This blog has been basically defunct for weeks, but now that I’m home and in the midst of a Joomla=>Drupal migration I think it’ll stay that way for the time being. Head on over to Dem Apples if you’re looking for me in the future. And drop me an e-mail at flaxter (at) gmail (dot) com otherwise.

(Comments have been disabled henceforth since they were all spam anyway.)

• MyDD
• Local news
• Local paper
• NYTimes
• WFSB

Then I took this one later that night:

And even later:

Unfortunately I neglected to take a screenshot even later (1:30 AM Pacific, I think) when it was back up because I figured it would be back up for good. But believe me, their website was completely online late last night.

Amazon has some funny recommendations for me:

* Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
* A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry, Volume 1, 3rd
Edition
* The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace
* ML for the Working Programmer
* Purely Functional Data Structures
* How We Know What Isn’t So
* Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition
* A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-Violent Conflict

The first and second to last are psychology books (although I’d love to read a computer science book with the title, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases”), the second is a math book, it’s obvious what the third and last are about, and the fourth, fifth, and seventh are computer science books. Nice…

Also, this:

“The fate of Haifa’s dogs also tells us something about their owners and the situation in which they have found themselves. As we were walking around our neighborhood, after a few hours of quiet, we noticed a number of ownerless dogs looking for their homes.”

And I just heard this on Pandora:

Read this: Why international law matters from Jonathan Edelstein (via Dove’s Eye View):

But there is an even more fundamental reason why international law matters. It is very rare for a military victory, no matter how decisive, to end the underlying conflict, and when the war is over, the issues will still have to be resolved and the conflicting parties rebuilt. Any measure that conserves human life and civilian infrastructure during the war will make those tasks that much easier, while scorched-earth warfare might win an immediate victory at the cost of making the underlying conflict more intractable. Israel, for instance, has won all its wars, some more decisively than others, but even its most spectacular military victories have failed to resolve the political conflicts that lie at their root. The ultimate solution has to be political, and in those cases where wars must be fought, it’s important to fight them in a way that doesn’t make reconstruction and mediation more difficult. That means doing everything possible to protect civilian life on the other side, and not damaging infrastructure in a way that might threaten the postwar stability of the opposing state.

Israel clearly has the right to defend itself against Hizbullah’s attacks, and it can be frustrating to follow the rules when the enemy doesn’t acknowledge them. It can be difficult to hold back and be discriminating in the choice of targets when the enemy claims the right to attack civilian targets or even denies that there is such a thing as an Israeli civilian. Nevertheless, even aside from the fact that conserving human life is a moral good, following international humanitarian law and limiting the scope of warfare is critical if there is to be a hope of multilateral resolution and a postwar political settlement. The law is not meaningless either to the short-term realities of war or the politics of the underlying conflict, and the long-term dividends of conserving civilian life are much greater than the immediate costs.

The appeal of the title does not derive from its simplicity or its specificity but rather from the existential truth of it. It’s as if the author read the screenplay aloud to his two sons and asked them what the film should be called. The first son might reply, “Death Flight! Wait, wait, no! Poisonous Air!” The second son, if he were autistic, would reply, “Snakes on a Plane.” The second son would be right.

San Francisco was fun. I’ll post pictures tomorrow.