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Monday, July 20th, 2009

2:17 pm
alas, it ain't so.
It turns out one of my favorite Ye Olde Kwazy Kwistian Letters, the one from Cotton Mather to Higginson instructing that the Quaker ship Welcome be boarded and the Quakers be either killed or sold into slavery, is a hoary hoax. It dates from electoral propaganda of the 1870s, when the Republicans were identifying themselves with the Puritans, while the Democrats were portraying Mather and Co. as addled barbarians.

Oh, well.

Anyway, here's the letter, 'cuz it's great:
To the Aged and Beloved
Mr. John Higginson:

There is now a ship at sea called the Welcome which has on board an hundred or more of the heretics and malignants called Quakers, with W. Penn who is the chief scamp at the head of them.

The General Court has accordingly given secret orders to Master Malachi Huscott, of the Brig Porpoise, to waylay the said Welcome, slyly as near the Cape of Cod as may be, and make captive the said Penn and his ungodly crew, so that the Lord may be glorified, and not mocked on the soil of this new country with the heathen worship of these people. Much spoil can be made by selling the whole lot to Barbados, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar, and we shall not only do the Lord great service by punishing the wicked, but we shall make great good for his ministers and people.

Master Huscott feels hopeful, and I will set down the news when the ship comes back.

Yours in the Bowels of Christ.
Cotton Mather
So anyway, Mather never wrote that. But I do think whoever came up with the hoax had an ear for it, 'cuz the letter is funny.

I first came across this letter in Ian Williams' book Rum, which came out in 2005 - only about four generations after this hoax was exposed - which I am now less trusting of.
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Saturday, July 18th, 2009

9:00 pm
BORING
boring
borng
bornign
borngin
boring
boring
borngin
robinrg
borinng
boring'
broing
broing
oirinb
boring
boing
boirng
boring
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4:00 pm
Regret to inform
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Friday, July 17th, 2009

4:28 pm
greasemonkey
Someone came out with a greasemonkey script to kill the "like" function on google reader. Thank GOD.

WHY would I want to know who on the internet likes something? Insufficiently stratified sample! Ahh ahhhhh Ahhhhahghh Ahhhh
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2:38 pm
I'm not listening anymore
I just listened, yesterday, to a reporter on NPR say the mass protests in iran were "almost certainly over." Of course, he was making this call from Pakistan.
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Thursday, July 16th, 2009

4:17 pm
Kant
I haven't bought a netbook yet, but that really new gateway 11.6" is neat. It's got rather better internals than the new 11.6" acer aspire one, and it's only twenty bucks more. Of course, acer owns gateway, so I suppose it's sort of a branding thing, that they're actually slightly different rather than exactly the same.

I looked at one at best buy. Man, those netbooks are small. Small, small, small. Small. The one I liked best of the small ones was the dell, but the current mini 12 is kind of crippled. No memory expansion. Otherwise I'd probably get it.

Maybe I should just get the gateway. It's only at best buy. I wonder if I can find a red one.

It's a spinner, though. Too bad I can't get it blank. They come with vista, which I won't be using.

I still want a mac, but wow, they are just priced out of the market. Forget it.
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8:41 am
The correction to the correction will one day have to be corrected
From Badscience:
"Three weeks ago the Daily Telegraph published an unpleasant article headlined “Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists”. It was based on the unpublished and unfinished dissertation of a masters student and got the story entirely wrong. The title of the press release for the same research was “Promiscuous men more likely to rape”, which gives you some small clue as to how weirdly this story was distorted by the newspaper."

"This was a grim story about rape. It was littered with nonsense about “scientists claim”, it was entirely wrong, and it really rather blamed women for rape, to an audience of a million readers."
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1:14 am
Natalya Estemirova
Natalya Estemirova was found dead in Ingushetia
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Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

11:30 pm
Read over
"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

Samuel Johnson
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Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

9:26 pm
"these people" can't be trusted to give the white man a square deal
Confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justices are pure theater. Nominees have to swear over and over that judges don't make law, that they just apply the law. That's nonsense, of course, and to hear any judge, or any of those Senators who've been to law school, saying that, makes my teeth hurt. Of course judges make law. But we have this stupid trope of the 'activist judge' and so the nominee has to swear to something that they know to be false, to satisfy this weird litmus test. It's as if one had to submit to a loyalty oath that most everyone knew was meaningless. "Do you solemnly swear before God and this flag that you are two-dimensional?" Or, "are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the third dimension?"

And listening to Jeff Sessions making accusations about racism - in 1986, his own nomination to federal court was rejected by the Senate judicary committee because he was too big an outright racist (even Howell fucking Hefflin voted against him) - is unpleasant. I keep expecting him to accuse her of being a witch.
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12:40 am
He could be an art project.
People talk about the Turing Test. Turns out people are trusting. They think even really simple, dumb programs are people. It takes days to suss them out sometimes. Especially if the people aren't told it's a Turing Test.

But, instead of programs, what about insane people? Does that guy pass?
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12:18 am
I for one welcome our new etc etc
Speaking of emergent behavior/wireworld stuff, did you know they just made a functional battery out of genetically-engineered viruses? They made one big enough to light up an LED.
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12:12 am
tattoo idea
Maybe I'll get a tattoo of the smallest known game of life orphan pattern. But then they might figure out a smaller one.

Now I want to read the cellular automata literature in political science.

edit- hey, they made a rule-set that can almost evaluate its own total state - it can count itself. Mostly.
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