BBC has the news about the code that appeared in the Da Vinci Code judgement.
A code hidden by a judge in his written judgement in the failed Da Vinci Code plagiarism case has been broken.
And, how did he do it?
The judge had told The Guardian and The Times that the code was based on the ancient Fibonacci number sequence, which is used by the heroes in Brown’s novel.
So, is Dan Brown going to sue him?
Tip of the hat to Lee at Blog Reload for this story. Texas Justice tells the tale of two people in the criminal justice system in Texas. Which one was black, which one was white?
Scales of justice can swing wildly
12:43 PM CDT on Sunday, April 23, 2006
By BROOKS EGERTON / The Dallas Morning News
First came the poor man, barely 17 years old – too young to buy beer or vote, but an adult under the Texas penal code. He took part in a $2 stickup in which no one got hurt. He pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery and was put on 10 years of probation.
He broke the rules once, by smoking marijuana. A Dallas judge responded in the harshest possible way: He replaced the original sentence with a life term in prison.
There Tyrone Brown sits today, 16 years later, tattooed and angry and pondering self-destruction. “I’ve tried suicide a few times,” he writes. “What am I to make of a life filled with failure, including failing to end my life?”
Now the flip side of the coin, also from Judge Keith Dean’s court: A well-connected man pleaded guilty to murder – for shooting an unarmed prostitute in the back – and also got 10 years of probation.
The killer proceeded to break the rules by, among other things, smoking crack cocaine. He repeatedly failed drug tests. He was arrested for cocaine possession in Waco while driving a congressman’s car, but prosecutors there didn’t press charges.
Judge Dean has let this man stay free and, last year, exempted him from most of the usual conditions of probation. John Alexander “Alex” Wood no longer must submit to drug tests or refrain from owning a gun or even meet with a probation officer. He’s simply supposed to obey the law and mail the court a postcard once a year that gives his current address.
In an article titled, Rabbi Gellman Tries to Understand Angry Atheists, Rabbi Gellman starts with:
I think I need to understand atheists better. I bear them no ill will. I don’t think they need to be religious to be good, kind and charitable people, and I have no desire to debate or convert them. I do think they are wrong about the biggest question, “Are we alone?” and I will admit to occasionally viewing atheists with the kind of patient sympathy often shown to me by Christians who can’t quite understand why the Good News of Jesus’ death and resurrection has not reached me or my people. However, there is something I am missing about atheists: what I simply do not understand is why they are often so angry.
He asks the question as if it is a rational question. I know many atheists and none of them are angry. More over, there are none of the signs in our cities, states or country that the preponderance of atheists are angry. From where does he ask this question?
A more prudent question is “Why are so many religious people angry?” Angry religious people can be found protesting abortion clinics and other places. Why are they so angry?
I don’t know many religious folk who wake up thinking of new ways to aggravate atheists, but many people who do not believe in God seem to find the religion of their neighbors terribly offensive or oppressive, particularly if the folks next door are evangelical Christians. I just don’t get it.
Rabbi Gellman seems to have his head in the sand. There are religious people a plenty who wake up itching for a fight about the right to post the Ten Commandments in city, state or federal buildings.
This must sound condescending and a large generalization, and I don’t mean it that way, but I am tempted to believe that behind atheist anger there are oftentimes uncomfortable personal histories.
Yes, that is condescending. I am likewise tempted to believe that behind all that religious anger are sometimes uncomfortable personal histories. The Rabbi is obviously not a very good observer of the human condition. If you talk to anyone to just about any depth, they all have some amount of uncomfortable personal history.
Perhaps their atheism was the result of the tragic death of a loved one, or an angry degrading sermon, or an insensitive eulogy, or an unfeeling castigation of lifestyle choices or perhaps something even worse.
Or, perhaps it is the result of a willingness to try to comprehend the world as it is, rather than through the rozy looking glass of stories told by goat herders 4,000 years ago.
Religion must remain an audacious, daring and, yes, uncomfortable assault on our desires to do what we want when we want to do it.
