Nice article

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/garden/28bowe.html?em

Gripping article about John Paul Stevens and today's court

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/us/26bar.html?hp

Highlight:

Thursday’s decision in the Citizens United case was more full-throated.

“The majority blazes through our precedents,” he wrote, “overruling or disavowing a body of case law” that included seven decisions.

Justice Stevens, who served in the Navy during World War II, reached back to those days to show the depth of his outrage at the majority’s conclusion that the government may not make legal distinctions based on whether a corporation or a person was doing the speaking.

“Such an assumption,” he wrote, “would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.”

The reference to Tokyo Rose was probably lost on many of Justice Steven’s readers. But the concluding sentence of what may be his last major dissent could not have been clearer.

“While American democracy is imperfect,” he wrote, “few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

Whale Rescue

This is amazing.  Listen to the latest RadioLab, "Animal Minds" where they talk about the daring rescue of a humpback whale in San Francisco:

http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2010/01/12/animal-minds/

Here is video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9fVEz5d4HU

Wow

The power of half.

Fringe mode in Emacs

My latest Emacs update added an annoying property whereby the space in a buffer after the EOF marker had dots on the left to show me that the file had ended.  Thus, in a one line file, I'd open it and see the one line, and 100 lines of dots on the left margin.  Really annoying.  The problem is it's hard to figure out how to turn it off.  I googled "emacs dots eof", but I got nothing but "dot-emacs" sites.  I asked on the excellent #emacs IRC channel, and some kind soul (shabble) pointed out it's called "fringe-mode".  You can turn it off with (fringe-mode 'none).

The Inverse Method for the Simulation of Consciousness?

This paper has a great title.  I wish I had such confidence in the inverse method.  It may make working on my thesis a more exciting prospect.

Antiaging

The antiaging debate is on. 



Interesting passages:

Comite left a tenure-track position at Yale because she became
frustrated with what she saw as medicine’s red tape and tunnel vision.
One galvanizing moment involved a woman named Vivian, who had a badly
scarred uterus and who had tried repeated in vitro fertilizations
without success. She came to see Comite at Yale, still hoping to have
a child, but failed to conceive. At wit’s end, Vivian consulted an
acupuncturist. She became pregnant after only a few treatments.  “I
would swear on a stack of Bibles and all my oaths there was no way
that woman could conceive,” Comite says. “That experience turned me
into an open-minded skeptic.”


Every year, Life gets a new set of beefcake photos taken. Now 71, he
said he put on five pounds of muscle this past year by scheduling
extra tae kwon do practices and cranking it up a notch in the weight
room. He can bench-press 235 pounds and can do 10 pull-ups, “full
extension.”  His age-management program could fill a spreadsheet. Life
began reciting from memory: 1,000 milligrams of calcium daily,
coenzyme Q10 pills twice a day, 5,000 units of vitamin D, 4 grams of
fish oil, 10 milligrams of melatonin at bedtime, a testosterone
injection once a week, human-growth hormone once a day. “That reminds
me,” he said, reaching into his desk drawer. “I’ve got to give myself
a shot.”  He pulled out a syringe, loaded up on human-growth hormone,
raised a pants leg and stuck the needle into his left thigh.

Unicode in an Emacs shell

My current project is a Haskell program that generates a lot of unicode that gets dumped to the screen.  I occasionally need to sift through the output. My usual method is to run a terminal in an emacs buffer (via M-x shell) and run the command line program generated from Haskell through that shell.

I was recently frustrated when I updated from Emacs 22 to Emacs 23.  While the unicode support is much better in general in Emacs 23, the shell stopped printing the unicode correctly.  After lots of false starts, I finally found that you need to run the following command:

M-x set-buffer-process-coding-system

with mule-utf-8 for both input and output.  Or add

(set-buffer-process-coding-system 'mule-utf-8 'mule-utf-8)

to the shell-mode-hook.  Then the unicode prints correctly.