Let it be recorded forever in the Libraries of the Internet that it was Philip Greenspun's Idea to outsource surrogate mothers...#

``One potential obstacle to this approach to single fatherhood is that apparently American courts are not anxious to enforce surrogate motherhood contrracts. For example, a woman could decide that she has grown attached to the baby that she has carried to term and elect to keep the baby. That isn't so bad necessarily. A man could hire 3 surrogate mothers, expecting a yield of 2.2 delivered children. What if one surrogate repudiates the contract to hand over the baby. Can she then sue the father for paternity? Could that mournful situation be prevented if the man purchased donated eggs from one woman and hired an unrelated woman to handle the pregnancy?

And in an age of outsourcing Java coding, something for which many months of training are required, to the Third World, why not outsource surrogate motherhood? Suppose that a man has a budget of $50,000 per child. A smart healthy college-bound woman in the U.S. would probably reject that amount, only slightly more than the cost of one year at a top university. Consider, however, a woman with a good genetic patrimony in a country where the average income was $5,000 per year. Ten years of salary for 9 months of work! A bit of labor (literally) today and enough capital to buy a house and perhaps start a business. Perhaps that $50,000 is beginning to sound attractive. Not to mention all the other advantages of production in a foreign country. Obstetrical care and hospital fees are vastly cheaper in any country other than in the U.S. ''

John Gruber is all over the future and nails the truth down hard...#

``Imagine if the plumbing in corporate America worked with the same degree of reliability as their computer infrastructure. This would mean that individual sinks, urinals, and toilets would go out of order on a regular basis. Water from drinking fountains would turn brown, but, hey that's just how it is. Every few weeks, teenage pranksters from Hong Kong would overflow every toilet in the building, knocking them out of commission.

In response to these problems, large companies would have large in-house plumbing staffs, led by a CPO (chief plumbing officer) reporting directly to the CEO. New restroom equipment would be chosen by the same plumbing staff that is employed for maintenance, thus providing a nearly irresistible disincentive to choose reliable low-maintenance equipment from other vendors.

In fact, all of the plumbing comes from a single company based in the state of Washington. This company's plumbing equipment is engineered such that it is extremely difficult to see how it actually works. The corporate plumbers are often equipped with certifications from this manufacturer, but they (the plumbers) in fact understand very little about how toilets and sinks truly work.

[...]

The corporate IT field is in large parts comprised of men who are not smart enough to program, but yet wanted a career in computers. They are the fifth wheel of corporate America — serving no practical purpose but their own employment. ''

Still in the 3rd ring of the 7th Circle, Dante meets three nobleman of Florence and notes their prominence and importance in an interesting style...#

``So I began: "Indeed, indeed, not scorn
But heartfelt grief to see your tribulation
Pierced me, too deeply to be soon outworn,

When this my lord gave me an intimation
Which made me think that I might look to gaze
On men like you, and of such reputation.

Truly, your city's mine; I've heard your praise -
Your deeds, your honoured names - rehearsed by all,
And have with love rehearsed them all my days.'' (ll. 52-60)

Dante certainly honours them with the eloquence of his verse and the efficiency of those short epiphanies.#

Dante is now in the 3rd ring of the 7th Circle where those Violent against Nature stay. He is talking to his old mentor and friend who warns him that the Floretines will treat him poorly in the future and tells him that much of Florence has succumbed to vice. Dante tells his old friend how he missed him.#

``I answered him: "Might I had have my will,
Believe me, you'd not yet been thrust apart
From human life; for I keep with me still

Stamped on my mind, and now stabbing my heart,
The dear, benign, paternal image of you,
You living, you hourly teaching me the art'' (ll. 79-84)

Dorothy writes this about Dante placing his friend in Hell...#

``The episode of Brunetto Latini gives the lie to the common assertion that Dante put only his enemies in Hell. But while maintaining, on the one hand, that personal feelings cannot remove the difference in God's sight between right and wrong, he asserts, on the other, that, as between man and man, nothing can ever remove the obligation to acknowledge benefits received. "For ever and ever (derivation) must be remembered, willingly praised, and ardently published before earth, and heaven ... Such a loyalty is necessary to the life of the City." (Charles Williams: The Figure of Beatrice, p. 130)'' (pgs. 166-167)