The Rabbi is obviously not a very good observer of history, for history is full of people doing what they want, when they wanted to it, all in the name of religion.
But wait! His condescension doesn’t end.
To be called to a level of goodness and sacrifice so constantly and so patiently by a loving but demanding God may seem like a naive demand to achieve what is only a remote human possibility.
How about finding the calling within oneself to rise to that level of sacrifice and goodness? To develop that a set of rules, maybe call them ‘mores’, that lead to the same behavior. Doesn’t that count for something?
However, such a vision need not be seen as a red flag to those who believe nothing.
Oh, I get it. If you don’t believe in what the good Rabbi believes in, you believe in ‘nothing’.
I can humbly ask whether my atheist brothers and sisters really believe that their lives are better, richer and more hopeful by clinging to Camus’s existential despair: “The purpose of life is that it ends.”
Yeah, that was humble all right. Just because I don’t believe in your god, Reb, doesn’t mean I am convinced in the empty shit that Camus was flinging from his cage.
In reading that article, I was reminded of someone I used to work with. One day, after trying to find a bug in a computer program for several hours, I took a break for lunch, which was something from the roach coach. He came to me, while I was eating, and started asking me about things I had tried or not tried. He was not an engineer and I told him that I would come see him after I was finished eating. He responded “Don’t get upset.” I wasn’t upset and told him so. He repeated himself, more forcefully. I started to get upset. This marketing type was getting in my face with a rising voice and telling me not to get upset. I told him I was eating and that I would answer his questions when I had finished. He turned red and the veins were standing out on his neck. He was trying to bully me into leaving my lunch to answer his questions. The lack of respect was clear. He didn’t respect me, he only wanted my loyalty. That he didn’t get. I left the company some time after that and he ended up becoming the president. He retired after selling the company and now owns a vineyard in Northern California. But that’s another story.
The lack of respect is clear in the Rabbi’s essay. He uses pejorative language and images to discuss what people who do not believe what he believes. I am reminded of the fuzzy faced young men from LDS who come to my door with some frequency. They have a little name plate on their pocket that identifies them as ‘Elder’ so-and-so. I tell them that they are not old enough to be an elder. The Rabbi is not wise enough to understand atheism.
Norman Ornstein is on the case.
A few weeks back, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia described the legal philosophy of his adversaries–those who believe that interpretation of the Constitution should not rely on strict adherence to the words and intent of the document and the framers. “But you would have to be an idiot to believe that,” Scalia said. “The Constitution is not a living organism–it is a legal document. It says something and doesn’t say other things.”
Put this on the list of things we already knew, but that the Bush Adminstration contradicted because it was politically inconvenient. From CNN ,
“The hurricanes we are seeing are indeed a direct result of climate change and it’s no longer something we’ll see in the future, it’s happening now,” said Greg Holland, a division director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Reducing the use of fossil fuels and the corresponding release of combustion by-products isn’t much of a priority to Bush and Cheney.
So it begins. Or continues, as the case may be. The Washington Post is reporting the latest in militias from Iraq.
Hundreds of Shiite Muslim militiamen have deployed in recent weeks to this restive city — widely considered the most likely flash point for an Iraqi civil war — vowing to fight any attempt to shift control over Kirkuk to the Kurdish-governed north, according to U.S. commanders and diplomats, local police and politicians.
It’s a few hundred Shiites and how many Kurds?
Kurdish leaders speak openly of their intention to use force if necessary to gain control of the city, which they consider the historical capital of a vast Kurdish nation also extending into Iran and Turkey. During the rule of President Saddam Hussein, Arabs brought in from elsewhere in Iraq displaced thousands of Kurds. As many as 300,000 Kurds who were pushed out have returned to the area, according to U.S. estimates, establishing vast settlements on the outskirts of the city and making them its largest ethnic community. Kurds also occupy most of the top provincial political and security jobs.
Way more Kurds.
It is too late to send CheneyRumsfeldWolfowitzFeith to Ramadi?
