dammit. i knew i should have gone to swarthmore. it’s nice to see a school actually place academics ahead of sports for once.

<p>when i was the online editor for the student newspaper at <a href="http://www.bates.edu/">Bates</a>, we came under heavy pressure from the athletics department to put the sports section on the back page (the back page is a desirable location since you don&#8217;t have to open the paper). they were pushing us because they wanted the copies of the paper that were sent to prospective students to show that Bates was really serious about sports. unfortunately, they had a lot of clout with the school and were able to basically give us the ultimatum that sports got the back page or we lost all of our funding. this threat presented three serious problems to the editorial staff: </p>

1. by allowing outside organizations to dictate our content, our journalistic integrity would be seriously comprimised.
2. for the entire history of the paper, the only thing which had stayed constant and could be considered a real “tradition” was the “question on the quad” section on the top fold of the back page; we considered it a part of our identity as a paper.
3. the paper was funded partly by the school and partly by advertising. the advertising spot below the fold on the back page was our largest revenue generator; if it were to be moved to the middle somewhere, we would lose a significant portion of our income. since the paper was barely staying afloat as it was (actually we were $5K in the hole before any of this even started), this was not an attractive option. we were basically put in the position of deciding if we wanted half our funding cut if we stood up to them or a third of our funding cut if we submitted.

<p>we managed to resist for the rest of the year that i worked there (until i, and a few others, got laid off because of the vanishing budget) mostly because we had legally binding contracts with our advertisers that their ads would run on the back page for that entire year. sadly, the next year, the paper was forced to give up and the sports section is now on the back page. so the result is that now bates will appear &#8220;serious about sports&#8221; to the potential students but it no longer has even the most basic online version of its newspaper (for comparison, <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/">columbia</a> has 19 different student publications online).</p>

<p>at around the same time that was going on, Bates finally gave the athletic department the power to recruit and offer athletic scholarships. previously (and this was one of the reasons that i liked bates and chose to go there), the athletic department had a small amount of informal influence over admissions but were not explicitly allowed to recruit athletes. it seems clear to me that Bates is heading downhill now; destined to become just another of the schools which admit non-athlete students merely so they can be sure they have bodies to fill the stands at football games. </p>

<p>i have this fantasy about one day becoming disgustingly rich (we&#8217;re talking bill gates rich) and going back to bates and saying &#8220;i am willing to give you X billion dollars on the sole condition that you cut all sports and burn down the gymnasium.&#8221; just to see what they&#8217;d do.</p>

<p>i was eating dinner the other night and on the radio i heard them announce some essay contest aimed at high school students asking them to write an essay about how sports had changed their lives for the better. i missed the details on how to submit but i seriously considered, as a protest, sending in my own essay on how sports had taught me a valuable lesson about how fucked up our educational system and our priorities as a society really are.</p> 

tomorrow (2000-12-12), my employer is sponsoring a seminar by Martin Garbus, the lawyer who defended (and is defending) 2600 magazine in the DeCSS case entitled “Hackers, Napster, Free Speech, and Piracy: How it Will Change the Entire Communications World Including Entertainment and Education.” and, because we’re just so unbelievably /<-31337, we’re broadcasting it live on the internet. so if you happen to be in NYC, you should come check it out in person. otherwise, you should tune in from 16:00 to 17:30 EST.

emile and i saw him at 2600’s press conference during H2K. the man’s definately good at what he does.

i finally made up a little FAQ for this site. i should really be sedated.

i’ve been playing around with SVG lately.

Scalable Vector Graphics are an image format similar to Flash but implemented entirely as XML. Adobe has a browser plugin available and new versions of Illustrator (as well as the new Flash generator supposedly) can save as SVG. now, the Apache project is working on Batik which aims to be a nice core library for dealing with SVGs and mozilla has (currently very limited) native support for SVGs.

i’m very excited.

Flash is nice to look at and all but has serious limitations for web use (it’s pretty much impossible to link to anything in an all flash site from outside, text-browsers and screen readers don’t stand a chance of being able to render anything remotely useful, etc) and it’s fully proprietary (eg, i can view flash on linux but i can’t make flash files on linux because macromedia hasn’t bothered porting generator).

