I spent a bit of time this morning following up on the story of escaped slave Henry Box Brown.  We read Ellen Levine's Henry's Freedom Box ast night with the kids, which strongly emphasizes the two parts of the story that children can probably best relate to: the separation of the family and the feeling of being inside the box for a long time ( Read more... )

This weekend I had a bit of time to pick up my hobby horse of worrying about ways to simulate virtual societies at a relatively fine grained level. One of the big problems that I have grappled with in the past is how to make the population pyramid come out right in the absence of a very detailed model of nutrition, health, accidents and warfare. On ( Read more... )

So, it looks like I am finally heading toward the stretch in my life when I will have an opportunity to make progress on my thesis.

As a good architect (*chuckle*), I am thinking of a protocol stack of sorts, and here are some of the layers that I have identified and wish to sort out.

• The layer of argumentation, which breaks down into two ( Read more... )

The continuous update process of Google Docs is somewhat annoying, esp since the last release lost some major capabilities. Most importantly from my point of view, we can no longer:

• use block quote, my favorite markup for setting of long citations
• specify a cross-document default font that is not Arial
• fiddle with the CSS directly
• Use CTRL-nn to ( Read more... )

The last gerbil moved on to the big Desert in the Sky, so we now have a bunch of gerbil maintenance equipment that we no longer need, including a cage, a water bottle, an exercise wheel, a food bowl, some food and some bedding.

If anyone is interested, let me know.

Update: It is all spoken for. Thanks.

Recently, it was proposed by the uninformed that I had somehow gotten _MWife_ "stuck" with adopting children of a "different race" than ourselves. I only thought it appropriate to take up these charges in a more public setting. Allow me to observe that like most urban legends, this one is based on serious misinformation.

• Those who take this stance are ( Read more... )

... I am down to posting here once a month.

The fact that I am not posting much on facebook either hardly qualifies as consolation.

This morning I figured out something about the way we constitute the self that was rather surprising to me (I make no promises that it will be surprising to you ( Read more... )

I have to say honestly, I am not sure why people are so focused on international adoption. Maybe it is not a bad idea that the Russian government is suspending adoptions to the US.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

• In international adoption, there are too many potentials for middle-folks. Why does international adoption cost so much? Because ( Read more... )

I have complete and utter sympathy for the adoptive mother, and I can understand why she felt that the adoption workers in Russia had pulled her over the table ( Read more... )