My alma mater, MIT, has always been in the forefront of Internet presence (since the Internet was, after all, largely developed there). Quite a few years ago now, the Open Courseware site was launched, which contains free online lecture notes, readings, past problem sets, and past exams for just about all of MIT's courses. To anyone who believes in the free sharing of knowledge, this is a great thing. But I found out today that MIT has gone one better; it also has DSpace, a site that makes MIT research materials freely available online.

When I got to the site and read the description, I immediately wondered: do they have theses posted? And of course the answer is yes; so here, for your reading pleasure, are my MIT theses, now available to the world courtesy of DSpace!

Bachelor's

Master's

After I posted my independence day post, I spent some time browsing around the Charters of Freedom site at the US national archives, which is where the transcript of the original Declaration of Independence is hosted. I noticed that, along with the pages on the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, they have a page there on the Marbury v Madison Supreme Court case.

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Two hundred and thirty-five years ago today, these words were approved by the Continental Congress of the United States of America:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

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The answer can be summed up in one sentence:

Not every data structure is a list.

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This is the first of what will no doubt be many dispatches from the "what's up with that?" department.

There was much rejoicing by many at the news yesterday that New York has passed a law permitting same sex marriage. This post is not about that issue, though I will say that I support such laws; "equal protection" is supposed to mean what it says, and if the state is going to provide special benefits to people who make life commitments to each other, it has no business saying that some couples can get them and some can't. But that's for another post someday.

While watching coverage of the event on CNN, one item struck me: it will be 30 days before any same-sex couple can actually apply for a marriage license under the new law.

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CNN announced some time back that the White House had released President Obama's birth certificate. Donald Trump claims that he was the one who pushed Obama over the edge, but that's neither here nor there. I mention the story because just yesterday, while browsing around the "Unqualified Reservations" blog, I came across this post from last summer by Mencius Moldbug, in which he proposes two new terms, "sealer" and "opener", to replace the traditional "birther" and "anti-birther". A "sealer", according to Moldbug, is someone who thinks Obama's birth documents should remain sealed.

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In a recent post, Eric Raymond describes an alternate history in which the Internet and the World Wide Web never happened. In this alternate timeline, the DARPA research that led to the Internet never got out of the "research curiosity" stage, and instead of having one Internet, we have multiple "walled gardens" like Compuserve and AOL. It's not a pretty picture: imagine not being able to email, text message, or Facebook a friend just because you and they have different ISPs. Imagine also that there is no Linux, no open source software, no way for anyone except a dedicated hobbyist to have a computer that doesn't run proprietary programs that you can't see the insides of. Not to mention that censorship would be a lot easier on networks that did not have infrastructure specifically designed to make that as difficult as possible.

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Quite a number of years ago now, I first read Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea. This post is not about the central topic of that book, which is evolution (I'm sure I'll get into posting about that on this blog in time, but for now you'll have to read this article on my old site if you want to see where I'm coming from). Instead, I want to talk about one particular claim Dennett makes in his book: that Stephen Jay Gould did not believe in Darwin's dangerous idea, the central premise of evolutionary theory.

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It's a well-known custom for Linux users to rant about some aspect of their OS. Unlike the Mac community, which gushes about how wonderful their OS is, or the Windows community, whose writings about their OS often read like soldiers' letters home from a war zone, we Linux types view ranting as a force for change. Or at least, as an explanation of why we personally no longer use the festering pile of dung we are ranting about.

The particular festering pile under the microscope in this post is KDE 4.

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A post at "Stephensplatz" describes Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (LOTR) as "A Notable Work of Children's Fiction" (that's the title of the post). As someone who first read LOTR in seventh grade, and who has re-read it many times since, this naturally got my attention. And since reading Tolkien's writing was, in large part, what made me first think of writing myself, it's fitting that a discussion of his work gets the first "real" post on this blog.

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