Axiomatic Breakfast

Michigan Messenger » Lose your house, lose your vote (via BoingBoing)

Michigan Republicans plan to foreclose African American voters

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

From Boing Boing, The Airport Security Follies - Jet Lagged - Air Travel - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Excerpt:

Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.

Digg pointed me to a good article about What Would Happen If the Post Office Had Competition? by Wilton D. Alston

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The New York Post has an interesting article about the problems with ‘Intelligent Design’. Intelligent design is the latest idea from the creationist crowd. It’s basically an attempt to push creationism without mentioning God. Lately there has been more and more push to get schools to teach Creationism/Intelligent Design. Anyway, the NY Post article a good job talking about the problems with ID. (Link from BoingBoing)

Excerpt:

From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims — that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.

But if we can’t infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock’s tail or the human male’s nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Corey from BoingBoing has posted a very interesting essay and open letter about his recent flight from the UK to the US. I’m sure that if this were on the news we’d see the obligatory “If it means we’re safer then I’m all for it” person but there is no justifiable reason for collecting this type of information.

Excerpt:

Last week on a trip from London to the US, American Airlines demanded that I write out a list of the names and addresses of all the friends I would be staying with in the USA. They claimed that this was due to a TSA regulation, but refused to state which regulation required them to gather this information, nor what they would do with it once they’d gathered it.

Noted computer security expert Bruce Schneier has a good article up on his blog regarding the problem with Electronic Voting Machines. It’s a very good essay on what voting machines need to do to be successful.

Excerpt:

In the aftermath of the U.S.�s 2004 election, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerized machines lost votes, subtracted votes instead of adding them, and doubled votes. Because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted. And while it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of the presidential election, the Internet is buzzing with rumors and allegations of fraud in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual elections. Over the next several weeks we’ll see whether any of the information crystallizes into something significant.

Here’s an interesting piece from NPR on how the political ‘debates’ are really run. (Link from photomatt.)

Excerpt:

After weeks of political wrangling, Sen. John Kerry and President Bush will square off for the first of three key presidential debates. Both camps have agreed to an elaborate, 32-page contract that spells out everything from the size of the dressing rooms to permitted camera angles.

Wired has a very good article entitled “The Crusade Against Evolution”. It’s a very good read about the current battle against the theory of Evolution.

Personally this bugs me. If you want to teach creationism (or ‘Intelligent Design’ or whatever you want to call it this week), don’t teach it in a science classroom. Teach it in a class on religion or something else. Science belongs in the science classroom, not non-scientific conjecture that has no scientific basis or value.

Excerpt:

…140 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 75 years after John Scopes taught natural selection to a biology class in Tennessee, and 15 years after the US Supreme Court ruled against a Louisiana law mandating equal time for creationism, the question of how to teach the theory of evolution was being reopened here in Ohio.

Avi Rubin is a well regarded Johns Hopkins computer science professor and leading critic of e-voting. Recently he “spent a day working as an election judge in the Maryland primary”:http://www.avirubin.com/judge.html. He wrote the above article right after the experience, and it’s quite an interesting read.

Wired has a scary article about the “Diebold electronic voting machines and how buggy and error-prone they are”:http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60563,00.html?tw=wn_bizhead_11.
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In a showing of complete stupidity, “the Roman Catholic church is now telling HIV sufferers not to use condoms”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/afp/vatican_religion_health.
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Looks like ICANN finally got a spine and is demanding that Verisign turn off their “SightFinder”:http://64.94.110.11 service by tomorrow evening. Here’s “the letter from ICANN to Verisign”:http://www.icann.org/correspondence/twomey-to-lewis-03oct03.htm
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Just about everyone has heard of the DMCA these days. This is the law that the Recording Industry is using to charge lots of their customers with copyright violations. Anyway, Senator Coleman (R-MN) is looking to “add a little judicial oversight to thje DMCA and make the files more realistic”:http://techdirt.com/articles/20031002/135205.shtml.

Salon has a very interesting premium article (get the free day pass) about “the huge problems with some of these new touch-screen voting machines”:http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/09/23/bev_harris/. Some are so poorly designed that ‘a 10 year old could rig the election’. Just from the limited technical description they give it sounds like a really pathetic attempt to create a software program.

The article also references this “collection of internal memo’s from the voting machine’s creator”:http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0309/S00150.htm. Diebold tried to coverup the problem by threatening prosecution under the DMCA.
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Here’s an interesting read. Someone has compiled the “Top 25 Censored Media Stories of 2002-2003″:http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2004/index.html. I don’t know how they compiled their list or anything but it’s interesting none-the-less.