I think this is an interesting way for Dante to explain Loyalty and Love at odds with the wrong deeds of the members of such a union. It also underscores how the laws of man and those of God are separate and not equivalent.#

Still in the Seventh Circle, now in the 3rd ring. "In a desert of Burning Sand, under a rain of perpetual fire, Dante finds the Violent against God, Nature, and Art."...#

``And slowly, slowly dropping over all
The sane, there drifted down huge flakes of fire,
As Alpine snows in windless weather fall.'' (ll. 28-30)

This is really interesting because I picture in my mind this tranquil scene of a pure white winter in Alaska with great green pine trees caked in snow. Then I switch the ground to sand, the trees to burned and scarred effigies of past greatness, and those lofty white snowflakes into balls of fire. Such a strange transformation.#

Dante asked a soul a question about why he was there...#

``But he himself, soon as he heard me frame
This question to my guide about him, cried:
"That which in life I was, in death I am.'' (ll. 49-51)

This is another instance of Dante stressing that a soul's place in Hell is chosen in life and all the shades in Hell recognize this. It's interesting, how difficult it must be to be in a tortured state knowing it all your own doing?#

As they exit the desert Dante sees a pool of bubbling blood...#

``Silent we came where, from that forest deep,
A little brook poured forth a bubbling jet
Whose horrid redness makes my flesh still creep'' (ll. 76-78)

Some of the stuff in Hell is very creepy and grotesque. I imagine how strange it was for Dante to submerse himself in his imagined understanding of Hell to write his Comedy in a coherent fashion...#

Dorothy comments that in this Canto, some of the spirits use different names for God...#

``Capaneus says "Jove"; Virgil says "God", meaning the same thing. *The heathen are judged by their own standards* '' (pg. 161)

I think this is very interesting, because it means that Sin is not breaking a "Rule" of God, it is a doing wrong in it's purest form. It also suggests that all Sinners know they are doing wrong and thus damn themselves to their position in Hell with their guilt.#

In the 2nd ring of the Seventh Circle those who are violent against themselves are trapped inside the withered trees that Harpies sit upon shrieking and shaking off shoals of the suicide's shelter. When Dante enters the forest he is surprised by a wailing wasted tree...#

``Already all round I heard a mournful wailing,
But, seeing none to wail, I stopped short, blinking
Bewilderedly, as though my wits were failing'' (ll. 22-25)

Dorothy writes this about the fact the suicides are trees...#

``The sin of suicide is, in an especial manner, an insult to the body; so, here, the shades are deprived of even the semblance of the human form. As they refused life, they remain fixed in a dead and withered form. They are the image of the self-hatred, which dries up the very sap of energy and makes all life infertile.'' (pg. 153)

When talking with a suicidal spirit, the shamed soul supposes to Dante...#

``So, in a scornful spirit of disgust,
And thinking to escape from scorn by death,
To my just self I made myself unjust'' (ll. 70-72)

Suicide is a cowardice injustice on the inflicter, as indicated by this example who used it to flee from the problems of their life, rather than standing strong and just.#

The same soul also says,#

``We shall take our flight, when all souls take their flight,
To seek our spoils, but not to be rearrayed,
For the spoils of the spoiler cannot be his by right'' (ll. 103-105)

Dorothy says this about the last line...#

``(literally, "It is not just that a man should have what he takes from himself") - Dante treats suicide as a kind of self-robbery (Canto XI. 43). Here he means, I think, that a robber cannot have a just title to the goods he has plundered.'' (pg. 154)

This is interesting because it indicates how Dante feels that because suicide is an escape, the soul cannot return from this self-exile in the final days to enjoy the spoils of their life.#

In the Seventh Circle the Violent are immersed in a pool of blood barely able to bear to grasp a breathe, because when they try to get out for a gulp they are fired upon by the demons of Hell...#

