At least according to Boing Boing, the whole Chris Benoit/Wikipedia thing was an unfortunate coincidence. A vandal has come forward and described his acts as a joke with poor timing and bad taste:

Nonetheless, I feel incredibly bad for all the attention this got because of the fact that what I said turned out to be the truth. Like I said it was just a major coincidence, and I will never vandalize anything on wikipedia or post wrongful information. I’ve learned from this experience. I just can’t believe what I wrote was actually the case, I’ve remained stunned and saddened over it.

I wish not to reveal my identity so I can keep me and my family out of this since they have nothing to do with anything. I am not connected to WWE or Benoit at all in anyway. I am from Stamford as the IP address shows, and I am just an everyday individual who posted a wrongful remark at the time that received so much attention because it turned out to actually happen. I will say again I didn’t know anything about the Benoit tragedy, it was a terrible coincidence that I never saw coming.

Read more about it on BoingBoing and wikinews.

chris benoit, wikipedia | 2 Comments »

I’m currently working through the project euler puzzles as a way to learn the Haskell programming language. For one problem I needed to generate the power set of a list (the set containing all subsets). I figured it might be in the standard library, which I don’t know well, so I googled it.

What I found on evan_tech was this mind-blowing code snippet:

import Control.Monad

powerset :: [a] -> [[a]]
powerset = filterM (const [True, False])

Yikes! Seems short…and the first two lines are just the includes and the prototype. The entire meat of the function is in the last line. But does it work?

*Main> powerset [1,2,3]
[[1,2,3],[1,2],[1,3],[1],[2,3],[2],[3],[]]

Of course it does .. but how. Check out Evan’s site for details. The short form is that it makes ingenious use of the List monad…which is the most confusing monad (IMHO) because lists seem so cuddly and familiar…lulls one into a false sense of security. Basically, the [True, False] says that for each element in the original list, I’m gonna want lists in the output which both do — and don’t include the original element. Makes sense at a high level…but where’s the looping? Well, turns out the List monad defines its >>= operator (bind) internally as concatMap (which is the only way you could do it…if you think about it). So the “Map” in concatMap generates the iteration.

Beautiful.

haskell, programming | 1 Comment »

I heard about the story of the murder-suicide of wrestler Chris Benoit and his wife recently. I mainly paid interest because my paper included a nice graphic of every pro wrestler who’d died in recent years…and it’s a big number…which made for top quality reading.

Now the story gets very interesting though. Seems Benoit’s Wikipedia entry was edited to include his wife’s death 14 hours before the police found her body. The first edit included text saying she was dead. This was subsequently removed. The text was re-added, this time quoting “pro wrestling websites” as a source. The reference was again deleted,  but was reinserted  as a “family emergency“.  It remained in this form until the after the police found the body.

Interesting.  Were these posts inserted by Benoit himself as a sort of public confession?  What are these “pro wrestling websites” and how did the information get to them…if it did?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that this story is moving forward…and now I’m paying attention.

read more | digg story

wikipedia | No Comments »

Further showing their commitment to addressing the most pressing issues facing Louisiana in the wake of Katrina, the state legislature has now banned cockfighting — starting in August 2008. So those of you who are currently grooming a particularly vicious specimen…make sure to fight him in the next 15 months, or you’ll lose your chance!

New Orleans, politics | 2 Comments »

If only they reacted this fast during Katrina, maybe New Orleans wouldn’t have been destroyed.  Gotta keep your priorities straight though.

New Orleans, politics | 1 Comment »

Turns out while all of us have been sitting on our hands and fretting about climate change, somebody’s actually gone out and found a solution. That’s right, the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association has been working overtime on this problem and has come up with a groundbreaking plan. It seems that everything is going to be alright if we just BUY MORE CARS. That’s right. It’s the old cars which pollute…the new ones are squeaky clean! So if you love the planet, you need a shiny new car.

On the CVMA website you can read “Driving for Clean Air”, where you’ll learn that “a vehicle produced today is 12 times cleaner than one produced in 1993, and 37 times cleaner than one produced in 1983″. A look under the hood (sorry) shows, however, that what is being compared are not emissions, but the legal emissions standards….which of course are more lax for cars which have been on the road for 14 and 24 years than for new cars.

