I am getting seriously irritated with "news" reports on the
Presidential Primaries talking about the $color $gender vote.

I was irritated when, before the South Carolina primary, pundits were
talking about how black women had a difficult decision to
make—between voting for Hillary Clinton because she’s a woman or
Barack Obama because he’s black. I am even more irritated by the
chatter now about how white males don’t have a (Democratic) candidate
to vote for since John Edwards suspended his campaign.

(As I think about this, I realize that race and gender have only been
an issue in the Democratic primary, presumably because all the
Republican candidates considered serious contenders are white males,
and therefore race and gender are not issues about which the media
machine can make hay. We will put the "who’s a serious contender?"
rant in the box for another day.)

Why in the world would I vote for Hillary Clinton because she happens
to have two X chromosomes? Why would I vote (or not vote) for Barack
Obama because he has more melanin than me? This is madness.
It seems to be a damned common madness—this same "us and them"
mentality seems to be behind the violence in Kenya, the "sectarian"
violence in Iraq, and a number of other conflicts throughout history.

Who does it help to divide otherwise rational, modern people into
tribes of mindless sheep? I just don’t get it.

I’ve heard only one serious ray of hope that all sanity has not been
lost: There was a commentator on NPR this evening who sounded about as
disgusted and irritated as I am about the expectations pundits have
for the outcomes of the race (in his case, among the "Latino vote").
He said something lovely, that I will try to quote as best as my
memory allows: that is if there is anything one can say about Latino
voters, it is that they are fiercely independent. He said that this
race will not be decided by outdated stereotypes, but by individuals.

His statement applies to a lot more than Latinos—we are all
individuals, not groups. No matter what group you claim membership
in, or are assigned to by demographers, it’s just you (and maybe
Diebold, but we’ll delay that issue too) in the voting booth.

And, on that note, if you’re in MA, CA, CO or any of the other
states voting Tuesday, make sure you take the opportunity to tell the
parties what you really think. If you’re unenrolled in Massachusetts,
you can vote in either primary and (supposedly) you will not be
enrolled in that party for doing so. (You used to have to fill out a
card available at the polling station to re-register as unenrolled,
but I have been assured that this isn’t necessary anymore because it
caused the state a stupid amount of paperwork.)

I’ve seen a number of others commenting on this anniversary of the
day Boston was shut down by a bomb scare. Here’s one example; you can
find others in the Herald or statist blogs.

On this day last year, we had the Boston bomb scare. Harmless devices
turned into a pretty good scare in Boston. The good thing is that
police and other authorities responded as if the devices were IEDs.

They were up for over a week before police and other authorities
responded. Had they been IEDs, we’d have been in serious trouble.

Boston authorities failed to do anything useful to solve the conjectured
problem, but did spend piles of cash and reputation on a false positive.
According to these articles, those piles were wasted: they’d spend them
on a similar false positive today. That is, they’d waste resources
acting without getting an expert to evaluate the devices quickly.
They’d waste further resources persecuting the vandals responsible as if
they were terrorists, prosecuting based on the city’s mistakes instead
of the citizens’ crimes.

There’s nothing to complain about in the actions of the officers on the
scene. They did hard jobs well. The real bomb hoax was perpetrated by
their bosses and commanders back at City Hall.

The good thing is that many people learned not to be scared of the
unusual. I hope for more mooninite signs and more blinky vests at the
airport. I hope for a society that’s hard to scare. I hope Boston
authorities will stop collaborating with terrorists.

Refuse to be terrorized.

Jack Nicholson can’t believe he’s still alive, so he’s remaking As Good as It Gets with Morgan Freeman playing Helen Hunt.

I was scraping the wet snow off my car this morning, there was a
bright white flash in the sky, like a spark.
The boom a few seconds later confirmed that it was not a
malfunctioning power line, as I’d feared, but thundersnow.
There were a couple more booms as I scraped off the car, but once I
was en route I couldn’t hear it anymore and was too preoccupied with
plows trying to run me off the road to watch for sparks.

How cool is that? Almost cool enough to warrant being up before 6 AM.

The biggest disadvantage of a film SLR is the time it takes to get my
pictures back. Nonetheless, here are some from Thanksgiving.

It was very cold, but very pretty at the Bronx Zoo on the Friday after
Thanksgiving.

href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2251/2184966039_5fc087faee.jpg?v=0"> src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2251/2184966039_5fc087faee.jpg">

This shot of the leaves in Stony Brook, NY is one of my best in a long
time.

It is with much relief, I’m sure, that you hear that I did not [die in
a knitting accident][]. I don’t knit, I crochet. It’s much safer.
(And I’ll have a recently-finished project to show you as soon as I
remember to take a picture)

Nor, yet, did I die in a blogging accident, although I suppose
this could be it. I’d say that if you don’t hear from me, you’ll
know,
but given my totally random posting schedule, you won’t really.