``All round the fosse they speed in myriad bands,
Shooting at every soul that tries to lift
Higher out of the blood than doom demands,'' (ll. 73-75)

Once Sin has you in life it is ever the harder to get yourself out of it because your Sin is used against and by the company of Sinners you keep.#

The Poets pause for a talk about the geography of Hell and Dante writes something that just rolls off the tongue...#

``And I: "But let's not lose the time so spend;
Think now what compensation thou canst find."
"Surely," he answered, "such was my intent." '' (ll. 13-15)

Poetry in motion?#

In the Sixth Circle, the Heretics lie, their bodies twisted so they must walk backwards. And Virgil makes a prophecy of his own on Dante's future revelations...#

``When thou shalt stand bathed in the glorious ray
Of her whose blest eyes see all things complete
Thou'lt learn the meaning of thy life's whole way.'' (ll. 130-132)

The way Dante writes about Beatrice is intimidating and awesome (in the old sense of the word).#

As Dante approaches the City of Dis, Virgil describes it as so...#

``On every side, the vast and reeking mire
Surrounds this city of the woe-begot,
Where now's no entering, save with wrath and ire...'' (ll. 31-33)

Only the fearsome are normally admitted to the City and it's surroundings reflect the spirit of the populace.#

In the fifth circle are the Wrathful, and Virgil encourages Dante to be cruel to a wrathful soul. Dorothy explains this succinctly...#

``It is important to understand this passage, since otherwise we may feel that Virgil is blasphemously encouraging Dante in very cruel and unchristian behaviour. We must distinguish between the literal and allegorical meanings, which the poem fuses into a single image.''

1. Literally. In Hell the soul is fixed eternally in that which it has chosen; it cannot, that is, enjoy there the good which it has rejected. Therefore, the reaction it calls forth from Dante can be no more than the reflection of what it has in itself. Thus Francesca calls forth that same easy pity which betrayed her to lust; Ciacoo, the perfunctory pity which is all that the egotist can spare for his neighbours; the Hoarders and Spendthrifters, because they made no distinctions in life, are indistinguishable in eternity (Canto VII. 53, 54). But the Wrathful have rejected pity and chosen cruelty; therefore they can receive no pity, and goodness can only manifest itself to them as wrath, since they have chosen to know it so.
2. Allegorically. In the vision of Hell, the soul knows itself in a state of sin. Up to this moment Dante has only wondered, grieved, pitied, or termbled; now, for the first time, he sees (in the image of the damned soul) *sin as it is - vile, degraded, and dangerous* - and turns indignantly against it. For whatever inadequate and unworthy reasons, he accepts judgment and places himself on God's side. It is the first feeble stirring of the birth of Christ within the soul, and Virgil accordingly hails it with words that were used of Christ Himself. (Luke xi. 27). (pgs. 120-121)

In the fourth circle of Hell is "the Hoarders and Spendthrifters", whom Dorothy writes the following...#

``Mutual indulgence has already declined into selfish appetite; now, that appetite becomes aware of the incompatible and equally selfish appetites of other people. Indifference becomes mutual antagonism, imaged here by antagonism between hoarding and squandering.'' (pg. 114)

For the rest of their days, until the Final Day, the hoarders and the spendthrifters are caught in an eternal joust against each other...#

``The Joust: Note the reappearance of community in a perverted form: these irrational appetites are united, after a fashion, by a common hatred, for the waging of a futile war. So nations, political parties, business combines, classes, gangs, etc., sometimes display a spurious comradeship in opposition.'' (pg. 114)

Dante is the third circle of Hell, where the Gluttonous are poisoned with unquenchable appetite. He asks a soul if he knows anything about some of his friends from Florence...#

``Where are they? Can I find them? Prithee tell -
I am consumed with my desire to know -
Feasting in Heaven, or poisoned here in Hell?'' (ll. 82-84)

I love that you can feel the tension and urgency in Dante's request.#

In the second circle of Hell is the Lustful and there is very pretty stanza about the story of Lancelot and Guinevere #

