Minority Rights Are Not Predicated on the Readiness of the Majority
Here in the US there has been some good news on the gay rights front recently: the House of Representatives voted to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy under which openly gay service members are discharged and which has been in place for the better part of two decades. Now it’s going to the Senate, where apparently things could get tough, but if all goes well we may see real policy change within the next year or so. Here is a Houston Chronicle article about it.
It should not come as a surprise that almost across the board, Republicans oppose this policy change. From the article:
Republicans, who voted overwhelmingly against it, cited statements by some military leaders that they need more time to study how a change in the law could affect the lives and readiness of service members.
Here’s what I haven’t heard anyone say in response to this: why do we care what the brass thinks about the “readiness” of service members to have out gays serving with them? How does that take precedence over eliminating blatant discrimination in military policy? Some things are more important than appeasing some homophobic bigots in the military.
The case against repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” is usually put this way (to quote John McCain):
I think it’s really going to be very harmful to the morale and effectiveness of our military.
The interesting part is that this argument is not new. As is pointed out by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in the article, the objection about “morale” is the same that was made by the people who opposed racial integration in the military 60 years ago. This was a cowardly and disingenuous argument then, and it remains so today.
Asparagus with Pine Nuts
This is my favorite way to eat asparagus. The trick is really getting it cooked just enough.
The low aperture is how you know it's a legit recipe.
› Continue reading
Adding ‘addremove’ to Git
I’m a happy git user, but mercurial has a nifty command with no git equivalent: hg addremove. This command removes deleted files from the repository and also adds new files in the current directory. For me, at least, it’s a useful command that I’d like to have. Of course, git is nothing if not flexible, so let’s add this command! I’m using a suggestion for a script that I found here. Add the following lines to your $HOME/.gitconfig:
[alias] addremove = !git add . && git ls-files --deleted | xargs --no-run-if-empty git rm
Tada—git addremove puts new files in the staging area and also removes deleted files. Now you don’t have to pay attention to your hipster friends who try to tell you how great mercurial is.
Bad UI Design Killed My Computer
OK, perhaps it didn’t kill it, but I thought it was somewhat entertaining. The story is this: last week I read this Jeff Atwood blog post on Coding Horror, where he describes a concept from UI design that he refers to as the “opposite of Fitts’ Law”. Jeff also includes a humorous illustration from a UI design book that illustrates the idea by showing a row of identical switches in the cockpit of a fighter jet: windshield washer, FM radio, ejector seat, and cabin lights.
Today I experienced a real example of the problems that can arise from this design flaw, similar to the issues Jeff points out with Gmail. I live in a moderately sketchy house, and there is a switch which controls the power to several walls worth of electrical outlets. The arrangement of controls is about as good as the fighter jet. Here’s a picture of the switch panel:
Brilliant switch design
› Continue reading
Pictures: Spring Break Ski Trip
I spent four days earlier this week skiing in Utah with some friends. We all skied at Snowbird, except for one day when I got an Alta pass and headed over the mountain to check it out. I had borrowed a video camera from a friend to try and get some handheld skiing footage, which seemed to work fairly well until I accidentally dropped it in some deep powder on some steep terrain and couldn’t find it. After that unfortunate episode, I was inspired to check out some helmet cams. I think this one seems pretty good; check out the video taken with it partway down this page.
I also had the chance on this trip to try out a new slope meter my brother gave me for Christmas. It was interesting to see how poorly I estimate slope—the very steepest terrain I skied barely hit 40°. It definitely doesn’t seem like that when you’re looking down from the top.
Fun with the Canon EF f/1.8 50mm Prime Lens
As a Christmas gift, I received the Canon EF f/1.8 50mm lens for my XSi. This is an awesome lens for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that it sells for under $100, making it essentially dirt cheap as far as lenses go. The reason that Canon can make a lens with an aperture this large for so little is that it is a prime lens, so it has few parts. The lens is known for having fantastic optical quality, even compared with much pricier lenses, at the cost of relatively poor build quality (it has a plastic housing that apparently doesn’t hold up well to wear and tear).
After messing around with it for a couple of days, I am very happy with it. At 1.8, the depth of field is ridiculous—for example, it is very easy to get the wrong part of a face in focus. The lens has a bit of trouble focusing, particularly in low light, and the motor is fairly noisy. Going for the $350 f/1.4 USM lens would probably fix these problems. I also definitely noticed the lack of IS as compared with the kit lens, but as this thing is so fast I really can’t complain about that. In fact, any criticism of this lens can be more or less rebutted by recalling the absurdly low price.
Using notify-send to Slack Off Efficiently
I’ve been working on a big project in MPI and the execution times on my code are annoyingly long (on the order of minutes). I like to keep my work in a separate workspace from my browser to minimize distractions, but then when I set my code running and head over to visit reddit or something I often don’t notice when my code finishes. Today it occurred to me that this would be a good use for libnotify. There is a command-line utility called notify-send (you should have it if you have a recent version of Ubuntu; not sure about other distros) which gives a simple interface to libnotify, so I whipped up a tiny script to call it:
#!/bin/bash EVAL_STRING="notify-send -u normal -t 5000 -i info \"Task completed\" \"$@\"" eval $@; eval $EVAL_STRING
I put it in a folder which is in my path, and now I just do
$ notify ./takes_forever
and I know as soon as it’s done. OK, back to work.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 16
Wilson Peak
This is the second-to-last last entry for the summer. The week before school started, I went on an ambitious hike to some fourteeners known as the Wilson group. We had initially intended to hike all three in a day, but as it turned out we only managed to do one: Wilson Peak. You may have seen a picture of this mountain before:
Not depicted: me at the top.