That is all.

not very good at pictures taken indoors.
However, this one turned out great:

This article is a few months old, but Adams has an amusing perspective on his unsurprising inclusion on terrorist watch lists. This came to my attention because of the new TSA emphasis on pseudo-science "micro-expressions".

On Paper

1. Dzur, Steven Brust

2. Paths of the Dead, Viscount of Adrilankha I, Steven Brust

3. Jennifer Morgue, Charles Stross

4. Little Book of Hindu Dieties, Sanjay Patel

5. Three Hearts and Three Lions, Poul Anderson

6. Lord of Castle Black, Steven Brust

7. Sethra Lavode, Steven Brust

8. Worlds of Shadow 1, Lawrence Watt-Evans

9. Death Masks, Dresden 5, Jim Butcher

10. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Marcus Borg

11. Blood Rites, Dresden 6, Jim Butcher

12. Dead Beat, Dresden 7, Jim Butcher

13. Proven Guilty, Dresden 8, Jim Butcher

14. Fugitives of Chaos, John Wright

15. Dorsai!, Gordon Dickson

16. Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett

17. Dune, Brian Herbert

18. Missile Gap, Charles Stross

19. Amulet of Samarkand, Bartimaeus 1, Jon Straud

20. Titans of Chaos, John Wright

21. White Night, Dresden 9, Jim Butcher

22. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow

23. Waterborn, J. Gregory Keyes

24. Blackgod, J. Gregory Keyes

25. Look to Windward, Iain M. Banks. It’s funny how the first chapter
    of a Culture book always turns me off, but the book after that is
    wonderful. At least now I know to bull onwards.

26. Adventures in Unhistory, Avram Davidson

27. The TeXBook, Donald Knuth

28. Exalted: Year One, various White Wolf

29. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Joanne Rowling

30. Unknown Quantity, a Real and Imaginary History of Algebra, John
    Derbyshire

31. On the Origin of PCs, Order of the Stick 0, Rich Burlew

32. Start of Darkness, Order of the Stick -1, Rich Burlew

33. Transparent Society, David Brin. Flung it across the room four
    times by chapter 4, went somewhat lightly over the rest. Feels
    like a good essay rushed into a book.

34. Stardust, Being a Romance within the Realms of Faerie, Neil Gaiman
    and Charles Vess. I have no understanding of the relationship
    between this, the original comic books, and the novel. If there
    are substantial differences, I might enjoy those others.

35. Magic in the Ancient World, Fritz Graf. This is I think
    translated from a German thesis. Lots of lead tablets, and a
    nice discussion of the distinction between evidenced sorcery and
    the literary tradition of sorcery. It’s a bit on the post-modern
    side: most of its discussion of how one becomes a sorcerer
    confuses what the sorcerers thought they were doing with their
    marginalization by society. In Graf’s discussion, there is no
    difference between a real magician, a deluded wannabe magician,
    and a man accused by his society of magic. He doesn’t argue for
    that point, just assumes it in many passages.

36. Thief of Time, Pratchett

37. Empire of Honor, J.E. Lendon

38. Great Work of Time, John Crowley

39. Journey to the West, Volume I, translated by Anthony Yu—the
    first 25 chapters of this enormous work.

40. Halting State, Charles Stross. Pity about the core scifi bit,
    which is that Quantum Key Exchange counters Quantum
    Computing—at least if it’s over Secure Optical Fiber. Also, QC
    is apparently really good for symmetric ciphers, and shared
    "one"-time pads are used for group authentication. Maybe this is
    how rocket scientists feel when they watch Star Wars, and I
    should be glad that my field’s prominent enough to be mauled in
    this way. The problems didn’t detract from the enjoyment of the
    story at all—I just substituted "magic" for "quantum" wherever
    I read it and continued. It’s a wonderful fun technothriller.

41. Android’s Dream, John Scalzi

42. Swordspoint, Ellen Kushner. In a nice 2002 edition with a set of
    short stories attached. Now I can’t tell whether Fall of the
    Kings is a sequel or not.

43. Supercapitalism, Robert Reich.

Electronic

1. Blue Fairy Book

2. Warlord of Mars, Edgar Rice Borroughs

3. King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard

4. Fire in the Mist, Holly Lisle

5. Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum

6. Eightfold Path, Buddha?

7. Doc Sidhe, Aaron Allston. Eugh. Baenist.

8. Old Nathan, David Drake. Wonderful.

9. The Philosophical Strangler, Eric Flint

10. Forward the Mage, Eric Flint

11. With the Lightnings, Lt. Leary 1, David Drake

12. Lt. Leary Commanding, Lt. Leary 2, David Drake

13. Pandora’s Legions, Christopher Anvil, edited by Eric Flint

14. Odyssey, Keith Laumer, edited by Eric Flint

15. The Tank Lords, David Drake. What brutality, after Lt. Leary!

16. Windows of the Soul, Keith Laumer

17. Retief!, Keith Laumer

18. The Lion of Farside, John Dalmas. This book could not be made
    into a movie rated less than R.

19. Star Soldiers, Andre Norton

20. Cross the Stars, David Drake