``We read of the smile, desired of lips long-thwarted,
Such smile, by such a lover kissed away,
He that may never more from me be parted'' (ll. 133-135)

Before passing over the Acheron, the "Joyless River", Dante is refused by Charon, the ferryman of the dead. Virgil explains to Dante why Charon would do this...#

``And by this passage, good souls never go;
Therefore, if Charon chide thee, do thou look
What this may mean - 'tis not so hard to know.'' (ll. 127-129)

In the explanation of the images in this canto, Dorothy points out that while all the demons in Hell are based on Greek and Roman mythology, there is deeper meaning...#

``Most of thte monstrous organisms by which the functions of Hell are discharged are taken from Greek and Roman mythology. They are neither devils nor damned souls, but the images of perverted appetites, presiding over the circles appropriate to their natures (pg. 89)''

I like this because by virtue of being monstrous, the demons in Hell show how horrible the true form of sin is when it is removed from the disguise of a human soul and left to it's own devices.#

In the examination of the lines of this canto, Dorothy discusses line 126...#

`` _all their fear is changed into desire_ : This another of the important passages in which Dante emphasizes that Hell is the soul's choice. The damned fear and long for it, as in this life a man may hate the sin which makes him miserable, and yet obstinately seek and wallow in it.'' (pg. 90)

I think this is very significant and intuitive, Sin is a choice and a perversion of a human's free will.#

At the beginning of Dante's journey, he isn't completely sure what he will do and is very confused. He captures his confusion and indecision brilliantly...#

``As one who wills, and then unwills his will,
Changing his mind with every changing whim,
Till all his best intentions come to nil,'' (ll. 37-39)

I've been reading The Divine Comedy - Hell by Dante Alighieri as translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. Since I just finished I'm planning on going through and posting all the parts that I thought were very good and my thoughts on some of them.#

Don Park writes about negotiation as a game...#

``Ross also touches on an important point:

Tools that allow mediators the flexibility to structure dialogue while deemphasizing personalities can accelerate constructive conversation.

Personalities and emotions are difficult to isolate and deemphasize in negotiations. Even act of doing so can backfire. I think a game-like interface might encourage negotiators to detach themselves emotionally from the arguments similar to the way chips in casinos detach gamblers from monetary value.''

Accordion Guy has a new video... yes.#

Bill Maher writes, "Stop this ride, I want to get off..."#

``A Democratic group is starting an effort to recall President Bush. Of course, you can't recall the president. You have to catch him lying about sex and impeach him. It's a totally different animal. But it's become obvious that not everyone knows how republican government works - today newly-minted candidates Jean-Claude Van Damme and Emmanuel Lewis vowed to clean house in Washington. ''

Via Daniel Drezner is Kevin Drum on Postwar Iraq...#

``Bush's conduct toward Iraq continues to be something that I just shake my head over. He lost my support before the war because I eventually became convinced that he wasn't serious about postwar reconstruction. After the war, it became clear that my suspicions were well grounded and that virtually no serious postwar planning had been done. And now, his continuing refusal to admit that we need more troops in Iraq or to make any effort to rally the country behind the time and money it will take to do the job right is simply inexplicable.

Obviously he realizes that failure in Iraq would be an enormous blow both to the U.S. and to the war on terrorism. And he — or his advisors, at any rate — must realize that we can't do it with the troops and funding we have in place now. There's just too much contrary evidence for him not to realize that.''

Daniel also points to Close-Up: The Mind of George W. Bush -#

``Bush also came to the White House with two kinds of experience—in business and in politics. He attended Harvard Business School from 1973 to 1975, making him the only modern President to have had such training. (Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush ran businesses, but neither went to business school.)

An important effect of going to business school is that it may keep one from going to law school—an especially important effect these days, when so many people in government have legal training. Many law schools and business schools, including Harvard's, use the case method, requiring students to work through historic trials or the problems of actual companies. But they use the method differently. Law school accustoms future lawyers to discerning theoretical constructs, either in past decisions or in legal principles, and applying them to the case at hand. Business school immerses future businessmen in the histories of specific companies, in order to develop problem-solving abilities. Law school worships understanding, business school worships skill. Law-school students scrutinize what has been done. If business-school students don't quite learn by doing, they learn how things have been done.''