SVG gets around all of these problems. first of all, it’s a W3C standard so there are no licensing issues preventing anyone and everyone from making viewers/generators and incorporating them into other programs (Free or otherwise). since SVGs are just XML (ie, plain text), anyone with a text editor can make them or tweak them by hand (trust me, i’ve been doing this all afternoon. there is something very cool about the idea of making graphics in emacs :) or write programs to generate them dynamically. it also means that you can simply apply different style-sheets to them to do things like just pulling out any textual data for the benefit of text-browsers and screen readers. and since any XML file can be parsed into a DOM, you can script it to your heart’s content. so currently SVG has javascript support that lets you do all the nice interactivity and animation stuff of Flash but i expect to see support for other scripting languages as soon as it starts to catch on.

now we just sit back and wait to see how microsoft is going to come screw it all up (there’s no way they’ll let any decent, open, standards based technology go unmolested for long).

jP’s dad has one of these. it is far more amusing than you could possibly imagine.

i highly recommend setting aside some time and some serious bandwidth and fully exploring e-sheep.com. amazing comic stories. some are funny, some are really funny, and some are strikingly profound.

I was reading wired’s article on modern day supercomputers, and I got me brain to thinking about modeling. so given atomic cordinates, and the exact solute conditions and temps, you can effectivel model the behavior of organic and inorganic compounds to about 100% accuracy given the right data. and this with no more than a first-gen pentuim or eqivilent. so in the course of studying for my final, I get to wondering where it will end when the chips get big enough.

example. a virus has no free will. there are no genes to respond to envrionmental cues until after host infect. so all that cool syringe action DNA injection you see is purely thermodynamic, just as reliable as dropping a rock above your foot leading to broken toes. it just happens as soon as it binds a bacteria without requiring any energy. so we can model, given the exact coordinates, concentrations of viriods and substrates (bacteria) the behavior of the viruses. you’d need a slightly bigger computer.

now. move on to prokaryotes. a bacteria is technically an input-response machine. they “sense” the environment around them and respond through chemical cascades to response to the environment in a seeminly intellingent manner. penicillin got you down? no sweat, just make some drug-pumps to zap it out. it seems intelligent to us cause it’s what we’d do, given the choice. but in evolutionary terms, it was just the smart thing to do, so it stuck. but this raises the question, can we model something like an E. coli or a yeast? i think so. we know everything that would happen. it’s just a spankload more atoms to keep track of. need a slightly bigger computer.

so then what about us? given the world’s biggest computer from dimension X, shouldn’t we be able to effectively model humans? if we track every interaction they have with every single environmental stimulus (heat, cold, how much, how long) every toxin and ligand (EtOH, cholera toxin, influenza, etc) and every social interaction, and we know the exact celluar, developmental and nuerochemical cascades they bring about, can’t you predict this model’s behavior with some degree of accuracy?

so the question arises, if we can model this sort of system, does that mean we’ve created an AI, or that we’ve crushed the notion that people have free will? I kinda like the idea that we’re just overly complex stim-response machines. given the media you’re grown in, pardon the pun, it seems reasonable that we should know how any given person “thinks” on the atomic/molecular level, and therefore acts.

or at least it’d make me feel better when I do things and don’t know why I did them.

i haven’t been to a McDonald’s in many many years so you could probably guess (correctly) that i don’t have anything particularly nice to say about them. however, i can only laugh when someone finds a chicken head in their wings and gets all grossed out and offended.

in other parts of the world, it is considered good form to serve you your chicken and fish along with the head to prove that it was freshly killed. however, someone should have warned the chinese that if you give a bunch of drunk american college students some chicken and fish heads, modern art is a likely outcome. tuck also has some fascinating footage of the entertainment possibilities inherent in chickenhead soup.

(my apologies for the poor quality of the chicken/fish sculpture. i scanned it in a few years ago when i didn’t really have access to a decent scanner.)

went to netscape 6 today… sure is wierd. I feel like I’m looking at the web through some sorta bubble-art. gotta figure out how to skin this sucker. I figured out a way to make litestep have an entirely hiroglyphic interface, I’m hoping I can do something similar here.

in other news, membrane association of PI 3,4,5 Triphosphate causes Akt phosphorolation and subsequent activation of 70 kilodalton ribosomal S6 kinase. film at 11. exams suck.