Staying Found in the Wilderness
How to use a compass
Magnetic declination FAQ

More evidence that fingerprint identification is pseudoscience

The abortion debate from a logical standpoint

Phrase of the day: begging the question

Secure your UNIX logs

"In March 2003, a teenage girl named Courtney presented one of her poems before an audience at Barnes & Noble bookstore in Albuquerque, then read the poem live on the school's closed-circuit television channel. A school military liaison and the high school principal accused the girl of being 'un-American' because she criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's failure to give substance to its 'No Child Left Behind' education policy. The girl's mother, also a teacher, was ordered by the principal to destroy the child's poetry. The mother refused and may lose her job..." Roses are red...

Codex Seraphinianus, Hallucinatory Encyclopedia

Doublethink in the Republican Party

"At the Camp War Horse detention centre in Baguba, north of Baghdad, it is a surreal scene: US soldiers handing out cash to freed prisoners along with a note saying 'You have not been mistreated.'

'Have you been mistreated?' the governor asks the detainees, dressed in orange boilersuits. 'No. We have never been tortured,' chorused those behind bars as some 50 soldiers stood nearby...

One interrogator explained his methods for getting prisoners to talk.

"I try to build a relationship and get their view point, and make them comfortable... I try to be friendly and open-minded," he said.

Bring in... the comfy chair!

Cultural Theorist Trading Cards

A leftist intellectual defends the war in Iraq

Very interesting and informative article on the systematic causes of the torture of Iraqi prisoners, written by the man who first published the torture photos in the New Yorker (and, incidentally, who also exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam), Seymour Hersh.

Revealing blacked-out documents (such as those released under the Freedom of Information Act)

Meet Anton Chekov

America and the Nazi Book Burnings

Transcript of Bush and Cheney's testimony before the 911 Commission, obtained from a secret recording of the meeting.

"Military intelligence has encouraged and told us 'Great job.'

They usually don't allow others to watch them interrogate. But since they like the way I run the prison, they have made an exception."

Torture of Iraqi prisoners

UN Human Rights Norms for Businesses

"Compassionate Coercion"

Diary of a Real American

Hitler vs Stalin

Word of the day:

perseveration: Uncontrollable repetition of a particular response, such as a word, phrase, or gesture, despite the absence or cessation of a stimulus, usually caused by brain injury or other organic disorder.

Who was Georges Bataille?

A Structured Approach to Hard Disk Encryption

"With the ratification of HR 3077... professors whose ideological principles may not support U.S. practices abroad can have their appointments terminated, any part of a course's curriculum containing criticisms of U.S. foreign policy can be censored, and any course deemed entirely anti-American can be barred from ever being taught."

They're Made Out of Meat

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong" --Voltaire

UNESCO Red Book on Endagered Languages

"Evola charges American society with creating a totally vacuous kind of human being, whose terms of reference are exclusively related to personal enrichment, whether financial or 'psychological'; one incapable of autonomous choice, an abject conformist; someone who has been made crass and incapable by a materially easy life which is without idealist impulse. Far from being the acme of human progress, American society is in fact at the most advanced stage of disintegration of modern civilisation..."

Explaining Cryptography to the General Public
PDF PS

So you would like to make a Linux PDA?

How NASA Sterilizes Spacecraft

"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz -- February 29, 1872.

"What is clearer proof of Roman wickedness than the sight of many nobles, to whom Roman citizenship should be valued as a splendid and dignified state, so distraught by their nation's savagery that they no longer wish to be Romans? ...far and wide they migrate either to the Goths, the Bagaudae or other tribes wherever they be in power ...preferring to live as freemen under a veneer of captivity than as captives under the guise of liberty ...the title of Roman citizen, at one time both greatly valued and dearly bought, is now repudiated and evaded." --Salvian of Marseilles

"The problem to be solved is to output a value judgment about operating systems. The assumptions being (of course) that UNIX is good and Windows is bad." Understanding Object Oriented Programming

"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto"

Latin Proverbs

When writing numerical dates please use the "YYYY-MM-DD" format, as per ISO 8601. For example, 2004-03-07. It makes life simpler for us all.