New Queer Eye Review of the Tonight Show episode...#

``Back at RL, Carson is bored and waiting for Jay to come out wearing jeans and a burlap colored shirt. It's nice, but nothing really unusual. Jay strikes some "action poses" that look like they're from a Sears catalog circa 1983. Kyan and Carson do the butt check on Jay while he looks fake-annoyed.

As Carson tries to convince Jay that shopping really is fun, Jay stage whispers to the camera that he hates this and it's "gay hell." Carson quickly corrects: "No... that's J. C. Penney's" and Kyan agrees. ''

Peter Lindberg unclogs his brain upon his blog and has this interesting bit...#

``Somewhere, recently, I read about how we seldom remember anything from our first three years, but it might be so that we don't remember things in a format that's compatible with our adult mind.

We learn to talk before three years old, but perhaps we haven't a deep enough sense of our language prior to that? So that our memories are encoded in a format that's more relevant to our senses.''

Makes a lot of sense.

Richard Tallent on lines of code...#

``Coding is not like taking shorthand. The speed gap is not in typing, but rather in knowing what to type. I'll probably spend at least twice as much time looking at my code as I do writing it. If that is true, the decision to use a VB-like syntax ("If...End If") over a less expressive syntax like C# ("if{}") becomes one of reading efficiency, not writing. For me, I can read VB much faster than I can match curly braces.''

Philip Greenspun writes...#

``The solution is McDonald's. If you can remember one piece of medical advice from my brother ("Don't eat anything a caveman wouldn't have eaten"), you skip the fries. For a beverage it is unsweetened iced tea or Diet Coke. So far, zero calories. All you need now is a sandwich. The bread isn't really on the Atkins diet but otherwise a McDonald's sandwich is vastly smaller and lower in calories than anything you'd get in an upscale restaurant. Best of all, the menu at McDonald's won't tempt you into excess. The sandwiches aren't all that delicious. If you're really hungry they can taste pretty good but have you ever been sad that you couldn't order both the Big Mac and the Quarter Pound with Cheese? ''

Carlyle writes about precognition...#

``My freshman year I took this course where we learned about coincidence and all that stuff, and "good" evidence versus "crap" evidence and all sorts of other shit...the name of it was "How Do You Know?" and it was the first in a four part series of rhetorical question classes that I have just gotten out of last semester. Anyway. Point. We read this long thing about how you really have so many dreams a night, and your subconscious memory remembers so many of those, that it's really not all that surprising that you sometimes recognize that things from your real life are exactly like something that happened in a dream you had before. Just out of sheer numbers, they said, it was inevitable that you would dream something that would actually happen. ''

Tim Bray writes about "Degrees of Viral Separation"...#

``I gather that Sobig.F is pretty aggressive in looking through your files to find email addresses, but let's imagine that it only looked in the Infectee's address book. Then the Sobig.F assertion would be quite a bit simpler: "Person A sends mail to Persons B and C."

So if you were to gather up a few million instances of Sobig.F-generated email (something that any ISP could do trivially, and the NSA may be doing at this moment), you could produce a pretty interesting map of who knows whom. ''

Razib at Gene Expression writes about how humans are evolving right now...#

``Nick Wade surveys the theory that humans are evolving now, contrary to the conventional assertion that culture, not biology, is driving the transformation of our species. Here something that I am surprised that Wade included in the article:

Not everything is roses in evolution's garden. Ronald Fisher, the British biologist, pointed out in 1930 that the genes for mental ability tend to move upward through the social classes but that fertility is higher in the lower social classes. He concluded that selection constantly opposes genes that favor creativity and intelligence.

