Thursday, April 08, 2004

A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity. Rwanda, where ethnic tensions were whipped up into a frenzy of killing, is now trying to make ethnicity a thing of the past. By Marc Lacey. [New York Times: International] 10:19:55 PM    comment []

Blowin' in the wind. The crowd that gathered on Halloween night in 1964 to hear Bob Dylan play New York City's Philharmonic Hall had no idea what storms lay ahead. By Charles Taylor, in Salon. 4:27:10 PM    comment []

Can mechanics talk to your car's systems?. Some car mechanics are having problems communicating with automobile computers. While many can win access, enough have problems that Congress is considering a law, the Right to Repair Act. Perhaps it's time to call Car Talk? (thanks to vanilla gorilla) [Smart Mobs] 4:15:27 PM    comment []

Deciding on Philosophy Graduate Schools. It's the time of year when I get lots of e-mails from prospective students of the variety, "How do you... [The Leiter Reports: Editorials, News, Updates] 7:11:30 AM    comment []

Activist combines human rights and data technology. Technology Serving Humanity. This slogan defines what Patrick Ball does with the Benetech Initiative in countries such as Guatemala and Peru. At noon on April 2, Ball gave a presentation in the UC Sunnen Lounge titled "Information, Power and Human Rights. [The Journal] Okay recap, short on the scientific side of the presentation, but nice photo. Would've been nice to read, "sponsored by the Philosophy Department" in there somewhere, but, oh, well. 7:10:51 AM    comment []

Wired blog number two launches -- Cult of Mac The next Wired blog, Cult of Mac, is off and running. Leander Kahney's journal on everything Apple has been in soft-launch mode for the last week and a half, but goes public today. Link to Cult of Mac, and link to that other Wired blog. *thanks, Xeni!) 7:06:53 AM    comment []

Majority Report radio show weblog. Majority Report, Jeneane Garofalo's new show on Air America Radio the new liberal talk-radio network, has a blog: Majority Report Radio Weblog [Learning the Lessons of Nixon] 6:57:04 AM    comment []

Two from Thoughts Arguments and Rants: David Velleman has posted the full automated course that goes along with his nice logic textbook blogic. It's got a slightly different focus to competing computer-based logic courses (such as the course in Language, Proof and Logic) in that it covers much more material (including modal logic, counterfactuals and probability) but doesn't go into as much detail in some areas (particularly about proof theory). But I think anyone teaching an introductory logic course would be well advised to look it over and think about whether they want to use it. I hope doing so doesn't kill David's bandwidth allowances. I've been looking at hosting packages the last few days so I'm getting very sensitive about these things! On a completely trivial note, the book contains a very tempting teaser of what a picture-book version of Counterfactuals would look like. I'm sure all the Cool Kids have heard this already, but I only just found out about Skeewiff's remix of the Soggy Bottom Boys' Man of Constant Sorrow. That's a 7.3MB download, but it's well worth it. It is, at the very least, the best freely available song I've heard in a long time. And electronic remixes of bluegrass songs seems like such an obvious idea, I'm surprised it hasn't been done before. (Or, perhaps more to the point, I'm surprised it hasn't been brought to my attention before.) 6:55:58 AM    comment []

Musicology. Prince has opened its own music store within his website. I guess this is a trend that every artist will follow: sell your own music on your own website. Maybe they get a higher cut when they sell it themselves. There will still remain however a need for an aggregation service. I am not going along all the artist websites to find the music I want. But such an aggregation service can be limited to search itself.... [Blueblog] 6:49:07 AM    comment []

Princeton Proposes Curbing the Growing Number of A's Awarded to A-List Students. A survey revealed that A's made up between 44 percent and 55 percent of undergraduate grades at 11 institutions. By Karen W. Arenson. [New York Times: Education] 6:44:24 AM    comment []

The spyware that loved me. CNET News.com sleuth John Borland wanted to see what would happen to his PC if he loaded rogue spyware apps onto the machine. That's when all hell broke loose. [CNET News.com] 6:38:30 AM    comment []