The website also features plan details under the heading “An Auto Green Plan”. The bold strategy laid out here features:

• New Green Technologies

  (hybrids, fuel cells, government grants for R&D

• Cleaner Fuel Choices For Canadians

  (mainly ethanol — shores up the Western support I suppose)

• Getting old polluting vehicles off the road

  (sweet, sweet profit)

• Greening the Government Fleets

  (delicious new public sector contracts)

• Changing Our Own Driving Behaviour

  (This one is really the best one. I can’t really do it justice, so I beg you to go read it yourself. Suffice it to say that less driving is not part of the plan. Think “accelerate more slowly” and “maintain correct tire pressure”)

As the CVMA says: “Believe or not, we can reduce emissions with every new car.”

canada, global warming, science | 1 Comment »

Last night Colbert performed a hilarious experiment in honour of Mr. Wizard’s passing. He sucked an egg into a bottle by first putting a piece of burning newspaper inside. Colbert explains that the smoke rises to heaven to alert god about the fire, who subsequently forces the egg inside to put it out.

read more | digg story

colbert, nostalgia, science | 1 Comment »

Here’s the new language from the White House:

“The executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 covers all government agencies that are part of the executive branch and, although it doesn’t specifically say so, was not meant to apply to the vice president’s office or the president’s office”, a White House spokesman said.

I really like the part about “although it doesn’t specifically say so…”

read more | digg story

fight the power, politics, united states | No Comments »

So the story of Cheney’s curious interpretation that the OVP straddles both the Executive and the Legislative branch recieved wide coverage in the MSM today. Most notable, perhaps was a front page article in today’s NYT. Yay. Recent coverage such as this WaPo article features quotes on the topic taken from a White House press briefing today. Here’s a quote I found particularly interesting (Perino is the WH spokeswoman).

As the “author” of the executive order and “the person responsible for interpreting” it, Bush “did not intend for the vice president to be treated as an agency,” Perino said.

Now that’s interesting isn’t it. Bush is the author of the executive order. True. It’s not a law, so he doesn’t have to be in the Legislative branch to write it. He’s also the executor of the order…appropriate because he’s the head of the Executive branch. And apparently Bush is also the interpreter of the order…here playing the role of the Judicial branch. So for the purposes of this order…Bush is effectively all of the branches. With the sole exception of the special new Cheney branch, that is.

politics, united states | 3 Comments »

Raw Story is reporting on Dick Cheney’s claims that the Office of the Vice President (OVP) is not contained within the Executive Branch. My understanding is that he claims that the VP’s role as president of the senate places the OVP in a middle ground between the Executive and the Legislative…making it essentially an unregulated 4th branch of the U.S. government. This is very scary.

This has been going on for some time now. Fortunately we have a democrat, Henry Waxman, at the head of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and he’s trying to look into these things. His current efforts center on Cheney’s claim of exemption from a 2003 executive order which “establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information”. Specifically, the OVP has refused to hand over sensitive documents to the National Archives, as the order requires.

Also on Waxman’s site is an excellent fact sheet about the issue, detailing 5 instances in which the OVP has used these claims of sweeping powers to conceal information:

• Exempting the Office of the Vice President from the Executive Order on Classified National Security Information
• Blocking GAO Oversight
• Concealing Privately-Funded Travel
• Withholding Information about Vice Presidential Staff
• Concealing Information about Visitors to the Vice President’s Residence
• Allowing Former Vice Presidents to Assert Privilege Over Documents

It’s laudable that Waxman is attempting to bring this to light. It is, however, shamefully late. This has been going on for 6 years. In addition, though I’ve seen blog coverage of these issues before, I’ve never once seen them treated in the Mainstream Media. I’m not really sure why that is…of all of this administration’s activities which have come to light, this one to me comes closest to having the flavor of the ultimate transformation of the U.S. government…and it’s downfall. I mentioned this item to a Romanian friend of mine and he replied “Sounds familiar.” I quizzed him on what he’d seen before and asked him why it was that people don’t seem to care. He simply smiled and said “They’ll care…but by then it’s too late”

Update: Huffington Post now has the story…will the MSM pick it up?

Update #2: Think Progress has it too

Update #3: Yay! Washington Post has picked up the story. Very well written article here.

Update #4: Oops.  Spoke to soon.  The above WaPo story is in a blog…not the print edition

fight the power, politics, united states | 3 Comments »