Pug’s Place

Well, crap. It appears that high school students, in general, favor government censorship and think that the First Amendment goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Most think flag burning is illegal and that the government has the right to restrict indecent material on the ‘net.

…

This slashdotter points out that “Of course they don’t know (about the First Amendment), we don’t allow them to!” Heh. High schools generally grant few rights to their students, so I suppose finding that most of them believe in censorship isn’t that mind-blowing of an observation.

I think at some point in the past I pointed out that our Bill of Rights has a preamble which all the history books leave out, but for the sake of completeness I’m going to just go ahead and paste it in here for the education of all my readers. Enjoy and be amazed, for the Bill of Rights supersedes the powers of our Constitution and cannot be altered legally by the government:

The First 10 Amendments to the
Constitution as Ratified by the States
December 15, 1791
Preamble

Congress OF THE United States
begun and held at the City of New York, on Wednesday
the Fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

THE Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.:

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

I’ve joined the FreeMiniMac Conga line this guy started. Hopefully it’ll become a good conga line and I’ll end up with a MiniMac quickly, since I’m getting in early. Hopefully through the magic of the conga line I won’t even need to bum off friends. But for the sake of completeness, my refer link is here.

Here we go again… la da deee da da dah…

The Library of Congress’ Copyright Office issued a Request for Comment some time ago about what to do with so-called “orphaned” copyrighted works, things that are still protected under copyright, but their creator/custodian has been out of contact for an absurd amount of time (FreeCulture.org of course wants those works brought back into the public domain). Nobody on the Internet has made it easy to submit a comment to the Copyright Office yet, so Gavin Baker asked me to write a web-form to make it easy. There were some problems with this:

1. The CO’s requirements said that comments must be submitted as attachments. So I had to find and integrate (read, debug…) a MIME-capable PHP email routine.
2. As Prof. Lessig said, “this could be a real source of irritation to the copyright office if people abuse it.” So thus I implemented an email verification step, which meant I added a database layer to the script, and the script became an application.
3. It’s also supposed to get the word out about Free Culture, so I added the ability to sign up for our primary mailing lists straight from the form. *THIS* meant I had to find a function to perform HTTP POST operations from within PHP, or in other words access a website and fill out a form automatically for the user. That took a few minutes, but now this voodoo is with the scri– application now too.

A couple hundred other little things went into it, too (okay, maybe a couple tens of other little things ). But now it’s online. It is not, however, very informative. That’s not my responsibility, thank goodness.

Amazingly, Prof. Lessig typed out my name in a conversation with Gavin (the one which contained the above quote). I feel touched and amazed. Maybe I’m just easily amazed, but it’s not every day that someone with Prof. Lessig’s notoriety refers to you.

Looming over this week was knowledge that this morning I would be taking the GRE. That is now done (8:30-11:30 AM), I’ve filled up Pug-mobile with gas and had a victory Philly from some fairly decent sub shop at the corner of 34th and Archer. And watched a victory episode of Enterprise.
Yesterday I had my first Analysis of Algorithms homework due. It took exceedingly disgusting amounts of effort and time to produce, but I think I’ve already started to get the hang of doing full-featured mathematical analysis of algorithms. Maybe. After they’ve been graded and I see that I failed the assignment I might change my mind. So the whole week has been a series of “oh god, homework hard. while homework; do homework; done” and “Once homework done, ack, ack, $130 GRE test, ack ack. Must do good, that’s a lot of pizza money. Ack ack”.

Also Wednesday, UF’s Free Culture group got featured in the Gainesville Sun [some commentary]. I was interviewed for this article quite extensively, but after the reporter (who apparently reads this blog!) was told to dumb it down further I got cut out. No worries, a lot of what I wanted to get across made it anyway, except my suggestion that dorms should be able to order DSL or cable modems. Ah well.

I’m now involved with Florida Free Culture and the national group as a webmaster, or maybe the webmaster, I don’t really know yet. If you’re wondering what this particular counterculture group does/wants to do, I’d suggest you take a look at their manifesto.

