I liked the vampire. :)

seriously--i think that's a hilarious logo, and i'd pay money to have it on an item of clothing. i'm of half a mind to just throw it up on cafepress or whatnot, but i respect salon too much to go blatantly stealing their copyrights.

...but Brin still makes some very good points. I'm working on my doctorate in CS now, and the students I see really are missing some of the basic nuts & bolts. And coincidentally, those fundamentals are precisely the ones on which BASIC focuses.

Seriously though, BASIC is such a simple language and I know that Brin is smart enough to write his own version. Most open source projects start from some random person being annoyed because he/she can't find something online that meets his/her exact needs...

And just to reply to the other letters: Python's cool, but it covers up a lot of the fundamentals. Perl has the same problem, plus has the added misfortune of being amazingly difficult to read. HTML isn't even a procedural language (and it doesn't come "pre-installed" on computers--it's just interpreted by a browser). JavaScript can be dreadfully unpredictable and testy in its behavior, and it's a bitch to debug. (I know--I coded in it professionally for a year.) And please, let's not educate tomorrow's coders in MS's current kludgey offerings--at least until they clean up their act and make their stuff compatible with everyone else's. When you use one of their products, you have this nasty tendency to end up with all the others too. And finally, it's and its are different words. Maybe it's snobbish of me, but I have a hard time reading letters that confuse them.

Good luck David and Ben. :)

Can somebody tell me what the hell the "Intimidator" from the last page is?

I think this was a great article. Even if he disappears tomorrow or turns out to have some truly reprehensible politics, Obama represents a future America in which I can truly believe, where everyone's given a fair shot. I have only one slight problem with it--Mr. Kamiya's use of the superlative in saying that African-Americans "got dealt by far the worst racial hand."

Not to discount the horrors of the Middle Passage and of Slavery, but at the very least even the worst black L.A. ghetto has electricity today. But if you go out to some Native American reservations (and here I'm thinking specifically of the Navajo reservation, where my family has intermarried and run trading posts for a century), not even that is true. Native Americans faced war, genocide, and exile, and are today only just beginning to make up some ground.

I don't want to start an argument about who "had it worse." I think that's a waste of time. I would simply caution Mr. Kamiya against using the superlative in future articles.

Is this just a coincidence? Or are the K Chronicles and Savage Love tuned into the same creepy underground vibe?

http://www.avclub.com/content/node/59130

Ignoring the social ramifications for a second...this strikes me as a bad idea. A child born of such a situation would be the ultimate in inbreeding--there's every chance that rare recessive disorders would start turning up in droves.

But assuming that the donor isn't too closely related--this seems a great development for both lesbians and infertile men.

...or is that publication completely racist?

Pictures of evil Latinos, and yet the "good" folks are all white families straight out of the fifties. I really do empathize with the NRA--I don't trust the government when it takes away citizens' weapons. But this thing was just plain offensive, and pandering to the worst fears and stereotypes imaginable.

When someone with whom you're in love attacks you, there really isn't any right answer. Getting out of the relationship is often the *best* answer, but it's not the *right* answer. We love to think it's cut and dried, but it's not. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

You know, what I'd like to see here is if they eliminated the age of the doctor as a factor. Thirty years ago medical admissions would have been a tad more skewed, and the older doctors are less likely to be up to date with what constitutes modern state of the art care. Maybe there is a sex difference, but I'm willing to be that it's at least a lot less if you control for the age of the doctor.

Or perhaps another group that's confounding this is doctors who were trained outside of the west? Granted, they're a minority, but they might also skew male enough to make a (small) statistically significant difference.

She expressed no opinions about movies, restaurants, etc., expecting me to be the MAN and make all the decisions myself. Of course, if I got the decision wrong, she'd sulk for the rest of the night. It was some of the most passive-aggressive behavior I've ever seen. If any woman tries this bullshit with me again, she's going to get booted out the door, fast. It's supposed to be a *partnership*.

But who I am to say? Maybe this stuff really works if you don't want anything more than a cave man. Just don't be surprised when he clubs a mammoth and expects you to cook it. If that's what it takes to make you feel feminine, be my guest. :)

You've gotta be 35.

(And no, I didn't really think you were serious.)

Aviatrix is just a Latin noun, and hence gendered. The fact that we're not used to using such gendered language is one of those idiosyncracies of the English language, and nothing more.

Anyway, on to my real question--what about those daggers? I've wondered before if there's some special TSA-approaved dagger-substitute that the Sikh authorities have allowed adherents to wear instead. Or do they just go without? Does anybody know?