The Vast Jeff Wing Conspiracy

I have great respect for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, but I’m getting tired of having them tell me, in great irrefutable detail, why I need to stop eating.

(Via The Skeptical Hypochrondiac.)

CFP closed today with “Quick Takes”, a series of five-minute presentations. Bruce Schneier, the moderator, made a public call for spur-of-the-moment additions, so I took the stage to talk about something that’s been bugging me about privacy activism. I’ve already had a few people ask me to put it online, so it’s posted after the break.

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I’m covering CFP 2009 for TidBITS this week. My first article went live yesterday morning; part one of my coverage should be up shortly.

If you want to follow the conference yourself, follow the links from the CFP site to the live (and archived) video coverage. It’s well worth checking out the Twitter stream; not only does it contain plenty of live comments from the conference, but the live stream is being displayed on stage and is becoming part of the conversation here. I’ll have more to say about that later — it’s an extremely interesting dynamic.

It is damned hard to attend the sessions, network in the hallways, and still find the time to write articles (and participate in that live Twitstream). There’s at least four hours of conference video, filmed in another room, that I want to watch later. It’s the proverbial drink from the proverbial firehose here.

Yes, it’s been a while since I wrote. I’ll be changing that soon. In the meantime, here’s the most amusing video I’ve seen in a long time.

A note for anyone who is Googling to see if the OS X 10.5.7 update fixes keyboard mapping problems introduced with 10.5.6 and non-US QWERTY keyboards, including using the System Events keystroke command, or various weirdnesses involving Microsoft Office:

Yes, Virginia, 10.5.7 is once again safe for your Dvorak keyboard and AppleScript macros.

tell application "TextEdit" to activate

tell application "System Events"
	tell process "TextEdit"
		keystroke "testing"
	end tell
end tell

--10.5.6: y.oycbi
--10.5.7: testing

Retweet Paul Krugman:

So Bobby Jindal makes fun of “volcano monitoring”, and soon afterwards Mt. Redoubt erupts. Susan Collins makes sure that funds for pandemic protection are stripped from the stimulus bill, and the swine quickly attack.

Oh, man. This Superman origin is truly awful brilliant horrible hilarious indescribable.

The scary thing is that I recognize the source artwork for 90% of the panels.

According to Boing Boing Gadgets, we’re supposed to be able to play with one of these ourselves someday soon.

Interesting story about a guy who fooled a few thousand Republicans into believing that the stimulus paid, among other things, for Laura Bush’s gambling debts and an exhumation of William H. Taft.

(Which, at $104,000, would be a bargain. The man was big.)

Tools were Twitter and a fairly simple follow strategy; personally I’m interested to see how easy it was to do.

Dear Frank,

Yes, people are mean in politics. Reality does suck.

Granted, politics have been mean, and reality has sucked, for a long time. But you’re one of the people to blame for the modern way in which it sucks, the one in which we can rebrand “torture” — and by “rebrand”, of course, I mean marketing, and not the actual red hot irons. Which you would probably call “interrogative probes.”

Not that any of us who were your students at Penn are particularly surprised. You were a great prof, but part of that was the amazing way in which you equated oleaginous stances to academic merit. “I can argue any political point so convincingly,” you said, “that none of you will be able to tell what I really believe.”

And you can. You’ve made a career of it. If you could have done so while double-dipping from the left and the right, I’m sure you would have. Some of us remember that Perot predated Gingrich on your resumé.

So have fun in Hollywood. I’m sure you’ll get along fine with the “arch-liberals” there. They’ll invite you to parties to play the foil, and you’ll go so you can pretend to be their intellectual superior. It’ll work out great for all of you.

Just do me a favor, Frank. Once you’re there, and you’re getting rich from fiction that is supposed to be fiction? Please stay. I think you’ve done the political infrastructure enough damage already.

Best,
Jeff Porten
UPenn, COL ‘90