No maps for these territories

I voted for John McCain. That is, I voted for McCain in 2000, when he was part of a slate of candidates that was lined up to oppose the vulnerable, eloquent but awkward Gore, who was funny and smart in person but robotic on camera. If you’ll recall, there was a huge slate of Republicans [...]

I ride my bicycle home from campus through downtown, past several blocks of businesses — restaurants, hair salons, an Asian grocery, banks — where you see people on the sidewalk and people park their cars on the side of the street, just like in a vision of a vibrant small-town America you thought didn’t exist [...]

So there’s a key paragraph near the end of today’s New York Times article on legal challenges to voting, vote fraud, and McCain’s hyperbole (“McCain’s Warning About Voter Fraud Stokes a Fiery Campaign Even Further”): “Acorn said that of its faulty registrations, 20 percent to 25 percent were probably the result of duplications, 5 percent [...]

I am having an election returns viewing party! If you are reading this and are local you are invited. (Unless you are my crazy stalker. J/K.) If you’re not local and want to come visit that is always welcome too, of course. It starts at 6pm and is at my house; I plan to serve [...]

I have tons of stuff I should be reading, from the purely boring and educational (PHP books, library science articles); to the relevant to my own writing (other Wikipedia books and articles, the new Zittrain, a bunch of collective intelligence theory that I somehow never got around to the first time); to the interesting-for-other-research-projects (books [...]

I went to hear Freeman Dyson talk tonight. It was a lot of fun. He didn’t talk about physics at all; instead, about “the individual vs the community” which naturally is a subject that lines up well with my interests. He described it as one of the most fundamental problems of our time, and approached [...]

I woke up to what I thought at first was a war going on. Then I thought my neighbors were moving furniture behind our adjacent wall. Finally I realized that when the landlord said that roofers were going to be coming early to fix the roof on Tuesday morning, they meant they’d be starting at [...]