The part of the article that I think is particularly worth paying attention to is this paragraph, which comes after many paragraphs explaining how scientists were saying what a terrible addictive effect pornography had on people:
When Brownback asked the panelists for suggestions about what should be done, the responses were mild, considering their earlier indictment of pornography. Several suggested that federal money be allocated to fund brain-mapping studies into the physical effects of pornography.
Allow me to summarise the article.
Scientists do studies on porn and find it to be highly addictive.
Senate asks scientists what should be done.
Scientists suggest that they should do more research.
I can't tell whether this is evidence that the scientists are right about it being addictive, or if it is actually harmless but they are experts at manipulating funding committees into paying them to watch porn.
I bought a new PlayStation 2 today. I had to, since as mentioned earlier, my old one died, and thus I had been cut off from San Andreas, which is clearly unacceptable.
It's the size of a DVD case. It's quite amazing.
I bought the PS2 with a bank card. This may not seem like a very significant point, but when you consider that I've been using only cash for about a year and six months, it takes on more importance. Yep, today I finally got a bank card from my bank, after two earlier attempts failed due to unspecified incompetence. I still don't have a credit card, but that will have to wait a bit longer. The lack of credit card forced me to pay for my DreamHost hosting by International Wire Transfer. Slight problems with that and the eagerness that DreamHost's automated billing scripts exhibited resulted in the downtime of whatwg.org, spreadfirefox.com, VoidWars, and another two dozen or so sites, and caused me to get bounced from the public SVG list just before some sort of flamewar errupted. Hint: If you're going to send last call comments on a spec, don't follow my example, send some actual technical comments. ☺
I also bought a DVD remote control for the PS2 and Munchkin Bites, the latest in the Munchkin line of card games.
Oslo switched to Winter Mode yesteday, going from autumn weather (cold with sunny skies and leaves everywhere) to winter weather (11cm of snow) between when I got to work and when I left for Salsa lessons. The snow apparently caught Sporveien (the bus company) off-guard, which rather surprised me. I mean, hello? This is Norway? It snows every winter? Still, I ran down to town and made it to the lesson at 20:00, just in time. Except apparently we start at 19:30 now. I guess I missed that announcement.
Two more weeks left of "Salsakurs I", then we break for the new year. I'm planning on continuing with Salsakurs II next year; I really enjoyed this course, much more than I had expected.
The former is something XML has needed for a while, I think. One more step along the way to being able to remove DTDs altogether from XML 2.0. I had quite a few comments on xml:id, given that it was such a small spec. In my experience, the XML Core group handle comments well, though, so I'm looking forward to their formal replies. (I sent them comments on XInclude back when that was in last call, and they took all of them into account, I was quite impressed.)
The second spec isn't on the Recommendation track, it's just going to become a Note. My comment was just a query regarding why one part of the spec is needed at all; I'm expecting their reply will be something like "well it isn't really but it would be convenient for some of the other work we're doing", which is probably quite reasonable. Since this spec isn't going to become a REC, I'm not too worried either way (I doubt I'll ever have to work with an implementation, for example).
In other news, my PlayStation 2 died. I will have to purchase a second unit. I hope they have those slim ones in stock in Oslo! I can't go without playing San Andreas for much longer!
Played Monopoly and, of course, lots of San Andreas.
Saw The Incredibles again. In fact a good dozen or so Opera people went to see it at the same time, it was quite amusing. Then we went to the pub for a while.
Went to an installasjonsfest organised by the OLUG people, and subscribed to their mailing list and joined their IRC channel.
Been spending most meals recently eating out with my parents, who are visiting for a week.
Am reading Quicksilver. (What is with Neal's sites using so much Flash!)
Am attending Salsa lessons. Great fun.
Responding to mail on the WHATWG list, and, in tandem, editing the WHATWG specs (which we're half-seriously collectively calling "HTML5"). Some interesting problems are coming up here, like how to handle headers when you nest the new section elements. Lots of discussion on the list about that one.
Still taking part in the SVG 1.2 Last Call comment threads. Last Call is your opportunity to help the SVG working group make the spec perfect. If you don't send your comments now, then you will have no right to complain if you don't like the spec later! This includes if you agree with comments people have already sent to the list — it isn't rude to send redundant comments, indeed when the CSS working group was going through CSS2.1 Last Call, we found it very useful to know which issues were issues that just one person was worried about, and which issues multiple people felt strongly about.
Opera Software's offices are at the top of a five story building
near downtown Oslo. The offices actually span two floors but the
entrance is on the fifth floor. This building, naturally, has a lift,
which was installed in 1969.
This lift has... issues.
Sometimes the lift forgets what floor you asked it to go to,
basically resetting itself when the doors close. For example, several
times I have entered the lift on the fifth floor, hit the button for
the ground floor, let the door close, and noticed the light behind the
ground floor button wink out. One theory is that the lift gets
confused as to which floor it is on, assumes it has already reached
the first floor, and therefore cancels the request. Another is that
the debouncer on the door is faulty, and when you close the door it
acts as if you had reopened it.
When inside the lift, accidentally leaning too close to the door
will immediately cause the lift to abruptly stop, wherever it is
(including between floors), cancelling all pending floor requests.
This is especially prone to happening when a lot of people are in the
lift at once, since the person closest to the door need but wave their
hand the wrong way to trigger the relevant sensor.
The door on the fourth floor doesn't close as designed. It slams
shut and then bounces open again, before closing again and locking
correctly.
Theoretically, the lift, when told to go to a certain floor, will
accelerate gently, reach a maximum velocity, ride to within a few
meters of the target floor, then decelerate gently then stop at the
requested floor. In practice it attempts this but often stops a few
centimeters from the correct level. Sometimes, it doesn't decelerate
until the last possible moment where it simply jars to a stop.
Occasionally, the lift doors don't open at all. The cabin will
happily come to pick you up when you press the lift call button, but
when it arrives, it just sits there, with the doors still locked. This
has also happened while I was inside the lift. Twice, so far. You have
to ride the lift up and down until the problem somehow resolves
itself, which usually takes a couple of minutes.
In many cases (especially recently) the lift will be happily moving
up through the floors and then suddenly will stop for no apparent
reason at all. You have to press the button for it to go on. It's like
the lift suddenly decided it wanted more attention.
And on a regular basis the entire lift will simply cease to operate
at all, requiring professional maintenance.
About the only thing that hasn't happened so far is the cable
snapping. I live in fear that it is only a matter of time.
Still. It is better than walking up all those stairs.