Sydney Spiesel, writing in Slate, talks about the new advisory issued by the FDA. Here’s the first graf.
Last week, the Food and Drug Administration reported that it had definitively established that marijuana has no medical use or value. Definitively? Established? I don’t think so.
What’s up with that?
The FDA’s statement implies that the agency reached its conclusion about marijuana after conducting a new serious analysis of the existing scientific literature on the drug. But of course no such analysis was reported in the medical literature and, in fact, no identifiable official at the FDA took responsibility for last week’s advisory. It was just put out there as a statement of fact.
But is it? There was a study done in 1999 by the Institute of Medicine and this new FDA report contradicts the IOM study on key points. The money graf:
However, in the seven years since the IOM report was issued, virtually no research on potential risks and benefits has been done, because the government has blocked such studies. So, we know neither more nor less about medical marijuana than we did seven years ago, whatever the FDA says.
Read the whole thing for live links.
From CNN, life in Ramadi.
Marines patrolling this city on foot don’t like to stay exposed too long, preferring instead to blow front gate locks off private homes with special shotgun shells to take temporary cover in walled courtyards before moving on. They don’t knock first — there is no time.
When will the Bush cabal learn that this is not working?
James Wolcott has a post up about this site. The Anchoress is best described as “doing self-therapy in public” which is only slightly less civil than “doing surgery in public”. Check out the header material, where “anchoress” is explained. Then ask (I know my kids would) “Where does she pee?” After reading her posts, I know where she poops.
Writing a blog is sort of like acting, writing or any other artistic endeavor, in that the artist both gets to and has to make the choices. I’ll be honest about something: it takes a certain amount of narcissism to write a blog. I am somewhat narissistic. But a leaking water line that is turning a small patch of my front lawn into a swamp and needs to be dug up and replaced is going to cure me of some of that narcissism. But Christ would not be able to cure this woman of the narcissism she evinces in her blog.
The GOP spin machine is working hard in Washington. It is the only GOP thing that is working hard. It is customary for the people in charge to take credit for anything that goes well, without regard to their actual contribution to the project, and to shift blame when things go badly, again, without regard to their actual contribution to the project.
In Washington and elsewhere, Republicans are trying to put some distance between themselves and the Bush Administration, but not so far that they cannot reap whatever credit may still be taken from it. Look for them, in the run up to the fall elections, to talk about the good that Reagan did. An example of this is from Craig Shirley in the Washington Post.
The elites in the GOP have never understood conservatives or Reagan; they’ve found both to be a bit tacky. They have always found the populists’ commitment to values unsettling. To them, adherence to conservative principles was always less important than wealth and power.
Reagan wasn’t a conservative. He was a corporate hack. He asked for even more money than Congress approved. The results are in this graph. Reagan had very little to do with the end of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. Striking an actor’s pose and telling Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin wall may look good on TV, but the heroes are those ordinary people in Eastern block countries who put their lives on the line and poured into the streets by the hundred thousand, willing to face down heavily armed soldiers with just their courage. That courage won the day, not Reagan’s stagey pronoucements.
Unfortunately, the GOP has lost its motivating ideals. The revolution of 1994 has been killed not by zeal but by a loss of faith in its own principles. The tragedy is not that we are faced with another fight for the soul of the Republican Party but that we have missed an opportunity to bring a new generation of Americans over to our point of view.
The revolution of 1994 achieved the goal of attaining power and control over the purse of the Republic. Note how few items from the “Contract for America” actually became law. Term limits for Republicans? Yeah, right.
All agree that the Democrats are feckless and without a plan or agenda. But most Americans are now presented with a choice between two parties that are both addicted to power — the Democrats to government power and Republicans to corporate and governmental power. Who speaks for Main Street Reaganism?
All agree? Yeah, all agree when you speak into an echo chamber. Mr. Shirley likes to use the “proof by assertion” method of righteous certitude. If you want to see a party without a plan or agenda, look to the Republicans. What have the Republicans done with their majority? Nothing. Because Republicans are not about governing, they are about winning so they can rule by fiat.