So, where does that bring us… Ah: Hoggtowne Medieval Faire starts this weekend here in Gainesville. Next weekend I’m definitely going with Liz and Katharine (are you coming, Katharine?), but I’m not so sure about this weekend. For starters, it’s supposed to rain. All weekend. Though in truth I don’t have anything better to do, and E. wants me to go with her this weekend. I don’t know, we’ll see.

So, GRE… The verbal section was essentially identical to the verbal on the SAT but with words out of the Unabridged Oxford English Language Dictionary. There were actually words I did not know on the test. Quite a number of them, actually. But then there were silly words like alacrity and perspicuity that everyone who hangs out with me should know. The essay prompts were easy to write about but had a lot of merit as gauges for writing proficiency, e.g. there were a lot of ways to answer the prompts. The quantitative section was full of analytic geometry and tricky math with plenty of decimal places and precise but small numbers (like, say, 0.393855). Lots of ways to throw off a student, I suppose. But doable. There was nothing we didn’t cover to death in 11th grade IB Pre-Calculus.

Here in Gainesville the GRE is done in a Sylvan Learning Center, which highly resembles a doctor’s office. You check in at a sliding glass window and are handed a clipboard with info you have to read and a statement you have to copy down — in cursive. Ack! It’s been a good… 7 years since I’ve written in cursive for any length of time, and at least 4 years since I’ve even tried using the script. It took me a long time to copy that in cursive, I’ll tell you! The first half of it has non-cursive lowercase ‘S’s and, well, I couldn’t remember how to write a capital I. Man, someone’s going to have a good laugh when they look at that statement. I countered any overt criticism by writing so small that most of the letters blurred together. Ha, that’ll teach’em… After the statement copying, you’re given the key to a locker and told to put all your stuff in it, including jackets, cell phone clips, keys, wallets, etc. Then you get the key, are escorted to a computer in a cubicle, given hearing protector-style ear muffs, 6 sheets of paper and a pencil. Your computer shows a photograph of your face snapped with a security camera and teachers you how to use the mouse. Then you take the test.

An interesting procedure, truly.

If anyone wants to know how I did on the GRE, feel free to ask me off the blog. I don’t really want to post the scores here in public.

The weekly homework for COT 5405 just got a whole lot tougher. It turns out that one must throughly analyze every algorithm we develop for the assignments. I suppose I should have expected that knowing the course title, but I thought the instructor was just being nice.

That course is getting more frightening each visit. It’s still within my realm of knowledge, so it’s not frightening in the same way as, say, IB German was in high school. It’s frightening because every time I go into the class and sit down, it’s like I’m a foreign exchange student in China taking an English-language class. All of the conversations going on between students are in either Chinese, Hindi, Bengali or another (generally Indian) language. Many of the conversations between students and the instructor are in Hindi, but the course is taught in English (uhh, very good!). Not only am I the only undergraduate in the class, but one of maybe 5 (4?) American citizens… and my l33t German Ski11z aren’t helping much.

So I don’t exactly think there are any students to whom I can turn for help if I should need it (and I think I do/will), so I’ll have to go to the instructor (the TA much less comprehensible). Now, the instructor does speak very good English and his Indian accent is easily understood, but the idea of going to the professor and saying “Hi, I need help: How did you get rid of that power of k in this analysis? I have no idea how to do that on the homework.” frightens me more with each passing lecture.

Obviously I’m going to have to confront my fears and go talk to Prof. Ranka, but maybe not before I turn in this week’s homework assignment…

While I have posted from class before, this is my first using my phone. nifty!

For your insane Tuesday morning amusement, here is Rock, Paper, Saddam!

And I’m going to now try and see if auto-trackbacking works…
Here’s a post to Katie’s blog! Let’s see what happens…

(17:53:14) James: Damn you, you’ve spoiled me. Now I hate windows.
(17:53:40) James: I can’t stand the OS anymore.

… My work here is finished. Scotty, beam me up.

Whoa:

In 1790, Virginia landowner John Sewall “sued his wife, Eve, after she gave birth to a mulatto child. If that had been the end of the action, it might be a simple case of adultery, but Eve and the child were sold into slavery in accordance with Maryland law.”

Harsh, but so outlandish as to be amusing.