though I don’t have a tremendous amount of respect for his half-hearted and rather dubious effort to use RDF/XML to model RDDL.

What does concern me is the reaction of people to Tim’s efforts and his pronouncements on the “badness” of RDF. Should I give up on RDF and the existing RDF/XML serialization technique just because Tim Bray doesn’t care for it? Am I forced to defer to him in all things XML?

Sorry, but I don’t think so. In the past I’ve not allowed other “inventors” to tell me how to do things, I’m not about to start with Tim Bray and RDF.

Bottom line, there is a group of people who spent a lot of time and effort and energy resolving issues related to RDF, and writing the new specifications; and there is an even larger group of people who spent a lot of time and effort creating the associated tools and APIs I use, and gladly. This week, if no one else will take a moment, one moment, to thank them for their effort, I will.

Thanks, folks. You done good.