Reaping the Islamic whirlwind

Well, now we know why America invaded Iraq, overthrew Saddam, and occupied the country: to bring the blessings of Islamic government to the Iraqi people. This New York Times article, Top Iraq Shiites Exert Influence on Constitution, lays out what we were fighting for in Iraq:

The clerics generally agree that the constitution must ensure that no laws passed by the state contradict a basic understanding of Shariah as laid out in the Koran. Women should not be treated as the equals of men in matters of marriage, divorce and family inheritance, they say. Nor should men be prevented from having multiple wives, they say.

For example, Shariah mandates that in dividing family property, male children get twice as much as female children.

"We don't want to see equality between men and women because according to Islamic law, men should have double of women," said Muhammad Kuraidy, a spokesman for Ayatollah Yacoubi. "This is written in the Koran and according to God." ...

In Basra, the second largest city in Iraq, where one of Ayatollah Sistani's closest aides wields enormous influence, Shiite religious parties have been molding the city into an Islamic fiefdom since the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Militias have driven alcohol sellers off the streets. Women are harassed if they walk the streets in anything less than head-to-toe black. Conservative judges are invoking Shariah in some courts.

So the US deposed a brutal (but rabidly secular and agressively modern) regime that was at best a theoretical threat to the US, and has created a new Islamic republic in the Middle East. Yes, the Iraqi people have now voted, and I guess that's a good thing. But it appears they have voted themselves back into the 15th Century. And it only took $400 billion and 1,500 American lives to achieve this triumphant result.

From the cold geopolitical standoint of what is best for America, the question bears asking: Is another Islamic republic in the Middle East what we wanted? Who thought that? I certainly don't remember anyone from the government making that argument. If the neo-cons who conned us into this war wanted to spread Islam, why didn't they make that case to the American people before they scammed us into war?

New NetNewsWire 2.0 betas

Ranchero Software today announced new public beta versions of NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite. I've been a beta tester for a while now, and I have to say (along with a lot of other people) that Brent runs the best damn beta testing I've ever seen — and I've seen a lot of beta software.

I also need to quote directly from the NetNewsWire Beta page:

Warning!

Beta software has bugs! Nasty, vicious bugs with great big, sharp teeth!

Don't use beta software unless you're clear on what "beta" means and you're comfortable running beta software.

I do hope that that warning is specific enough so that anyone reading this would understand what they're getting themselves into.

Sun both causes and helps skin cancer?

Via Chuq, Sunshine might stop skin cancers: "Sunshine might stop certain cancers from growing, including skin cancers, according to two new studies." Color me confused.

Check out Think Progress

New weblog: Think Progress, a project of the American Progress Action Fund. They did a terrific job tonight live-blogging the State of the Union. They took something that Bush said, and then pointed out the facts, with links to backup information. Here's an example (I haven't included their embedded links):

Gangs

President Bush said: "Tonight I propose a three-year initiative to help organizations keep young people out of gangs."

FACT: President Bush has proposed a 40 percent cut in federal juvenile crime prevention funds, which would effectively "pull the plug" on good local programs that reduce gang and youth violence.

FACT: President Bush has sponsored a 44 percent overall reduction in delinquency-fighting and anti-gang funds since 2002.

Good stuff. I look forward to more like it from this blog; I've bookmarked it.

New Wise-Women Tutorial

There's a new tutorial up at the Wise-Women site, Cascading Style Sheets: Using Element Display For Layouts, Links & Lists by Miraz Jordan. Check it out.

And yes, the site was semi-retired for a while, but we've got some new people involved and interested, so things are back to life. Tell your friends!

We need this

If we had two of these, we'd have no excuse for being couch potatoes: the GameBike Home.

GameBike is an exercise bike and Plug-and-Play video game controller that fully controls every movement on the screen with your own body movement. Handlebars control the steering, pedal rpm controls the speed, you control the strategy. Connect to any Sony Playstation, PS2, XBox, and Game Cube (play up to four Cateye GameBike™s at one time with PS2, using multi-tap). Choose from eight workload levels provided by silentbelt-driven magnetic resistance system.

Not that our marriage really needs us to be more competitive with each other…

Your kind aren't welcome here

We're looking for a good, solid, challenging program for Sean this summer, and his high school (at first) recommended the YESS Program at Caltech. It sounded perfect at first glance, especially as Sean is having trouble figuring what to choose as a major:

The mission of the Young Engineering and Science Scholars (YESS) Program is to bring together talented high school students in a concentrated educational environment that exposes them to the rigors and joys of scientific investigation, while concurrently demonstrating the analytical and experimental skills necessary for success.