Fisher's idea has not been proven wrong in theory, although many biologists, besides detesting it for the support it gave to eugenic policies, believe it has proven false in practice. "It hasn't been formally refuted in the sense that we could never test it," Dr. Pagel said. Though people with fewer resources tend to have more children, that may be for lack of education, not intelligence. [...]

Does anyone really buy this? Yes, the Flynn Effect is undeniable, but assuming the premises, that intelligence is heritable to some extent, that socioeconomic status (SES) has some relationship to innate intellectual capacities and low SES status has a positive correlation with fecundity-it doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect the dots. ''

Razib writes about a book, "The Geography of Thought"...#

``Now, on the point of difficulty unraveling causes and factors in any given phenomena, Nisbett has an interesting point to make on this. The Chinese tendency to accept compromise, to see the truth in every point, and accept that some things are just beyond rational modeling, has been very detrimental to any stab toward a true science. The European tendency to be dogmatic about rational points and attack and tear down contradictions until a coherent model emerges is much more fruitful in the context of scientific progress-Europeans have made many mistakes (phlogistan? ether?), but for every hundred errors one discovers a gem of truth. In contrast the Chinese seemed to accept that the natural world as capricious because humans could not conceive of all under heaven and that the focus should be on social harmony, something which intelligent apes have a much better grasp of. Just because it is difficult does not mean that one should give up the quest, that is the Western view, and the view of those of us who accept that evolutionary psychology might be a bullshit factory, but it is the only game in town and gives us a better grasp of the understanding of human nature than just cordoning off certain avenues of research because they are difficult and prone to error.''

Moxie runs an interview...#

`` In the interest of not letting down those who unabashedly call me a cat blogger, I sat down this evening and had a conversation about the state of the tech industry with Bentley. In particular the California technology economy.

Sadly, Bentley did not have the $3,500 to file to run for Governor but he is an executive on the elite and elusive Board of the California Technology Commission and runs an economic thinktank out of his litter-box. ''

Tony Pierce see babes, photographs babes, an IS a babe...#

``and everyone had tattoos.

beautiful ones.

i saw this girl that was covered in them, gorgeous girl. my heart hopes that she's a stripper but i don't go to any strip clubs so what's the use. she had a great skirt on too. i tried to take a picture but how do you do it and not be like a pervert.''

Tony Pierce has a great outlook on blogs, blogging, and politics...#

``i look at my elected officials the same way that i look at the batteries of my remote control - when they stop being effective, they get removed.

the president, the congress, and the supreme court have not been effective.

dont take it personally.''

i'm panting right now from nervousness#

Kim writes about problems when we use different terminologies...#

``My mom is a doctor. I was talking to her the other day, and I casually mentioned that I had done some coding on the weekend. She looked at me in horror, and it took her a few seconds to understand what I meant.

To her, "coding" means having a heart attack.''

Dan Sugalaski writes about optimizing Parse::RecDescent grammars...#

``Well, first, failure is expensive. I know, I know, Duh!, but it bears repeating. Failure shows up both in rules that actually fail, and rules that succeed but after one or more alternate versions fail first. Scrutinize those rules! Make them as cheap as possible, since odds are (Unless you have a really skewed frequency distribution) that there will be far more failures than successes. Order the rules so you've got the best chance of actually hitting the correct rule first, up to a point. (If you have a rule that succeeds, say, 10% of the time but is horribly expensive to run, you may find it faster to put more likely to fail, but far cheaper, rules before it) Factor out common prefixes (like the "if expr then command" part of the ifelse rule, which is valid for both the if/then and if/then/else forms)''

James Robertson on the coming storm...#

``[...] Get ready for a sellers market in the IT realm again, and soon. Ok, your immediate reaction is that I'm nuts. People have been getting laid off in droves, and offshore outsourcing has been all over the news of late. So where am I coming from? Simple - demographics. The demographic trends indicate a coming shortage, starting sometime in the next two years. And based on the numbers, it could easily be a bigger crunch than 1998-2000. What's driving this? The baby boom generation is starting to retire, and that cohort is bigger than the ones following it - by a lot. Just look around any IT shop, and what do you see? An awful lot of people within a few years of retirement''