“Dad’s great, but listening to all that talk radio has put some weird ideas into his head,” said daughter Samantha, a freshman at Reed College in Portland, OR. “He believes the Constitution allows the government to torture people and ban gay marriage, yet he doesn’t even know that it guarantees universal health care.”

via Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be | The Onion.

I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller.

vs

In sum, the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self defense.

(via Hit & Run)

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they’re never going to be born. The number of people who could be here in my place outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here.

Richard Dawkins

I think about this almost every day. Consequently it irks me that the increasingly clichéd question “what is the meaning of life?” has been epitomized in popular ontology. We are each the winner of the universe’s ultimate lottery, and our response is “It must be a game. Who has some cheat codes?”

The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability.

via Christopher Blizzard · intellectual honesty and html5.

Indeed. While the new stuff that HTML5 enables is exciting, the most amazing part is that the spec attempts to describe how a parser should implement these features in enough detail that two different browser vendors can follow the spec and end up with a parser that works the same (for the most part) as one created by another team who also followed the spec.

The movie looks great — part The Matrix, part Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, part Dark Knight, from what I can tell — but the production values of this trailer are sublime. Well-paced, with a healthy “whaa?” factor. Best of all, the music is absolutely epic. The score is called “Mind Heist” by Zack Hemsey.

It has elements of obvious tribute to Hans Zimmer, who composed the score for the film, but seems a bit edgier than Zimmer’s work. I’m rather obsessed with movie trailers and commercials as works of art. They are micro capsules of art and emotion that have to engage and move you in an impossibly small amount of time. Music can play a huge role in that feat.

So are presidents the judges of their own authority, up to the very moment when they are impeached?

For Yoo, the answer seems to be yes.

Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman’s presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found. Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports.

Uh, that is complete bullshit. Social Security taxes alone are 12.4% (employer pays half) of up to $106,800 of gross income. Medicare is 2.9% (employer pays half) with no ceiling. If I calculate the tax burden that I personally pay (so not including the fact that everything I buy is price-inflated from upstream taxation), I pay at least 35%. In fact, every dollar I’ve earned so far this year is going to be paid to the government… it is only in mid-May that I’m allowed to start keeping any for myself.

Our first child, M. Atticus Jaquith (“Atticus”), was born at 4:56pm on April 26th, 2010.

Vitals:

• Boy
• 6 lb, 11.4 oz
• 20 1/4 in
• Dark hair
• Blue eyes
• 2 dimples!

He’ll go by Atticus — named after Atticus Finch, the principled and stoic character from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The “M” stands for Michael, my father’s name. We really liked the name Atticus, and also wanted to work Michael into the mix. We thought Michael Atticus sounded better than Atticus Michael, ergo the call-him-by-his-middle-name business. This will matter years later as we have to “full name” him when he gets in trouble.

Some more shots:

Sarah did great. She was induced three weeks early due to blood pressure worries. Her pressures are coming down, as expected, now that he’s out. He’s very sleepy, but can be roused for temporary bouts of alertness. He doesn’t cry much… so far he’s content to just chill out. We’re both very fond of him, and very excited about all of this!

Much of what Cory says resonates with me. But I disagree with his conclusions. My reaction to the iPad went in stages: meh, horror, acceptance.

Meh

The iPad announcement was underwhelming. It suffered from vastly inflated expectations, and so much of the device is derivative of the iPhone. It looked like 2007′s state of the art, except that it wouldn’t fit in your pocket.

Horror

Then I “got it.” This is something that people will use in lieu of a computer, and eventually in stead. I spent a solid day in a state of horror. I grew up with computers that you could open, and fix, and build yourself, and write programs for that would run instantly and you could send to your friends and they could run them instantly. I did all of those things. That freedom to tinker helped me discover a lot about myself, and now I’m a Lead Developer on an Open Source web publishing platform used by tens of millions of people to publish content that is viewed by billions of people. The iPad seems like an attack on the cornerstone of my career and my very constitution.

Acceptance

Not everyone needs a computer they can service, and upgrade, and program. Full stop. This was my first breakthrough. My second was this:

There will always be computers for tinkerers.

Cory calls the iPad infantalized, and talks about its “contempt for the user.” That’s one way of looking at it. I suspect that most people without a programming background or who are not expert computer users will just call it “easy” and “intuitive.” We had a nice couple of decades where we thought that the future was a powerful $3,000 expandable, upgradable multi-function machine on everyone’s desk. We were wrong. People don’t want something that is capable of doing anything. They want something that does what they want to do, does it well, does it reliably, at a low price, and makes them feel clever. General purpose computing devices failed them. We were never going to live in a world where everyone is an expert user of traditional general purpose computers.

That may be cynical, but it’s true. This is the part where you start crying and I hug you and tell you that everything is going to be okay. Queue piano crescendos to mark the emotional turning point. But seriously, it’s going to be okay.

The kids are still tinkering, and if I know anything about tinkerers, it is that they find a way to change their world, no matter what hurdles you put in front of them.

You can also take courage in the fact that the main barriers against fusing the user’s paradise that Apple offers and the tinkerer’s paradise about which we wax nostalgic are legal in nature. Software patents and the DMCA are the real enemy. Apple is only playing the game according to the rules of the board. Bring down those travesties, and Cory may avoid having to pay for an expensive and painful Apple tattoo removal.

I’m no designer. Does someone with a bit of design sense want to take a stab at the above concept? Done right, I could see it as a fun t-shirt for WordPress contributors to wear. There are some other fun things you can play with, notably the fact that “web” starts with a “W.” What do you think?

For a year after giving birth, nursing mothers must be allowed breaks on the job to express breast milk as often as necessary, and a private place to do so that’s not a bathroom. Employers with fewer than 50 employees are exempt.

Health Care Law Includes Some Surprises – NYTimes.com

What, women can’t get in a milky mood if there’s a toilet present?