"In the tenth century...the Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, in order not to part with his collection of 117,000 volumes when travelling, had them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order." --Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

"The thing most feared in secret always happens." --Cesare Pavese, in his journal

Ashcroft is scary

"What I cannot create, I do not understand" --Richard Feynman

Hacker's Guide to Higher Math

Exotic words in the OED

"It’s a rejection card. How impersonal. Most places at least scribble something with a pen like “Good, but we’re out of business” or something. This was just a stupid card with some little ditty about plums..." Slushkiller

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." --Brian W. Kernighan

"Once upon a time, mighty Indra, lord of the heavens, king of the dawn, paused by the shores of the sea of milk and listened to the song it sang. "Just for a moment", he thought to himself. "That can't do any harm." But before he knew it, the song drew him headlong into the sea and he vanished, to be reborn in the world as a mortal..."

I'm a pig, not a god!

Koufax Awards for best lefty blogs

The Politics of Peer Review

"Java actually isn't a terrible language, compared to something like Perl for example, but there are some tremendous problems with it that I think don't get discussed openly enough..."

Java: Language of Tommorow ;)

Raiders of the Lost Ark, resurrected

Top 75 Network Security Tools

Left Anti-Intellectualism and Its Discontents

"As an adjective, "childfree" refers to one who does not have children, does not wish to have them, believes that he or she will never want children, actively plans his or her life so that he or she will not have children, and does not consider his or her life diminished by the absence of children. As a noun, it refers to someone who is childfree or a group of people who are childfree. Another word for this concept is "childless by choice...""

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

International Journal of Digital Evidence

PLT Online: Programming language theory texts online

"Everything Object Oriented Programming can do can be done better in functional programming - the code is easier to write, runs faster, and uses less memory..."

OO vs Functional

Objects Have Failed

Positivism and Psychology

Why You Want to Start Using SML Today
(also applies to OCaml, which is my language of choice)

An Introduction to Programming Languages

and then...

The Parable of the Languages

Modern Static Typing: Less Code, Better Code

"With GNU id-utils many text-searching tasks become simpler and faster. For example, you can list all files that reference a particular `#include' file throughout a huge source hierarchy, search for all the memos containing references to a project, or automatically invoke an editor on all files containing references to some function or variable. Anyone with a large software project to maintain, or a large set of text files to organize, can benefit from the ID utilities."

"Wipe repeatedly writes special patterns to the file or files to be destroyed, using the fsync() call and/or the O_SYNC bit to force disk access, in order to lessen the chance of data recovery using techniques such as magnetic force microscopy."

"Programs that wite programs
are the happiest programs in the world"

The Alphabet Synthesis Machine

Satanic Sysadmins

Load balancing myths

Why OCaml

Lots of unwise science experiments (with video)

On the same day that Saddam Hussain was captured Bush quietly signed the Patriot Act 2 in to law

Gnosticism Gateway - Directory of Online Gnostic Studies Resources

Those Dark Hiding Places: The Invisible Web Revealed

Distributed Proofreaders

Why ML/OCaml are good for writing compilers

Time

Free Hacking Zone

Tor: The Next Generation Onion Router

The Remailer Geographical Mapping Project

"Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence" (King James Bible - 1 Timothy 2:11-12).

Christianity is such an enlightened faith, don't you think?

Gauss Gun: shoots nails, totally silent

Biblical Inconsistencies

Which Historical Lunatic are You?

anti-antiwar.com

The IPv6 Mess

"almost half of all articles published in [medical] journals are by ghostwriters [representing pharmaceutical companies]" -- Massive fraud in the pharmaceutical industry

Some lessons from programming language flamewars

What's so scary about Microsoft's Trusted Computing?

I'd rather use a socket...

Fighting the hiding of information

The Picture of Everything

What 20th Century Theorist are You?

The Smell of Java

Slashdot pays homage to Philip K Dick
More... and more

General Tommy Franks predicts marial law in the case of a major WMD attack on the US

Fear of a Postmodern Planet

Why LD_LIBRARY_PATH is bad

Software Engineering Document Templates