The YESS program offers a unique opportunity for high school students to be immersed in a curriculum focusing on both academics and research. Students will work alongside Caltech students and faculty in multiple areas of science and engineering to experience the culture and methodology of the science professional.

Each week of the program will include relevant lectures and laboratory exposure, research, project work and field trips. A special faculty speaker series focusing on the foremost scientific topics as well as an interactive workshop on the complete college admissions process will conclude each day's activities. The program provides participants with the opportunity to interact with other talented students from across the country, as well as visit and explore various Caltech facilities and engage in life at one of the world's leading research institutes.

The bad news: this program's open to everyone except for white and asian boys. Yep, it's okay to discriminate on the basis of color and gender, so long as you pick the right ones to discriminate against.

Okay, I understand the theory (although I admit I have a problem with the "two wrongs are necessary to make a right" basis). But why not just allow everyone to apply, and pick deserving students, allowing for bias towards under-represented groups? As the parent of a son who needs just the type of help that this course seems geared to provide, it's frustrating as hell to have it not even be a possibility for him, solely for factors that are 100% out of his control.

A new home server

We're revamping our backup system, because our old system, based on a DLT tape drive, requires too much hand holding (tape swaps, cleaning, etc.), doesn't have sufficient unattended capacity for our current Macs, and is really noisy. We'll be switching to a hard drive-based system, as outlined in Joe Kissell's excellent Take Control of Mac OS X Backups. Our home server is way long in the tooth (it's an old UMAX Mac clone running Mac OS 9 and AppleShare IP). So we've been thinking of changing to a different server machine anyway. We need to run Retrospect as a backup server, the Now Up-to-Date shared calendar server, and some file server software. As it turns out, because we're in the Apple developer program, we have a license for Mac OS X Server anyway, so we may as well use that, even though it's ridiculously overkill for our file server needs.

We had been thinking that we would use my old 400 MHz Power Mac G4 as the new(er) server, until the Mac Mini came on the scene. Now, we have the Power Mac already; it's long since paid for. But it's a bit noisy, and then I looked up the energy consumption of the two machines. The Power Mac is 200 watts; the Mac Mini only 85 watts. So I did a quick Excel worksheet comparing the energy costs of the two, and taking into account local electricity costs, the approximate net cost of the Mac Mini if we sold the Power Mac G4, the UMAX, the DLT drive, and 14 DLT tapes on eBay (I conservatively estimate we can get $300 for the lot). We already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse around here for the Mini.

It turns out that we can recoup the net cost of the Mac mini in energy savings in a bit more than one year. And the standard $499 configuration of the Mac Mini (G4 1.25GHz, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive) is just fine for running all of the different server software. If we were buying a Mini as a desktop machine, it would absolutely need more RAM, but the standard configuration will do for a server.

SpiderWorks eBooks

If you're like me, this is a must check out: SpiderWorks eBooks. Yes, they don't officially open until February 1, but just look at what they'll have on opening day:

• "Danny Goodman's AppleScript Handbook (Mac OS X Edition)"
• "Learn C on the Macintosh (Mac OS X Edition)" by Dave Mark
• "AppleScripting the Finder" by Ben Waldie
• "Cocoa Game Programming Workshop" by David Hill

They're $10-$15 each. It's nice to see another way to get some Mac programming titles, as they tend to not sell enough to be worthwhile for traditional publishers. I've got at least two of these in their old dead-tree versions; I wonder if they offer upgrade pricing? <g>

Wow. Just wow.

Count the errors in this paragraph (found here):

There never has been any entry-level pagination software on the Mac, writes Dori Smith at Backup Brain. But will Pages do the trick, finally? Could be. He doesn't think Pages is a word processor; it's more of a pagination tool.

What number did you get? My score can be found in the comments.

New Powerbooks

Okay, I admit it: I'm a little tempted by the new PowerBooks. Sure, at 1.67 GHz the new 15" is only 33% faster than my current 1.25 GHz 15" PowerBook. What's cool is that for an extra $100, I could get dual-link DVI capability and drive one of the new 30" displays.

Yep, that's right: I could spend $2400 to get a machine that does pretty much everything I do now, but would allow me to hook up a $3000 display. Oh, the things I would do if I was ridiculously wealthy…

The New SAT

New-SAT Takers: Confused Yet? (registration required) is an article in today's NY Times. Count me as one of the ones who's confused.

As the UC's require the new SAT for admission, there was never any question about which one Sean was going to take. But the fact that the grading is so variable, combined with not knowing which of the many SAT II tests he should take, is driving me up the wall.