I’ve spent a lot of time and effort since 1997 developing effective propaganda tactics for
reaching the business world on behalf of the hacker community — among other things, by
popularizing the term ‘open source’. If you want to grok how this is done, read
my October 15 interview with a bunch of Prudential Securities investors.
Pay attention [...]

Thanks, all of you, for the compliments. The last thing I expected was to become a geek pinup!
Cathy Raymond

“Free Love”, eh? Well, that would explain a lot. Jack must have been the dude I saw
damn near run into a doorframe yesterday because he was checking out my wife Cathy so intently he forgot to watch where he
was going. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

A reader asks:

To clarify, while I believe natural selection explains a lot I have
caveats about IQ as a tool for testing intelligence. If you can’t
measure the coast of France with a single number how can you do it
with human intelligence?

Easily. Human intelligence is a great deal less complex than the
coast of France. :-)
It’s fashionable [...]

From the November 12 “Kernel Panic”:

In fact, this strip is incorrect. I did not coin the term “open source”;
I only popularized it. It was coined by
my friend Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute. While it’s true that I more or less ran the brainstorming session and fortunately had enough of a clue to recognize [...]

Mike Smith relays an interesting possible explanation for the observed
statistical fact that American and European Jews have a mean IQ a
standard deviation higher than Caucasian gentiles:

During the period from ancient times to modern times, there was a
constant phenomenon of Jews converting to Christianity (there were
many social pressures to do so). In a nutshell, the idea [...]

This is what kept me too busy to blog for months:

To find out more about it, go here.

Uh-oh. I see another identity-politics double-bind coming. Eugene
Volokh comments
on the anti-semitic canard that Jews were disproportionally
influential in the development of Communism. The sides in this kind
of dispute are very predictable. One one hand, the anti-Semites, a
disgusting crew of racist troglodytes with evil motives. On the
other, the good-hearted and right-thinking people [...]

I always wanted to be a Heinlein character when I grew up. Somebody thinks I succeeded…
Robert Heinlein wrote you – your stranger in astrange land, you.
Which Author’s Fiction are You? brought to you by Quizilla

There’s been quite a blogospheric flap lately about Kim DuToit’s
essay The
Pussification Of The Western Male. The single feature of the
conversation that surprised me most is that nobody connected it to
Steven den Beste’s equally searing essay Anglo Women are an
endangered species.
Steve’s point complements Kim’s and amplifies it in some useful
ways. Nobody wants to [...]

I got email from Dr. Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog,
about an hour ago. The bad news was, he turned down the short story. The
good news was he accepted the fact article.
I’m going to be published in Analog!
/me does geeky victory dance
OK, so this is one of those things where if you don’t [...]

The good folks at ibiblio.org are about to upgrade me from b2 to WordPress. There might be a short outage involved, and it’s possible the
new CSS will garble my pages. Any problems should be transient and fixed
within a few hours.

The CSS designer for WordPress, the successor to the
b2 engine that I may be upgrading to shortly, responded to my previous
rant. In a generally thoughtful and responsive post, he said “But
even if [pixel sizes] are defined for fonts, does your browser not let
you easily resize this?”.
This, I’m afraid, is CSS designer cluelessness in a [...]

People who put absolute pixel sizes in CSS layouts should be lashed
with knouts. I’ve tripped over this problem yet again while moving my
blog; I’m using b2, and the default
stylesheet shipped with it was obviously produced by some graphics
designer who has failed to grasp the fact that there are lots of
different display sizes and resolutions [...]

I’ve had a copy of David Frum’s Dead Right sitting on my
coffee table for months. I didn’t buy it, it was landed on my by an old
friend who persists in imagining that I’m interested in reading
conservative political theory. In fact, it’s been years since I
found conservative theorizing other than wearily predictable. and it
would [...]

A reader, responding to the suggestion that we call the Baathist
holdouts in Iraq
werewolves, asked rhetorically whether the intent was to dehumanize
them. Lurking behind this question was the theory that war supporters
like me need to make our enemies into un-persons in order to justify
continuing to kill them.
This question displays a kind of self-absorption by a [...]

The blogosphere has shown some ability to change the terms and
terminology of the terror-war debate in the U.S. It’s time for a bit
of meme-hacking. Let’s see if we can displace terms like “insurgent”
or “Saddam loyalist” with one that conveys the true depth of evil we
are facing. I have a candidate to propose.
A [...]

This is the new home of Armed and Dangerous, formerly located at Blogspot.

Well, the election results are in. The Democratic Party took a
beating yesterday — a worse one, I think, than it has really
assimilated. The Pew Research Center has analyzed
the results. If you guys don’t want your butts handed to you in 2004,
I have a few suggestions.
First, a reminder for new readers or old [...]

VodkaPundit asks: Is the Democratic Party becoming increasingly
likely to pull a Whig Maneuver and disappear into history? If so, what
replaces it?
The Democrats certainly seem to be trying pretty hard to
self-destruct. But this is not a new story; it’s been going on ever
since the New Left captured the party apparat in the early 1970s. [...]